Saagar Enjeti

They're constantly needed at malls.

Professor, when we zoom out a bit, again, you know, looking to your own work and what you've looked at in the classroom, what are the parallels in history to these types of forces, to people coming out in the workforce in the midst of great technological change, of a great amount of wealth concentrated in potentially bubble assets?

What does that look like and manifest in a society?

I think we do have a public policy framework under Trump.

Rather than going in the direction of making sure that people will not be immiserated, what they've done is, you mentioned earlier, he wants to dramatically increase.

He's already increased the defense budget dramatically, but he wants to up it even further.

And then we've also seen this tremendous increase in the domestic policy

law enforcement budget and an emphasis on mass surveillance, et cetera.

So it seems like the direction they want to go in is a sort of crackdown, authoritarian crackdown to make sure that people, if they're unhappy, are not going to have the ability or will be too afraid to get out of line.

That's exactly right.

Well, do you see the introduction of AI?

As you mentioned before, we've had general purpose technologies introduced before.

Over time, once you had a transition, they benefited, I think, the population overall, although there are some that may dispute that.

But the difference may be twofold.

Number one, how quickly AI

AI has been developed and is being disseminated.

And number two, previous general purpose technologies were meant to replace like the horse, for example.

This is explicitly meant to replace human beings.

And the developers of it will tell you that and tell you things like we intend to make all of human labor irrelevant, human beings effectively irrelevant to productivity growth and economic output, et cetera.

So do you see it as a more grave threat