← The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Loading summary
Transcript253 lines
- [00:00]
David Autor
K Pop Demon Hunters Saja Boy's breakfast
- [00:02]
Daron Acemoglu
meal and Hunt tricks meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle.
- [00:10]
David Autor
So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [00:14]
Jon Stewart
It is an honor to share.
- [00:16]
David Autor
No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle.
- [00:25]
Daron Acemoglu
Pick a meal to pick a side.
- [00:27]
Jon Stewart
Ba da ba ba ba and participate
- [00:29]
David Autor
in McDonald's while supplies last spring Black
- [00:31]
Jon Stewart
Friday is on at the Home Depot. Save on grills and patio sets that will be sure to bring your hosting game up a notch. Fire up your feast with help from the Home Depot and save on grills like the next grill four burner propane gas grill was $249. Now in special buy for one 99 or give everyone the best seat in the yard with the Hampton bay Mayfield park four piece conversation set for only $399. Save on grills and patio sets with low prices guaranteed during spring Black Friday only at the Home Depot now through April 22nd while supplies last exclusion supplies. See homedepot.com Pricematch for details. Foreign. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. My name is Jon Stewart. It's another weekly show podcast on this Earth Day eve. Is that do you celebrate? I love Earth. I can't wait. The pitter patter of little feet at six in the morning running downstairs to open up their Earth Day presents. And as this glorious Earth is being celebrated while simultaneously being destroyed on the back end of it, I thought it would be appropriate not to worry about Iran, not to worry about climate change, but to worry about a third existential threat, which is AI, artificial intelligence. It is happening, people. And it's about time that we had a sober conversation about its, its deleterious effects, but also its opportunities. And so we're going to go straight to the source. We're going to go to two brilliant, brilliant MIT economists who are going to talk to us a little bit about the possibilities of AI, the collateral damage of AI, and the various ways we might be able to mitigate that. So we're just going to get right into it with those cats right now. Here they are, Folks. We're gonna break it down today in terms of the AI revolution and what will be the repercussions for the American people, the American worker, the world writ large. Who do you go to for this kind of thing? You go to the experts. You go to the brilliant people you go to. Doron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate. I don't throw that around. Nobel Laureate in Economics, MIT Institute professor. And David Autor, Ruben Feld, professor of Economics at M. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [02:52]
Daron Acemoglu
Oh, our pleasure. Absolutely.
- [02:54]
David Autor
Thanks for having us on.
- [02:56]
Jon Stewart
David and Darren, I am beginning to get increasingly discomfited by the speed at which AI seems to be infiltrating into not just sort of the popular consensus in culture, but the workforce. So I want to ask you guys, what is our timeframe as this technology is? When are we gonna really feel the full effect of this new technology?
- [03:27]
Daron Acemoglu
Just beginning to get worried about it now, John,
- [03:31]
Jon Stewart
you know me, you know me. We know each. No, I've been. You know, I'm worried about everything.
- [03:40]
Daron Acemoglu
So am I. And I'm very worried about this, too.
- [03:43]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [03:43]
Daron Acemoglu
Not about the timeline, because the timeline is so uncertain. It's hard for me to worry about something that's so uncertain, but with all of the consequences. I think we are definitely not ready for AI the workforce isn't ready for AI we don't know what it's going to do. I think the people who are really not ready for AI are the students whose learning is going to be affected in so many different ways. And we don't know. We have no guardrails, no ways of ensuring that students are actually learning how to learn and they can actually become experts in anything in the age of AI when they can get a lot of answers from AI. So there's just so many things to be concerned with now.
- [04:26]
Jon Stewart
David, will they need to learn anything? Because.
- [04:28]
David Autor
Yes.
- [04:31]
Jon Stewart
What will they need to learn? Won't we all just be.
- [04:33]
David Autor
If they don't need to learn anything, then they're just not needed as workers. And we don't want to be in that scenario. Right. So we do need people to have expertise in mastery. And I do think AI has both potential and risk. Right. And I think Daron will talk more about the risk, so I'll probably talk more about the potential. And let me point out that although I do not have a Nobel Prize around here at mit, it's more distinguished to not have one than to have one.
- [04:56]
Jon Stewart
David, can I tell you, I love how you've set yourself apart from your colleagues. Exactly. By not getting a Nobel Prize.
- [05:03]
David Autor
Exactly. Someone's got to, you know, someone's got to stand out.
- [05:06]
Jon Stewart
You know what? The idea that you have that rebellious spirit at MIT to go against the grain.
- [05:12]
David Autor
Exactly.
- [05:13]
Jon Stewart
And not get a Nobel Prize. Well, then let's Start with that. David. The real concern is, look, and let's step back for a moment. We talk about disruptions for workers over time. Industrial revolution, globalization, those were sort of the dynamics that really impacted workers, but those took place over time. So, David, you're going to talk more about the potential. Talk us through the previous disruptions and how AI fits into those paradigms.
- [05:50]
David Autor
Sure. So let me first say, just to bring it to the present first, what we should be concerned about is not running out of jobs per se, but having jobs that, that where their expert labor is not needed. So a future in which everyone is like carrying the box from the UPS truck to the front door is very different from a future in which everyone is doing medical care. Right. So it's not the quantity per se, but whether specialized human labor is still needed. I think it will be. But it really matters whether we are replaceable, whether we are all kind of redundant versions of one another, or whether we have real added value in this economy. Now, we've been through lots of technological transitions. Some have been much more traumatic than others. The Industrial Revolution was very much so. There's a 60 year period that people refer to as Engel's Pause in the early first Industrial Revolution where productivity was rising rapidly and yet working class wages were not. And artisanal labor. These people who had spent their lives developing expertise in weaving and so on, they were just wiped out. And, and it took decades before there was actually need for specialized labor again, a lot of what, you know, who worked in those dark satanic mills, it was basically unmarried women and indentured children doing dirty, dangerous, unskilled work. And it took decades, really into the late 1700s. Sorry, excuse me, late 1800s. I'm sorry. Until we started to.
- [07:14]
Jon Stewart
So this is why you don't have the Nobel.
- [07:15]
David Autor
I know. David, hold me back.
- [07:17]
Jon Stewart
You gotta know the right century.
- [07:18]
David Autor
That's right. Until we actually started to use specialized skills again, where people needed to follow rules, they needed to master tools, and their expertise was really needed. And so that was a very traumatic technological transition. And eventually we came through it okay. But most the people who were there at the outset did not. And a lot of these transitions, young people adapt them usually more successfully by choosing different careers. People don't make big career transitions in mid adulthood. They don't go from being a steelworker to a doctor or a programmer to a nurse. So those transitions are kind of generational. And so when it moves really fast, as it did in the era of the China trade shock, for example, people just get left behind. Places eventually recover, but individuals much less so.
- [08:10]
Jon Stewart
And you talk about. It's very interesting. And Daron, maybe we'll ask you. We're talking about specialized labor, you know, and David is talking about the craftspeople who knew weaving and those things, and they're replaced by automation and these kinds of things. Manufacturing jobs that were replaced in the China shock maybe weren't considered as specialized, but still blue collar. Is AI going to bring about those same disruptions but in what you would call, I guess, white collar labor or less specialized knowledge and more administrative knowledge?
- [08:46]
Daron Acemoglu
I think it certainly will. The timeframe is unclear. Just to add to what David said, this kind of experience is not a distant one. As David's own work shows, the China shock when it led to cheap imports coming and destroying parts of manufacturing had the same effect.
- [09:08]
Jon Stewart
You're talking about in the 2000s when they were. When China was admitted to the WTO.
