Lucas Perry

So you said the United States represents sort of the extreme end of this, where you can see the largest effect size in these areas, I would assume.

Yet it also seems like there's this picture of the global East and South generally doing better off, like people being lifted out of poverty.

There's that really compelling figure that you gave at the beginning of our conversation where you said 6% of counties account for two-thirds of our economic output.

And so there's this change in dynamic between productivity and labor force.

And the productivity you're suggesting is what is increasing.

And that is related to and contingent on AI automation technology.

Is that right?

Does that lead to us requiring less human labor?

I see.

How does the reality of AI and automation replacing human labor and human work essentially increasingly completely over time factor into and affect the virtuous and vicious versions of productivity?

In what timeline?

Okay.

Is that like two decades?

This is very interesting.

So you can think of every job as basically a list of tasks.

And AI technology can automate, say, some number of tasks per job.

But then the job changes in a sense that either you can spend more time on the tasks that remain and increase productivity by just focusing on those tasks, or the fact that AI technology is being integrated into the job process will create a few new tasks.

The tension I see, though, is that we're headed towards a generality with AI where we're moving towards all tasks being automated.

So perhaps over shorter timescales, it seems like

we'll be able to spend more time on fewer tasks or our jobs will change in order to meet and work on the new tasks that AI technology demands of us.