Steve Levitt
speaker
962 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 31 Jul
Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
He was just going to do it because he was born to do it.
Whereas somebody like me, well, you know, I'm kind of willing to do whatever people pay me to do.
And it is something that's more or less outside of our economic models.
The idea that people just believe so deeply in something.
Belief is a hard thing for us to model.
Belief may have been a big part of what got us into space, but space today has become big business, and the incentives are more purely economic.
Satellites today are an enormous economic activity.
Do you have a rough idea what the revenues are right now of satellite companies and other private companies operating in space relative to NASA's annual budget of about $25 billion?
So 20 times, 25 times bigger than NASA's budget.
I've been talking to some folks at Google who foresee a world in which a huge share of all the computation done by humanity would be done in space in the form of swarms of these solar-powered satellites, what they call Project Suncatcher, and they'd be acting as data centers for a future AI-driven world.
What do you think the chances are that they or someone else will actually pull this off?
You talked about that in a very matter-of-fact way, but most of the way you talk about space is more romantic and more intuitive, I would say.
What's your intuition?
Ultimately, there's a practical dimension to this question.
AI space data centers are objects launched up into space that need to be regulated just like everything else.
I asked Rosanna Hoffman from the UN how she would think about regulating AI data centers in space.
Spoken like a true economist.
That's exactly the sort of thing that economists would say we not only should have, but really need if you're dealing with this negative externality of space junk.
After the break, if AI goes to space, what will it learn?
You're listening to Freakonomics Radio, and we'll be right back.
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