Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok on AI, Jobs, and Economic Growth

**Tyler Cowen** (0:00)
In a world with strong AI, there's a kind of moral nervousness that sets in. So I'm much more likely to tell people, like, hey, you'd better fasten your seatbelt.
Like, you don't want to miss out on what's coming, how many years you might live.

**Alex Tabarrok** (0:14)
Suppose I tell you that AI is going to create 50 percent unemployment. Half of the people in the workforce will lose their jobs. That sounds terrible. That's catastrophic. Suppose, however, that I tell you that the workweek will be cut in half.
People will do half as much work. That actually sounds glorious. That sounds great. And yet, these are almost the same thing. The problem with social media isn't that it stores information.
The problem is that it stores information instead of you storing the information. Every time you screenshot something instead of thinking, every time you share instead of reflecting, you are training yourself to be a little more hollow.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:08)
One of the biggest questions surrounding AI is what happens to work. Will increasingly capable systems eliminate jobs, create new ones, or fundamentally change the relationship between labor, productivity and economic growth?
Economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok take a long view. Looking across centuries of technological change, they argue that growth itself is often the most important variable. It creates new industries, expands opportunity, and raises living standards, even when the specific jobs of the future are difficult to predict. Wyatt Thomson of OpenAI speaks with Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok about AI, labor markets, economic growth, and the future of human work.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:53)
One of the fears I hear most often is that strong AI or AGI is just going to put everyone out of work.
I have a much more optimistic view than that, and I think most economists do.
One way to think about it is just to realize AI creates many, many jobs, even though it will take away some jobs. One of the neatest properties of current AI models is they allow a small number of individuals working with AI to really do a lot more work than was possible previously. So this will mean more companies, more projects, more nonprofits, just more ventures, more attempts to entertain people, and all the new things that will be done by humans working with AI will create jobs. So I think the view both Alex and I hold is that assuming our government does not mess up other policy matters, but we think we can basically keep full employment for the indefinite future.
Just a few areas where I think AI will create or already is creating a lot of new jobs.
One area is generally energy, electricity, the grid. Alex himself has written a lot on the United States electrical grid. It's completely screwed up. It will take 20 years, 30 years, 40 years to fix. I'm not sure we'll ever fix it. The AIs cannot do that on their own. That's a good deal of jobs right there. The biomedical sector and medical trials, there will be many, many, many more ideas to test. AIs will help with the testing, but I don't think pure testing by simulation will be possible anytime soon. In any case, the law requires testing on actual humans. That's another growth sector. Simply care for the elderly. There will be robots, personal companions. We have this already, but the elderly also will want human care. It wouldn't surprise me if in the future, 15-20 percent of all jobs were elderly care. That's a growth sector will not be taken away by AI. Louis Garacano had an excellent online essay. He referred to what he called messy jobs. Jobs where it's hard to explain exactly what the job is, but on a given day, you're doing 11 different things, and it requires coordination in figuring out what you want to do next and getting other people to help you. Louis Garacano says, tell your kid to go into messy jobs. They're hard to describe, harder to name. But again, there's a real future in messy jobs.
I think just government lawyers will be a very significant growth sector for employment. We need to write a lot of laws about AIs. I don't even think the law will be good laws. Probably like many of you, I think the AIs will often maybe always could do a better job writing those laws. I just don't think we'll trust the AIs to be writing all those laws, even though we probably should. And it will be humans. The humans will work with the AIs. The AIs may even do most of the work. But there will be humans with oversight and a kind of guarantee or you could say liability cushion. Cybersecurity, this is discussed quite often. Compliance as a sector. I think just niche entertainment. So there'll be a lot more music, art, sculpture, whatever, you know, cinema produced. Again, a lot of the work will be done by AI, but not all of it. The market will be very fragmented. Cost of production will typically be much lower than they are today. So a lot more people will be able to earn livings working with AI doing niche entertainment.