Anton Korinek

speaker

180 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 27 Feb

Anton Korinek’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · Is A.I. Eating the Labor Market? + The Latest on the Pentagon, OpenClaw and Alpha School · 27 Feb 2026 podcast

And I have gotten a fair amount of flack from my fellow economists over the past decade.

Although I'll say over the past year or two,

Many of my colleagues have said, well, I still don't entirely buy your worldview, but I'm glad somebody is thinking about it and I wouldn't rule it entirely out.

It is a fallacy that whenever a job is lost in the economy,

that person is going to remain unemployed forever.

But I think what we really want to look at is overall demand for human labor.

And if that demand curve shifts downwards because AI systems can supplant more and more of it, then what that's ultimately going to imply is that either the quantity of jobs or the wage levels or both may contract.

Now, I should say there's also the possibility that labor continues to do okay and it just doesn't grow as fast as the rest of the economy.

So, in other words, that the labor share of output is going to shrink, but at least we are not falling behind in absolute levels.

Our economic theories tell us that...

Whether that outcome or the one where labor just flat out loses, which one of those outcomes materializes depends in part on the speed of automation.

For all of our sakes, I'm crossing my fingers and I'm hoping that we will only lose out in relative terms and not in absolute terms.

But right now, I don't think we have any data that can tell us with any degree of certainty which of those outcomes is going to happen.

I may have expressed myself a little bit unclearly, but what I meant to say is that

the current capabilities are eventually going to diffuse to the economy.

And of course, by that time, I'm very much with you.

The actual capabilities are going to have advanced even further.

And, you know, if we are on this trajectory of skyrocketing capabilities, the gap itself may indeed go up rather than down.

I think that is the most plausible outcome probably.

But what I really wanted to emphasize is

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