Tyler Cowen

So I thought, well, I'll do economics.

But I think in a way I've always done both.

I'm not sure I'm the one to diagnose, but I would say when I'm in the Bay Area,

Like the people here, to me, are the smartest people I've ever met, on average.

Most ambitious, dynamic, and smartest, like by a clear grand slam, compared to New York City or London or anywhere.

That's awesome and I love it.

But I think a side result of that is that people here overvalue intelligence and their models of the world are built on intelligence mattering much, much more than it really does.

Now people in Washington don't have that problem.

We have another problem.

And that needs to be corrected too.

But I just think if you could root that out of your minds, it would be pretty easy to glide into this expert consensus view that tech diffusion is universally pretty slow, and that's not gonna change.

No one's built a real model to show why it should change, other than sort of hyperventilating blog posts about everything's gonna change right away.

Ricardo knew this, right?

He didn't call it AI, but Malthus, Ricardo, they all talked about this.

It was just humans for them.

Well, people then would breed.

They would breed at some pretty rapid rate.

There were diminishing returns to that.

You had these other scarce factors.

Classical economics figured that out.