Alex Imas

So there's an economic subfield.

It's very, very small, but on the economics of structural change.

So if you look at agriculture and manufacturing, right?

If you look at them as share of GDP and share of employment, going back to like the 1800s, they were a huge part of the labor force and GDP of the economy.

And if you look, basically they become smaller and smaller, smaller parts of the economy.

Why is that happening?

It's because they're getting automated.

What does automation do?

It makes the price of those sectors very cheap, but people are satiated on the goods.

You can only eat so much, right?

So what does that mean?

It means even though we're eating just as much as we were before, because the price has come down so much, they are now tiny shares of the GDP, right?

What is made up the larger part of the GDP?

It's services, right?

These are tasks that haven't been automated yet.

So the question is, the number one question of economics in the age of advanced AI is what becomes scarce, right?

Everybody's talking about abundance.

We're going to have abundance.

Sure, we're going to have abundance of some things, but some things are going to remain scarce.

So if you answer that question, what's going to be scarce, a lot of the other answers pop out of it.