Asia week ahead: Regional inflation and trade data in focus ahead of China’s Golden Week

I am grateful for the educational opportunities this university has afforded my family over the years, including my uncle Samuel DuBois Cook who received his M.A. and Ph.D. here in 1950 and 1953. I am delighted to be here! Today, I would like to discuss the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for workers and the labor market, more generally.1 I will discuss AI's potential to boost productivity, offer a framework to consider which jobs will be most affected by AI, and consider AI's effect on aggregate employment. I hope this discussion will be informative for many of you in the audience, especially those of you who will be entering the job market in the next few years. However, before discussing AI, I think it will be helpful to first set the stage by reviewing how the labor market has evolved in recent years and where it is today. View of the Labor Market On the eve of the pandemic, the labor market was quite strong. The unemployment rate was flirting with historical lows, having fallen to 3.5 percent in the fall of 2019 from an average of 4.7 percent between 2014 and 2019. Jobs were relatively plentiful, with 12 openings for every 10 unemployed job seekers. Then, the labor market changed dramatically in the first few months of the pandemic when economies around the world shut down. By April 2020, nearly one out of every seven U.S. workers was unemployed. The U.S. labor market lost more than 20 million jobs in just two months. To put that into perspective, that is nearly four times the total number of jobs in Ohio. U.S. workers and employers, with the support of timely and extraordinary policy action, proved to be resilient and innovative. As we know from the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Datin post: FED'S COOK: LABOR MARKET 'SOLID' BUT HAS COOLED NOTICEABLY; MAY BECOME MORE DIFFICULT FOR SOME TO FIND EMPLOYMENT post: FED'S COOK: SEES SIGNIFICANT EASING IN INFLATIONARY PRESSURE post: FED'S COOK: UPSIDE RISKS TO INFLATION HAVE DIMINISHED; DOWNSIDE RISKS TO EMPLOYMENT HAVE INCREASED