- [09:12]
Daron Acemoglu
And then, yeah, starting in 1990s, but especially in 2000, but really after 2000. And robots at a much smaller scale had exactly the same effects. Huge increase in productivity for steel, electronics, cars. But blue collar workers lost their jobs. Many communities, just like with the Chinese imports shock, were thrown into recession. And the same thing can happen if there is very rapid displacement of white collar jobs. Now, the timing is very unclear. There is a lot of hype and a lot of reality to the capabilities of AI models. So far. We're not seeing mass layoffs. We may be seeing some slowdown in hiring, it's unclear. And white collar jobs are less concentrated geographically compared to, say, textiles or toys, the things that were affected by Chinese imports or cars, definitely, or steel. But the numbers of jobs in white collar occupations is high. So there could be a lot of people who lose their jobs. Now, the thing is that despite the tremendous advances in AI over the last eight months or so, these models are not yet able to do the whole occupation for many of the white collar jobs yet that may to come, that may be to come, or it may take a while. That's why there is so much uncertainty. But uncertainty is a very bad reason to be complacent.
- [10:51]
Jon Stewart
David, you know, a story that those that are behind AI tell us is very different. You know, when. When the people that are creating these AI models talk, they talk in utopian terms. We will be freed from the burden of the toil. We will paint and write poetry, even though AI is probably going to do that as well. But when they talk to their investors, they speak very differently. And I want to ask you about a quote that I heard. There was a gentleman who was talking to his investors about AI and he said, it will allow you the benefit of productivity without the tax of human labor. He referred to human labor, us as a tax, as something that a company wants to avoid paying to retain productivity. That's what worries me is that, you know, we talk a lot about this and it's always framed in terms of productivity.
- [11:52]
Daron Acemoglu
So wouldn't you like to be freed from your podcasting job, John?
- [11:56]
Jon Stewart
Listen, man, I've been toiling in the podcast minds for. I'm getting podcast lung. It's a terrible. It is a terrible crippling addiction.
- [12:08]
David Autor
Yeah. So, you know, most of us are, you know, both workers and consumers and we're not going to be able to consume if we're not working. And, and, but of course, from the perspective of a firm, right? They want their customers, they'd rather not have their workers. Right? Labor, you know, economists will tell you this. Labor demand is derived demand, right? It's not, it's not that firms want labor.
- [12:25]
Jon Stewart
Explain that. Derive demand. What is, what is that?
- [12:27]
David Autor
Yeah, they want to make stuff, right? And usually making stuff requires, you know, space and people and, you know, electricity and stuff and people. But if they could make it without the people, they would be just as happy. It's, you know, it's like Spinal Tap, you know, if they had the sex and the drugs, they could do without the rock and roll. Right?
- [12:44]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [12:44]
David Autor
You know, but of course, people have always been necessary. So although firms have always had this fantasy that they could fully automate, they'd never been able to do so. And often it's kind of turned out not how they expected. Right? So during the, you know, the era of numerically controlled machines, they thought they would deskill and replace workers. Actually, they turned, you know, manufacturing workers into programmers. So it doesn't always work out the way that firms expect it to, but it may this time. There's certainly many, many more things are subject to AI automation than we're subject to the previous era. Because AI has a whole new set of capabilities, right? Previous computers could do routine tasks. They could follow rules, rules specified so tightly that a non sentient, non improvisational, non problem solving, non creative machine could just carry it out without having to understand what it's doing. That really limited the set of activities that we could subject to computer programming. But now AI learns inductively, right? Learns from unstructured information, it infers rules, it solves problems without our even understanding how it's solving them. That Allows it to enter many, many new realms. Now let's, to make this very concrete, it's useful, I think, to contrast two occupations. One that people talk about all the time and one they should be talking about. So the one they talk about all the time is long haul truck drivers. Right. And there are about three and a half million of them in the United States and they say they're going to be replaced by autonomous vehicles. That is a problem we can handle because it's going to go very slowly. Right. The day that let's say Elon Musk announces tomorrow he has a self driving truck and let's just pretend we believe him and it's, you know, that's how
- [14:15]
Jon Stewart
I've been operating for years.
- [14:17]
David Autor
And so it totally works. We're not going to throw all our trucks into the Atlantic Ocean and buy new ones tomorrow. It's going to take decades to replace all of that capital and all the infrastructure. So that's going to be a slow transition. And labor markets can deal with transitions that happen at a couple of percentage points a year because people retire, new people don't enter. That's manageable.
- [14:35]
Jon Stewart
You're saying if it takes place over a generation.
- [14:38]
Daron Acemoglu
Absolutely.
- [14:39]
Jon Stewart
Then that's something that even though it will be disruptive, it won't be catastrophic.
- [14:42]
David Autor
Exactly.
- [14:43]
Jon Stewart
Okay.
- [14:43]
David Autor
Now let's think of call center workers. There are about as many of them in the United States as there are long haul truckers. They're paid less, they're primarily women. But there are just as many. Those jobs can go very, very quickly. Right. Because those can be the, you know, automation can encroach rapidly. I don't think they'll all go. The ones that remain will actually be more specialized. They'll be at the top of the queue. Right. When the AI says I give up, you will be handed over to, you know, the last 20 people standing.
- [15:10]
Jon Stewart
So rather than 20 people, five people will handle what's left of the human tasks. Exactly. That need to be handled.
- [15:17]
David Autor
And let's just say that's a mixed bag. Right. Those will be better jobs. They'll be higher paid, there'll be more expertise intensive, but there'll be fewer of them. Right. And that will. We'll see this in language translation, we'll see this in call centers. We may see this in software as well. Right. Software will bifurcate. We'll have a small number of people who build AI models, who run data centers, who run enterprise software. And they'll be highly paid and highly specialized. And then we'll have Infinity Vibe coders. And they'll be like Uber drivers. You'll call them up to write an app for you. They won't be paid nothing. There'll be a lot of them that won't be highly paid. So we're going to see a variety of impacts, but the ones work that is fully cognitive work, is much, much more vulnerable, can change much more quickly. Eventually, robotics will also more and more enter the physical realm. But that's still, you know, some ways off.
- [16:12]
Jon Stewart
Ground News. It's this website and app. It's designed to give readers a better way, an easier way to navigate the news. You know, if you go on the algorithmic, the Twitters and the things and, or, or the weaponized news organizations or the websites, you don't even understand how they're manipulating your worldview and how they're getting past the reptilian barriers that you have towards polarization and all those different things. Ground News gives you the information you need to be able to battle that. It pulls together every article about the same news story from all outlets all over the world and puts them in one place and, and not, not incentivized for like the worst, most hostile, most partisan take it tells you where it's coming from. They show you how reliable the source is and who's funding it. Who's funding it. Follow the money, know who's behind the headline. I'm telling you, man, the Nobel Peace Centers even mentioned that Ground News is an excellent way to stay informed. Noble Peace center, that's I think the one that Trump started. I think it 3D prints Nobel Peace Prizes. It just hands them out. The platform's independently operated, supported by its subscribers, so they stay independent and they stay mission driven. They don't get sucked into this slop. If you want to see the full picture, go to Ground News. They can help you through the noise and get to the heart of the news. Go to groundnews.com stewart subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access Vantage subscription discount. Available only for a limited time. This brings the price down to like $5 a month. That's groundnews.com stewart or scan the QR code on the screen. But. So let's talk about that during, you know, yeah, when we talk about these sort of two areas of work, which is the human expertise that needs to be done and then physical work where robotics do everything is moving in that direction. AI feels like it stripped mind, the entirety of human accomplishment. You know, the 10,000 years that we have spent developing these areas of expertise These areas of knowledge, the kinds of things that made us feel relevant to, to the progress of the human condition, AI comes in and six months later goes, okay, what else you got? What else are you going to feed me? And then it starts to move forward. Are you confident that. So what David's talking about is already a reduction of the human workforce. Is that the thing that you are most concerned about or is it the eradication?
