Emad Mostaque on The Last Economy: 1000 Days to Reimagine Work, Value & Human Purpose

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Emad Mostaque, famously the founder of Stability AI and currently the founder of Intelligent Internet and author of the provocative new book, The Last Economy, a guide to the age of intelligent economics. Emad has long been one of my favorite thinkers in the AI space. Very few people managed to grapple seriously and honestly with the world-changing nature of AI while also building something that matters in the here and now. But Emad has. Since founding Stability in 2019, he's demonstrated a deep understanding of AI technology trends, a keen eye for talent, the ability to inspire people with a positive vision for a wondrous future, and an appreciation for the stakes and risks, as evidenced by the fact that he signed, while still CEO of Stability, the famous 2023 Paws letter. The fundamental problem that Emad addresses in the new book is that human society is built on the premise of scarcity. This makes sense. In humanities hunter gatherer past, everyone had to contribute to the group's survival, and freeloading simply couldn't be tolerated. Still today, as Elon Musk puts it, if you don't make stuff, there's no stuff. But what happens when an AI doctor, which doesn't need to eat, can provide better frontline medical advice than a human doctor? At one-one-thousandth the cost. Such technology represents abundance for patients around the world, many of whom will enjoy better access to medical expertise than ever before. But taken to its logical conclusion, it implies poverty for human doctors. Similarly, what happens when all the cars can drive themselves, and the millions of Americans who earn a living by driving are no longer needed for that purpose? And zooming out, what happens when this pattern repeats itself across a majority of the economy, leaving displaced human workers with no where to go, all in less than a generation? Emad argues that there's no escaping these questions. Even if AI capabilities stalled out today, and we never got a truly powerful AGI, the AIs we already have, with proper implementation and integration into existing systems, are powerful enough to support this change. And in reality, with Frontier AI Developers racing to build AI agents that are explicitly designed to replace human labor, we have maybe a thousand days to find good answers.
With that in mind, Emad is simultaneously working to assemble the open-source datasets and train the small models that are needed to ensure that this abundant future is accessible to all, while also trying to answer the question of what the future and the transition to it might look like in as much concrete detail as possible. In this conversation, and even more so in the book, which I do encourage everyone to read and ponder, Emad coins a number of memorable terms, including the intelligence inversion, the metabolic rift, and the abundance trap, and also proposes a new way to think about the health of the economy, which would measure not just the monetary value of the material goods and services sold, but also the levels of intelligence, connectivity, and resilience in the system. He also makes fascinating analogies between the mathematics of neural networks and the economics of firms and markets, and even proposes a new dual currency system, with one for physical goods that are rivalrous in consumption and intrinsically scarce, and another for intangible goods that are non-rivalrous and fundamentally abundant. The Realist in Me recognizes that these are underdog ideas. But as Yuval Noah Harari has famously explained, the stories we collectively tell ourselves are a huge part of how society operates. Money itself is a shared fiction, but a useful one because it helps us allocate scarce resources relatively efficiently. So the Idealist in Me says that in context, Emad can't be any crazier than whoever it was that came up with the idea of using gold or shells as a medium of exchange in the first place. Big picture, while I usually tend to assume that the economic upside of AI will take care of itself, I think it is important to recognize that what Balagistrinder Vasan calls the nuclear outcome, where we get the weaponization and constant threat from AI without the material abundance and accompanying personal freedom, is still a real possibility. So can we collectively start telling ourselves a story of abundance? In which a person's right to a decent life isn't predicated on their economic contributions, and in which caring for one another isn't something we do to meet our own needs, but because such interactions are a core part of the human experience? And can we do it in time to give people something to believe in before the inevitable modern Luddite movement shows up and tries to shut the whole thing down? While so many people, myself at times included, are focused on the latest model updates, on the horse race coverage of who's winning and losing, and on making our apps work, Emad invites us to stop thinking so small, to recognize that we have agency, and to challenge ourselves to intelligently imagine and intentionally build our own shared future. Or as he puts it in the book, the machines are taking our jobs. Thank God, now we can get to our real work. With that, I hope you enjoy this challenging and inspiring conversation with the one and only Emad Mostaque.