Will AI destroy the economy?
4/26/202655 min
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Will AI make us all richer and more productive, or steal our jobs and impoverish us? The Industrial Revolution gives us clues about what could be about to happen.
(00:00) Intro
(04:58) Will AI decrease wages?
(06:19) Will AI increase wages?
(13:00) Luddites
(16:17) The Industrial Revolution
(24:50) Who profited?
(26:51) Workers became powerful
(31:12) Why customers matter
(36:03) Henry Ford’s dilemma
(39:55) Who benefits from increased productivity
(43:32) Will AI liberate us?
(45:57) Why I am positive about the future
(51:19) How we can WIN
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsGary Stevenson· Host0:00
[biscuits clinking] Fresh biscuits. [laughs] Okay, welcome back to Gary's Economics. This week, we are going to explain whether AI will drive wages up or down. [gentle music] Okay, so this is a question which I keep getting asked. So fans of the channel will know I was on tour in Australia and New Zealand, uh, about a month ago, and every single tour that I went, I got asked, "What's AI gonna do to the economy, to inequality, to wages?" Um, and I was hesitant to do a video on it because initially it seemed so obvious to me that AI was going to displace jobs and drive wages down. But the more I sat and, and read about it and thought about it and talked about it, the more I realized that this answer is not so unbelievably obvious as I initially thought. So there are a lot of people putting out the idea that AI might actually drive wages up. I've got a couple of quotes here. There's a, there's an article in Fox Business, uh, saying AI is gonna drive... substantially reduce wage inequality and drive up wages for low-wage workers. Uh, Fortune magazine has a piece here from the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, saying that it's gonna raise lower paid wages. Uh, I was reading The Economist this week, and they strongly implied that there's no evidence that AI is displacing jobs.