Days After Announcing Mass Layoffs, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma Tapped To Advise The Federal Reserve On Jobs

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The US Federal Reserve has announced the industry leaders who will head up its various task forces guiding monetary policies. The country’s central bank has made some baffling appointments to its productivity and jobs 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 moving to gaming from Microsoft’s Core AI group, in the first few months of her tenure, she’s overseen yet another price hike for the gaming hardware and most recently announced to the company that it would be cutting 3,200 jobs across its studios. Microsoft has been gutting its staff across many divisions for awhile, so this isn’t a new policy she’s personally brought in. But the timing here could not be worse, especially as so much of the game industry is struggling to keep people employed and to figure out a responsible way to use AI.

Joining her in this strange advisory trio are Marc Andreessen, who doesn’t have the best track record on talking intelligently about AI, and Charles I. Jones, a Stanford University economics professor who is currently on leave to work at the Anthropic Institute. Jones aside, it’s not necessarily the most reassuring group when it comes to being critical of artificial intelligence and the job market.