Economist Molly Kinder: skip the AI jobpocalypse debate, plan for the "messy middle"
GregCook2011 · x · 2026-08-14
This is a 58-minute episode of the podcast Your Undivided Attention, featuring economist Molly Kinder — who recently left her senior fellow role at the Brookings Institution to become founding CEO of a new organization dedicated to AI's impact on jobs, and writes the Substack Kinder Futures.
Key arguments:
- The debate over whether AI causes mass unemployment is stuck: AI CEOs promise a post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income, while techno-optimists and some economists insist AI will create more jobs than it destroys. With the argument going back and forth, actual workers get no guidance and nobody plans ahead.
- Kinder proposes a "messy middle": a period of concentrated and uneven workforce disruption, rather than uniform boom or collapse.
- She offers evidence-based arguments on which jobs AI will specifically affect, the second- and third-order consequences, and what should be done today to protect people's livelihoods.
More from AGI Musings
- Does AI remember more mean better? A test with 21 drafts — sujingshen · 2026-08-14
- AI for Introspection: Externalize Experience, But Real-Life Observation Is Key — DevToD4 · 2026-08-14
- In the AI Era, the Scarcest Resource Is Judgment, Not Data — ingliguori · 2026-08-14
- The AI Race Dilemma: Even Rational Actors Lead to Irrational Outcomes — ventblanc · 2026-08-14
- Matthew McDonagh: Use AI for the Right Stuff — McDonaghMatthew · 2026-08-14
- Stewart Alsop III: Six Years of Five Minutes a Day to Get to the Useful Stuff — StewartalsopIII · 2026-08-14