Phil Trammell

Well, I was going to say there's a sense in which nothing's yet been completely automated.

If you look at the network adjusted factor shares of a good, which is to say you look down the supply chain and say, not just like the final step, how much of that is done by capital and labor, but what went into the machines that can automate that final step?

you'll find that labor's adding a lot of belly down the supply chain.

So like, you know, computer and electronic products in the US have a very stable capital share, network-adjusted capital share of around 50%, it's not 100%.

I do think there's this qualitative shift that I think we agree is coming, which is that there will be at least some goods whose network-adjusted capital share goes to one, right?

Because the whole supply chain can be automated and there's no part in it that we care intrinsically about having a human do.

So that'll be a, you know, that'll be a qualitative shift.

Interestingly, the implications of that shift for the overall capital share are ambiguous because if we, let's say that we've got the two sectors, the human intrinsic sector with the ballerinas and everything else, right?

Right now,

everything else has been scarce because of the lack of labor in it, right?

But if we fully automate the supply chains for everything else, right, and we satiate everything else really fast, then the quantity of everything that's not a ballerina, say, goes to infinity, but...

or the marginal utility in that stuff goes to zero faster than the quantities rising.

So if you just looked at the goods available to, you know, a Mongolian of the distant past, no expert on this society, but I know that they didn't have nearly the variety that we have now.

And

They looked at the jobs that were sort of intrinsically human, like being a singer, say, and they looked at the things that were not intrinsically human, like the transportation services provided by their horses or the different kinds of food they had.

if they just kind of held the varieties fixed in both categories and asked what will happen once we have a lot more automation, they might have said, well, we'll just satiate in horse-like transportation and in yogurt and in yurts.

Those shares will all go to zero and we'll be left spending all of our money on singers.

But of course, that's not what's happened because as we've accumulated more wealth and more advanced machines and so on,

We've expanded the range of things other than singers to spend our money on, and the share spent on singers has stayed sort of negligible.

So likewise, that's sort of my central prediction about how the future unfolds, though it could go either way.