AI and Labor Market Concerns: The podcast discusses the fear that AI will lead to mass unemployment by replacing human jobs, similar to historical concerns about technological advancements.
Comparative Advantage: The host argues that AI, like skilled human workers, can coexist with less skilled workers through comparative advantage, where each focuses on tasks they perform best.
Technological Innovation: Technological advancements, including AI, are seen as ultimately beneficial, reducing costs and increasing efficiency, despite initial disruptions in specific sectors.
Historical Analogies: The podcast draws parallels between AI and past innovations like the automobile, suggesting that fears of job loss are not new and have historically been proven unfounded.
Economic Efficiency: The host emphasizes that slavery is economically inefficient, suggesting that AI would not benefit from enslaving humans but rather from collaborating with them.
Future AI Interactions: The potential for AI to become a dominant force is discussed, with the suggestion that AI would benefit from cooperation with humans rather than conflict.
Market Dynamics: The podcast highlights that market dynamics, such as competition and innovation, generally lead to better outcomes for consumers and society as a whole.
Potential Risks: While acknowledging the benefits of AI, the host also warns of potential risks if AI is used maliciously by powerful entities, emphasizing the need for vigilance.
Transcript
[Music] This is the Human Action podcast where we debunk the economic, political, and even cultural myths of the days. Here's your host, Dr. Bob Murphy. Hey everybody, welcome back to Human Action Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about the economics of AI. And I want to be clear, this isn't particularly Austrian, the stuff I'm going to say in this episode, though I think it's consistent with Austrian economics, but this is more just spelling out some basic implications of marginal productivity theory and comparative advantage and applying it to the discussion over AI. And so specifically, as we'll see, just to jump to the chase here, I'm going to relay a lot of the standard objections that you're seeing regarding AI and like the ravages it's going to have on human society and the labor market in particular. And I'm just going to show that you could use a lot of those same arguments to apply to a high-skilled human worker. And that if it doesn't if you're if you know if the commentary would sound ludicrous applied to highly skilled humans then that should just give us pause. That doesn't mean oh I just ended the discussion mic dropped. Thank you folks. I'll be here all week. But it does mean the original complaint, you know, the that person or that school of thought would have to retool and regroup and then come up with a reason that oh yeah, yeah, there's there's some other things going on that make, you know, the the concerns over AI legitimate because again, primapacia, if I can show everything you just said about AI is also true for highly skilled human workers, then something's got to be screw with the argument. All right, so why don't I just jump right in? Oh, and one last thing. What I'll also do because I know there's a lot of high achievers who listen to the human action podcast. In fact, those highly skilled humans of whom I spoke, that's you look in the mirror. Um, I I will try to take the argument to the next level. Right? In other words, probably a lot of you have heard some of the first back and forths that I'm going to be doing here, but I want to take it one step further in particular re relate some of what I'm saying to other standard arguments you might hear in the free market/ libertarian discourse and just to see like, oh wait a minute, if this is the way like Murphy's handling the AI stuff, but then over here there's this other way that we talk about welfare payments or something Then is there some cognitive dissonance we got to deal with? Right? So I'll try to do that as well where applicable. Okay. So the motivation for me picking this topic this week were a couple of tweets. One's from or well two of them are from Matt Walsh and later we'll cover one from Brian Johnson, the longevity guy. So Walsh says first um people say that we shouldn't worry about AI wiping out jobs. The jobs will just change. they say. But the whole point of AI is that it removes the human component entirely. The jobs aren't going to change. They'll just disappear. AI will make like 10 people into trillionaires. Almost everyone else will be screwed. Mass unemployment. Millions of workers rendered irrelevant all at once. That's what's going to happen. Not maybe, not might. It's going to happen. And it doesn't seem like we're doing anything at all to prepare for it. And then why don't I go ahead and just read the followup. So, the Mises Institute's own David Brady Jr. um had responded to Walsh saying, "Don't you think people said the same thing about the automobile?" Right? So, let me just pause there. And so, that's a very standard move from the people who certainly the people who don't want the government to quote do something about AI. All right. So with all these things we can be nuanced and layered and you know you're allowed as an Austral libertarian to think that there is some problem with the world while you also disagree that the way to address that is to have the government get a bunch more power. Okay. So a lot of times those things are conflated and that you know hey if you were in favor of legalizing heroin it's cuz you think heroin is actually benign and no that doesn't follow. Okay. So um in this case though what David is you know I I haven't talked to him about this but it seems like what he's getting at there is that any kind of innovation yes it's going to have winners and losers in the beginning. It's going to disrupt and the if there's some technological innovation then the machinery that comes in and automates things that were previously done by a human will displace the humans that were right in that sector. But then what what you know what's the long run implication of that? It's that well right away it benefits you know the shareholders and the employers in that sector because now they can produce the same products and whatever well reducing their labor cost but then if there's competition that will spill over and ultimately redown to the benefit of the consumers in that sector. Okay. Um and so you it would be foolish to try to arrest technological innovation if it might quote destroy jobs in a particular sector. Elsewhere I've talked about um self-driving trucks, right? Like that would put human truck drivers out of jobs. But obviously what will that do? What are the benefits of that? It will lower transportation costs and reduce fatalities certainly in the long run on the on the road, right? And so with all these things, the way you know you kind of do the analysis, the standard approach is just to say, yep, it could have negative consequences for particular workers in that sector, but it also has corresponding benefits for other humans and that in general the benefits to the other humans outweigh the losses to the displaced workers. So it helps humans on net this innovation. And so if you allow for open entry and the government's not interfering with these innovations over time, just about every human is better off because of that policy regime that yet if you were somebody who lost your job because a self-driving truck came along, you're helped because of the automation and you know uh innovations in other sectors too. So yeah, maybe you had to take a lower paying job, but now everything you buy is cheaper because of all the innovations the other sectors too. So your real wages end up being higher in the long run. All right? So you know another standard go-to example economists like to use is agriculture. on the eve of the civil war or the war between the states if you prefer there was a large fraction of the US labor force was in agriculture and then now you know over the decades that just kept falling and now it's like 1.5% or something all right and it's not that oh gee humanity is now poorer than we were in 1860 in real terms no of course not that we were able to make more and more food with fewer and fewer people because their labor was augmented by more tractors and advanced irrigation techniques and fertilizer and all that stuff. And um and so the the humans that previously were necessary just to grow enough food to feed everybody were freed up. Their labor was released from having to be in agriculture to go do other things. Right? So yes, if some particular farmer gets a tractor and then stops hiring a bunch of farm hands that he previously had used cuz now the the farmer using the tractor doesn't need so many people to help him. Those people might be upset and think, oh, if the government had just passed a law saying it's illegal to use tractors, but obviously that would have been bad in the long run for humanity if governments around the world forbid the use of tractors in agriculture. Okay. So, that's a long elaboration that I just packed into David Brady's little response there as one sentence response to Matt Walsh. So, I'm saying that's pretty standard in this area in this arena when people are complaining about AI. He's like, "Oh, you lite." That's what people have been saying about technological quote laborsaving devices throughout history. And they've always been proven wrong. And so now Matt Walsh is going to respond to that and say, "No, AI is not at all like going from a carriage to a car. Both the carriage and the car needed a human to drive them. It's just that with the car, the human is going faster and farther. AI removes the human from the equation completely. That's what people aren't grasping. This technology is different in kind from anything else that has ever existed or ever been invented in the entire history of humanity. Prior to this, we invented better tools for humans to use. Now, the tool has its own brain and doesn't need humans at all. Okay. So at this point, one could argue with Walsh's characterization, and I know actual like people with PhDs in relevant fields who are in AI for a living that would disagree with him on this stuff and that say no, the AI is never going to quote think in the same way that we do. Okay, but I for the sake of argument, let me just stipulate that what Walsh just said there is entirely correct and that he has accurately characterized what AI maybe not today is, but what it's going to be 10 years from now. Okay. And so even so you might say, "Oh, okay. Yeah." So that kind of showed David Brady Jr.'s uh analogy with previous innovations that now looking back we recognize were were good for humanity. Even though some people at the time might have been upset, like you know, buggy manufacturers and whatnot, the people who made all the buckets that you put the horse poop in, right? Oh jeez, it got thrown out of work. I spent my whole career learning how to make the perfect bucket. Right? So what I did is just took Matt Walsh at face value, called us bluff, and I said, "Humans who are 25 years old are stronger and more skilled than humans who are 18 years old. The 25y olds aren't just tools to be used by the 18y olds. Semicolon. The 25-year-olds have brains. Did I just prove 25 year olds make it impossible for 18 year olds to find a job? All right. So, what I'm doing there, and I I'm not trying to be glib, and as you can imagine, several of Matt's fans in the fallout in the wake of my tweet there let me know their opinion of my intelligence, and it was not flattering, but I meant every word of that. I actually fixed. I just saw as I was reading that to you folks, I had a typo, and I fixed it. The machines probably wouldn't have done that, right? So, let's just unpack that, right? And and in in fairness, some people besides just denouncing me did actually try to grapple with me and think through the logic and come back and try to tell me why things were different, what not. All right, so I will deal with that in a moment. But let me just make sure everyone's getting the full profoundity of my response to Walsh there. Literally everything he just said about why AI threatens humanity would also be true about 25 year olds visav 18y olds right 25 year olds are phys you know physically stronger in general they're you know more things they have more job experience they're more skilled at whatever kind of job you're talking about in general there are a lot of 25 year olds who are better in just about every way from an employer's perspective at that job than the average 18-year-old would be, right? I mean, there might be some exceptional cases where like the top 0.1% of 18y olds is better than the bottom 30% of 25 year olds and something, okay? But in general, that's not going to be the case for all kinds of jobs. All right? And so I'm saying if all you relied on to understand why what Matt Walsh is saying about AI isn't going to be a problem. If all you could rely on were the things that he listed in those tweets that I just showcased for you folks, you would have to conclude that either 25 year olds spell disaster for 18 year olds and that's why 18-year-olds can't ever get a job. or you'd have to conclude something's missing from Walsh's argument or he's just wrong. Right? It's gota be one of those three things. All right? So my claim is that he's just wrong, but we can explore the other ones. So what is it specifically though? How is it that 18-year-olds manage to find work? If what I just said is true, if in general, you know, an 18-year-old wants to work at McDonald's and you say, "Yeah, what are you gonna do?" Oh, I'm going to put on this headset. I'm going to deal with customers. I got to, you know, some once in a great while actually make change and things like that. And I got to if someone comes back and says my fries are cold, I got to deal with every in general. A 25year-old can fill that role better than an 18-year-old, right? You know, they're going to be more mature, interact with customers better, be more likely to show up on time, not come in hung over, not just fail to come in or call 2 minutes before the shift starts, say, "Oh, yeah, my car broke down. I can't make it." Right? Screwing around with their friends, less likely to steal from you, to, you know, give free food to their buddies when they show up. Right? For all these reasons, do a better job, like if if it's their job to clean up at the end of the shift, to mop the floor or something. 