- [19:15]
Daron Acemoglu
Yeah, reduction is first and eradication is later. And in the process wages be stagnating or even declining. And David, you know, everything David said I agree with. But there's one other thing to add. Again, it's a wild card because we don't know how quickly these AI capabilities will develop and how quickly they will be adopted. But all of our earlier examples of displacement, which as I said and David said, haven't been so good for workers, such as during the first 80 years or so of the British Industrial Revolution or during China and robot shocks, they were confined to a few occupations. Even then it was very hard for people to relocate and get jobs and newcomers to find jobs. But you know, weavers during the British Industrial Revolution, once power looms came in, they lost about two thirds of their earnings. But they could then become unskilled factory operators, blue collar workers went to construction or other things, or some of them withdrew from the labor force. If Dario Amadei or some of the other people who are most vocal about the capabilities of these models and what they will do to the workforce are correct, there are going to be many sectors at the same time being hit. So yes, if the rest of the economy was booming and 3.5 million customer service representatives were laid off, we could find other jobs for them, perhaps with somewhat lower pay. But what if all occupations are going in the same direction? That is Armageddon. Now, I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon.
- [21:02]
Jon Stewart
David just sighed. You said Armageddon and David's side?
- [21:06]
Daron Acemoglu
No, no, I will let David. I mean, that's not going to happen anytime soon, but I think we have to be prepared for it because some people are saying it's going to happen in the next two, three, four, five years. Either those plans are leading trillions of dollars of investment which are going to come to nothing, or there is going to be a grain of truth in some aspect of it. But either way, we have to be prepared for that. Now, displacement is real.
- [21:37]
Jon Stewart
So you're talking about either this is a financial bubble where an incredible amount of capital is being poured into a technology that ultimately will be a bubble that, you know, resolves nothing and is not worth the investment, which causes a kind of financial catastrophe, or it's real and it causes a personal human labor catastrophe.
- [22:06]
Daron Acemoglu
Is that I would say I'm somewhere in between, I think the speed of which will be much slower, which will then lead to a lot of money being lost because the investments need to be monetized, and they need to be monetized soon if these investments are going to pay off. So I am in the middle. I think that these capabilities will come at some point, but not as soon as these investments are being motivated by. But I am uncertain enough that either all of it being a bubble or all of it happening within the next five years. Can I say with good consciousness, that's a zero probability event? I cannot. I mean, so many technologists are saying, look, in our labs we have these even more amazing models. I mean, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. But I can't. I can't say, oh, necessarily, it's wrong.
- [22:56]
Jon Stewart
How do you, how do you means test these hypotheses?
- [23:01]
Daron Acemoglu
I cannot. We cannot. Nobody can.
- [23:02]
Jon Stewart
We can't do it because they're all
- [23:04]
Daron Acemoglu
based on what's going to come next year and we don't have access to it.
- [23:07]
Jon Stewart
So everything we're doing is. We're looking backwards. We're looking backwards, but not forwards. David, you were going to say.
- [23:13]
David Autor
Okay, so, so first, I don't, I don't think that the success of AI companies and the value of their investments entirely depends on them displacing labor. If we just got much more productive, that would also pay off. Right. So if we got more efficient in healthcare, if we got, you know, better at transportation, if we did education better. So it doesn't all have to come from just throwing people out of work. And it's also important to remember that although these transitions have been wrenching, we're infinitely more wealthy than we were 200 years ago. We are much better off. None of us wants to live on the main.
- [23:44]
Jon Stewart
On. On the main. But obviously, if you look, insert. You know, I don't think the Rust belt would say, yeah, that was. Globalization was great for us.
- [23:52]
David Autor
No, no, they, they're not starving. Right, right. They're not. They have a. They're generally not starving. They have. Look, I, I don't mean to be unsympathetic.
- [23:59]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, yeah.
- [23:59]
David Autor
But the standard of living in almost anywhere in America, including in the least privileged places, people have indoor plumbing. They, they are not, they are not food deprived. By and large they have some access to education, they have some safety. It's much better than conditions in pre industrial England 250 years ago. So I don't think that. So although there's always costs and I don't mean to minimize them, I think they're real and the transitional costs are enormous and the beneficiaries are not the same as those who are harmed. So it's not like they just make these. But I think we should recognize there's enormous upside potential here as well. We shouldn't only be sentimental about what would be lost, we should also recognize the opportunity to, to accelerate science, to improve our adaptation to climate change and energy generation, to improve medicine, to do education better. We might do it worse. We could do it better and distribute more of the world's wealth to more of the people in the world. I actually think artificial intelligence like mobile telephony can be potentially beneficial to the developing world in a way by increasing self sufficiency, by giving access to expertise in engineering, in medicine that is not readily available.
- [25:17]
Daron Acemoglu
So can I just jump in there please? Because David and I have been studying these things together and separately for the last 30 years and almost everything you'll hear from David I agree with. And most things you hear from me, well, David probably would disagree with them, but anyway. But there is one place of disagreement between me and David and David put his finger on it. So let me expand because I think this just again underscores the uncertainty. So David and I completely agree that there is a potential to use AI in what we call a pro worker way, meaning you make workers more productive, they become better at their jobs, they gain additional expertise, they start performing new and more important and interesting problem solving tasks. The place of disagreement between me and David is that I think that direction requires a complete change in the focus of the industry and we won't get it on their current path. The current path is very automation focused. Whereas I think David thinks, well, whatever the companies do, somehow better things might come out. So I think he's more optimistic about those productivity gains that could then create meaningful jobs. I think we really are squandering that opportunity. That opportunity is there, but we're squandering. And that's the most important reason why I love being in shows like yours where people listen to as opposed to what I say, because I think we need to change the conversation. The conversation shouldn't just be about the doom and the gloom or the amazing promise of AI. It should be about are we actually using these Models these capabilities for the right thing or the wrong thing. That's the main conversation we need to have.
- [27:01]
Jon Stewart
Well, let me, let me mediate the dispute between.
- [27:04]
Daron Acemoglu
Oh, I think we've tried every, many
- [27:06]
Jon Stewart
people have tried before it turns, before it turns physical. I don't want it. I don't want to get there. I don't know how close who are to each other.
- [27:13]
David Autor
I know I've seen a lot of fist fights on this podcast.
- [27:15]
Jon Stewart
That's exactly right. And things do get out of control. Yeah. And if we want, if we need to take it to the octagon, we'll take it to the octagon. I don't have a problem. I don't have a problem with any of that. But I, I think what we're talking about are sort of two separate things. So I want to see if we can tease those out a little bit. You know, you said a phrase duron that I think is interesting, which is you want to make it. You said worker.
- [27:39]
Daron Acemoglu
Pro worker.
- [27:39]
David Autor
Pro worker.
- [27:40]
Jon Stewart
You said pro worker. What David is talking about, I think is sort of the patina over society that these advances allow us to fight diseases that we didn't have to do.
- [27:52]
Daron Acemoglu
Sure.
- [27:52]
Jon Stewart
But it, it's, I agree with that. It's pro human to a certain extent, but not necessarily pro worker. So I guess, David, what I would say to you is generally those that are deploying these new things are not concerned about being pro worker in any way. Now, the increase in productivity may have it. You know, they always say a rising tide lifts all boats. And I always say, unless you don't have a boat. And then really you're just, then it's just water and you're treading it. But so the people that run, it's sort of like globalization. What they learned was capital travels and labor doesn't. So if I can find ways to pay workers less or to give them less safe working conditions. So globalization was by no means pro worker for workers that were accustomed to more first world conditions. But if you were a worker in the global south, those investments were wildly pro worker because your conditions. So how do we tease out what we mean by pro worker and the standards of society that we're talking about raising?
