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The dystopian scenario has become familiar: artificial intelligence sweeps through the economy, machines take the jobs, and workers are left behind. Tyler Cowen doesn\u2019t buy it \u2014 but his alternative isn\u2019t exactly reassuring.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI will not bring mass unemployment,\u201d the George Mason University economist and Bloomberg columnist said during a keynote at the Sana AI summit at the New York Public Library in New York City. \u201cBut it will change most jobs.\u201d For Cowen, that distinction matters enormously. And it points to a problem that may be harder to solve than unemployment: the psychological, social, and institutional cost of adjustment.<\/p>\n
The adjustment won\u2019t be uniform. The economist, who has blogged nearly every day since 2003 at his outpost Marginal Revolution, laid out a striking inversion of conventional wisdom about who wins and who loses. The people most at risk, in his telling, aren\u2019t truck drivers or factory workers \u2014 they\u2019re the Manhattan lawyers, strategy consultants, and finance partners who spent decades mastering a set of elite credentials and playing by the rules. \u201cThose are actually the people who might lose,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people who will win are the people who are best at taking initiative, figuring out how AI works, figuring out how agents work, doing something different,\u201d including, Cowen suggested, workers in the developing world and immigrants who never had access to those rules in the first place.<\/p>\n
The psychological stakes are high. Cowen was blunt about why that inversion will be so painful. \u201cWhen some people go up in status, and some go down in status, I will tell you, those who lose suffer more psychologically than those who gain.\u201d Status loss, he argued, hits harder than income loss \u2014 and for a professional class that has built its identity around intellectual mastery and institutional prestige, watching AI commoditize that mastery is an identity crisis, not just a career one.<\/p>\n
The reason why is simple, Cowen said. Our lives have been pretty boring up until now. \u201cNo one in this room is old enough to have lived through a radical technological revolution,\u201d Cowen said. His grandmother, born in 1905, lived to see \u201cthe birth of consumer society, automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, so much in the first 50 years of her life.\u201d But it hasn\u2019t been like that since the mid-20th century. \u201cOur lives have not really been disrupted. But what is coming is that virtually all of us will, in a radical way, have jobs that are very different from the jobs we expected.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018How much of society is really efficient?\u2019<\/p>\n
He pointed to higher education as a case study in the pathology of non-adjustment. \u201cHow much of our society is really efficient?\u201d he asked the crowd, one of the many times he generated laughter. \u201cHow well are we [teachers] adapting to the AI world? We sit around, we bitch about cheating. \u2018Oh, the students are cheating. We gotta stop them from cheating.’\u201d Universities are failing to reckon with the fact that the tasks students are using AI to shortcut are the same tasks those students won\u2019t be doing in two or three years anyway, he argued: \u201cThe cheating is a signal that the whole system is screwed up. Don\u2019t blame the cheaters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowen estimated that roughly 40% to 50% of U.S. GDP \u2014 government, higher education, healthcare, nonprofits \u2014 will be \u201cvery slow to adjust,\u201d an institutional drag that explains why he forecasts AI lifting growth from 2% to 2.5% rather than the 20% or 40% some in Silicon Valley claim. But that\u2019s still a big deal, he said, pointing to the $39 trillion national debt: \u201cIf you do budget calculations, you all know about the U.S. debt, right? Like you feel, we\u2019re screwed. My kids are screwed. Grandkids are screwed.\u201d But if our economy can grow at 2.5% because of AI, \u201crather than exploding and making us the next Greece, that debt actually converges to a manageable level.\u201d<\/p>\n
The AI world will feel more normal to most Americans<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Cowen\u2019s advice for individuals amounts to a reorientation away from purely intellectual capital. He argued that being physically present, interpersonally skilled, and human in ways AI cannot replicate will be the new premium skills in the AI economy. \u201cBeing in the world and being human and being physical will be more the thing. It will be more what our lives are about.\u201d <\/p>\n
People like the tech professionals listening to him at the NYPL will be more uncomfortable, he said, but it will be a relief to everybody else. \u201cI think for the vast majority of Americans, it will actually feel more normal, maybe happier. Oh, there\u2019s too much screen time? Just have your AI agent manage it for you,\u201d he said, provoking more laughter, \u201cand tell you once every two days when there\u2019s something in your WhatsApp chat that you actually care about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowen noted that he himself has reallocated two-thirds of his own time \u2014 doing more mentoring, more public speaking, more human-facing work, and less writing. \u201cCharisma will matter more. How you look will matter more. The egghead class, I think, will take a tumble in status.\u201d He mused that \u201cit will be a very weird, strange world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fortune talked to Cowen backstage at the event, and noted similarities between his arguments and those of Alex Imas, the University of Chicago behavioral economist who believes the \u201crelational aspect\u201d of work will become scarce and therefore more valuable. \u201cHe\u2019s very good,\u201d Cowen said, adding that Imas is \u201cright about many things.\u201d Cowen said that, in the AI age, you can choose either to join the disruption or be disrupted by it, and that many people \u201chate AI because it\u2019s too good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowen wrote a book arguing that commercial culture, including pop music and the attendant countercultures that often accompany it, is actually a byproduct of capitalism and economic progress. He agreed with Fortune\u2019s question that several recent innovations, such as rap music, have similarities to AI. \u201cYes, sampling is like AI,\u201d he said, although he wasn\u2019t sure whether the genre of punk rock also qualified. A noted basketball fan, Cowen also said that watching the 7\u20194\u2033 phenomenon Victor Wembanyama was a bit like how the AI revolution is playing out: hard to comprehend. (He predicted an NBA finals of Oklahoma City and New York, but he said the current Western Conference matchup is \u201cthe real finals.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Cowen acknowledged onstage that none of his predictions are an easy sell to a professional class that has been reassured about the great jobs and professions they would have for a generation. AI polls worst with young people for this reason, he argued, noting the booing of commencement speakers such as Eric Schmidt. \u201cIt will feel bad for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n
His long-run view remains genuinely optimistic: longer lives, better medicine, a wealthier society. But he\u2019s careful not to let that optimism paper over the turbulence in between. \u201cWe will live through one of the most fantastic chapters of human history ever,\u201d he said. \u201cWe will live much longer and fix many things that go wrong with our bodies and maybe our minds and along the way, feel disoriented and sometimes demoralized.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Top #economist #Tyler #Cowen #biggest #problem #age<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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