Alex Imas: prediction

Transcript context

…Today I’m chatting with Alex Imas, who is Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind and Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, and Phil Trammell, who is Head of Economics at Epoch and research scholar at Stanford. In general what I want to understand in this interview is what economics tells us about what we can expect in a world with more and more automation and more advanced AI. I want to understand what that tells us about what will happen to wages and the labor share, what the best way to tax and redistribute the wealth generated by AGI will be, and what kinds of things will be scarce. What is scarce tells you where the value will accrue. I want to start there. What are some plausible candidates of what will be scarce? Something like the relational sector, which is defined as services and goods where the fact that a human was in the loop is part of the value of that product. Because humans are naturally scarce, if we have automation where a lot of other things stop being scarce, we will still have scarcity in the things that humans are involved in and in the loop for. I’m curious to understand whether humans doing services for other humans can ever be a big part of the economy. Here’s maybe one intuition pump. In a world where AI can physically do anything humans can do, there’s this whole machine economy where they’re building factories and doing research and coming up with new ideas. Humans may or may not be involved in the physical production of those things, but probably not in the ultimate limit, if robotics is solved. If you don’t care about humans being involved in that process, why would they be? But then there are these other things you point out where we actually do want the ballerina or the barista to be a human. That’s part of the value of going to a cafe or a performance. But only humans have that preference. So there’s this human economy where humans are doing services for each other, and part of their wealth is flowing to other humans. But part of their wealth is also flowing out, because they will want some of the automated goods this machine-only economy is creating. This is not a closed loop. A lot of things in the machine-only economy are a closed loop because the machines don’t care about getting the human barista to make them a coffee. Within that model, isn’t it intrinsic that the human-only economy will become a smaller and smaller share?…

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