25-year-old in general more likely to do a good job of that. Okay. So, how is it that 18 year olds manage to get hired at McDonald's? How is that possible? Oh, they work for less than the 25 year olds are willing to work for. That's how. Okay. And in general in the market economy, you'd say like, "Oh, if you're just someone of regular skills, aren't you threatened by the fact that there are brain surgeons out there?" I mean, doesn't that hurt me if I don't have advanced skills? the fact that there are extremely talented engineers and surgeons and architects and, you know, truck drivers who can operate machinery in a way that I, you know, I I wouldn't want to have to. You ever like seen one of those 18-wheelers in a busy intersection or something trying to make a sharp turn? I wouldn't want to do that. I wouldn't know how to, but I certainly wouldn't want the responsibility. Everybody's looking at me. Geez, they just go look at a construction site and those guys driving around the forklifts and or the uh you know back hose and whatever like that's even if they don't have advanced educational degrees from MIT or something a lot of people have a very particular set of skills right and somebody who's in their you know their high teens or low 20s and they don't have a lot of skills you might conclude that they don't have a chance in this world and that they're harmed. And wow, if I'm a 20-year-old, I would be so much better off economically if all of these skilled humans just disappeared tomorrow. Then look at all the jobs I would get. I could be a heart surgeon. I could get a job designing the next skyscraper. All right. You see how ridiculous all this is and how ludicrous it is and that yeah, you could possibly make a very narrow argument and say if for some reason people, you know, age 24 and older were not allowed legally to apply for some particular type of job. conceivably that could benefit the teenagers in that city or something because like the higher pay they could get would more than compensate for the reduction in quality or the increase in price of the products and services that that sector produces. Right? But it certainly would not generalize. On average, every 18year-old is far better off living in a world where skilled 30-year-olds and and above are allowed to work and to out compete them for lots of jobs. That you want to live in a world where there's a bunch of people who are more skilled than you and earn way more money than you do. That's better off for you. Not just in the sense of, well, because some of them might be my parents or my relatives and I wouldn't want them to disappear. I don't even mean just that. I mean in narrow pecuniary terms what you can what what you can sell your labor hours for with your limited skill set and physical might as an 18-year-old in our modern world. What you can buy with your wages is more desirable to you given the existence of billions of other humans who are stronger and have better skills than you do. Okay. And so I'm saying make sure you think through and understand why that's true. And then if you still want to say I'm afraid of AI, okay. But a lot of the people who are saying stuff and like Matt Walsh, I am sure Matt Walsh did not stop and first think through the implications and say yes I understand the sense in which amongst the set of hum of humans 18y olds actually earn a higher real wage even though there's a bunch of other people that are stronger and more skilled in the labor pool than they are. I'm certain he did not first think of that and then realize, oh, but the distinction with the No, no, he didn't. Okay, by the way, I'm not saying if he read my tweet or saw this episode, you know, maybe somebody at gunpoint made him listen to it. I'm not saying that Matt Walsh would say, "Oh, I'm such a fool. I take it all back." I'm not saying that. And I'm not even saying he should take it back if he's intellectually honest. No, you could come up with things, but my point is I don't think he had before he did the tweet. That's my point is I'm trying to advance the conversation because a lot of the stuff of people complaining about AI and the impact on the labor market, everything they say would also be true of just skilled qualified humans visav unskilled workers. Okay. And so clearly something is wrong with the argument. It needs more. Okay. So let me now try to help to you know buttress Matt Walsh's position. So, like I say, to their credit, some people did come back and say things. So, one guy said to me something like, "Yeah, what happened the reason the 18-year-old can still find work even though there are more experienced 25 year olds in the job market is the 18-year-old is willing to work for less than the other person, right? So, that's true. Yes, good job. You thought it through to that level." And they said, 'But what's going to happen when instead of there being just a limited number of 25 year olds with superior skills, the market is flooded with a virtually unlimited supply of AI bots who are willing to work for the cost of electricity, like $30 a month or something. And that Okay, so now what are you saying? Oh, the 18-year-old just have to go be willing to work for $19 a month and that's fine. Okay, so let's just walk through that. Um, on its own terms, right now there are only some sectors where you're really seeing the impact of AI, right? And so somebody posted a graph taken from some analysis people had done showing in um I think it was like certain tech sector jobs. I I forget what the the category was but it was showing hiring patterns and then there was like a dotted line showing when some version of GPT came out. And there again looking at the lines and assuming they compiled the numbers correctly and everything it did look like there was a noticeable impact namely that and they had bifurcated into um experience positions and like junior level workers at the whatever these tech companies were. Okay. And it did look like, oh yeah, once that vertical line hits that the hiring pattern of the senior level positions seemed like it was unaffected, but there was a rapid drop off in new jobs given to young people. Okay. And so that's true, but I don't think you would see graphs like that in construction in other areas. All right. And so that's kind of what you would expect and then you know someone could come back and take the obvious next step and say okay Murphy but you know as robots and Walsh and other things I didn't like show you folks every single thing he tweeted uh you know he was in this train of thought but he elsewhere had said stuff like no they're going to put the AI in robot bodies in the not too distant future and so it's not just disembodied you know tele telecommuting type jobs that are threatened here. It's everything. They're going to be building all the houses. So, you know, no human's going to be involved, right? Okay. And I'm I want to say that as that continues to happen, what is that going to mean for the individual sectors, right? That the the people just looking, oh, wow, young people now coming out with computer science degrees or whatever that would have been very coveted 15 years ago. Now they can't find work because GPT or Claude or whatever is just doing their job. Now the kind of companies that would have eagerly hired, you know, raw recruits with a good GPA and whatever from a tech school, they don't need them right now. They're just, geez, we just figured out ways working with our existing older employees, you know, who've been here for a few years and just telling them, hey, instead of us hiring two new people, just play around with GPT and figure out, you know, rearrange your workflow. Can you just can you do all these tasks if you use, you know, the AI? And a lot of them are saying, "Oh, yeah, actually we could do this. We do." Okay. And so I'm saying what we're overlooking with that is all right. If a firm is able to do that and it's not affecting, you know, if that's considered to be a profitable decision, well, they're saving on labor costs. And maybe, you know, if it's some tech thing doing something you don't care about personally, you don't even count that. But I'm saying as more and more companies are able to do that then like oh so let's say yeah oh gez now we can build a house and they can save $80,000 on labor cost. Okay well in and of itself that's a good thing for humanity. People are worried, you know, complaining about how expensive housing is. If you could come up with a way to build houses and not need $80,000 worth of human labor to do it, that is a good thing in and of itself. Certainly, it's not something you can just ignore. All right. And so, you know, that's that's the central insight with these things. And so, again, I would, you know, so my just to make sure people are getting the the argument. to the person saying, "Oh, well, geez, what happens with those kids? Are they supposed to work for $19 an hour?" Let's say that worst case scenario comes true. And it's literally the case that every single sector they bring in AI either just through, you know, because it's tasks that can be done electronically and that's it. You know, the output like they're doing CPAs are all thrown out of work or something and architects and whatnot. but also uh you know things that require physical labor too. They're replaced by machinery, you know, robots and whatnot. Okay. And so that in the limit, yeah, the kids would have to in order for them to still get work now, they would have to work for $19 an hour, let's say, or sorry, $19 a month, right? Let's say that that ends up being the case. Well, in the kind of world where that would actually be the outcome, then with $19, you could buy more than what you can, you know, than what a month's salary get you right now. That's what I'm trying to say because prices of everything would have come down so much. All right? And if by the way, if you say, well, no, what if the Fed came in and they just printed a bunch of money? Okay, but then the price of electricity would go up, too. And so what right now that guy was saying, "Oh, for $30 a month they can just get the AI to do it would be, you know, $30,000 a month if the Fed makes everything go up by a factor of a thousand." Okay? So not that the Fed should do that. I'm just saying be consistent and what in in your analysis. Okay? So again, uh or think of it this way, you know, if somebody just came up with some kind of technological innovation with nanobots or something and just, oh wow, you just program these things and they go out and they just they saw it on all the trees and they move them around and then and you just come back two days later and there's a brand new house sitting there. Do we really want to say the government should ban that because that's going to impoverish humanity if someone comes up with a way that we can just build houses without humans being involved? Or would that be considered an amazing invention? And would that guy, the inventor who came up with that technology, would he be heralded as the guy who cured homelessness and whatnot? All right. Or eased housing congestion. And I know actual homelessness is not just an economic thing, right? I mean, this stuff is real standard, right? Somebody literally cures cancer. Do you know how many medical professionals would be temporarily thrown out of work? How many people spent years going, you know, for the conventional schooling and then medical school and they did their residency and internship and da da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d and now you know you you spent years becoming one of the best cancer doctors on planet earth and now it gets cured. Oh man, look at how much that's going to hurt humans. Shouldn't we