Expert opinions on Economics

A certain degree of alarmism, which is probably disproportionate [...] People are talking their book and making it sound like you can run a company without any employees in the future.

People have the wrong intuition when they say that if AI can do my job for ten dollars an hour, then my wage falls to ten dollars and my life is terrible. A world where AI can do research or teaching at that cost is a world where AI is extremely capa...

70% think AI will lead to fewer jobs. They are right.

Having an unconditional series of payments from universal basic income would be an effective safety net for unemployed individuals. [...] Essentially, I'm worried that people who benefit from AI, after the fact, are going to say, 'Well, why do we hav...

I no longer believe in universal basic income as much as I once did. I'm much more interested in ways where we think about kind of collective ownership. [...] [A] fixed cash payment, although useful and maybe a good idea in some ways, does not get at...

Instead of universal basic income, how about we stop taxing nurses who make $75,000 a year? We don't need to give her universal income yet — let's just stop taking money away from her.

In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses. [...] This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence.

Technologies that could free us from drudgery, poverty and environmental collapse instead make life worse for most people in most countries.

Allowing those who are richer to put more in than those who are poor runs counter to any notion that there's any kind of redistributive justice taking place.

We will end up in a very concentrated world where there's like one to five giant networks of data centres owned by one to five companies, possibly in coordination with their governments. [...] If you've only got one to five companies and they each ha...

The market believes that there are going to be high returns to these investments. That is predicated on two assumptions: that AI will be technologically successful and that there will be limited competition. [...] if it's technologically successful, ...

Right now, companies pay payroll taxes for their workers but get tax breaks for investing in technology—effectively, a tax penalty for hiring human beings and a tax break for buying equipment. [...] Building an economy that works for all of us will r...

Capitalism has also depended on somewhat of a power balance between labor and capital, but if it's hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes. [...] If there was an easy consensus answer, we'd have done it by now, so I don't...

One approach gaining support is to slow the displacement of workers with new taxes on AI services and investments. [...] The challenge these proposals aim to address is real — but trying to hold back the tide is the wrong answer.

A moratorium will give us time to ensure AI is safe and effective, time to protect our privacy and well-being, time to defend our democracy, and time to make sure the economic gains of this technology benefit the general population, not just a handfu...

Whether AI's benefits are widely shared is a political question, has nothing to do with technology.

The fruits of the AI industry are not the government's "free safe." This is an anti-market idea that goes against market principles and is no different from socialist-style distribution.

we therefore try to find legal ways [...] to divert the moment of taxation to the moment of actually received cash income.