Mar 19, 2026 Trumponomics
Stephanie Flanders sits down with Nobel Prize–winning economist Daron Acemoglu to unpack one of the most urgent questions facing the global economy: how is artificial intelligence changing the future of work, and what are the potentially dire consequences for society and democracy?

Tariffs, crypto, deregulation, tax cuts, protectionism, are just some of the things back on the table when Donald Trump returns to the Presidency. To help you plan for Trump's singular approach to economics, Bloomberg presents Trumponomics, a weekly podcast focused on the Trump administration's economic policies and plans. Editorial head of government and economics Stephanie Flanders will be joined each week by reporters in Washington D.C. and Wall Street to examine how Trump's policies are shaping the global economy and what on earth is going to happen next.

We are right now focusing on AI as an automation tool, as a tool to replace workers. That's not the best way of using AI. The best way of using AI is to try to complement workers so that they can do new things, they can perform new tasks, they can increase their sophistication level, and also respond to challenges in the world economy from globalization, from aging, from climate change, by creating new goods and services, new organizations, and so on. If we do that, I think I would be more optimistic about the future.

...AI is pretty useless in jobs that involve a huge amount of interaction with the physical world: Construction, custodial work, manufacturing work, work that involves home care [...] hairdressing. The reason being that we are very far behind in robotics, but also AI models themselves don't have a good conceptual understanding of spatial-causal relations, that even if we had fantastically flexible robots that could cut your hair or hold your hand. AI models would continuously make mistakes about spatial-causal relations and those unreliabilities would end up breaking your neck.

[...]

I've also eliminated, again based on other people's coding, any jobs that include a high degree of judgment. So we wouldn't want AI to run air traffic control.

[...]

Think about it yourself. If the Manchester Airport said from now on, "We're not going to have any air traffic controllers. Everything's gonna be done by AI. It might hallucinate, it might make some mistakes, but that's fine. It's cost savings." Would you fly to Manchester Airport?