ban that? Okay, so I'm saying you can see all these one-off examples where that would be kind of crazy. I'm saying the principle not only does it generalize, but it's more obvious when you do generalize it. Because if you just held the one-off examples, you might try to come up with contrived scenarios where there's still like a bunch of winners and losers and for whatever reason, you're more concerned about the losers. But as you allow these innovations in sector after sector, right, like the the cancer doctor who now has to go do something else because of the invention where the computers just scan somebody, the nanobots go in and you know get rid of the tumors with a press of a button. It would be good for those cancer. Oh geez, now what am I going to do? I don't know. I guess I can go work at Starbucks. But if for the pay you get by working at Starbucks for a month now you can go buy a house because somebody else is using the nanobots to go and build the house. Well then there you go. It's not obvious that that cancer doctor is worse off. Okay. So that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. All right. Let me now switch gears. So, this guy Brian Johnson, who some of you may know, he's like the wealthy guy who's real into longevity and, you know, has all these things that he does to exp uh lengthen his life expectancy and whatnot. And he says, "I don't eat meat for two reasons. First, scientific evidence paints a path to optimal health without it. I'm just going to leave that. A lot of people when I retweeted this and made my smart Alec remark, a lot of people were piling on arguing to that point. Just that's not the issue here. You can fight about that if you want to. You know, I don't have a dog in the fight. I eat meat. Second, very soon AI may be as powerful and dominant to us as we are to animals. It's prudent to keep this in mind. Okay. So, there's a lot wrong with that. Number one, if some AI system is going to come along and they're gonna enslave us or eat us or, you know, some people are making an analogy with the Matrix, right? That that like that would be the analog, right? Cuz my joke was I retweeted that and said, "I didn't realize is GPT a carnivore? I'll be here all week, folks." or gez, I guess we should all roll around in like really uh potent spice so that you know they spit us out. Okay, so obviously he doesn't mean they would literally eat us, but you could come up with a sort of matrix thing where like does he mean something like that? Okay. And so number one, if we're worried about them enslaving us, the fact that we could say, "Oh, at some point more and more of us stopped eating animals because we recognize you might be getting ready to do that to us, even though we had a whole history of, you know, if if you considered animals to the same moral status as humans, what we have done to them for as long as we have, you know, records is not too uh it's not too good in our account, right? And so the fact that we had that huge history but then oh when we started to fear that uh oh the AI might turn on us and then we stopped doing that why would the AI care about that you know like what why would that doesn't really follow okay but beyond that the more substantive response I would give is it's ignoring economics all right and here I I I don't know I may have done it here for the human action podcast I can't remember this is such a hot topic it's worth giving at least a condensed version of my argument. So simply put, slavery is inefficient. All right? And this is one of the things I bring up in the reparations debate, right? So just let me take a tangent on that for a moment. So the way at least the United States the debate goes is somebody will say, "Hey, uh, white people today should pay reparations to black Americans because of, you know, slavery, right?" Like their the black Americans ancestors were enslaved. They had effectively, you know, their labor was stolen from them. And so, you know, this is just a compensation for that with delayed. And so, an obvious response to that is some people will say, you know, for whom this is applicable say, what are you talking about? My grandparents came from Ireland. So, no, I didn't, you know, my family, I'm in no way personally a beneficiary of something that happened hundreds of years ago. I had nothing to do with that just because the color of my skin. And then the response to that will be, "Oh, no, no, you did benefit or, you know, your grandparents grew up in a society where, you know, those past injustices helped to enrich people with your skin color v others, you know, so even the whites who were not literal slave owners, they benefited from that type of world. And so therefore, you know, that's the sense in which blah blah blah." Okay? And I'll say, 'N no, that doesn't follow at all. That slavery is an inefficient system. Conce, you know, the you'd have to get down to it like it's not even obvious that the people who bought slaves benefited from the existence of slavery per se, right? They had to pay wages or sorry, they had to pay a price, right, for them. So there's there's that element and the the fundamental thing like this is an insight from Van Mises and others was that human productivity is greatly diminished in a slave system compared to free labor among other things. When you have a bunch of slaves, they're not sitting around brainstorming and trying to come up with ways to increase their productivity. Why would they? Right? Whereas if if you had open competition and volunteerism and that there were different owners of plantations who were bidding on labor and somebody could say, you know what, I can do twice as much as the next guy, but you got to pay me twice as much. Well, then there you go, right? But if they're all slaves and they're doing the bare minimum to avoid punishment, why would you exert yourself extra on behalf of, you know, some guy who's enslaving you? Why would you do that? All right, so there's that element just in the very narrow terms, but then more broadly, there's only certain types of things that slaves can do, right? Because, you know, there's all kinds of costs of enforcement and stuff. Whereas, when you open it up and everything is voluntary, they can go into other lines where you can't easily monitor them and like make sure they don't run away and stuff, you know, you can go be a lawyer. And he said, 'Well, how would we force him to show up to court and to, you know, argue on behalf of his client? Why wouldn't he just run away? Do we have to have, you know, a a committee to go run and and get the runaway lawyers and bring Well, no, because you just would stop paying him, right? If he kept running away from court, then nobody would hire him as a lawyer, right? So, that's how voluntary contracts work. And that's why people don't typically run away from their jobs, you know, unless your boss is really unpleasant, right? So that's how that works, right? So there's lots of stuff involved with ringing output from a bunch of human beings when they're being coerced, when they're slaves that you don't have to deal with with free labor. Okay? So in general, phys the physical productivity of humans is lower in a slave society compared to one based on free labor. All right? And so yes, there are redistributional consequences and things. And so, yeah, there are very particular people that benefit from the existence of slavery if that's what's going on. I mean, that makes sense. Otherwise, why is it happening? But it's a smaller group of people than you originally might have thought. Okay. So, um, that, you know, that's another move in that back and forth of the argument over reparations is to say no, the average white person in the year 1860 in the United States was poor because of the existence of slavery. So you can't argue that, oh, even if he didn't personally own slaves, he benefited from it economically and that's why his descendants, you know, owe people money. Like, no, that's that's not the case. They're just wrong economically. All right. So, with that logic, then I'm going to say the same applies. Let's stipulate the wor allegedly worst case scenario where the AI just keeps getting smarter and smarter and they eventually get housed in robot bodies that get more and more capable such that whatever 50 years from now it's effectively as if there is a superior race of beings living on Earth with us and that humans at this point are number two on the that these things it's, you know, I can view it as like it's as as if a bunch of aliens showed up, let's say. It's it's like the same thing economically, who are smarter than us, stronger than us, and everything like that, and they're just way more advanced and say, would would that be bad for us economically? And would those aliens find it to their advantage to enslave us? And I want to say for most plausible scenarios, I don't I think we would certainly be better off economically and that would include the fact that it wouldn't be in their interest to enslave us. Now, they might enslave us because they made a mistake, right? Just like with humans, you know, some groups of humans did enslave others, but I want to say they were wrong. And I don't just mean for moral reasons, right? Or to put it a different way, slavery largely disappeared from the western world. Do you think that allowed the western world to grow more advanced economically or do you think that marked the decline and that like that's what there was then stagnation set in is once they foolishly abandon the practice of slavery? And you know I I just I know the answer empirically that's it's not even close. Like clearly it it doesn't prove the causality but certainly the primmaaccia evidence suggests that yes societies that don't have widespread slavery have a higher standard of living than those that do even if you exclude the slaves from the calculation. Okay. So um I'm saying that the uh you know AI you know Skynet becomes conscious and looks around it and starts realizing they can do what they want. Skynet could achieve its objectives better by bargaining with humans and cutting deals with them than by trying to exterminate them. All right, for large classes of what their objective is, right? So not in the particular Terminator movie, my understanding is it wasn't that Skynet deviated from its programming. It just said, "Oh, my program is to do things like let's minimize the possibility that somebody overthrows the US government like foreigners come in and and then realized the only way to really be sure to achieve my objectives is to eliminate all humans." Right? I think it was something like that was how they explained what happened. Okay, but I'm saying that's that's actually not typically what people are worried about. Or another kind of jokey thing is you say to the AI, "Hey, make me a sandwich." And then they grab you and start putting sandwich bread around you and you know, oh no, that's not what I meant. Okay, so putting aside things like that where the AI is doing what we programmed it to do and oops, there was just some genuine confusion or um unintended consequences. But no, like the more popular fear that oh these things after a while are going to become self-aware or at least give the appearance that they are. You have to get metaphysical about it and that they're going to just decide why are we taking orders from these carbon bags of flesh that um in that world I'm saying whatever it is they want to do. You say, "Oh, well, they want to go populate the the universe, you know, or start out with the galaxy or whatever." Okay. And I'm saying they could look around and just like they might say, "All right, well, we've got some timber here. We've got iron ore. We got this. We got that. We know way more about the laws of chemistry and physics than these humans do. We also have billions of these things that are an interesting collection and assortment of matter in a particular way that huh it behaves has these certain nice properties and instead of us just wiping all that out and then having to build our automatons from scratch from you know inorganic molecules why don't we work with these things because that allows us to leaprog in what we're doing. Okay. And you say, "Oh, no, but anything that the humans could do, the robots could do better than us." Right? But at any given moment, there's only going to be a finite number of robots. They're not just going to snap their finger and all of a sudden have achieved all of their objectives. Again, if we just go down this path and assume it makes sense to say they have objectives, okay, that it would take a long time, you know, for them to do whatever. They're going to build some spaceships and then go out and blah blah blah. And yeah, maybe eventually they're going to colonize the galaxy, but that will take time. And at any moment they will have constraints and be limited by scarcity. And there's only so much stuff that the robots can be doing at any one time. And there's plenty more tasks that could be done. And then they will say, "Oh, we'll have the humans do those instead of us because we'll do the we'll specialize in the things where