- [29:16]
David Autor
So Jerona and I, along with our colleague Simon Johnson, also know a Belora, further increasing my distinction from not having one. Just wrote a paper on pro worker AI and what we mean is tools that extend the usefulness of human expertise and the range, the things that we can do give people new things to do, things that they Didn't. And let me say, what do we mean by new things to do? I don't mean sort blocks, but there are a quarter million data scientists in the United States right now. They earn about $120,000 a year at the median. Those didn't exist 20 years ago.
- [29:49]
Jon Stewart
Now what does a data scientist do?
- [29:51]
David Autor
A data scientist is someone who basically deals with, we have, we have enormous amounts of data, we have enormous amounts of computing power. How do we process, how do we organize that and make it accessible, right. The data that we have on the Internet is so complex. You know, it's video, it's text, it's images. And data science is all about how you use that constructively. We had no tools, right? We had, we had statistics, we had no tools for doing anything like that. And now there's tons of expert work and a lot of new work. A lot of where the value of human work comes from is demand for new forms of expertise, right? Like so, you know, we've had electricians and plumbers for a while now we have solar electricians and solar plumbers. They're people who do those fields, but they're specialized even further. Much of our medical work, right. You know, we didn't have pediatric oncologists 50 years ago, right. Or even, you know, people who do, like, you know, someone who's a, you know, a fitness coach. That's also a new form of work and that, and often that creates demand, it creates specialization. People earn a premium for that. It, it needs to keep moving, right? And so expertise is always being actually devalued by automation and then reinstated by new ideas, new creativity, and new opportunity. And so both of those things happen. But we have much less control and predictability about the new work. It's easy to predict what will be automated, it's hard to predict what will be, how much new work will be and where it will occur, and most important, who will do it. Most of the new work of the last 40 years has been for people with high levels of education. And the majority of American adults do not have a college degree. It's only about 40%. And so we really. And college graduates have done fine for the last 40 years. It's the majority of people who are not college graduates that we should be concerned about. And so in our view, pro worker AI in particular is AI that enables people without as much elite credentials to do more valuable medical care, to do more programming, to do more legal services, to do contracting, skilled repair. Right? And we think there's opportunity there. But I agree with Jerome. There's no guarantee that that's where we're going, that where tech firms or even where the market is pointing now. I'll say. I don't think. With some exceptions that I won't name. I don't think most of the tech bros are evil. I don't think they mean to do harm.
- [32:00]
Jon Stewart
All right, now you and I are going to have a problem, but I
- [32:04]
David Autor
don't think they don't really know how to control this. Right? They don't. They don't. If you told them, if you said, you know, Dario, this is how you make pro worker AI, I think he would be very interested in that. I honestly don't think he knows.
- [32:15]
Daron Acemoglu
I thought we said that.
- [32:16]
David Autor
I don't think he knows what that means. Precisely.
- [32:18]
Jon Stewart
But are they even interested in that? You know, I'm curious what you guys think, you know?
- [32:22]
Daron Acemoglu
No, they're not interested, John. They're not interested.
- [32:24]
Jon Stewart
Right?
- [32:25]
Daron Acemoglu
They're not interested because they've been locked into this AGI, artificial general intelligence craze. And your chops in this industry are measured by how close you can argue or you really go towards this sort of AGI and AGI, if you take it seriously, hopefully. I don't think we have to take it seriously anytime soon. But if you do take it seriously, it means that these models can do everything, everything better than the very, very best experts. And then once combined with advanced robotics that are flexible enough, then they can do all the works better. So a lot of economic intuitions are based on what David Ricardo introduced, which is comparative advantage. If you have an advantage in winemaking, fine, you'll make the wine and I'll do the podcasting. You won't do both podcasting and winemaking because you have a limited amount of time. Now, if indeed we get to AGI, that framework is out of the window because these models can operate very cheaply and they'll have an advantage over all human work. I don't believe we're getting there anytime soon. But that is the agenda, and that's the agenda that's driving the industry. That's the problem.
- [33:33]
Jon Stewart
Is the agenda AGI in the industry, or is the agenda to own the operating system of our society? That's where I'm more concerned, you know, bringing up where it may go. But some of it does have to do with those that are the owners, Palantir Open AI, the owners of these new technologies and how exploitative they want to be for workers and also ideologically, what are they going to do if they own, you know, when the companies were laying fiber optic cables or the companies were laying electricity or any of those kinds of things, there was not an ideological component. But when you listen to the guys that are laying the new pipelines for, for whatever this society is going to be, they are ideological 100%.
- [34:31]
Daron Acemoglu
John, you nailed it. You nailed it. I think there is an ideology of AI. AGI is part of it. But let me just try to illustrate that going back to what David said, which again, that part was based on our joint work. So I agree, sort of mostly you're
- [34:47]
Jon Stewart
required to agree with how in your
- [34:49]
David Autor
own work your name's on it, buddy.
- [34:51]
Daron Acemoglu
So the capability of using AI with non expert workers to increase their expertise to allow them to do new things is definitely there. And I think it's the most exciting part. But fighting against that is the ideology and the practice of centralizing all information in the hands of a few companies and a few people.
- [35:12]
Jon Stewart
Yes.
- [35:13]
Daron Acemoglu
And if they control that information and if they want to use it in the way of not make the novices more expert, but get rid of the novices, get rid of the experts, then you have a very different world. And that's the agenda. Now can they achieve that agenda? Not necessarily true, because there are technical barriers to it, but that's what they're trying to do. Yes, you're absolutely right.
- [35:40]
Jon Stewart
So the avocado is one of nature's mysteries as far as I'm concerned. I find it to be a very vexing. It's not, I want to say vegetables. I think it's a fruit. Right. You know what, you'll Google it. You're right. You probably don't even have to Google it. You probably know it. Avocado Green Mattress. They sell mattresses, pillows, solid wood furniture. What more do you need? And no pits. It's all made from materials designed to support healthier living and more restorative sleep. Made without the harmful chemicals. Can actual Avocados say that? Probably not. They only use certified organic, non toxic materials. Their products are designed to support deep restorative sleep so your body can properly recover, reset and wake up and take on the day. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocadogreenmattress.com TWS to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocadogreenmattpress.com TWS avocadogreenmattrush.com TWS.
- [36:56]
David Autor
Okay, so I would make three points. First, you know, you shouldn't take Drone and me too seriously about, like telling you about the future of AI. Right. We're not experts in this. I, I don't think you should take Dario Amadei very seriously about projecting the future of the economy. He means well, but he's not, you know, it's not. It's like people have been telling us forever we'll run out of work because we're automating stuff that hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it can't happen, but just means thinking about it mechanically is not the right way to think about it. Second of all, I don't even think when there's AGI that that will actually put all humans out of work. Many, many problems are not computational problems. They their political and interpersonal problems about who has control, who has ownership rights, who has the information. You know, if I say today, here's a better way to reorganize mit, I've got it.
- [37:41]
Daron Acemoglu
What?
- [37:42]
David Autor
You know, and I've calculated, you know, I did it with my AGI. MIT will not be reorganized tomorrow. Right. It's a political problem.
- [37:48]
Daron Acemoglu
Depends on whether you have dictatorial powers or not. If they also have the dictatorial powers, then it will be reorganized.
- [37:53]
David Autor
Okay, well, I mean, if we get, if we also throw democracy out, then we're in more trouble.
