Deric Cheng

And so with the agricultural revolution that took, what, 5,000, 10,000 years, the industrial revolution took at least many decades, the internet revolution has occurred in the process of perhaps a couple of decades, and that the advent of AI will happen

more quickly.

But yeah, it will happen much more quickly.

But also that the diffusion of the AI technologies throughout all of society will still happen much more slowly than perhaps we can think about in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, right?

Like, I think many developing countries are only starting to see the internet start to diffuse into their societies.

And similarly, it could be a significant period of time for AI does so for most of the developing world.

Yeah, I can definitely empathize with the economists and existing policymakers because when you step into the bubble of people really thinking about AI capabilities, some of the things that they're talking about do seem so extreme or hard to believe, right?

But I think that...

There is the potential right now for a shift from the traditional sort of automation that we have seen over millennia, in which individual jobs get automated and people move from those jobs, say typewriters, to like knowledge workers, or say from horse cart drivers to taxi drivers.

All of those shifts typically led to more jobs in new industries because there were always a higher level or more complicated or more advanced roles for people to move into.

I think there is the possibility that AI does theoretically have the ability to automate nearly fully large amounts of cognitive labor and that as it gets better and better,

that it can continue to expand across many, many knowledge work industries and also compete directly with humans on even the new jobs that are created in the knowledge working industry, right?

They might be adapted to become AI coordinators themselves.

And so I do think that there is the risk of

decrease, maybe not the total number of jobs, but the total number of desirable jobs that we want humans to have.

I think a lot of the goals of the economy have been to move people towards knowledge work, towards intellectual work, towards leveraging the value of education.

And when we

take the implications of AI capabilities into account, that starts to move the needle in the opposite direction, almost pushing humans towards more manual labor.

And so when you start to take some of these assumptions into account, the shape of how you do economic modeling changes very dramatically.

And there is a lot of work, I'm sure, that still needs to be done in terms of understanding what that might look like and what the implications of that would be for our society and our economy.