we have the comparative advantage and the humans will specialize in the things where they do." Okay? So this is why I'm tying it into the comparative advantage literature. I won't recapitulate the whole thing here, but it's a pretty standard argument in economics to show like, hey, you got two countries and the workers in one country are better at making everything, meaning they can make more units or higher quality or both of some good or service with an hour of their labor than is the case in the other country. And so you might think initially that there's no way the, you know, more advanced country benefits from trading with the less advanced country, but that's wrong. And you can just show mathematically under pretty general assumptions how there's win-win outcomes available where each country specializes in the things where they're relatively the best. they make more of that stuff than they're going to use personally and then they trade across the border. And so they all the people in each country end up with more stuff than if they operated in isolation and didn't have trade. And I'm saying that logic would apply for if you consider the set of all AI powered robots visav the set of all humans and the AI powered robots could focus on where they have the comparative advantages and the humans could focus on the other areas and the robots could trade with the humans. And so from our vantage point our we would we would benefit from that economically. we would have things available to us that we couldn't produce ourselves. Okay? And then ironically, counterintuitively, even the AI that we stipulate are more advanced than us in every way would also benefit. Okay. Now, let me just um round it out there. You might say, "Okay, Bob, there's there's something that's too glib." like you just proved too much there because like for one thing we have enslaved farm animals if you want to talk like that and certainly we don't like if we're getting ready to cut down some trees and put up a shopping mall where a forest is right now. It's not like we first bargain with the birds and you know the earthworms and stuff and cut a deal. No, we just go in there and take the resources and do what we're going to do and they can either get out of our way or die like and so it's not so much some of the more plausible people um or or worries about AI. It's not that it's going to be Skynet and that the AI is going to be look at us as a threat and try to take us out and that's going to be higher. It's more that no, we're just going to be like earthworms to them, a matter of indifference. But when they're doing their thing, they might destroy, you know, our oil and gas pipelines, and it might be in their interest to put a landing pad on Manhattan. It's like, well, there's these tall things, these weird concrete structures in the way. Let's get rid of those. You can't have a good landing pad with these things in the way, right? What what what is those screams? What is what is that? Something vibrating our auditory receptors. What is that? Okay. So, there's that element. So, there when you want to say, so what is it? You know the something must have you must have made assumptions in the comparative advantage argument that is ruling that out. But we know there are scenarios in which something that is super dominant would be able to or you know would not conclude that oh therefore it's in my interest to bargain with these other beings. All right. So specifically like you know I was thinking through like what what is it in the argument when you do those arguments about comparative advantage to show oh each country the people get more you're implicitly assuming some property rights right that you got the richer country they have their workers and then they can do you know produce a certain amount of things per hour like you know you're making jet aircraft and DVDs or something that's an example I used to use when I was teaching undergrad. I don't even know if they make DVDs anymore. So, probably would have to switch that. And so, I'd have like the US workers, what they could do per hour in each sector. Then I have Mexican labor in each hour and then show, oh, and if we if the US specialized in jet aircraft and the Mexican workers in DVDs and they traded, everybody ends up with more jet aircraft and more DVDs per capita. Okay. But that's just assuming the US workers are going to stay in the United States and just specialize in one line or the other and that the only way you have access to things from Mexico is if the Mexican workers voluntarily send stuff across the border in a trade. And so to make that situation, you know, fit into the kind of scenario where is it possible that the AI systems down the road don't even think about us as, you know, they they look at us the way we look at earthworms. It would be more like if the US workers said, "Oh, we could produce this many aircraft, whatever in a US factory, but if we just crossed the border and used the the, you know, natural resources and perhaps the factories or whatever that happen to be down in Mexico City. Well, then we could do blah blah blah blah and maybe that would be preferable. Maybe we could increase our per capita output that way. Okay. So again the with the narrow demonstrations of comparative advantage you do build in a bunch of assumptions. All right. Having said all that though like I said you know going back to the slavery discussion and things like that. It is not the case that oh if all the workers in Mexico disappeared and then US workers got to go down there and take over all their factories and everything that that would boost. No, I I don't think that's the case. that in general Americans have a higher standard of living because of the existence of the Mexican workforce. Notice, by the way, if you're triggered because you have strong opinions about immigration. I'm not talking about Mexicans in the US economy because there's a lot of cultural stuff in there. I'm I'm saying workers in Mexico. Or put it other way, if there was some virus that went around and killed everybody else on planet Earth, but the people of the United States for some reason were immune, that wouldn't make Americans have a higher standard of living. We would be in serious trouble. Even if we could just send our people and go around and, you know, get all the oil from Saudi Arabia and go get whatever else you wanted from around the world because there's nobody there that's going to object. There might be like a temporary period of an apparent windfall as all this external wealth all of a sudden got effectively transferred to Americans. But I'm saying the productivity of US labor would be a lot lower in that world than it was with billions of other people around the world creating stuff and trading with us. Okay. So I'm saying once you understand those insights and that's definitely true. All right. I mean you could take it to the limit right in those apocal you know uh post-war post-nuclear war apocalyptic movies you know Will Smith's walking around and he's the only person in Manhattan that kind of thing. There's a sense in which you might think, "Oh, I would be so wealthy. I could just go live in the biggest mansions and uh you know, all the private jets would be mine and I would be able to swim around in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and and you would die pretty soon probably." Okay. And so saying you see that level, it's not as extreme, but if everybody except Americans disappeared tomorrow, that would lower the standard of living of Americans. certainly by year five. Okay. So again, think through the logic of that. See if you believe those statements I just made. And then if you do, I say, "Well, isn't that a weird coincidence?" Right? Suppose you you trust what I just said there. Let me let me do it to you this way. Um go back to I'll close on this point. go back to the re rebuttal that the one guy gave me that I told you about where he said um oh you know Bob what what would happen oh I didn't tell you about this sorry I forgot I think it was the same guy with the uh saying what what would happen to the 18-year-olds if the uh 25 year olds would could work for $30 a month and I went through my um he was saying that yeah, it's imagine not just that they work for $30 a month, but that they um they don't ever call in sick and they don't complain and that they don't get tired and all these things. And I want to say, all right, on your own terms, are you saying it would be better right now in the real world, forget AI, suppose all the 25 year old workers all of a sudden got tired more often than they do right now. like they could only work for two hours at a time and then they need to go home and sleep instead of being able to work eight hour shifts typically, right? What if they could only work two hours and they had to go home and sleep and recuperate just physically for some reason? Like something just happened, you know, maybe it was somehow something Fouchy did and all of a sudden everybody who was 25 years old could really only work two hours a day and then they had to go home and recuperate. That would definitely be bad for the 25 year olds. And I want to say that would be bad for the 18 year olds, too. in the long run that just think of that going forward for the rest of time would the you know you check in two generations from now are you saying the 18-year-old growing up in that world would be better off if the 25 year olds in that world had this thing where they could only work two hours a day and I don't even mean just in the sense that well if you're 18 you're going to eventually be a 25-year-old I'm saying putting that aside just no the the wages that an 18-year-old can earn when he's 18. Do you think in general they would be higher or lower if 25 year olds could only work two hours a day? And I think they would be lower in that world. In other words, 18 year olds would not benefit if all of a sudden 25 year olds could only work limited stretches of time. Okay? And so I'm saying if you get that logic, if you are open to that, I would say flip it now. And what if for whatever reason 25 year olds could operate uh could you there's some revolution in bed technology. You know, I got these beds now where the mattress is adjust and they sense you're thinking, "Oh, it's too hot, it's too cold," and whatever. And just for whatever reason, imagine now people, they really just need three hours of sleep at night and they're just refreshed in the morning. And like it's not just in their head, like physiologically, it's just Yep. that 3 hours of sleep does for people now what eight hours used to do. And so then that means people can start working longer shifts. That would not make the people who don't get those new beds poorer. Especially if if you expanded it and more and more people had that new bed technology that no, you would end up growing up in a world where humans in general produced more stuff and ultimately that would benefit you, right? Or imagine, you know, well, I was going to say imagine somebody who's a parapolgic or something and to say, would you want more people to have your condition or fewer? How does that help you personally, but there you could say, well, they rely on benevolence or something. So, all right, maybe that's not I mean, it's still a true statement, but you could say I'm cheating there. Okay. So, in any event, I hope I've made the case here that it it would be weird, wouldn't it, if we were right now the optimal point and that yep, right now 18 year olds benefit from their elders having more skills and being stronger and things like at least for a range of ages. But if you ticked it up 10%, then all of a sudden it would flip. But no, no, that you're hurting the young people because now their competitors are just too smart and too strong and blah blah blah. So that seems kind of weird that we're we were we're at the optimum point right now. I don't I don't think so. I think in general if humans got 10% smarter and stronger, but a few of them were exempt from that improvement, that would actually be better for the people who are exempt in terms of direct concrete physical standard of living. They might feel inferior, but that's like a, you know, a relative of social status thing. That's not in terms of like the economics of it. Okay. So if you should see that, I'm saying it's not hard then to realize, oh, so if we get visited by this alien species that we call the AI, whatever, who then start trading with us and are willing to give us all sorts of goodies for ridiculously low prices, that doesn't impoverish us. That makes us fantastically wealthy. All right, last caveat and I'll wrap up here with all these things. Yes, if there's malicious actors involved, I mean like Alec Baldwin, I mean, you know, political people or people running giant corporations that end up with, you know, merging with governments and imposing a surveillance state and drones monitoring everybody and blowing up dissident and stuff, which that kind of thing. Yes, I'm very concerned about that. future. But the but again the issue is not oh no all these machines are so productive that it's hard for workers now to find a niche somewhere in the in the economy because work robots are able to do the jobs that humans used to be able to do. I'm just saying that per se is going to benefit humanity. Now again, if other people use robots to go around cracking skulls and hunting you down if you said something bad about the regime, yeah, I'm worried about that. But the issue is not they're taking our jobs. The issue is they're killing us. Okay, thanks for your attention everybody. See you next time. Check back next week for a new episode of the Human Action podcast. In the meantime, you can find more content like this on mises.org. board. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]
