Alex Imas

So there's like a Pareto improvement.

Everybody's getting better as a result of AI automation.

And of course, there's a trivial sense in which that must be true because whatever money you're saving, whatever money the company is saving by not paying the humans instead of just paying the AIs,

Those resources still exist in the economy and they can just be paid off to people.

But there's going to be some allocative inefficiency.

The government doesn't know exactly who got laid off because of AI.

There's some political problem of if the meta worker gets laid off first and they're making 200k a year.

Is there a politically sustainable situation where you give them a 200k check a year when there's many people who are working who are making much less?

Do you at all find this scenario plausible where AI is actually automating a bunch of things, but there isn't enough wealth creation as there is automation?

I think it's- Is that plausible?

And why is it implausible that it just like a company can save money by laying off a bunch of software engineers?

But and in the long run, there's a Jevons Paradox thing.

And, you know, we can't anticipate in advance what we do with more software.

And surely there's going to be more uses.

But in the short run.

The fact is just that a lot of people are laid off and they still need to figure out how they can use a million X more JavaScript tokens.

The concern is that suppose, whatever you're saving on those white collar workers,

If that's not growing the economy, but it's just creating some, you know, saved resources that can be allocated elsewhere, is that enough to do a broad-based redistribution scheme?

Because then you have, like, the money you've saved off a couple of people.

Yeah.