TIME100 AI 2026: David Autor

In February 2024, the MIT economist David Autor first published his most contrarian notion about generative AI—that, “if used well,” it would create jobs and increase pay. It was something of an about turn for Autor, who had written for decades about why technological advances had hollowed out the middle class.

The intervening years have only reinforced the theory of Autor, one of the nation’s most vocal and prominent economists aiming to ascertain AI’s potential impacts on labor. “All this talk of everyone being replaced has been debunked,” he says. “It hasn’t happened yet. The U.S. labor market is actually in pretty good shape.” 

Autor calls AI “a crappy automation technology” because it’s “just not a replacement for a sentient worker with judgment and domain knowledge. It’s a supplement to them. It can be useful to them.” While it might reduce headcount in some roles or areas, “it’s just not a wholesale replacement of people,” he says. He insists he’s not a Pollyanna, acknowledging that some kinds of expertise may be replaced by the tech and affect corresponding workers. 

And yet he sees AI as a potential expertise-leveler. “It could enable more people to do legal work, more people to write software, more people to do a higher level of healthcare, more people who are doing kitchen contracting to do more design, more people who are doing skilled repair to expand the set of things they can fix do it more efficiently,” he says.