- [37:58]
Jon Stewart
But, David, so this is. Let me talk about it in kind of. You know, you made some really good points about the historical precursors of the industrial revolution and globalization. I just want to make a little bit of a point about human nature. When new technologies come along that are truly transformative. Thinking of splitting the atom, Right. So you have brilliant people working on splitting the atom. And if you split it one way, you can use it to power the world. And if you split it another way, you can blow the world up. Which one did we try first? So when we talk about AI and we're talking about the technology, it doesn't necessarily have to be transformative in the way that we're talking. Theoretically, we can talk about how powerful it is for the general tools that humans use to rule over other humans. And I'll give you an example. Palantir comes across with this incredibly powerful AI generated systems. And what do they do? They suck information out of the system and then they funnel information about people who are undocumented. And the government then uses that information. It's not just about what it might do, it's about how governments or individuals will use these new powers to game the system and gain advantage over their competitors. Isn't that a more realistic conversation?
- [39:32]
Daron Acemoglu
Oh, you nailed it. You nailed it exactly, John. So I think for the next version of our paper, Simon Johnson, when are
- [39:37]
Jon Stewart
we writing a paper together?
- [39:38]
Daron Acemoglu
Exactly. I was just gonna say you have to become a co author.
- [39:41]
Jon Stewart
Where's my Nobel?
- [39:44]
Daron Acemoglu
Yeah. The direction of technology is highly malleable, and there is always a worse direction than the one you fear. And sometimes we find it the more dictatorial, authoritarian, less democratic we are, the more likely we are to find that direction. Nuclear weapons are much more likely under times of war or times of authoritarian control, and nuclear energy becomes much more reasonable if it's subject to democratic oversight. Exactly. The centralization of information, the ideology of AGI and the sort of the meetings of the mind around the surveillance state and the technology are very worrying precisely because they open those bad doors for us. And anyway, many of the people in the industry would have no problem walking through those doors headfirst.
- [40:38]
Jon Stewart
And, David, I want to ask you about that because, you know, you're making really good points about sort of the ways that these new technologies can be used to uplift. But in my mind, I'm thinking atomic. It's splitting the atom. And are you concerned? Because I think you are more optimistic about where this thing is going, about what I'm raising here.
- [41:04]
David Autor
Oh, absolutely. I'm very concerned. And I think AI is God's gift to authoritarians. Right, right. It's great for centralizing control. It's great for monitoring, right? It is, yeah. And I think it's going to.
- [41:15]
Jon Stewart
It's.
- [41:15]
David Autor
We already see. If we want to see, you know, mass surveillance and censorship at scale, you know, go to China and they're exporting that model, and we. We've privatized a lot of it. We're still doing it. I'm very concerned about that. So I'm trying to emphasize that there's opportunity, not that we're on a. We're destined to get there. I think we're destined to have a range of outcomes, some of them quite terrible, some of them quite good, and very unevenly shared. And the balance may be towards the bad, it may be towards the good, but I think we have to. If we don't bear in mind that we have an opportunity, we certainly won't. We'll certainly squander it.
- [41:47]
Jon Stewart
Understood?
- [41:48]
Daron Acemoglu
Absolutely. But I think we also need to. And this is the first most important observation that David made, but we also need to have the public conversation that those opportunities exist and we're not currently targeting them. Right, right. We're currently Targeting something very different. Mass automation, surveillance state, a new sort of merger between the security apparatus and tech companies. Those are the things we are contemplating or practicing right now.
- [42:18]
David Autor
And there's another conversation we're not having this. I just want to loop back to a point you made, John, a little while ago about sort of, you know, all the stuff on the Internet now kind of being monetized. There's a really fascinating book by Max Casey, who's an economist at Oxford, called the Means of Prediction, right? So play on the Marxian phrase the means of production. And he makes a. I think what is a brilliant analogy says, look, you know, the enclosure movement in like, you know, medieval Europe, right, Was when all the common land, all of a sudden the Lord said, hey, we own that and we're just going to farm that ourselves. And it may have been actually a more efficient way of farming, but the commoners were just wiped out by this. Right. Well, you could say that AI is in some sense enclosing the Internet, right? It's taking all this common property and monetizing it. Right? All of the stuff we put out there, all our photos and all of our writing and all of our movies. And you say, oh, well, they're not, you know, they're not enclosing it. I mean, it's still there, just where you left it. But of course, you never thought your artwork was going to compete with you, right? You never thought the story you wrote would be regurgitated and sold, and you couldn't sell your work anymore. So I do think this unilateral transfer of property rights is a huge thing that is under. Recognized, under discussed.
- [43:22]
Daron Acemoglu
Man.
- [43:23]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [43:23]
Daron Acemoglu
Oh, yeah. This is. That's so important. But can I. Can I add one thing? 100% agree with David, but it has an additional really bad effect, which is
- [43:31]
Jon Stewart
that he always wants to be the. He wants to be the black swan. Darwin always wants to walk in and
- [43:36]
Daron Acemoglu
go, really dark soul, Black swan. Yes, exactly.
- [43:39]
Jon Stewart
Yes, exactly.
- [43:40]
David Autor
Go for it.
- [43:40]
Daron Acemoglu
But the kind of the useful things that David and I are mentioning that you can do pro worker AI that really requires very high quality data. It requires if you're going to build a tool for electricians that makes novice electricians perform the expert tasks that solar electricians and the best season ones can do. You require the data from those electricians dealing with the hardest problems. That data will not be produced unless there is property rights over data. And there are data markets in which people can get the returns for the data that they create. But this enclosure thing that David described is a data extraction economy. So it's creating the opposite.
- [44:29]
Jon Stewart
Guys, this is blowing my mind. It's something that I, that I had not thought of at all. But I think that's what you're bringing up is so interesting. So as AI strip mines, the totality of human expertise and experience. Right? So let's look at it in terms of music. You get royalties. If you write a song and somebody uses that song, they pay you a royalty. If somebody, you know, plagiarizes your lyrics or finds a way to take your melody and put it into their song, you're going to be paid for that. AI is a human expertise laundering machine. It's basically taking everything that we've got and training itself in some ways replacing us. But without that royalty payment. Where the royalty payment goes is to OpenAI or to Palantir or to any of these other places. And if you ask them what they're doing with it, they'll say that's proprietary.
- [45:29]
David Autor
Yeah, we're in the Napster era of AI, Right? Remember Napster? Like just everybody's music and just burn it, rip it and share it. That was not viable. We wouldn't have a music industry if we hadn't gotten control of that. Right. With Spotify, with Apple Music, where we pay royalties when we listen to those songs. More royalties, but we do pay them.
- [45:48]
Daron Acemoglu
But the difference is that in the Napster, it was the consumers who were doing that replication. Now it's the most powerful corporations humanity has seen who's doing it.
- [45:56]
David Autor
But this is a failure of property rights, a failure of legislation. People say, oh no, fair use allows that. Well, fair use never envisioned this, right?
- [46:02]
Jon Stewart
No.
- [46:03]
David Autor
And so who cares what the law said? It's not applicable. We should be changing it. People should be compensated and not just once. They should be compensating as their information is reused. And that's actually a manageable problem. Talk to people at Google who've worked on this. They say, yeah, we know how to do that. Right. We just don't, you know, we don't have an incentive to do it, but we know how to do it. And if the laws, we would support it. Right. So I think that, and by not recognizing that this enclosure is going on, that this sort of property rights are being reallocated, right?
- [46:33]
Jon Stewart
Yes.
- [46:33]
David Autor
Economics doesn't deal with that.
- [46:35]
Jon Stewart
It's reverse socialism.
- [46:36]
David Autor
Exactly, exactly. Right.
- [46:39]
Jon Stewart
They're taking from the workers and they're funneling up to these five individuals and it comes back to, you know, to torture. This, this atomic analogy. You got the sense that people like Oppenheimer or Einstein were aware of the gravity of what was happening and through the crucible of war maybe made some decisions they might not have made otherwise in this environment. I don't think Altman, Karp, Thiel. Thiel was asked, you know, should the human race flourish and continue to exist? And he took like a five second pause, like, let me, let me think about that for a second.
