Alex Imas

Today, I'm chatting with Alex Emas, who is Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind and Professor of Economics at University of Chicago, and Phil Trammell, who is Head of Economics at Epoch and Research Scholar at Stanford.

In general, in this interview, what I want to understand is what economics tells us about what we can expect in a world with more and more automation, more and more advanced AI, what that tells us about what will happen to wages, to labor share, what the best way to tax and redistribute the wealth that will be generated as a result of AGI will be, and what kinds of things will be scarce, because what is scarce kind of tells you where the value will accrue.

So I want to start there.

What are some plausible candidates of what will be scarce?

I'm curious to understand whether humans doing services for other humans can ever be a big part of the economy.

And here's maybe one intuition pump.

So...

in a world where AI can physically do anything humans can do.

You know, there's this whole machine economy where they're like building factories and doing research and coming up with new ideas.

And humans may or may not be involved in the physical production of those things, but probably not given that in the ultimate limit, if robotics is solved, if you don't care about humans being involved in that process, why would humans be involved in that process?

But then there's these other things that you point out where we actually maybe in some cases do want the ballerina or the barista or whatever to be a human that's part of the value of going to a cafe or a performance.

But only humans have that preference.

So there's this human economy where humans are doing services for each other.

And part of their wealth is flowing to other humans.

But part of their wealth is also... They will want some of the automated goods this machine-only economy is creating.

And so part of that wealth is flowing out.

And so if you just think of this as like... This is not a closed loop.

But a lot of things in the machine-only economy are a closed loop.

Because the machines don't care about getting...

the human barista to make them a coffee.