In case you were concerned that we didn’t live in the Onion parody version of an actual, functioning universe, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is now leading a Federal Reserve task force dedicated to “productivity and jobs.” Yes, that Asha Sharma.
Sharma, whose hobbies include masochism, weird natalist bullshit, and collaborating with other execs to sort of just wing their way through the wanton destruction of 3,200 people’s livelihoods, will be one of three heads of a task force designed to “assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments.”
Sharma used to be president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, and I guess she still is at heart. She’ll be joined by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Stanford economics professor Charles I. Jones (who is, notably, on leave to work at Anthropic) . Other Federal Reserve task forces will center around communications, balance sheet policy, data, and inflation frameworks. They will be headed up almost exclusively by C-suite ghouls and economics professors—aka, the people who train tomorrow’s C-suite ghouls.
"The Federal Reserve's commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering. As is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor," said Chairman Kevin Warsh in an announcement. "The US economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers' means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon. I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution. The goal is straightforward: to ensure the Fed is best positioned to achieve our objectives in this consequential time."
The Asha Sharma portion of the equation looks goofy in headline form but makes perfect sense in the context of our country’s current direction. Businesspeople and politicians have decreed that the line must go up at all costs, and AI—which is inevitable, if you haven’t heard—will further that goal not by replacing human workers (definitely not! never!), but by pushing jobs, uh, somewhere else.
I’m sure Xbox, where freshly cut-to-the-bone teams are despairing over their inability to do things as simple as continuing to use their own proprietary game engines, will make an excellent testbed for this philosophy.
Recommended
Gita Jackson
