An Economist Lectures The Fed On AI And The Future Of Knowledge Work

InnovationScienceAn Economist Lectures The Fed On AI And The Future Of Knowledge WorkByJohn Drake,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. John Drake is a professor at the University of Georgia. Follow AuthorApr 21, 2026, 11:28am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Facade on the Federal Reserve Building in Washington DCgettyOn March 27, 2026, Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University, presented to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and did something unusual. Rather than lecturing about AI, he used it, live, as they watched, to do real economic research. An AI agent crawled a replication archive, downloaded 305,000 congressional speeches, classified each one by immigration sentiment and returned results that broadly replicated a landmark study. Total cost: eleven dollars.The talk was called “AI Agents for Research Workers,” and the framework Cunningham built around his demos leads to a genuinely uncomfortable conclusion. The same technology that makes researchers more productive can, if they respond to it the wrong way, make their work worse. If he is right, there is no doubt that this applies to knowledge work of all kinds.I spoke with Cunningham at length about the talk. What emerged was something more candid than a slide deck can capture, a portrait of a researcher who is simultaneously evangelizing these tools and worrying about what they are doing to him to him, and to us.What an AI agent actually isMost people think of AI as a chatbot. A person types a question, the system types back an answer, the person copy-pastes the result into whatever they were working on. An AI agent operates differently. It reads files, writes code, runs it, hits an error, diagnoses the problem, fixes it and continues, all inside a project directory, without the human typing a line of code. This is huge because the vast majority of knowledge work...