Barkin: Driving Through Economic Fog (Still)

Thank you for the invitation to join you today. It's great to be at the San Francisco Fed and to be part of this conversation. I’m going to focus today on a question that is on my mind as a policymaker and that elicits strong and wide-ranging views. What might the rapid advance of artificial intelligence (AI) mean for the U.S. economy, and what does it mean for monetary policy? Is AI more than hype? At the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, AI systems are transforming pediatric care. AI tools help diagnose rare diseases and can predict patient decline hours before more traditional methods. They also allow for treatment protocols that are personalized in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago. But our relationship with technology is complicated. Some people embrace it, and others not so much. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is just a few miles away from the place where “hitchBOT” met an untimely end back in 2015. HitchBOT was a cute, hitchhiking robot designed to explore how people relate to technology. He had successfully hitchhiked across Canada and parts of Europe before being decapitated in downtown Philadelphia. You don't have to look far to find passionate views on AI and the future of the economy. Some of my business contacts tell me AI will fundamentally transform their operations — changing not just how they produce, but what it is possible to produce. Others are more skeptical. They expect AI tools to produce incremental improvements rather than revolutionary changes. These perspectives matter far beyon Fed's Paulson: The Fed has made notable progress in bringing inflation down. *PAULSON: NO SIGN LABOR MARKET CONTRIBUTING TO INFLATION *PAULSON: LONG-TERM INFLATION EXPECTATIONS MAY BE MORE FRAGILE Just in | Fed's Paulson Warns Iran Conflict Poses Risks to Economic Growth and Inflation.