Paul Krugman: prediction

Transcript context

…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. If I think a lot of your criticisms of the Republicans, of Donald Trump, as I read you, very often you’re saying that what’s wrong here is really quite obvious. So, that it’s still happening, is your view that somehow shame has become too weak a force? Or is it asymmetric information? Is there simply some kind of permanent lock that bad forces have over various processes? Kind of the micro foundations of how some very obvious wrongs could persist.…

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