Mina Kimes

The fact they aren't spending money leads to a recession.

And overall, you have the irony of productivity growth leading to a demand-side recession.

That's the Citrini picture he's painting.

And I'm not here to endorse it.

I'm not here to say it's right or wrong.

But I just want to point out the tension between these two questions that you and Paolo asked, because they are making opposite assumptions about the future of this technology.

There's no question, there's a profound irony here.

These folks in AI, they talk about themselves as inventing God, and the first thing they do is saw off the branch on which they sit.

The first thing that it's done is turn English into the universal language of coding, thus not only completely changing the job, but also potentially open the door to folks who are word cells.

Now suddenly maybe they're able to build apps that displace the apps built by the shape rotators that we're supposedly talking about how we need to learn to code or otherwise accept permanent status in the underclass.

There's a profound irony here.

You could say it's totally fitting that essentially if what these architects are trying to do, if the architects of AI are fundamentally trying to use the corpus of the internet in order to allow a technology to do all human work,

Well, of course, the first thing they would understand how to automate is their own work.

You know, I'm here sort of trying to point out ways in which my perspective on AI and the economy is a little bit different than Mina's.

But I think it's important to say here, like, the last column that I wrote for my Substack was called Nobody Knows Anything.

And it's a famous line from William Goldman, who's a screenwriter for all the president's men and the princess bride.

And the first three words of his autobiography about the ability of Hollywood to predict hits was nobody knows anything.

And my big thesis about AI right now is that anybody trying to make any macroeconomic prediction about what this tech is doing to us doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.

It's very, very hard, in fact, to see any effect

that AI is having on the economy right now.