Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The Times actually assigned, told people to write things from the perspective of a century from now, looking back, and I was the only one who was willing to do it straight. You predicted ride sharing in that piece, by the way. I don’t know if you remember this. Yeah, it was fun. None of it was entirely serious, but yeah, there is this question. At the moment, college degrees still carry a significant wage premium. But there is a question in many ways, in the longer run — I think I did say that — a lot of the things we think of as being high skill, requiring lots of education, are actually the kinds of things that computers can, in the end, do. AI, or machine learning, whether that’s really AI or not, but it can do a whole lot of stuff that we thought of, not very long ago, as being the stuff that you have to go to school for years and years to achieve. Whereas robot plumbers are still quite a ways off because the material world tends to be full of unpredictable, hard-to-model features. The idea that we’re always going to be spending huge resources or that it will always make sense to put a lot of effort into higher education is at least arguable. I think the idea that we could become a society where education goes back to being a status symbol for the elite is a live possibility.…

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