Ricardo mentions the unemployment rate in the US not changing due to AI...this is another case where, yeah the data "says" that, however the reality is a little more nuanced...

While the unemployment rate has held steady, it's based on the number of people who are searching for jobs. That hasn't been steady. There's a lot of people who haven't bothered searching, or quit searching because of how tight the job market is. Now, a lot of layoffs did take place in the name of "AI" where more often than not, they were big tech firms who over-hired in the pandemic and are using ai as an excuse to ditch employees and correct that while not loosing face before their stockholders.

Now the third economic impact are the CEOs who DON'T understand the tech, think of it as magic and bought into the belief that they could replace all their customer service employees with a bot who has no understanding of how the world actually works. It hasn't gone well for them. Most of them have wound up having to re-hire and train employees at a higher wage. There were also some who incentivized using ai...rather than providing the means to use it and rewarding increased productivity...and they had their employees setting up ai agents to waste tokens so they "looked" good on the metrics the company was using. Then the CEO's got the bill for their AI usage. When your paying double for the employee plus the tokens they're wasting...somehow it doesn't save them money?!

Now, what has had more of an impact than AI are all the political events we've seen: go-go-stop tariffs, war, price of gas, shipping being disrupted, price of electricity and water rising (which can be a result of AI datacenters...keep in mind, they've been building more of those than what's being used) the months last year where the government wasn't funded, and union government jobs were not being paid a salary, then the extra cost of healthcare zapping the average household's expendable income. If people don't have money, they can't buy stuff, and it's very bad for the actual economy. Keep in mind that the stock market doesn't reflect the economy. That reflects propaganda and the magical thinking of day traders...

So AI is, and will have an effect on the economy...it's just not the one which was being foretold by the tech-guru-prophets. What they are deliberately leaving out is the fact that the investment into AI is way in excess of what it can ever hope to repay, since it still lacks a business model. It still lacks a way for it to bring in money and be profitable. The AI companies are cross-investing in each other's companies to hype their collective stock prices, and make them look like they're worth more then they actually are. Eventually, the music is going to stop, investors will want their money back...and all the AI computing--which is being heavily subsidized--will stop being cheap or free. At that point, we might have to cut back on what it's being used for. It may be wise to think critically about how we're implementing it now...to preserve our thinking ability, so if it is yanked away, or becomes an unfeasible expense in the future, we're still able to function.

Interesting content as always. However, I strongly disagree with your guest on AI not impacting jobs. Talk to anybody who works in the comms and marketing field ... or software development,  programming, engineering ... the list goes on. As a communications strategist, campaign / marcom / creative consultant, I know first-hand that those contracts are few and far between, when they used to be in abundance. And, yes, that can be directly correlated to business managers now using AI versus calling in comms & marketing experts. We have to think differently, and creatively, to stay relevant. Thanks as always for great information!