The Dark and Mysterious Economy of Influencers

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Laelyn Wong: David Otter has been looking at the effect of technology on the labor market. He finds that computers made elite workers better at their jobs and much richer. But they also made a bunch of good middle class jobs disappear, he says. What will it take to reinstate the middle class with AI? And how do we get there? After the break, hear how our indicator series on the dark economy of influencers came together.

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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