Bloomberg News reporter Aki Ito has found a sweet spot writing about the intersection of technology and the economy. Based out of Bloomberg’s San Francisco bureau, she covers the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, Dallas, Minneapolis and Chicago, as well as technology-related trends in the U.S. economy.
In Depth recently spoke with Aki to discuss her career path and the challenges she faces in her current position.
How did you end up covering the Fed – from San Francisco?
A lot of people ask why I’m not in Washington if I’m a Fed reporter, and it’s because power at the Fed is actually pretty decentralized. There are 12 regional Fed banks, and their presidents play a critical role in setting monetary policy. I’m responsible for covering four of them.
What are the challenges that come with the beat?
One challenge is the time I spend traveling to cover the speeches that these Fed officials deliver. At peak times, I’m in two or three cities in the same week. It’s grueling, but it’s also taken me to places I never would have seen otherwise, like Williston, North Dakota, which is at the heart of the new oil boom right now. I got stuck at their regional airport because the assigned flight attendant didn’t show up and they couldn’t find anyone else to fill in for her. That’s what happens when your unemployment rate is below 1 percent.
You’ve built out a bit of a niche covering how technology is influencing the economy. How did that specialty emerge?
It wasn’t something I had planned or anticipated ahead of time. Living and working in San Francisco, I was running into a lot of interesting people developing the technology to do things a little differently than before. And as I looked closer, it became clear to me that some of these fairly technical and little-known breakthroughs were changing or had the potential to change the broader economy.
There were wide implications beyond our Silicon Valley bubble – the way jobs get allocated in the marketplace with sophisticated computer algorithms, for example, or the kind of work that better and better machines are making obsolete. And if that’s the case, it shouldn’t be just a handful of the world’s best computer scientists and venture capital investors who know about this.
You’ve written a few trend stories about technology in the economy. Which one that you’ve covered do you think poses the biggest risk to individuals around the world?
I think the biggest change is included in my story about automation in the workplace – how advances in artificial intelligence are allowing machines to do all this work that only humans could do before. It’s just incredible what you can teach computers and robots to do today and how much this technology is already being used across different industries. One study estimated that, in a decade or two, computers and robots could do the jobs that employ about half the U.S. workforce today.