Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
6/4/20261 hr 16 min
Economics of AGI episode w Alex Imas and Phil Trammell.
There’s a bunch of important questions about how we deal with AI that only economics can answer.
What is the optimal way to tax and redistribute the wealth that will be generated? How should countries not in the AI supply chain index into the gains? Is there any world where inequality doesn’t explode?
It might seem like these questions have obvious answers, but the first thing economics teaches you is that your intuitions can often be entirely wrong.
It was very helpful to chat through these things with Alex and Phil.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Will capital share increase?
(00:19:36) – Messy Middle scenario
(00:25:57) – How to tax and redistribute AI wealth
(00:30:02) – Why demand collapse is unlikely
(00:39:26) – Human employees would be hard to integrate into the machine economy
(00:43:08) – What if some humans (or AIs) value wealth accumulation intrinsically?
(01:01:28) – What should developing countries do?
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDwarkesh Patel· Host0:00
Today, I'm chatting with Alex Imas, who is director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind and professor of economics at University of Chicago, and Phil Trammell, who is head of economics at Epoch and research scholar at Stanford. In general, in this interview, what I want to understand is what economics tells us about what we can expect in a world with more and more automation, more and more advanced AI, what that tells us about what will happen to wages, to labor share, uh, what the best way to tax and redistribute the wealth that we generated as a result of AGI will be, um, and what kinds of things will be scarce. Because what is scarce kind of tells you where the value will accrue. So I wanna start there. What are some plausible candidates of what will be scarce?
Alex Imas· Guest0:43
Something like the relational sector, which is what I defined as, um, you know, basically services and goods, where the fact that the human was in the loop was actually part of the value of that product. So because humans are naturally scarce, if we have automation where a lot of other things stop being scarce, uh, we will still have scarcity in things that humans are kind of involved in and in the loop for.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host1:04
Hmm. I'm curious to understand whether humans doing services for other humans can ever be a big part of the economy. And here's maybe one intuition pump. So in a world where AI can physically do anything humans can do, you know, there's this whole machine economy where they're, like, building factories and doing research and coming up with new ideas, and humans may or may not be involved