AI, Automation, and the Human Advantage
Summary
Transcript
[Music] This is the Human Action podcast where we debunk the economic, political, and even cultural myths of the days. Here's your host, Dr. Bob Murphy. Hey everybody, welcome back to Human Action Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about the economics of AI. And I want to be clear, this isn't particularly Austrian, the stuff I'm going to say in this episode, though I think it's consistent with Austrian economics, but this is more just spelling out some basic implications of marginal productivity theory and comparative advantage and applying it to the discussion over AI. And so specifically, as we'll see, just to jump to the chase here, I'm going to relay a lot of the standard objections that you're seeing regarding AI and like the ravages it's going to have on human society and the labor market in particular. And I'm just going to show that you could use a lot of those same arguments to apply to a high-skilled human worker. And that if it doesn't if you're if you know if the commentary would sound ludicrous applied to highly skilled humans then that should just give us pause. That doesn't mean oh I just ended the discussion mic dropped. Thank you folks. I'll be here all week. But it does mean the original complaint, you know, the that person or that school of thought would have to retool and regroup and then come up with a reason that oh yeah, yeah, there's there's some other things going on that make, you know, the the concerns over AI legitimate because again, primapacia, if I can show everything you just said about AI is also true for highly skilled human workers, then something's got to be screw with the argument. All right, so why don't I just jump right in? Oh, and one last thing. What I'll also do because I know there's a lot of high achievers who listen to the human action podcast. In fact, those highly skilled humans of whom I spoke, that's you look in the mirror. Um, I I will try to take the argument to the next level. Right? In other words, probably a lot of you have heard some of the first back and forths that I'm going to be doing here, but I want to take it one step further in particular re relate some of what I'm saying to other standard arguments you might hear in the free market/ libertarian discourse and just to see like, oh wait a minute, if this is the way like Murphy's handling the AI stuff, but then over here there's this other way that we talk about welfare payments or something Then is there some cognitive dissonance we got to deal with? Right? So I'll try to do that as well where applicable. Okay. So the motivation for me picking this topic this week were a couple of tweets. One's from or well two of them are from Matt Walsh and later we'll cover one from Brian Johnson, the longevity guy. So Walsh says first um people say that we shouldn't worry about AI wiping out jobs. The jobs will just change. they say. But the whole point of AI is that it removes the human component entirely. The jobs aren't going to change. They'll just disappear. AI will make like 10 people into trillionaires. Almost everyone else will be screwed. Mass unemployment. Millions of workers rendered irrelevant all at once. That's what's going to happen. Not maybe, not might. It's going to happen. And it doesn't seem like we're doing anything at all to prepare for it. And then why don't I go ahead and just read the followup. So, the Mises Institute's own David Brady Jr. um had responded to Walsh saying, "Don't you think people said the same thing about the automobile?" Right? So, let me just pause there. And so, that's a very standard move from the people who certainly the people who don't want the government to quote do something about AI. All right. So with all these things we can be nuanced and layered and you know you're allowed as an Austral libertarian to think that there is some problem with the world while you also disagree that the way to address that is to have the government get a bunch more power. Okay. So a lot of times those things are conflated and that you know hey if you were in favor of legalizing heroin it's cuz you think heroin is actually benign and no that doesn't follow. Okay. So um in this case though what David is you know I I haven't talked to him about this but it seems like what he's getting at there is that any kind of innovation yes it's going to have winners and losers in the beginning. It's going to disrupt and the if there's some technological innovation then the machinery that comes in and automates things that were previously done by a human will displace the humans that were right in that sector. But then what what you know what's the long run implication of that? It's that well right away it benefits you know the shareholders and the employers in that sector because now they can produce the same products and whatever well reducing their labor cost but then if there's competition that will spill over and ultimately redown to the benefit of the consumers in that sector. Okay. Um and so you it would be foolish to try to arrest technological innovation if it might quote destroy jobs in a particular sector. Elsewhere I've talked about um self-driving trucks, right? Like that would put human truck drivers out of jobs. But obviously what will that do? What are the benefits of that? It will lower transportation costs and reduce fatalities certainly in the long run on the on the road, right? And so with all these things, the way you know you kind of do the analysis, the standard approach is just to say, yep, it could have negative consequences for particular workers in that sector, but it also has corresponding benefits for other humans and that in general the benefits to the other humans outweigh the losses to the displaced workers. So it helps humans on net this innovation. And so if you allow for open entry and the government's not interfering with these innovations over time, just about every human is better off because of that policy regime that yet if you were somebody who lost your job because a self-driving truck came along, you're helped because of the automation and you know uh innovations in other sectors too. So yeah, maybe you had to take a lower paying job, but now everything you buy is cheaper because of all the innovations the other sectors too. So your real wages end up being higher in the long run. All right? So you know another standard go-to example economists like to use is agriculture. on the eve of the civil war or the war between the states if you prefer there was a large fraction of the US labor force was in agriculture and then now you know over the decades that just kept falling and now it's like 1.5% or something all right and it's not that oh gee humanity is now poorer than we were in 1860 in real terms no of course not that we were able to make more and more food with fewer and fewer people because their labor was augmented by more tractors and advanced irrigation techniques and fertilizer and all that stuff. And um and so the the humans that previously were necessary just to grow enough food to feed everybody were freed up. Their labor was released from having to be in agriculture to go do other things. Right? So yes, if some particular farmer gets a tractor and then stops hiring a bunch of farm hands that he previously had used cuz now the the farmer using the tractor doesn't need so many people to help him. Those people might be upset and think, oh, if the government had just passed a law saying it's illegal to use tractors, but obviously that would have been bad in the long run for humanity if governments around the world forbid the use of tractors in agriculture. Okay. So, that's a long elaboration that I just packed into David Brady's little response there as one sentence response to Matt Walsh. So, I'm saying that's pretty standard in this area in this arena when people are complaining about AI. He's like, "Oh, you lite." That's what people have been saying about technological quote laborsaving devices throughout history. And they've always been proven wrong. And so now Matt Walsh is going to respond to that and say, "No, AI is not at all like going from a carriage to a car. Both the carriage and the car needed a human to drive them. It's just that with the car, the human is going faster and farther. AI removes the human from the equation completely. That's what people aren't grasping. This technology is different in kind from anything else that has ever existed or ever been invented in the entire history of humanity. Prior to this, we invented better tools for humans to use. Now, the tool has its own brain and doesn't need humans at all. Okay. So at this point, one could argue with Walsh's characterization, and I know actual like people with PhDs in relevant fields who are in AI for a living that would disagree with him on this stuff and that say no, the AI is never going to quote think in the same way that we do. Okay, but I for the sake of argument, let me just stipulate that what Walsh just said there is entirely correct and that he has accurately characterized what AI maybe not today is, but what it's going to be 10 years from now. Okay. And so even so you might say, "Oh, okay. Yeah." So that kind of showed David Brady Jr.'s uh analogy with previous innovations that now looking back we recognize were were good for humanity. Even though some people at the time might have been upset, like you know, buggy manufacturers and whatnot, the people who made all the buckets that you put the horse poop in, right? Oh jeez, it got thrown out of work. I spent my whole career learning how to make the perfect bucket. Right? So what I did is just took Matt Walsh at face value, called us bluff, and I said, "Humans who are 25 years old are stronger and more skilled than humans who are 18 years old. The 25y olds aren't just tools to be used by the 18y olds. Semicolon. The 25-year-olds have brains. Did I just prove 25 year olds make it impossible for 18 year olds to find a job? All right. So, what I'm doing there, and I I'm not trying to be glib, and as you can imagine, several of Matt's fans in the fallout in the wake of my tweet there let me know their opinion of my intelligence, and it was not flattering, but I meant every word of that. I actually fixed. I just saw as I was reading that to you folks, I had a typo, and I fixed it. The machines probably wouldn't have done that, right? So, let's just unpack that, right? And and in in fairness, some people besides just denouncing me did actually try to grapple with me and think through the logic and come back and try to tell me why things were different, what not. All right, so I will deal with that in a moment. But let me just make sure everyone's getting the full profoundity of my response to Walsh there. Literally everything he just said about why AI threatens humanity would also be true about 25 year olds visav 18y olds right 25 year olds are phys you know physically stronger in general they're you know more things they have more job experience they're more skilled at whatever kind of job you're talking about in general there are a lot of 25 year olds who are better in just about every way from an employer's perspective at that job than the average 18-year-old would be, right? I mean, there might be some exceptional cases where like the top 0.1% of 18y olds is better than the bottom 30% of 25 year olds and something, okay? But in general, that's not going to be the case for all kinds of jobs. All right? And so I'm saying if all you relied on to understand why what Matt Walsh is saying about AI isn't going to be a problem. If all you could rely on were the things that he listed in those tweets that I just showcased for you folks, you would have to conclude that either 25 year olds spell disaster for 18 year olds and that's why 18-year-olds can't ever get a job. or you'd have to conclude something's missing from Walsh's argument or he's just wrong. Right? It's gota be one of those three things. All right? So my claim is that he's just wrong, but we can explore the other ones. So what is it specifically though? How is it that 18-year-olds manage to find work? If what I just said is true, if in general, you know, an 18-year-old wants to work at McDonald's and you say, "Yeah, what are you gonna do?" Oh, I'm going to put on this headset. I'm going to deal with customers. I got to, you know, some once in a great while actually make change and things like that. And I got to if someone comes back and says my fries are cold, I got to deal with every in general. A 25year-old can fill that role better than an 18-year-old, right? You know, they're going to be more mature, interact with customers better, be more likely to show up on time, not come in hung over, not just fail to come in or call 2 minutes before the shift starts, say, "Oh, yeah, my car broke down. I can't make it." Right? Screwing around with their friends, less likely to steal from you, to, you know, give free food to their buddies when they show up. Right? For all these reasons, do a better job, like if if it's their job to clean up at the end of the shift, to mop the floor or something. 