yahoo news | Economists Said AI Wouldn’t Take Jobs—Some Now Admit They Got It Wrong
**Economists Said AI Wouldn’t Take Jobs—Some Now Admit They Got It Wrong**
*Jose Antonio Lanz – Sat, April 11, 2026*
For years economists urged calm about technology‑driven job fears, pointing to ATMs, Excel and robotic vacuums as examples of tools that augment rather than replace workers. That consensus is now cracking. A new paper by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Forecasting Research Institute, Yale, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 69 economists, 52 AI specialists and 38 superforecasters on AI’s impact on the U.S. economy. All three groups agree that faster AI progress will depress labor‑force participation – the polite way of saying “fewer people working.” In the “rapid” scenario, where AI eclipses human performance across most tasks by 2030, economists project the U.S. labor‑force participation rate falling from the current 62 % to 54 % by 2050, with roughly 10 million jobs lost directly to AI rather than demographics. The same scenario forecasts annual GDP growth rising to about 3.5 % by 2045‑2049, while AI experts are even more bullish at 5.3 %, creating tremendous aggregate wealth that would become heavily concentrated at the top—potentially 80 % of total wealth held by the richest 10 % of households by 2050.
The paper highlights a shift in the debate: disagreement among experts is no longer about whether powerful AI will arrive, but about its economic consequences. Earlier pro‑tech arguments assumed automation would eventually generate new categories of work, but the new question is whether AI can automate the very act of inventing new tasks. Recent data show a mixed picture. A Yale‑Brookings study from late 2025 found no mass‑unemployment signal three years after ChatGPT’s launch, yet the same research documents a 13 % relative employment drop for workers aged 22‑25 in the most AI‑exposed occupations. The macro‑level employment figures look stable, but the leading edge of the labor market is already feeling the strain.
Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/economists-said-ai-wouldn-t-130103017.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
#federalreserve #forecastingresearch #yale #chatgpt #u.s.