- [47:22]
David Autor
That's a tough one there. Yeah.
- [47:23]
Jon Stewart
So the nuance of what you're both bringing to the discussion seems utterly absent.
- [47:31]
Daron Acemoglu
And you know, you nailed it again, the war conditions. You know, Einstein, who was very pacifist because he was worried about Germany, Third Reich supported the atomic weapons and several other. And you know what? Silicon Valley is also creating war conditions. The framing of AGI is either China gets there first and we become their vassal state, or we have to go first. And that's creating this war like condition. You know, you have to allow us to do anything we want, even the worst things, because otherwise China is going to do them. So that's creating the equivalent of the 21st century war condition.
- [48:09]
David Autor
And Oppenheimer, by the way, spent the rest of his career opposing the H bomb and eventually was stripped of his security clearance and went to, you know, died a broken man effectively because he was persecuted for trying to control the invention that he was so instrumental in creating. But I mean, maybe it makes sense to talk a little bit about what are some policies that we could have.
- [48:27]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, please do.
- [48:28]
David Autor
Okay, so, I mean, I would, I would put them in three buckets. But let me start with one that people call wage insurance. And wage insurance, an idea that actually was experimented with during the presidential administration that reigned from 2008 to 2016. I'm not going to say what the President's, but you can guess.
- [48:43]
Jon Stewart
I don't recall, but I think I remember him in a tan suit, handsome guy, Very handsome guy. Very handsome guy.
- [48:51]
David Autor
Anyway, that's all I remember. But you know, the idea was, look, you lose a job in manufacturing, let's say you're making $50,000 a year, $25 an hour, and you can find another job. But it's going to be like a 15 bucks an hour, right? And it's not only is that low wage, but you're like, hey, that's beneath my dignity, right? Like that's, I'm not going to take that job. So wage insurance says, hey, look, we get that, we're going to make up half the difference for up to like say 8,000 bucks, up to two years just take the $20, take the $15 an hour job, you'll make 20. Right. And then you can look for something better. And it gives people, it gets people back into the workforce more quickly. It's like an earned income tax credit for returning workers. This program was so effective in terms of saving unemployment insurance money and generating additional payroll revenue that it paid for itself.
- [49:32]
Jon Stewart
How is that different, David, than unemployment insurance?
- [49:35]
David Autor
Unemployment insurance. You get it while you're not working this. You get it if you return to work.
- [49:40]
Jon Stewart
I see. Yeah, I see.
- [49:41]
David Autor
And now this needs to be scaled
- [49:43]
Jon Stewart
and it makes up. So I get what you're saying. It makes up in some ways the difference that you would have gotten from a job that was paying a little bit more.
- [49:52]
David Autor
That's right.
- [49:52]
Jon Stewart
To what's. Okay. That makes sense.
- [49:54]
David Autor
And I think, by the way, this is very politically viable. Right. In America, we're not very friendly towards people who aren't working. If you're working, that's okay with us. Right. And so an incentive to work rather than an incentive or something that's subsidizing work rather than subsidizing leisure, something that many people can get behind, especially if it's pretty cost effective. Now we need a bigger demonstration, right. What was done. And people like Brian Kovach at Carnegie Mellon University is trying to stand up a multi state demonstration of this. I've been trying to, speaking with funders, trying to get it going. So that's like one really actionable policy. And let me say this is a no regrets policy. It's not like if the Armageddon doesn't come to pass, we go, oh, damn, why did we do wage insurance after all? You know, this is just a good idea. It's a good, it was a good idea 10 years ago, it's a good idea now. So let me pause there and turn it over to Ron for the next. The next idea.
- [50:40]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, yeah.
- [50:41]
Daron Acemoglu
Well, you know, that's a great policy. I am fully behind it. But let me say before I talk about the next policies, I think the most important step, even before the policies is actually this conversation, this conversation that needs to just take place much more widely, that there are many different things we can do with AI and it's a choice what we do with AI. That's what's lost in the current media environment. For about 10 years, the entire mainstream media was so excited about the tech barons that they couldn't do anything wrong. Now they're talking about, you know, killer robots and doom. Okay, that's a useful corrective but we're actually missing the most important conversation. The most important conversation. AI is not one thing. AI is a whole spectrum. And at the one end of the spectrum, as we've been emphasizing, there are some terrible things. And at the other end of the spectrum we made there are feasible things that we can do that are much better. Who's gonna decide that? Who are gonna empower to make those civilization changing decisions? Dario Amadei, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel? No, I think it should be the democratic process should have part on it and people should become more informed about it. I think that conversation is first and then all the policies have to come on top of that.
- [52:10]
Jon Stewart
Folks, I don't know if you can hear it in my voice. I'm tired and sleep well last night? I need a good night's sleep. I always need a good night's sleep. And you know what I could do? I could buy a new mattress, maybe a princess bed, maybe get a little four poster thing, throw some mosquito netting on there, spend a ton of money. Or I gotta do the only thing that matters, get some nice sheets. Some nice clean, freshly done, comfortable sheets. That's what you need. The bowl and branch way. It's the best way to get a better night's sleep is the, is the bedding. Get the nice bedding. You don't want the chafing bedding you don't want. I sleep in corduroy. Who would do that? Makes no sense. You can upgrade your sleep with Boland branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping. Bolandbranch.com TWS with code TWS Bolandbranch B O L L A N D Branch.com TWS code TWS to unlock 15% off exclusions apply.
- [53:28]
Daron Acemoglu
And then there are many policies that we can worry about. Like for example, in the United States we tax labor heavily, we subsidize capital.
- [53:36]
Jon Stewart
It's been that way for 50 years.
- [53:38]
Daron Acemoglu
How does that change the incentive? Well, it's gotten much worse over the last 25 years and much, much worse with the Trump administration. And how do you think that changes firms and technologists decisions? It makes them more leaning towards automation because automation is being subsidized.
- [53:56]
Jon Stewart
That's right.
- [53:57]
Daron Acemoglu
So let's change that tax and we can raise more taxes also because we're just giving a pass to all capital income.
- [54:04]
Jon Stewart
But it's kind of a perpetual motion machine because what happens is when these new technologies come along, capital flows towards it in such massive ways. This giant, you know, trillions and trillions of Dollars that flow in and building data centers and sucking up water and electricity and money. And then what they do with the profits is they reinvest not just in their technologies, but in their political power.
- [54:30]
Daron Acemoglu
Oh, 100%.
- [54:31]
Jon Stewart
So they take their money and they bring it to bear on Washington. You know, it was a shocking moment to me at the inauguration of an American president to see in the front row in a room of the swearing in, not the people, but the tech companies that had the closest proximity and access to the president.
- [54:54]
Daron Acemoglu
And you know what's worse? We don't even know who owned who. Whether they owned the government or Trump owned them.
- [55:00]
Jon Stewart
We don't know which is what. David, you were gonna say something, though.
- [55:04]
David Autor
Well, I just wanna talk about another policy.
- [55:05]
Jon Stewart
Oh, okay, great. I like derome's, though. The ch. Changing of the tax incentives that can even out to talk about pro worker. That makes we value capital over labor. And I think the pendulum needs to swing back. So I think that was a really important point.
- [55:20]
David Autor
But let me suggest another policy related.
- [55:22]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, please do.
- [55:23]
David Autor
Which is what people call universal basic capital. Right. So not universal basic income. Right. Which is like write people a check every month, but the notion that when people are born, we give them an endowment of capital with voting rights. Right. Like shares. And what does this do? Well, one, it diversifies it. Most people's, you know, their entire income is bound up in their human capital, right. Your. Your income comes from your ability to produce valuable labor. Well, that's a pretty risky bet, right, for anyone, right? Because, you know, value of labor changes over time. Specialized skills become. Sometimes they become more valuable, sometimes they become worthless.
