š® Sunday edition #540: Can aging be reset? Will AI hollow out youth jobs? What happens when autonomy erodes?
Hi all,
Welcome to our Sunday edition, where we explore the latest developments, ideas, and questions shaping the exponential economy.
Enjoy the weekend reading!
Azeem
The bull, the bear and the disruptor
Given all the other places you could put your money, would you choose OpenAI? Will its return be better than buying the Nasdaq? My gut reaction was āno wayā. But nothing beats pencil, paper and Excel and when I sat down with my simplistic OpenAI model and ran some scenarios, a different picture started to emerge. Hereās my take:
An update on the job market
Two more papers came into my view this week on AI and youth employment. First is a piece of research by Harvard economists that looked at 285,000 US firms and 62 million workers to find that junior hiring among AI-adopting firms was down by 22% starting in early 2023 relative to non-adopters, while senior employment continued growing.
These findings align with
ās research using ADP payroll data, which found that workers aged 22-25 in AI-exposed occupations experienced a 6% employment decline since late 2022, while older workers in the same jobs grew 6-9%.
The second study Iād like to highlight found that since 2021, sectors exposed to LLMs have seen higher wages and more jobs, especially for young and well-educated workers. But in areas where AI directly replaces people, jobs have fallen. This, again, aligns with Erikās paper.
I discussed the latest research in my video commentary:
The fountain of youth
Putin and Xi were caught on a hot mic musing about organ transplants and immortality. Odd talk, but biotech is starting to make the idea less fanciful. We are now developing both the atlas and the search tools to discover how human aging might be reset ā and this matters hugely beyond wrinkles: aging is the single biggest risk factor for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimerās, and most of the conditions that undermine quality of life.