Alex Imas

That's like a very simple scenario to think about because obviously people are going to get fired if it's fully automated.

The other one is the one we've just been talking about where people become much more productive, but consumer demand is not elastic enough to absorb that extra production.

So you're going to have much fewer people doing a lot more stuff.

So again, you're going to have a lot of unemployment.

The third thing is related, but is basically how many jobs each person has will determine the incentives of the company to actually invest in the automation technology.

So let's talk about the one task job.

Let's say a person is just pulling the lever.

And let's say right now that doesn't even look exposed.

We look at the exposure graph, it doesn't look exposed.

But let's say we're kind of getting kind of close and it just needs a bit more money to get to the automation switch.

Well, the company has a lot higher incentive to invest that money if they know that if they invest that money, hey, they can get rid of that person completely.

Whereas they have less...

when, you know, let me invest in automating the lever pull if I know that I can't fire the person because he's also going around and doing a lot of stuff.

So we have to think about the incentives of the firms to automate in the first place.

These are large projects to do the automation.

It's not like, oh, OpenAI releases a model

all of the companies adopted overnight.

We see it in, you know, a week later, we see the outcome.

There's a lot of an organizational kind of going back and forth.

A lot of systems need to be changed, all of this sort of thing.