Austan Goolsbee: evaluation

Transcript context

…The Chicago Fed loves us. That you better be careful. Here’s my second question about AI and its impact on productivity. How much of the improvement in AI . . . I’ll tell you the thought experiment I like to do is to ask, what jobs would be replaced with the AI that exist right now, not extrapolating it forward? Because a lot of the grandest dreams for AI and rapid adoption, I think, are premised on extrapolating a growth rate. To the extent that some of the improvement in AI is not coming from improvements of AI theory or new algorithms, but instead from bigger and bigger data sets and more and more computing power, data sets and computing power have diminishing returns that will kick in pretty quickly. So, it would behoove us to remember that there was a time 15 years ago when self-driving cars were improving so rapidly that people were predicting that within five years, there would not be a single professional driver in the United States. Then, basically, what happened is, the rate of improvement didn’t go negative; it didn’t go to zero. It just slowed way down. Now, we’re having some self-driving taxis in different cities, but we’re nowhere near what, 15 years ago, there was a group of real advocates who said, by 15 years from now, people are going to be like, “Dad, what do you mean people used to drive their own car? How dumb were people?” We’re still a long, long way from that. How should we reform the MBA business graduate education? You’re an expert on that.…

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