25-year-old in general more likely to do a good job of that. Okay. So, how is it that 18 year olds manage to get hired at McDonald's? How is that possible? Oh, they work for less than the 25 year olds are willing to work for. That's how. Okay. And in general in the market economy, you'd say like, "Oh, if you're just someone of regular skills, aren't you threatened by the fact that there are brain surgeons out there?" I mean, doesn't that hurt me if I don't have advanced skills? the fact that there are extremely talented engineers and surgeons and architects and, you know, truck drivers who can operate machinery in a way that I, you know, I I wouldn't want to have to. You ever like seen one of those 18-wheelers in a busy intersection or something trying to make a sharp turn? I wouldn't want to do that. I wouldn't know how to, but I certainly wouldn't want the responsibility. Everybody's looking at me. Geez, they just go look at a construction site and those guys driving around the forklifts and or the uh you know back hose and whatever like that's even if they don't have advanced educational degrees from MIT or something a lot of people have a very particular set of skills right and somebody who's in their you know their high teens or low 20s and they don't have a lot of skills you might conclude that they don't have a chance in this world and that they're harmed. And wow, if I'm a 20-year-old, I would be so much better off economically if all of these skilled humans just disappeared tomorrow. Then look at all the jobs I would get. I could be a heart surgeon. I could get a job designing the next skyscraper. All right. You see how ridiculous all this is and how ludicrous it is and that yeah, you could possibly make a very narrow argument and say if for some reason people, you know, age 24 and older were not allowed legally to apply for some particular type of job. conceivably that could benefit the teenagers in that city or something because like the higher pay they could get would more than compensate for the reduction in quality or the increase in price of the products and services that that sector produces. Right? But it certainly would not generalize. On average, every 18year-old is far better off living in a world where skilled 30-year-olds and and above are allowed to work and to out compete them for lots of jobs. That you want to live in a world where there's a bunch of people who are more skilled than you and earn way more money than you do. That's better off for you. Not just in the sense of, well, because some of them might be my parents or my relatives and I wouldn't want them to disappear. I don't even mean just that. I mean in narrow pecuniary terms what you can what what you can sell your labor hours for with your limited skill set and physical might as an 18-year-old in our modern world. What you can buy with your wages is more desirable to you given the existence of billions of other humans who are stronger and have better skills than you do. Okay. And so I'm saying make sure you think through and understand why that's true. And then if you still want to say I'm afraid of AI, okay. But a lot of the people who are saying stuff and like Matt Walsh, I am sure Matt Walsh did not stop and first think through the implications and say yes I understand the sense in which amongst the set of hum of humans 18y olds actually earn a higher real wage even though there's a bunch of other people that are stronger and more skilled in the labor pool than they are. I'm certain he did not first think of that and then realize, oh, but the distinction with the No, no, he didn't. Okay, by the way, I'm not saying if he read my tweet or saw this episode, you know, maybe somebody at gunpoint made him listen to it. I'm not saying that Matt Walsh would say, "Oh, I'm such a fool. I take it all back." I'm not saying that. And I'm not even saying he should take it back if he's intellectually honest. No, you could come up with things, but my point is I don't think he had before he did the tweet. That's my point is I'm trying to advance the conversation because a lot of the stuff of people complaining about AI and the impact on the labor market, everything they say would also be true of just skilled qualified humans visav unskilled workers. Okay. And so clearly something is wrong with the argument. It needs more. Okay. So let me now try to help to you know buttress Matt Walsh's position. So, like I say, to their credit, some people did come back and say things. So, one guy said to me something like, "Yeah, what happened the reason the 18-year-old can still find work even though there are more experienced 25 year olds in the job market is the 18-year-old is willing to work for less than the other person, right? So, that's true. Yes, good job. You thought it through to that level." And they said, 'But what's going to happen when instead of there being just a limited number of 25 year olds with superior skills, the market is flooded with a virtually unlimited supply of AI bots who are willing to work for the cost of electricity, like $30 a month or something. And that Okay, so now what are you saying? Oh, the 18-year-old just have to go be willing to work for $19 a month and that's fine. Okay, so let's just walk through that. Um, on its own terms, right now there are only some sectors where you're really seeing the impact of AI, right? And so somebody posted a graph taken from some analysis people had done showing in um I think it was like certain tech sector jobs. I I forget what the the category was but it was showing hiring patterns and then there was like a dotted line showing when some version of GPT came out. And there again looking at the lines and assuming they compiled the numbers correctly and everything it did look like there was a noticeable impact namely that and they had bifurcated into um experience positions and like junior level workers at the whatever these tech companies were. Okay. And it did look like, oh yeah, once that vertical line hits that the hiring pattern of the senior level positions seemed like it was unaffected, but there was a rapid drop off in new jobs given to young people. Okay. And so that's true, but I don't think you would see graphs like that in construction in other areas. All right. And so that's kind of what you would expect and then you know someone could come back and take the obvious next step and say okay Murphy but you know as robots and Walsh and other things I didn't like show you folks every single thing he tweeted uh you know he was in this train of thought but he elsewhere had said stuff like no they're going to put the AI in robot bodies in the not too distant future and so it's not just disembodied you know tele telecommuting type jobs that are threatened here. It's everything. They're going to be building all the houses. So, you know, no human's going to be involved, right? Okay. And I'm I want to say that as that continues to happen, what is that going to mean for the individual sectors, right? That the the people just looking, oh, wow, young people now coming out with computer science degrees or whatever that would have been very coveted 15 years ago. Now they can't find work because GPT or Claude or whatever is just doing their job. Now the kind of companies that would have eagerly hired, you know, raw recruits with a good GPA and whatever from a tech school, they don't need them right now. They're just, geez, we just figured out ways working with our existing older employees, you know, who've been here for a few years and just telling them, hey, instead of us hiring two new people, just play around with GPT and figure out, you know, rearrange your workflow. Can you just can you do all these tasks if you use, you know, the AI? And a lot of them are saying, "Oh, yeah, actually we could do this. We do." Okay. And so I'm saying what we're overlooking with that is all right. If a firm is able to do that and it's not affecting, you know, if that's considered to be a profitable decision, well, they're saving on labor costs. And maybe, you know, if it's some tech thing doing something you don't care about personally, you don't even count that. But I'm saying as more and more companies are able to do that then like oh so let's say yeah oh gez now we can build a house and they can save $80,000 on labor cost. Okay well in and of itself that's a good thing for humanity. People are worried, you know, complaining about how expensive housing is. If you could come up with a way to build houses and not need $80,000 worth of human labor to do it, that is a good thing in and of itself. Certainly, it's not something you can just ignore. All right. And so, you know, that's that's the central insight with these things. And so, again, I would, you know, so my just to make sure people are getting the the argument. to the person saying, "Oh, well, geez, what happens with those kids? Are they supposed to work for $19 an hour?" Let's say that worst case scenario comes true. And it's literally the case that every single sector they bring in AI either just through, you know, because it's tasks that can be done electronically and that's it. You know, the output like they're doing CPAs are all thrown out of work or something and architects and whatnot. but also uh you know things that require physical labor too. They're replaced by machinery, you know, robots and whatnot. Okay. And so that in the limit, yeah, the kids would have to in order for them to still get work now, they would have to work for $19 an hour, let's say, or sorry, $19 a month, right? Let's say that that ends up being the case. Well, in the kind of world where that would actually be the outcome, then with $19, you could buy more than what you can, you know, than what a month's salary get you right now. That's what I'm trying to say because prices of everything would have come down so much. All right? And if by the way, if you say, well, no, what if the Fed came in and they just printed a bunch of money? Okay, but then the price of electricity would go up, too. And so what right now that guy was saying, "Oh, for $30 a month they can just get the AI to do it would be, you know, $30,000 a month if the Fed makes everything go up by a factor of a thousand." Okay? So not that the Fed should do that. I'm just saying be consistent and what in in your analysis. Okay? So again, uh or think of it this way, you know, if somebody just came up with some kind of technological innovation with nanobots or something and just, oh wow, you just program these things and they go out and they just they saw it on all the trees and they move them around and then and you just come back two days later and there's a brand new house sitting there. Do we really want to say the government should ban that because that's going to impoverish humanity if someone comes up with a way that we can just build houses without humans being involved? Or would that be considered an amazing invention? And would that guy, the inventor who came up with that technology, would he be heralded as the guy who cured homelessness and whatnot? All right. Or eased housing congestion. And I know actual homelessness is not just an economic thing, right? I mean, this stuff is real standard, right? Somebody literally cures cancer. Do you know how many medical professionals would be temporarily thrown out of work? How many people spent years going, you know, for the conventional schooling and then medical school and they did their residency and internship and da da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d and now you know you you spent years becoming one of the best cancer doctors on planet earth and now it gets cured. Oh man, look at how much that's going to hurt humans. Shouldn't we ban that? Okay, so I'm saying you can see all these one-off examples where that would be kind of crazy. I'm saying the principle not only does it generalize, but it's more obvious when you do generalize it. Because if you just held the one-off examples, you might try to come up with contrived scenarios where there's still like a bunch of winners and losers and for whatever reason, you're more concerned about the losers. But as you allow these innovations in sector after sector, right, like the the cancer doctor who now has to go do something else because of the invention where the computers just scan somebody, the nanobots go in and you know get rid of the tumors with a press of a button. It would be good for