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The Ezra Klein Show · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
In an Ezra Klein debate on whether AI is a bubble, Azeem Azhar had argued that new kinds of jobs will appear over five to ten years. Kedrosky disagrees: AI is making cognitive work like call centers far cheaper, and he thinks the disruption will move faster than new jobs can be created.
…to absorb what it is they have to do with this technology. And it's just not the case that you get the best model from OpenAI and say, fix my company and it fixes it. I mean, these things take time. And that's what I see when I talk to bosses. However fast they want to move, it just takes time.
Paul, how do you see this?
We're basically repricing labor, right? I mean, this is the fastest adopting technology in history. And its fundamental function is to reprice cognitive labor. And I mean, this is the deep struggle because the Article of Faith, the West Coast ideology on this stuff is technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. And so it becomes just a thing that people repeat, like a mantra that they hope will become true. And the reality is we've never seen a general purpose technology that had such broad applicability, was adopted so quickly, and was repricing labor at the same time. Because when I say repricing labor, I mean it's making it vastly cheaper to do things like call centers, for example. And as a result, these things, this change is going to be destabilizing long before we figure out how to turn them all into, I don't know what the equivalent of webmasters is. And so this is the problem, right? Is that it's happening so much faster than any prior GPT that these…
This has also struck me as another form of economic risk for not just workers, but actually AI and for some form of this bubble popping or deflating if it is a bubble. Because you can imagine a world where actually the problem is not whether or not companies are willing to adopt AI, that actually…
This has been my complaint from the very beginning of the process by which these companies have launched models. That they've essentially been conducting unlicensed drug trials on the public in the sense that these are hugely consequential technologies that are launched in a way that were they a…
Zeem, how do you see this political risk dimension?