- [55:52]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [55:52]
David Autor
So we distribute. And by the way, you can call the Trump accounts if you want. Right. They're already being done.
- [55:58]
Jon Stewart
I think we're calling it Trump everything.
- [56:00]
David Autor
That's right, that's right.
- [56:01]
Jon Stewart
This is actually the weekly show Trump podcast.
- [56:04]
David Autor
That's right.
- [56:05]
Jon Stewart
We just add the word Trump to everybody.
- [56:07]
David Autor
Jerome has the Trump prize in economics. That's right, yeah. Just to return to our main theme, but so what does this do? Right? One, it gives people a more diversified portfolio. It's something they can invest in. Right. They can't spend it until they're 18. Second. It gives them ownership rights.
- [56:21]
Jon Stewart
What are they.
- [56:22]
David Autor
Basically, you're get. You know, it's just like. It's like getting a bond when you're born.
- [56:25]
Jon Stewart
Okay.
- [56:26]
Daron Acemoglu
Like the Alaska fund for everybody.
- [56:27]
David Autor
Okay, that's right, that's right. But. But what? It gives people a diversified income portfolio somewhat. It also redistributes Voting rights. They have voting rights over capital. Right. And even. You could even set it up so even if you sell your stocks, you maintain the voting rights.
- [56:41]
Jon Stewart
But what is the voting right?
- [56:42]
David Autor
Is.
- [56:43]
Jon Stewart
Is it a. So the way that I would think about it is it's reverse. It's Benjamin Button, Social Security. So rather than. It's a large fund. And then when you're born.
- [56:54]
David Autor
That's why you're the comedian. That's good.
- [56:55]
Jon Stewart
You're a given. Well, I just watch a lot of movies. So when you're born, you are invested into this larger fund.
- [57:03]
David Autor
That's right.
- [57:04]
Jon Stewart
That has been. Now, then the questions come up. Well, what is that fund invested in and how does it grow?
- [57:10]
David Autor
No, it's invented. It owns, you know, it owns shares of these tech firms, for example. Right. It owns a piece of the economy. Right. And so then we all have some voting rights. And that's really important because if labor, there is certainly a risk that labor will become less valuable and capital more so. And if so, we want more people to have ownership stakes. Part of the brilliance of the labor market is that in a country without slavery and without labor coercion, everyone owns at most one worker themselves. Right. So it's intrinsically relatively equal. But capital is not like that.
- [57:40]
Jon Stewart
So I'm. The reason why I'm slightly dubious about that is. And I'll tell you why. Companies won't even do that for their own employees.
- [57:49]
David Autor
No, the government has to do it. It has to be done publicly.
- [57:53]
Jon Stewart
Publicly. But the government is going to give away shares of privately owned companies.
- [57:59]
David Autor
Or buy them. That's fine.
- [58:01]
Jon Stewart
Or buy them. Okay. All right.
- [58:03]
David Autor
Yeah.
- [58:03]
Jon Stewart
All right. Now I'm feeling a little better.
- [58:05]
Daron Acemoglu
But here is the problem. Here is the problem. I completely agree with David's. You know, that would be a nice addition to a functioning labor market.
- [58:13]
Jon Stewart
Yes.
- [58:13]
Daron Acemoglu
But here is what I want to put a pin on, which is that the tech solution to these problems of universal basic income.
- [58:21]
David Autor
I didn't say I hate AUBI exactly,
- [58:24]
Daron Acemoglu
but, yeah, I want to just underscore that. Or other schemes where people are somehow given a handout so that they can just not work. I think there are many problems with that. First of all, I think we don't know what to do with millions of people who don't work. That would be highly bad for their mental health, for social peace. But even worse, I think if you create any system like that based on dividends, based on income, based on other things, as long as society knows, oh, these are the creators. Peter Thiels, Elon musk, et cetera, and the rest living off the income that they've created. That would create a horrible two tier society where there are those with very, very high status and all the rest.
- [59:10]
Jon Stewart
We have a horrible, we have a horrible two tiered society. I know, but it will get even worse now.
- [59:15]
Daron Acemoglu
I know.
- [59:15]
David Autor
I mean, look at in Norway, right? They have a sovereign wealth fund that's worth 2 GDP and it's coming from oil. But people are public owners of that, right? And they're doing okay and they're working,
- [59:26]
Daron Acemoglu
but they're working in Norway.
- [59:27]
David Autor
I'm in favor of work, but I
- [59:29]
Jon Stewart
want to push back on just a couple of things within that. So the system that's already been designed is a two tiered system and there's already that sort of Randian philosophy that there are makers and takers and. But when you have an economic system that requires labor at its cheapest level and you have outside pressure of globalization that continues to drive those wages down and conditions down, well, we've created the conditions for that permanent underclass. And then we blame those people as though their poverty is a function of vice, is a function of a lack of virtue. And that's what I want to push back on. I don't view money that goes into those communities as handouts. I view them as investments. And we have to find a way within this. I love the idea of giving people some ownership over the industries that drive the country. I think for too long we have allowed these companies the providence of the stability of this country, the subsidies of this country, the investments of this country, and asked for no vig. And I do think the house should always win and the house should be the American people and there should be a rake, right?
- [60:53]
Daron Acemoglu
Yeah, 100%, John. Now you're definitely a co author.
- [60:56]
Jon Stewart
Give me my prize.
- [60:59]
Daron Acemoglu
But you also put your finger in passing on something that's very important. And you might want to have Michael Sandel on the show to talk about this sort of, this ideology of meritocracy that somehow all of those who are so successful are, well, deserving and virtuous. And all of those who have lost out of globalization, of technological change, of social change are losers that deserve their fate. I think that's been very, very pernicious. I think you cannot understand the rise of Trump, the rise of anger in this country without that full meritocracy ideology. And he's been the most eloquent describer of this. And I think it's a very, very important thing. You put your finger on it not Trump.
- [61:43]
David Autor
Michael Sandel has been the most.
- [61:49]
Jon Stewart
Who would have thought there's so much fun to be had at mit? Nobody thought that.
- [61:53]
Daron Acemoglu
Please don't have Trump on your show, Jon. Foreign.
- [62:02]
Jon Stewart
Folks, I'm gonna be honest with you. You know, a lot of times I'll be. I'll be pitching you products. Am I crazy about them? I don't know. Maybe I muster some enthusiasm, but then every now and again, a product comes along and I'm like, oh, I actually use them. I actually wear those. Those are. They're super comfortable. And that's what we got now, folks. Bombas is in the house. Bombus, baby. That's the alliteration I'm looking for. Bombus. I can't even tell you how excited I am that we got Bombus. Bombus is. First of all, I don't know about you, but I'm a sock man. Like, I like a nice comfortable sock. If you give me a sock, every other part of my body is immune to discomfort, but my feet. You throw on a nice pair of socks, man, and you can have yourself a fine day. And Bombus is the most comfortable socks in the world, man. Just get rid of all your old socks. You know what happened to me recently? I had some socks in my drawer, and I put them on, and it was as though the fabric had expired. Like, when you pulled it on, it made a noise like the universe was coming apart. It went like. Like, almost crackling. It was. Needless to say, I didn't have a good day that day. Here's even the best part about Bombus. For every item you purchase, an essential clothing item is donated to someone facing housing insecurity. A one for one model with over 200 million donations and counting. Head over to bombas.com weekly and use weekly. And use code weekly for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M B A S.com weekly code weekly at checkout. These are really interesting, and I really do like them. And what I love about it the most is these are actionable, specific ideas. What so frustrates me about our political process in this moment. You know, we have this incredibly powerful technology that sits just on the horizon, but we have a political system that is unable to articulate mostly anything but platitudes. We have to start talking about kitchen table issues. The working families must get to think.
