Azeem Azhar

It would be a little bit like

feudal Russia, only the Tsar is even richer and the serfs are even poorer.

So, I mean, when you paint it that way, without there being really significant policy interventions, you'd essentially have a giant vacuum cleaner in San Francisco sucking up all of the money in the

AI systems and even companies that are operating with their own products will be paying so much economic rent to the AI companies that they'll have the slimmest of margins, just like sharecroppers on a 17th century English farm.

And I think that that direction

absent any policy interventions, and if the technology worked out the way you described it, would probably be a direction that we would end up traveling.

Now, my bet is that the AGI vision won't play out the way people think it will.

I think it'll take much longer to get this technology in the economy.

I think...

It'll just be harder to get that robot that can do anything and everything.

And I also think that at some point, as we saw in Caledonia, Wisconsin, people would stand up and say, hey, we need to change this script.

We need to push things in a different direction.

the technological rapture, as we might call it.

It is quite odd to feel that sense of messianic belief that comes from some of the bosses and some of the people who work for them.

But reality has a rude way of interrupting dreams.

It just does.

And things end up being messier than we might expect.

And I think we could already see that with

with generative AI today.

So it is true that businesses have adopted it faster than previous technologies, faster than the internet and faster than the PC.