✨ My interview with economist Tyler Cowen on the Age of AI (and more)

On this episode of Faster Please!—The Podcast, I am joined (again) by Tyler Cowen. Tyler is an economics professor at George Mason University and co-founder of the economics blog Marginal Revolution. He is an opinion writer for The Free Press and the author of several books, including The Great Stagnation, Average Is Over, and Stubborn Attachments.During our conversation, Tyler and I discuss AI risk, the extent to which public pushback could slow AI progress and economic growth, different forecasts for AI development and where Tyler stands, and what the technology could mean long term for the American economy.In This Episode:* The Effect of AI Industry Pushback (0:41)* Different AI perspectives (7:37)* The Fear of AI (12:37)* Economic Growth: (17:32)* The Future of Jobs (23:06)* AI on a Global Stage (26:50)A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)But here are some of the many highlights from the chat:✨ On potential catastrophic harms from AI…They love to talk in extreme parables of Skynet going live or a bioterror attack where all humans die. But, you know, in the short run, the intermediate term, what share prices should we expect to go down? What variables should we expect to change? Give me a number for what cybersecurity costs will be next year and by what percentage that will go up.There was another estimate I saw. It said cybersecurity insurance costs will double over a five-year time period. This was from experts in the sector. Again, I’m not endorsing that number, but it’s a number, and it puts it in perspective. It’s terrible if those costs double. But again, it’s not an insane scenario that we can’t live with.✨ On whether AI fears lead to heavy regulation or a pause…The discourse will be ugly and stupid no matter what your point of view, even if you favor a lot more regulation. But it’s very hard to stop fundamental new technologies. There’s also Chinese open source. There’s a national security imperative here. I just think it’s going to happen. It will pain me every day to see the debates and some of the laws that probably end up getting passed, but I just don’t see how it gets stopped. You know, for better or worse—I would say for better. But there’s not a coherent path for telling a story of how this ends.✨ On how much AI company executives are to blame for the public AI backlash…I don’t know if the word “blame” is the right word here. I think a lot of the PR has not shown enough equanimity, and the people who are motivated to work on this are precisely the same people who think it will have very extreme effects. And those companies have gotten a lot done at a truly incredible pace, even by American or tech-world standards. So the notion that they have semi-religious views of what this all means is a very San Francisco kind of thing.Like, do I blame people in the 1960s who thought that LSD was creating a new world, a new way of living, a new way of life? Well, sort of—but that’s what we are. You know, we’re a little nutty in the head as a country, and this is California, and then it’s San Francisco. So we also need to embrace that nuttiness at the same time. I think that’s the bigger picture I try to keep in mind when maintaining my own equanimity.✨ On roadblocks to economic growth from AI…The thing (AI) being smarter is not the problem. The things are already very smart. The real issue is, if you're in a mid-size to large organization, reorganizing your systems—HR, finance, whatever, all the things they do at AEI—not just for people on an individual basis to use, say, ChatGPT to augment their labor, but actually building the whole system around AI in a way that's reliable and coherent and everyone there knows how to work with. That's very, very, very hard and slow. And if I saw more progress on that, then I would really think the rates of productivity growth will be much higher soon.✨ On AI and job displacement…In any foreseeable future, we can achieve full employment if we don’t screw up other policies. Just think of the number of jobs that w