Notes on podcast interview with Betsy Stevenson

I just listened to this interesting podcast interview of Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist and professor. She had some great thoughts about the socio-economic ramifications of AI in the US. The podcast is called What's Your Problem and the episode was called Finding Meaning (and Money) in the AI Age. Here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to listen for yourself.

Here are my notes on what she talked about:

• Betsey said:

Students are struggling with productive struggle because cognitive offloading is so easy.

You need to struggle in order to learn, and right now it is really difficult for teachers to come up with curriculum that students can't short cut with AI.

• The tax system in the US prefers capital to labor, so even if the labor is better and more efficient, AI is cheaper anyways because of tax incentives. The US should raise capital gains tax so that companies get incentives to hire people instead of using that money to buy more money.

My own thoughts on this is that this is why the US can't export anything. Making things is too expensive. The most efficient and fastest way to make money in the US is to sell it as loans and collect interest.

• The US should institute a data dividend. The people should get paid - like how people in Alaska or Saudi Arabia get oil dividends - for all of us who gave our data to AI. This is different from the universal basic income all the tech bros are talking about. This way people are invested in and benefit from the tech they created.

• As people are getting lonelier as more and more they talk with LLMs instead of people, "3rd spaces," places where people hang out - coffee shops, parks, makerspaces, etc., should be subsidized.

Everyone talks about how AI is going to destroy the world, but I think the more interesting question is what kind of world we’re building with it. If AI changes how we learn, work, make money, and connect with each other, we should be thinking not just about what AI can do, but what we actually want our society to look like.