Benjamin Todd

speaker

4,140 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2023 last heard 28 May

Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #244 – Benjamin Todd on how we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history · 26 May 2026 podcast

full 100% AGI is created because it takes time to roll out.

But then several years later than that, they start to crash.

So that would just be this.

This happens in many economic models where you can have full automation

get a rising then falling pattern of of human wages but there's another possibility which is that maybe there's one percent of tasks where we either don't allow ais to do them or they can never like quite do them or it's just like inherently important that a human does them and if you say if you put that into this model that only 99 automation is ever reached rather than 100 then in that model human wages just keep increasing indefinitely

And everyone is left working on that remaining 1% of tasks.

So there's a huge, potentially this huge difference between actually 100% automation and 99% automation.

Well, I don't know where this will help, but it has kind of happened in history before where in the past, almost everyone worked in agriculture and now that's only a couple of percent of people.

So in a sense, 99% jobs have already been automated.

But that remaining 1% of things just expanded to become the whole economy.

And even in places like South Korea, that transition happened in only one generation.

So it can even happen very quickly.

But yeah, in terms of what these things will be, Alex MS had this interesting article recently about, he called them relational jobs.

So it's jobs where a human doing them is part of the reason why we want them.

And so for example, maybe a lot of luxury services or luxury crafts are kind of like this.

And he observes that typically as we get wealthier, we actually buy more of these types of things rather than less.

And you need to also picture, this is an economy where maybe there's like, there's a hundred or a thousand AIs per person.

So like the idea that it could just be this like tiny little slither of like the still human things among this like vast economy.

I think that makes it seem a bit less counterintuitive to me.

Another is these things might, some of these things might essentially be oversight roles where you're like giving the AI preferences and instructions because like each person is kind of like a mini CEO where they have, there's like,

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