- [64:33]
Daron Acemoglu
So you think, like creating American AI dominion and cryptocurrency are not actionable issues?
- [64:39]
Jon Stewart
Well, let me tell you something. Proud owner of Melania Coin. I can tell you that my future is set.
- [64:49]
David Autor
But
- [64:51]
Jon Stewart
we are in this position. What's so, I don't even want to say ironic about it is we could probably plug these questions into AI and come up with more specific and actionable and interesting solutions than what are being offered by our political system.
- [65:12]
Daron Acemoglu
Right.
- [65:13]
Jon Stewart
And that's the part I can't wrap my head around. Where do you guys see why is that the case?
- [65:19]
David Autor
Well, I actually think that. So the idea of wage insurance is in currency. It's being discussed. I've discussed it with people in the Trump administration. I've discussed it with people in the Democratic leadership. I think there's enthusiasm for that. Or, you know, there's also, I should say, there's new efforts around doing, modernizing, training in a way where we can measure it and monetize it and return the revenues. And, you know, Raj Chetty and the Group of Opportunity Insights at Harvard, they're working on this in a really innovative way. Harvard.
- [65:48]
Jon Stewart
Harvard Safety School talking mit, baby.
- [65:55]
David Autor
Yeah, exactly. So I do think there are a set of policies that are that, again, I would call no regrets policy. We won't be sorry we did them. Even if the worst doesn't come to pass and we know how to do them well, they're not. Not totally out of reach. So I absolutely. With Jerome, we need to shape the conversation. We need to deploy the technology constructively. But we also, we've got to recognize we are in for a rough ride. Even if it goes well, we're in for a rough ride because the transition is going to be so fast. So we should have policies that support people, support their income, support job transitions. Right. And give them also an ownership stake. So they're on some of the upside of this, not just the downside, and that's distributing capital more broadly would have that effect.
- [66:31]
Jon Stewart
David, I can't tell you how much I love that and how much I think that in some ways over the last 50 years, I think that's what's gone wrong with the economic condition in this country, is that labor has never been offered an ownership stake in the value of their productivity. And Daron, I want to ask you about that, and I've so appreciated this conversation. But you know, when we talk about productivity gains, because that's always how it's framed. It always outstrips wage. Always. And maybe that's just the way that the system is.
- [67:07]
David Autor
No, it's not how it was until the mid-1970s.
- [67:10]
Daron Acemoglu
Exactly.
- [67:11]
Jon Stewart
But I'm saying since the 1970s.
- [67:13]
David Autor
Since. Yeah, for 50 years.
- [67:14]
Jon Stewart
Since the Reagan revolution.
- [67:15]
David Autor
That's right.
- [67:16]
Daron Acemoglu
But, you know, like, people say that about, like, oh, the capitalist system. Well, it was a capitalist system in Europe, in the United States, from 1940s to the mid-1970s where wages grew faster than productivity, workers with less than a college degree had faster wage gains than managers. That was feasible. There's nothing in the laws of economics or in the laws of democracy against that. We just chose a different path since 1980.
- [67:42]
Jon Stewart
And do you think at this point those powerful corporations have, there's almost a, that they kind of have us at an extortion point where they say, you know, oh, if you try and do anything to regulate us or you try and do anything to tax us, we'll, we'll leave.
- [68:01]
Daron Acemoglu
Well, look, this is such, such an important point. This is such an important point, John. First of all, these corporations are absolutely enormous. I mean, it's not a fair comparison, but I just did the calculation last week. Each one of the largest seven tech companies has annual revenues in current dollars twice as large as the Brit entire British Empire's GDP in the middle of the 1930s century. These are enormous, enormous corporations.
- [68:28]
Jon Stewart
Right?
- [68:28]
Daron Acemoglu
They need to be regulated. And. But the rhetoric that they cannot be regulated, AI cannot be regulated, that's false. China proves it. Okay, I don't approve of what China does. I don't approve what they intend to do, but they show very clearly AI can be regulated tech companies. Alibaba is now completely subservient to the interests of the Communist party in China. We could also make Google and OpenAI and anthropic be much more in line with the democratic priorities in the United States. There is nothing in the laws of economics, in the laws of physics that says these companies cannot be regulated.
- [69:03]
David Autor
They're not delicate flowers. When Sam Altman says, When Sam Altman says, oh, if you charge us for intellectual capital property, we'll be put out of business. That's not only not true, it's kind of pathetic because they say we don't produce anything of value. If you actually make us pay for our inputs, no one would buy it.
- [69:19]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [69:19]
David Autor
That's crazy and it's not true. So, I mean, look, I think, yeah, there's constructive ways to steer it. We don't need to shut it down. We don't need to like, regulate it to death so it can't move. Right. The US Is innovative and that's great. We have a lot to be proud of in that we have led this technology. We're building it out quickly. You know, it's valuable but we need to. It's an opportunity and we could squander it. We need to steer it. It will be left to its own. It's going to do. It's not going to be pro worker like.
- [69:47]
Daron Acemoglu
What you're hearing both from me and David is that AI is a very promising technology, but it's precisely the reason why we've gotta put the care to make sure that we use it for the right thing.
- [69:57]
Jon Stewart
Gentlemen, you have done the impossible. You have done the impossible, which is you have somehow not allayed my fears, but you've given me hope that the future is actually not yet been written. And what it does is it creates opportunity. And when you have those opportunities to write it in the proper way. But I think what you've done really well today is you've given specifics that none of this is platitude. This is all the specificity of here's what it could do, here's the damage it's going to do, here's a way to mitigate it, and here's some ways to give us a shared prosperity for it. And I think that's truly. I think that's the conversation that the two of you. Have you thought about having a podcast?
- [70:53]
Daron Acemoglu
We were hoping we would join you after this.
- [70:56]
Jon Stewart
What? Yes, unfortunately, what I've done is I had my data scientists, they've been strip mining this conversation. I don't need you.
- [71:06]
David Autor
We're done.
- [71:07]
Jon Stewart
I've created AI avatars of the two of you and now we're done.
- [71:13]
David Autor
Fantastic. That frees some time, man.
- [71:17]
Jon Stewart
Thank you so much for this conversation. I've truly appreciated Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate in Economics, MIT Institute Professor David Autor Ruben Feld, professor of Economics at mit Guys, fantastic. And really appreciate it. And I hope to continue the conversation with both of you.
- [71:33]
David Autor
Thank you so much for having us on. This is superb. We love what you're doing and it's great to have this conversation.
- [71:38]
Daron Acemoglu
This was fantastic. It's a lot of fun. Thanks, John.
- [71:44]
Jon Stewart
Holy smokes. I'm feeling something. Are you feeling something at home? Are you listening to this? Are you feeling something? I'm feeling the possibility of futures unwritten. The opportunity that it gives us to correct our path, to. To put us on a righteous path towards a more positive, productive, equal future. My God. And I apologize, we don't have our normal staff chat today because as you can see, I'm on the road, so we weren't able to accomplish that. But, man, I so appreciated what those gentlemen were saying and the specificity of it, and I hope you did too. And it's put me in something that I've needed for a little bit, which is a better mood I am in. I am. I am now. And by the way, maybe I'm drinking the Kool Aid too, but I am in a slightly better mood than I was at the beginning of this whole shmagegy. But man, I enjoyed that conversation tremendously. And thanks as always to our fantastic team. Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Momedovic, producer Gillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Votola, who he and Nicole Boyce, our audio engineer. They had to work today. Today was a day when I couldn't figure out how to log into Riverside. They had to do a little extra work today. And as always, our executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Very nice. And we shall see you next. The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.
- [73:39]
Daron Acemoglu
Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer
- [74:10]
David Autor
Paramount Podcasts.