Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
Economics of AGI episode w Alex Imas and Phil Trammell.
There’s a bunch of important questions about how we deal with AI that only economics can answer.
What is the optimal way to tax and redistribute the wealth that will be generated? How should countries not in the AI supply chain index into the gains? Is there any world where inequality doesn’t explode?
It might seem like these questions have obvious answers, but the first thing economics teaches you is that your intuitions can often be entirely wrong.
It was very helpful to chat through these things with Alex and Phil.
Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Will capital share increase?
(00:19:36) – Messy Middle scenario
(00:25:57) – How to tax and redistribute AI wealth
(00:30:02) – Why demand collapse is unlikely
(00:39:26) – Human employees would be hard to integrate into the machine economy
(00:43:08) – What if some humans (or AIs) value wealth accumulation intrinsically?
(01:01:28) – What should developing countries do?
Transcript
00:00:00 – Will capital share increase?
Dwarkesh Patel
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?
Alex Imas
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 sc
