Job risk depends on task complementarity within a role
“The thing that I think we're less good on is how those tasks relate to one another. This is the term called complementarity. ... when the tasks are interrelated, screwing up on one or two tasks means you did not complete your job. And it's basically is kind of almost a zero one sort of relationship. So the extent of that complementarity at how these tests are related will determine the extent to which automation is going to affect the labor market.”
Agents can develop persistent biases through synthetic memory files
“The workaround, because they don't have memories, I'm not updating their weights. The kind of workaround is that for agents to write down little skill files for themselves. So what they were doing is essentially writing down skill files for agents that follow that would say, hey, this kind of sucked. Remember this, so it's kind of a persistent effect.”
Future economic scarcity will shift toward human meaning and time
“The number one question of economics in the age of our advanced AI is what becomes scarce? Right, everybody's talking about like abundance. We're gonna have abundance. Sure, we're gonna have abundance of some things, but some things are gonna remain scarce. So what is gonna be If you answer that question, what's going to be scarce? A lot of the other answers pop out of that.”
Consumer demand elasticity determines if productivity gains cause unemployment
“If the consumers don't respond by buying a lot more of the product, the firm is going to fire a bunch of people because they can do more with less. But when prices come down, people buy way more of the product, then they might hire more of the same people. And in many sectors we've seen kind of the second thing play out.”
AI generality differs significantly from previous specific-purpose technologies
“All of a sudden, the generality of the technologies just exploded, And to me that was that was a huge deal. I kind of feel maybe this is not just going to be like the steam engine or whatever. It might be very different. Maybe we won't have jobs, maybe there will be new jobs.”
AI agents create a paradigm shift by performing computer actions
“The thing about agents versus just like the web based browsers, they can do stuff on your computer. They can say, like you could tell it like look, make me a spreadsheet. It will go and make you a spreadsheet using the tools that are available in your computer, not just say okay, here is how you would make a spreadsheet but you have to get your story, and that's a complete that's a paradigm shift as far as the economics of the technology.”
The speed of AI development outpaces historical labor transitions
“The thing that I feel like a lot of economists and just people in general, I think aren't talking enough about is speed. You talk about that if things are fast, we need public policy, we need the new jobs aren't going to come fast enough. Training isn't going to happen fast enough where you're going to get you know, things are going to get fully automated very quickly, and people are going to become unemployed. There's not going to be enough time in the economy to see that pretty little graph.”
Expanding capital ownership may be necessary if labor is replaced
“The thing that makes most sense to me is somehow expanding the ownership of capital. If labor is replaced by capital, then what's going to help people is formally were a labor in labor Now universal Basic, universal basic etf. Right, yeah, but it was everybody, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly universal. Everyone gets a monthly slice of the index.”
