Anton Koronek

If everything goes well with AI, and I should say that is a big if, then AI abundance essentially carries the notion that we could all be so much more wealthier than we can even imagine today.

AI and robots and so on will be able to produce a lot more goods and services than what we have in today's economy and would make us essentially an order of magnitude wealthier and better off.

There are two types of positive outcomes depending on what your relationship to work is.

Some people who really like their work, they predict a world where you have a lot more exciting work yet than today, maybe with a little bit less time intensity.

And then folks who are not that crazy about their job, they're predicting a world where we will have to work a lot less and can still sustain the kind of wealth and well-being that we have in today's world.

You can see this in lots and lots of pronouncements by business people who say, oh, we need more skilled workers.

And that essentially encapsulates this notion that if we only had more workers, we could produce so much more.

The thing with AI and advanced robotics is that those wishes may actually come true and we may enter a world where they can just press a button and have one more AI worker or press another button and have one more robot and those can all perform work on their behalf and essentially expand our economic opportunities.

You know, I think it's the first time of this particular nature.

But if you want to go into like history and look for any parallels, I think the closest parallel would be the Industrial Revolution.

So you would have to go back some 250 years for anything that comes even close to what we are about to experience this time, I think.

From a big picture economic perspective, you can say work as we have it today didn't even really exist before the industrial revolution.

Because before then, the most important factor of production was the land that people worked in order to produce the food that they needed.

And all of a sudden you had these new technologies that didn't rely so much on land as they relied on machines.

It started with spinning and weaving in the textile sector, but then soon we had the steam engine and electricity and so on.

and what that implied was that what was really scarce in the economy the land wasn't as important anymore and the new thing that you needed to produce in addition to the labor that people had to put in

were machines that you can easily copy and reproduce.

So you could easily build more spinning wheels, more weaving machines and that meant that there was nothing holding back production and that meant that we could suddenly produce a lot more because that bottleneck of land was overcome.

And in some sense, you can see that's the main reason why today people in advanced economies are something like 20 times richer on average than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

At the time, it was actually quite disruptive.