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Nick Fountain: There's been all this doom and gloom about AI. He says a study shows that it could help workers get better at their jobs. Nick talks to MIT professor David Otter, widely regarded as one of the greatest labor economists in the world. The American middle class has been shrinking for more than 40 years. Could AI help reverse that trend?

For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envisions a future where we use AI to make a wider array of workers much better at a whole range of jobs and help rebuild the middle class.

This episode was produced by Dave Blanchard and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Katherine Silva. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer.

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