My talk at DeepMind – Marginal REVOLUTION

Here is a transcript of my remarks, anything from the audience (Q&A with comments) has been cut out.  Excerpt:

The problem will not be how does my life get meaning, but how do I deal with all the meaning my life will have? A kind of exhaustion. And this comes up in the labor supply debates. So again, there’s one point of view like, oh, there’s AGI, there’s going to be mass unemployment. The more moderate, reasonable point of view is not that there’s mass unemployment. Many jobs still require humans. There’s comparative advantage. But total leisure time will go up. I think that’s likely the correct view, but across what time horizon?

If you think about your lives today, like I’m much busier and I’m busier because of AI. I’m working much harder. I don’t have to do that. But the point is my relative wage gradient for working harder today, it’s really quite extreme. And if I were, say, an 18 year old, I would feel I really had to work hard not to fall behind. There’s this new thing coming to the world. All sorts of people will be jumping on it. If I only start looking at it when I’m age 23, I’m behind by X number of years. So I would truly be working hard. At age 64, I don’t have to feel I need to work that hard. I can always just say if I choose to, well, I’m going to run out the clock, as they say, just kind of step back and wait until I die and I’ll be fine. I’m not going to do that.

Every time a new model comes out, I’m still excited. I used to be very excited. But they come out more and more frequently. And now I look at my calendar and I’m like, uh-oh, could you all wait a week, please? Because you want to be ready. You want to play around with it. You want to test it out. You want to talk about it with your friends. It’s a slight bit of an exhaustion. And again, for you all working here, you have access to models that haven’t come out yet or maybe will never come out. But all the time, you have fresh stimuli. And I hope, I think you must all be drenched in meaning. And you’re like, oh, my goodness, someone else tells me, look at this new model. What do I do with that?

So I think sometimes, like, when will the time come when the leisure dividend from AI arrives? No one is forcing you to work harder. But there’s a substitution effect from the higher implicit wage on your future earnings that if you work harder now, it will have a payoff. You’ll at least avoid being behind.

Interesting throughout, definitely recommended.