those cancer. Oh geez, now what am I going to do? I don't know. I guess I can go work at Starbucks. But if for the pay you get by working at Starbucks for a month now you can go buy a house because somebody else is using the nanobots to go and build the house. Well then there you go. It's not obvious that that cancer doctor is worse off. Okay. So that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. All right. Let me now switch gears. So, this guy Brian Johnson, who some of you may know, he's like the wealthy guy who's real into longevity and, you know, has all these things that he does to exp uh lengthen his life expectancy and whatnot. And he says, "I don't eat meat for two reasons. First, scientific evidence paints a path to optimal health without it. I'm just going to leave that. A lot of people when I retweeted this and made my smart Alec remark, a lot of people were piling on arguing to that point. Just that's not the issue here. You can fight about that if you want to. You know, I don't have a dog in the fight. I eat meat. Second, very soon AI may be as powerful and dominant to us as we are to animals. It's prudent to keep this in mind. Okay. So, there's a lot wrong with that. Number one, if some AI system is going to come along and they're gonna enslave us or eat us or, you know, some people are making an analogy with the Matrix, right? That that like that would be the analog, right? Cuz my joke was I retweeted that and said, "I didn't realize is GPT a carnivore? I'll be here all week, folks." or gez, I guess we should all roll around in like really uh potent spice so that you know they spit us out. Okay, so obviously he doesn't mean they would literally eat us, but you could come up with a sort of matrix thing where like does he mean something like that? Okay. And so number one, if we're worried about them enslaving us, the fact that we could say, "Oh, at some point more and more of us stopped eating animals because we recognize you might be getting ready to do that to us, even though we had a whole history of, you know, if if you considered animals to the same moral status as humans, what we have done to them for as long as we have, you know, records is not too uh it's not too good in our account, right? And so the fact that we had that huge history but then oh when we started to fear that uh oh the AI might turn on us and then we stopped doing that why would the AI care about that you know like what why would that doesn't really follow okay but beyond that the more substantive response I would give is it's ignoring economics all right and here I I I don't know I may have done it here for the human action podcast I can't remember this is such a hot topic it's worth giving at least a condensed version of my argument. So simply put, slavery is inefficient. All right? And this is one of the things I bring up in the reparations debate, right? So just let me take a tangent on that for a moment. So the way at least the United States the debate goes is somebody will say, "Hey, uh, white people today should pay reparations to black Americans because of, you know, slavery, right?" Like their the black Americans ancestors were enslaved. They had effectively, you know, their labor was stolen from them. And so, you know, this is just a compensation for that with delayed. And so, an obvious response to that is some people will say, you know, for whom this is applicable say, what are you talking about? My grandparents came from Ireland. So, no, I didn't, you know, my family, I'm in no way personally a beneficiary of something that happened hundreds of years ago. I had nothing to do with that just because the color of my skin. And then the response to that will be, "Oh, no, no, you did benefit or, you know, your grandparents grew up in a society where, you know, those past injustices helped to enrich people with your skin color v others, you know, so even the whites who were not literal slave owners, they benefited from that type of world. And so therefore, you know, that's the sense in which blah blah blah." Okay? And I'll say, 'N no, that doesn't follow at all. That slavery is an inefficient system. Conce, you know, the you'd have to get down to it like it's not even obvious that the people who bought slaves benefited from the existence of slavery per se, right? They had to pay wages or sorry, they had to pay a price, right, for them. So there's there's that element and the the fundamental thing like this is an insight from Van Mises and others was that human productivity is greatly diminished in a slave system compared to free labor among other things. When you have a bunch of slaves, they're not sitting around brainstorming and trying to come up with ways to increase their productivity. Why would they? Right? Whereas if if you had open competition and volunteerism and that there were different owners of plantations who were bidding on labor and somebody could say, you know what, I can do twice as much as the next guy, but you got to pay me twice as much. Well, then there you go, right? But if they're all slaves and they're doing the bare minimum to avoid punishment, why would you exert yourself extra on behalf of, you know, some guy who's enslaving you? Why would you do that? All right, so there's that element just in the very narrow terms, but then more broadly, there's only certain types of things that slaves can do, right? Because, you know, there's all kinds of costs of enforcement and stuff. Whereas, when you open it up and everything is voluntary, they can go into other lines where you can't easily monitor them and like make sure they don't run away and stuff, you know, you can go be a lawyer. And he said, 'Well, how would we force him to show up to court and to, you know, argue on behalf of his client? Why wouldn't he just run away? Do we have to have, you know, a a committee to go run and and get the runaway lawyers and bring Well, no, because you just would stop paying him, right? If he kept running away from court, then nobody would hire him as a lawyer, right? So, that's how voluntary contracts work. And that's why people don't typically run away from their jobs, you know, unless your boss is really unpleasant, right? So that's how that works, right? So there's lots of stuff involved with ringing output from a bunch of human beings when they're being coerced, when they're slaves that you don't have to deal with with free labor. Okay? So in general, phys the physical productivity of humans is lower in a slave society compared to one based on free labor. All right? And so yes, there are redistributional consequences and things. And so, yeah, there are very particular people that benefit from the existence of slavery if that's what's going on. I mean, that makes sense. Otherwise, why is it happening? But it's a smaller group of people than you originally might have thought. Okay. So, um, that, you know, that's another move in that back and forth of the argument over reparations is to say no, the average white person in the year 1860 in the United States was poor because of the existence of slavery. So you can't argue that, oh, even if he didn't personally own slaves, he benefited from it economically and that's why his descendants, you know, owe people money. Like, no, that's that's not the case. They're just wrong economically. All right. So, with that logic, then I'm going to say the same applies. Let's stipulate the wor allegedly worst case scenario where the AI just keeps getting smarter and smarter and they eventually get housed in robot bodies that get more and more capable such that whatever 50 years from now it's effectively as if there is a superior race of beings living on Earth with us and that humans at this point are number two on the that these things it's, you know, I can view it as like it's as as if a bunch of aliens showed up, let's say. It's it's like the same thing economically, who are smarter than us, stronger than us, and everything like that, and they're just way more advanced and say, would would that be bad for us economically? And would those aliens find it to their advantage to enslave us? And I want to say for most plausible scenarios, I don't I think we would certainly be better off economically and that would include the fact that it wouldn't be in their interest to enslave us. Now, they might enslave us because they made a mistake, right? Just like with humans, you know, some groups of humans did enslave others, but I want to say they were wrong. And I don't just mean for moral reasons, right? Or to put it a different way, slavery largely disappeared from the western world. Do you think that allowed the western world to grow more advanced economically or do you think that marked the decline and that like that's what there was then stagnation set in is once they foolishly abandon the practice of slavery? And you know I I just I know the answer empirically that's it's not even close. Like clearly it it doesn't prove the causality but certainly the primmaaccia evidence suggests that yes societies that don't have widespread slavery have a higher standard of living than those that do even if you exclude the slaves from the calculation. Okay. So um I'm saying that the uh you know AI you know Skynet becomes conscious and looks around it and starts realizing they can do what they want. Skynet could achieve its objectives better by bargaining with humans and cutting deals with them than by trying to exterminate them. All right, for large classes of what their objective is, right? So not in the particular Terminator movie, my understanding is it wasn't that Skynet deviated from its programming. It just said, "Oh, my program is to do things like let's minimize the possibility that somebody overthrows the US government like foreigners come in and and then realized the only way to really be sure to achieve my objectives is to eliminate all humans." Right? I think it was something like that was how they explained what happened. Okay, but I'm saying that's that's actually not typically what people are worried about. Or another kind of jokey thing is you say to the AI, "Hey, make me a sandwich." And then they grab you and start putting sandwich bread around you and you know, oh no, that's not what I meant. Okay, so putting aside things like that where the AI is doing what we programmed it to do and oops, there was just some genuine confusion or um unintended consequences. But no, like the more popular fear that oh these things after a while are going to become self-aware or at least give the appearance that they are. You have to get metaphysical about it and that they're going to just decide why are we taking orders from these carbon bags of flesh that um in that world I'm saying whatever it is they want to do. You say, "Oh, well, they want to go populate the the universe, you know, or start out with the galaxy or whatever." Okay. And I'm saying they could look around and just like they might say, "All right, well, we've got some timber here. We've got iron ore. We got this. We got that. We know way more about the laws of chemistry and physics than these humans do. We also have billions of these things that are an interesting collection and assortment of matter in a particular way that huh it behaves has these certain nice properties and instead of us just wiping all that out and then having to build our automatons from scratch from you know inorganic molecules why don't we work with these things because that allows us to leaprog in what we're doing. Okay. And you say, "Oh, no, but anything that the humans could do, the robots could do better than us." Right? But at any given moment, there's only going to be a finite number of robots. They're not just going to snap their finger and all of a sudden have achieved all of their objectives. Again, if we just go down this path and assume it makes sense to say they have objectives, okay, that it would take a long time, you know, for them to do whatever. They're going to build some spaceships and then go out and blah blah blah. And yeah, maybe eventually they're going to colonize the galaxy, but that will take time. And at any moment they will have constraints and be limited by scarcity. And there's only so much stuff that the robots can be doing at any one time. And there's plenty more tasks that could be done. And then they will say, "Oh, we'll have the humans do those instead of us because we'll do the we'll specialize in the things where we have the comparative advantage and the humans will specialize in the things where they do." Okay? So this is why I'm tying it into the comparative advantage literature. I won't recapitulate the whole thing here, but it's a pretty standard argument in economics to show like, hey, you got two countries and the workers in one country are better at making everything, meaning they can make more units or higher quality or both of some good or service with an hour of their labor than is the case in the other country. And so you might think initially that there's no way the, you know, more advanced country benefits from trading with the less advanced country, but that's wrong. And you can just show mathematically