AI agents got so good that this top Meta exec quit her job

Three months ago, we began our podcast miniseries by asking how likely artificial intelligence is to take large numbers of jobs. Our first guest, Box CEO Aaron Levie, argued that mass disruption would be highly unlikely. And several subsequent guests, from Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to labor economist Kathryn Ann Edwards, expressed similar skepticism about a labor wipeout.

The argument has significant emotional appeal — who doesn’t want to believe that technology will create more jobs than it eliminates?

For our final episode, I wanted to speak with someone who has considered the problem from all the major perspectives we’ve covered here from the start: operator, software builder, and civic leader. And that wish led me to Clara Shih.

In our conversation, she lays out a three-way taxonomy for how AI reshapes a job, borrowed from MIT economist David Autor; predicts that one in five corporate roles is "especially going to be challenged"; explains why she disagrees with her nonprofit advisor Andrew Yang about universal basic income; and offers a hot take about who will actually do the legal, marketing, and accounting work of the future.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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