Is AI Shrinking the Middle Class?

There’s been a lot of anxiety lately about AI replacing workers. But what many economists are really worried about is not mass unemployment, but polarization. Emerging technology, they say, isn’t coming for all our jobs—it’s shrinking the middle class, specifically. Experts warn that we’ve seen this movie before with globalization a generation ago. Without a smart policy response, the coming shifts in the labor market could not only heighten economic hardship, but also sow even more division in our increasingly polarized society. In this episode, we ask: Could the robots come between us? And what can we do about it? MIT’s Frank Levy and David Autor, Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson, and CMU’s Lee Branstetter suggest ways we can work together to ensure the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an economic reboot for the better.