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This isn’t UBS saying this, it’s their “chief economist,” and you have to keep in mind that title inflation is rampant in banking (they are famous for handing out VP titles, director titles etc).

The tell that this is not a core executive is that this comment was made in a blog post the person wrote with a bunch of other spicy statements. How many investment bank shot callers or revenue producers spend their time writing blog posts?

Chief economist is basically a marketing/pr job. You’ll see them frequently on cable news, op-ed pages, etc.

I don’t work in finance btw but if you read any business news this is pretty obvious.



This. Economists have had some of the most ludicrous takes on automation Ive ever seen.

There was a ball state U paper for instance that mathematically confused offshoring with automation: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

There was one about 3 years ago from HSBC where they made a "creativity score" and assigned it to each job and just assumed that "low creativity" jobs would be automated: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/these-are-the-jobs-with-the-h...

Key takeaway - just 7 more years and we will no longer need construction workers!

I dont think they actually ever dig down into the nuts and bolts of the economics of automation or try to understand it on a low level and their knowledge of engineering is childlike. I think this guy in particular is imagining a certain level of literal magic going on under the hood of GPT which definitely does not exist.

My guess is that this is all an elaborate way of saying that layoffs are coming and that shareholders should just assume that it's pure profit for them because AI is magic.


I can’t remember where i read that economists are modern day sooth sayers, doing the modern equivalent of killing birds and studying the layout of their entrails to devine the future, with a similar probability of success.




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