Will AI take our jobs? We put the question to Alex Imas, the new Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind and a professor at Chicago Booth, whose entire job now is studying how frontier AI reshapes the economy. His short answer: probably some of them, but the popular story is mostly wrong about which jobs and how fast.

Alex makes the case that a job is a bundle of tasks, not a single thing AI either does or doesn't do, and that the number of people who should actually care about is how much consumer demand responds to falling prices. Get that wrong and you predict mass layoffs. Get it right and you sometimes predict more hiring. We get into why the automation panic is two centuries old, why he thinks blue-collar work is in more danger than white-collar, and why the people already winning are the ones adopting AI fastest.

We also cover the AGI versus ASI distinction and why it changes everything for the economy, what happens when there's no moat and open models stay six to eight months behind, the three-tier pricing future he sees coming after the 2026 compute crunch, and what any of this means if you're deciding whether to send your kids to college.

The episode was recorded before Alex joined Google

Timestamps

00:00 Meeting Alex Imas

00:44 Will AI take our jobs?

03:35 Is this an AI question or an economics question?

06:18 The economy is already behind the AI we have

07:43 Why AI adoption is K-shaped

12:51 Was Andrew Yang right?

13:45 The automation panic is 200 years old

16:46 Dario's six-month claim, and why we don't see it yet

17:22 A job is not a task

22:38 The three numbers that actually predict the labor market

22:42 The chess engine analogy and the centaur phase

25:45 Recursive self-improvement and the hamburger problem

30:06 Should AI labs be the ones answering alignment questions?

31:17 The "invisible hand wave" and why nobody wants fully autonomous AI

33:27 AGI vs ASI, and why the difference is everything

35:28 Commodities vs relational goods

41:14 Star Trek, replicators, and predicting with sci-fi

45:20 Inequality and the Upper West Side VCs

46:21 Your money manager was automated in the 1960s

50:47 Are OpenAI and Anthropic overvalued? The moat problem

54:29 What has to be true for the losses to make sense

55:43 Cognitive atrophy and monopoly fears

57:00 The 2026 compute crunch and the three-tier pricing future

1:01:52 The Apple vs Android analogy

1:03:54 A rich-country perspective

1:04:16 Protecting the skills that actually matter

1:07:02 Will not using AI become a status symbol?

1:08:53 Does capitalism even survive?

1:13:44 Redistribution becomes the political battleground

1:18:16 Blue collar vs white collar: who's really at risk

1:21:18 Advice for parents in an AI world

1:22:43 Saving for retirement when the Valley says don't

1:25:06 Will non-elite colleges survive?

Music:

"Kid Kodi" - Blue Dot Sessions - via Free Music Archive - CC BY-NC 4.0.

About: The Information Bottleneck is hosted by Ravid Shwartz-Ziv and Allen Roush, featuring in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers about the ideas shaping the future of machine learning.