Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok on AI, Jobs, and Economic Growth

In a world with strong AI, there's a kind of moral nervousness that sets in. So I'm much more likely to tell people, like, hey, you'd better fasten your seat belt. Like, you don't wanna miss out on what's coming, how many years you might live. Suppose I tell you that AI is going to create 50% unemployment. Half of the people in the workforce will lose their jobs. That sounds terrible. You know, that's catastrophic. Suppose, however, that I tell you that the work week will be cut in half. People will do half as much work. That actually sounds glorious. You know, that sounds great. And yet, these are almost the same thing. The problem with social media isn't that it stores information. The problem is that it stores information instead of you storing the information. Every time you screenshot something instead of thinking, every time you share instead of reflecting, you are training yourself to be a little more hollow. One of the biggest questions surrounding AI is what happens to work. Will increasingly capable systems eliminate jobs, create new ones, or fundamentally change the relationship between labor, productivity, and economic growth? Economists, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok take a long view. Looking across centuries of technological change, they argue that growth itself is often the most important variable. It creates new industries, expands opportunity, and raises living standards, even when the specific jobs of the future are difficult to predict. Wyatt Thompson of OpenAI speaks with Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok about AI, labor markets, economic growth, and the future of human work. So one of the fears I hear most often is that strong AI or AGI is just gonna put everyone out of work. I have a much more optimistic view than that, and I think most economists do. And one way to think about it is just to realize AI creates many, many jobs, even though it will take away some jobs. So one of the neatest properties of current AI models is they allow a small number of individuals working with AI to really do a lot more work than was possible previously. So this will mean more companies, more projects, more non profits, just more ventures, more attempts to entertain people, and all the new things that will be done by humans working with AI, will create jobs. So I think the view both Alex and I hold is that assuming our government does not mess up other policy matters, but we think we can basically keep full employment for the indefinite future. Just a few areas where I think AI will create or already is creating a lot of new jobs. One area is generally energy, electricity, the grid. Alex himself has written a lot on The United States electrical grid. It's completely screwed up. It will take twenty years, thirty years, forty years to fix. I'm not sure I will ever fix it. The AI's cannot do that on …