Deric Cheng

And that we assign some value onto it.

We assign value onto art that we know who has painted it or that we know the story behind it.

And so that there is certainly still a gap for that human connection in terms of the creation of the product given to the people.

And then the second thing that is kind of involved in this is that certain things are just frankly too low volume, especially things that require a lot of manual precision creation for AI systems to develop.

I don't think AI systems are going to be developing violins for the next few decades because they're

It's low volume, it's very artisan, and it requires a lot of nuance that frankly has never been encoded online or onto the internet.

And so it just doesn't seem worth it for these corporations that are developing these very complicated or expensive AI systems to be putting in effort towards these until well, well, well down the line.

Yeah, I see, especially if we have the risks of increasing inequality that we have been discussing, that luxury goods will become a larger and larger portion of the economy, and that those status symbols could be a big problem.

driver of many portions of the economy, right?

Like having more people supporting your lifestyle would be a possible direction or having more expensive and signaling goods such as yachts.

I do think that that isn't necessarily the case and that we still have a lot of slack in the global economy to be bringing a lot of people out from

poverty, out from financial insecurity, out from scarcity, and that the focus of what we should be doing as a society is to move as many of these resources in the direction of lifting as much of the world out of these very difficult conditions so that we have almost a guarantee of a good lifestyle, of good housing, of education, of healthcare, of financial security, and that should be the priority for society.

Yeah, I think a really good tool in the Economist toolbox is called Baumol's price effects, which is essentially the recognition that things that are limited in terms of availability will go up in price, whereas things that are progressively cheaper and cheaper to produce will go down in price.

So TVs, consumer goods, phones, our technologies have gone significantly better.

And as a result, we can buy

frankly, almost anything you want on Amazon or other platforms for a 10th of the price that you might have imagined 20 or 30 years ago, right?

At the same time, our housing costs have gone up, our education costs have gone up, our healthcare has gone up, all of these for different reasons.

But a large underlying problem is that the availability of them is bottlenecked.

And so

When more wealth is captured or more wealth is created and less goes towards consumer goods, inevitably the cost of some of these limited goods must go up.