Autor: AI is a skill-disequalizer, not equalizer, for junior lawyers

Autor is best known for the 'China shock,' research showing that Chinese import competition caused lasting damage to American manufacturing communities — wages and labor-force participation stayed depressed for at least a decade. Some economists, including Apollo Global Management's Torsten Slok and Tufts' Bhaskar Chakravorti, have drawn parallels between that experience and a potential 'AI shock' on the U.S. labor force. But Autor has pushed back, arguing on the Possible podcast that AI 'will not be, in any sense, a repeat of the China trade shock' because that was experienced by U.S. firms as a 'pure negative competitive shock,' whereas AI will have a 'very different texture.' His worry, he says, is not mass job loss but that AI 'eliminates some areas of specialty while creating new ones simultaneously' — and the workers losing old careers are generally not the ones able to take advantage of the new roles. The patent-law experiment narrows in on whether workers using a powerful new tool are actually building the expertise they need to advance. The study was conducted by Google, which paid its direct costs and whose employees made up six of seven co-authors; MIT's human-subjects committee determined MIT was not engaged in the research. Google representatives described the paper as independent research Autor did as part of his fellowship.