The US Federal Reserve has announced the sector leaders who will lead its various working groups responsible for guiding monetary policies. The country’s central bank has made some puzzling appointments to its productivity and employment team, which will “assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.”
One of the advisors will be new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. After leaving Microsoft’s Core AI group for gaming, in the first months of her tenure she oversaw another rise in gaming hardware prices and recently told the company it would cut 3,200 jobs at its studios. Microsoft has been gutting staff in many divisions for some time, so this isn’t a new policy that it personally introduced. But the timing couldn’t be worse, especially as much of the gaming industry struggles to keep people employed and find a responsible way to use AI.
Alongside him in this odd advisory trio are Marc Andreessen, who doesn’t have the best track record for speaking intelligently about AI, and Charles I. Jones, an economics professor at Stanford University currently on leave to work at the Anthropic Institute. Jones aside, this isn’t necessarily the most reassuring group when it comes to criticizing artificial intelligence and the job market.
