Two years later, Acemoglu’s measured take has not caught on. Chatter about an AI jobs apocalypse pops up everywhere from Senator Bernie Sanders’s rallies to conversations I overhear in line at the grocery store. Some previously skeptical economists have gotten more open to the idea that something seismic could be coming with AI. A California gubernatorial candidate said last week that he wants to tax corporate AI use and pay victims of “AI-driven layoffs.”
On the one hand, the data is still on Acemoglu’s side; studies repeatedly find that AI is not affecting employment rates or layoffs. But the technology has advanced quite a bit since his cautious predictions. I spoke with him to understand if any of the latest developments in AI have changed his thesis, and to find out what does worry him these days if not imminent AGI.
AI agents
One of the biggest technical leaps in AI since Acemoglu’s paper has been agentic AI, or tools that can go beyond chatbots and operate on their own to complete the goal you give them. Because they can work independently rather than just answering questions, companies are increasingly pitching agents as a one-to-many replacement for human workers.
“I think that’s just a losing proposition,” Acemoglu says. He thinks agents are better thought of as tools to augment particular pieces of someone’s work than something malleable enough to handle a person’s whole job.
One reason has to do with all the various tasks that go into a job, something Acemoglu has been researching in his work on AI since 2018. For example, an x-ray technician juggles 30 different tasks, from taking down patient histories to organizing archives of mammogram images. A worker can naturally switch between formats, databases, and working styles to do this, Acemoglu says, but how many individual tools or protocols would an AI require to do the same?
Whether or not agents will supercharge AI’s impact on jobs will come down to whether they can eventually handle the orchestration between tasks that humans do naturally. AI companies are in heated competition to prove that their AI agents can work independently for ever longer periods without making mistakes, sometimes exaggerating the results—but Acemoglu says many jobs will be spared from an AI takeover if agents can’t fluidly switch between tasks.
The new hiring spree
For years Big Tech has been offering staggering salaries to recruit AI researchers. But I asked Acemoglu about a different hiring spree I’ve noticed: AI companies are all building in-house economics teams.
OpenAI hired Ronnie Chatterji from Duke University in 2024 to be its chief economist and announced last year that Chatterji will work with Jason Furman—Harvard economist and former advisor to Barack Obama—to research AI and jobs. Anthropic has convened a group of 10 leading economists to do similar work. And just last week, Google DeepMind announced it had hired Alex Imas, an economist from the University of Chicago, to be its “director of AGI economics.”