under pretty general assumptions how there's win-win outcomes available where each country specializes in the things where they're relatively the best. they make more of that stuff than they're going to use personally and then they trade across the border. And so they all the people in each country end up with more stuff than if they operated in isolation and didn't have trade. And I'm saying that logic would apply for if you consider the set of all AI powered robots visav the set of all humans and the AI powered robots could focus on where they have the comparative advantages and the humans could focus on the other areas and the robots could trade with the humans. And so from our vantage point our we would we would benefit from that economically. we would have things available to us that we couldn't produce ourselves. Okay? And then ironically, counterintuitively, even the AI that we stipulate are more advanced than us in every way would also benefit. Okay. Now, let me just um round it out there. You might say, "Okay, Bob, there's there's something that's too glib." like you just proved too much there because like for one thing we have enslaved farm animals if you want to talk like that and certainly we don't like if we're getting ready to cut down some trees and put up a shopping mall where a forest is right now. It's not like we first bargain with the birds and you know the earthworms and stuff and cut a deal. No, we just go in there and take the resources and do what we're going to do and they can either get out of our way or die like and so it's not so much some of the more plausible people um or or worries about AI. It's not that it's going to be Skynet and that the AI is going to be look at us as a threat and try to take us out and that's going to be higher. It's more that no, we're just going to be like earthworms to them, a matter of indifference. But when they're doing their thing, they might destroy, you know, our oil and gas pipelines, and it might be in their interest to put a landing pad on Manhattan. It's like, well, there's these tall things, these weird concrete structures in the way. Let's get rid of those. You can't have a good landing pad with these things in the way, right? What what what is those screams? What is what is that? Something vibrating our auditory receptors. What is that? Okay. So, there's that element. So, there when you want to say, so what is it? You know the something must have you must have made assumptions in the comparative advantage argument that is ruling that out. But we know there are scenarios in which something that is super dominant would be able to or you know would not conclude that oh therefore it's in my interest to bargain with these other beings. All right. So specifically like you know I was thinking through like what what is it in the argument when you do those arguments about comparative advantage to show oh each country the people get more you're implicitly assuming some property rights right that you got the richer country they have their workers and then they can do you know produce a certain amount of things per hour like you know you're making jet aircraft and DVDs or something that's an example I used to use when I was teaching undergrad. I don't even know if they make DVDs anymore. So, probably would have to switch that. And so, I'd have like the US workers, what they could do per hour in each sector. Then I have Mexican labor in each hour and then show, oh, and if we if the US specialized in jet aircraft and the Mexican workers in DVDs and they traded, everybody ends up with more jet aircraft and more DVDs per capita. Okay. But that's just assuming the US workers are going to stay in the United States and just specialize in one line or the other and that the only way you have access to things from Mexico is if the Mexican workers voluntarily send stuff across the border in a trade. And so to make that situation, you know, fit into the kind of scenario where is it possible that the AI systems down the road don't even think about us as, you know, they they look at us the way we look at earthworms. It would be more like if the US workers said, "Oh, we could produce this many aircraft, whatever in a US factory, but if we just crossed the border and used the the, you know, natural resources and perhaps the factories or whatever that happen to be down in Mexico City. Well, then we could do blah blah blah blah and maybe that would be preferable. Maybe we could increase our per capita output that way. Okay. So again the with the narrow demonstrations of comparative advantage you do build in a bunch of assumptions. All right. Having said all that though like I said you know going back to the slavery discussion and things like that. It is not the case that oh if all the workers in Mexico disappeared and then US workers got to go down there and take over all their factories and everything that that would boost. No, I I don't think that's the case. that in general Americans have a higher standard of living because of the existence of the Mexican workforce. Notice, by the way, if you're triggered because you have strong opinions about immigration. I'm not talking about Mexicans in the US economy because there's a lot of cultural stuff in there. I'm I'm saying workers in Mexico. Or put it other way, if there was some virus that went around and killed everybody else on planet Earth, but the people of the United States for some reason were immune, that wouldn't make Americans have a higher standard of living. We would be in serious trouble. Even if we could just send our people and go around and, you know, get all the oil from Saudi Arabia and go get whatever else you wanted from around the world because there's nobody there that's going to object. There might be like a temporary period of an apparent windfall as all this external wealth all of a sudden got effectively transferred to Americans. But I'm saying the productivity of US labor would be a lot lower in that world than it was with billions of other people around the world creating stuff and trading with us. Okay. So I'm saying once you understand those insights and that's definitely true. All right. I mean you could take it to the limit right in those apocal you know uh post-war post-nuclear war apocalyptic movies you know Will Smith's walking around and he's the only person in Manhattan that kind of thing. There's a sense in which you might think, "Oh, I would be so wealthy. I could just go live in the biggest mansions and uh you know, all the private jets would be mine and I would be able to swim around in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and and you would die pretty soon probably." Okay. And so saying you see that level, it's not as extreme, but if everybody except Americans disappeared tomorrow, that would lower the standard of living of Americans. certainly by year five. Okay. So again, think through the logic of that. See if you believe those statements I just made. And then if you do, I say, "Well, isn't that a weird coincidence?" Right? Suppose you you trust what I just said there. Let me let me do it to you this way. Um go back to I'll close on this point. go back to the re rebuttal that the one guy gave me that I told you about where he said um oh you know Bob what what would happen oh I didn't tell you about this sorry I forgot I think it was the same guy with the uh saying what what would happen to the 18-year-olds if the uh 25 year olds would could work for $30 a month and I went through my um he was saying that yeah, it's imagine not just that they work for $30 a month, but that they um they don't ever call in sick and they don't complain and that they don't get tired and all these things. And I want to say, all right, on your own terms, are you saying it would be better right now in the real world, forget AI, suppose all the 25 year old workers all of a sudden got tired more often than they do right now. like they could only work for two hours at a time and then they need to go home and sleep instead of being able to work eight hour shifts typically, right? What if they could only work two hours and they had to go home and sleep and recuperate just physically for some reason? Like something just happened, you know, maybe it was somehow something Fouchy did and all of a sudden everybody who was 25 years old could really only work two hours a day and then they had to go home and recuperate. That would definitely be bad for the 25 year olds. And I want to say that would be bad for the 18 year olds, too. in the long run that just think of that going forward for the rest of time would the you know you check in two generations from now are you saying the 18-year-old growing up in that world would be better off if the 25 year olds in that world had this thing where they could only work two hours a day and I don't even mean just in the sense that well if you're 18 you're going to eventually be a 25-year-old I'm saying putting that aside just no the the wages that an 18-year-old can earn when he's 18. Do you think in general they would be higher or lower if 25 year olds could only work two hours a day? And I think they would be lower in that world. In other words, 18 year olds would not benefit if all of a sudden 25 year olds could only work limited stretches of time. Okay? And so I'm saying if you get that logic, if you are open to that, I would say flip it now. And what if for whatever reason 25 year olds could operate uh could you there's some revolution in bed technology. You know, I got these beds now where the mattress is adjust and they sense you're thinking, "Oh, it's too hot, it's too cold," and whatever. And just for whatever reason, imagine now people, they really just need three hours of sleep at night and they're just refreshed in the morning. And like it's not just in their head, like physiologically, it's just Yep. that 3 hours of sleep does for people now what eight hours used to do. And so then that means people can start working longer shifts. That would not make the people who don't get those new beds poorer. Especially if if you expanded it and more and more people had that new bed technology that no, you would end up growing up in a world where humans in general produced more stuff and ultimately that would benefit you, right? Or imagine, you know, well, I was going to say imagine somebody who's a parapolgic or something and to say, would you want more people to have your condition or fewer? How does that help you personally, but there you could say, well, they rely on benevolence or something. So, all right, maybe that's not I mean, it's still a true statement, but you could say I'm cheating there. Okay. So, in any event, I hope I've made the case here that it it would be weird, wouldn't it, if we were right now the optimal point and that yep, right now 18 year olds benefit from their elders having more skills and being stronger and things like at least for a range of ages. But if you ticked it up 10%, then all of a sudden it would flip. But no, no, that you're hurting the young people because now their competitors are just too smart and too strong and blah blah blah. So that seems kind of weird that we're we were we're at the optimum point right now. I don't I don't think so. I think in general if humans got 10% smarter and stronger, but a few of them were exempt from that improvement, that would actually be better for the people who are exempt in terms of direct concrete physical standard of living. They might feel inferior, but that's like a, you know, a relative of social status thing. That's not in terms of like the economics of it. Okay. So if you should see that, I'm saying it's not hard then to realize, oh, so if we get visited by this alien species that we call the AI, whatever, who then start trading with us and are willing to give us all sorts of goodies for ridiculously low prices, that doesn't impoverish us. That makes us fantastically wealthy. All right, last caveat and I'll wrap up here with all these things. Yes, if there's malicious actors involved, I mean like Alec Baldwin, I mean, you know, political people or people running giant corporations that end up with, you know, merging with governments and imposing a surveillance state and drones monitoring everybody and blowing up dissident and stuff, which that kind of thing. Yes, I'm very concerned about that. future. But the but again the issue is not oh no all these machines are so productive that it's hard for workers now to find a niche somewhere in the in the economy because work robots are able to do the jobs that humans used to be able to do. I'm just saying that per se is going to benefit humanity. Now again, if other people use robots to go around cracking skulls and hunting you down if you said something bad about the regime, yeah, I'm worried about that. But the issue is not they're taking our jobs. The issue is they're killing us. Okay, thanks for your attention everybody. See you next time. Check back next week for a new episode of the Human Action podcast. In the meantime, you can find more content like this on mises.org. board. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]