Dwarkesh Patel
Hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI progress, timelines, and the people building frontier models, along with economists and historians.
“In a world where AI can physically do anything humans can do, humans may or may not be involved in the physical production of things — probably not. But then there's this human economy where humans are doing services for each other, and part of their wealth flows to other humans, but part also flows out to buy automated goods. Only humans have that preference for other humans. So isn't it intrinsic that the human-only economy will become a smaller and smaller share?”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · June 2026
Context
The framing question that sets up the episode with economists Alex Imas and Phil Trammell. The model is a machine economy that needs nothing from people and a human economy that keeps leaking value into it, because humans want machine-made goods but machines don't want anything from humans. Trammell asks to rephrase the question before answering it.
Transcript
…what the best way to tax and redistribute the wealth that we generated as a result of AGI will be, and what kinds of things will be scarce, because what is scarce kind of tells you where the value will accrue. So I want to start there. What are some plausible candidates of what will be scarce?
…where the fact that the human was in the loop was actually part of the value of that product. So because humans are naturally scarce, if we have automation where a lot of other things stop being scarce, we will still have scarcity and things that humans are kind of involved in and in the loop for.
I'm curious to understand whether humans doing services for other humans can ever be a big part of the economy. And here's maybe one intuition pump. So in a world where AI can physically do anything humans can do, you know, there's this whole machine economy where they're like building factories and doing research and coming up with new ideas. And humans may or may not be involved in the physical production of those things, but probably not, given that in the ultimate limit, if robotics is solved, if you don't care about humans being involved in that process, why would humans be involved in that process? But then there's these other things that you point out where, well, we actually maybe in some cases do want the ballerina or the barista or whatever to be a human. That's part of the value of going to a cafe or our performance. But only humans have that preference. So there's this human economy where like humans are doing services for each other and part of their wealth is flowing to other humans. But part of their wealth is also like they will want some of the automated goods that's like machine-only economy is creating. And so part of that wealth is flowing out. And so if you just think of this as like, this is not a closed loop, but a lot of…
I would like to pitch kind of a rephrasing of that question. So I think my view is that kind of forecasts that economists like us would make are not necessarily as individual forecasts like me and Phil Trammell talking right now, are not necessarily very useful. The reason I think that, so there…
It's probably worth defining labor share and capital share real quick. So the whole economy, like the total sum of goods and services sold, is either paid out to people in wages or it's paid out to capital, which is to say that there's like rents on buildings and then there's shareholders of…
it's like it really, this is a call to or fact, like, right? So it's incredibly, we should stress this. It's incredibly surprising that it's over 60% after the Industrial Revolution, after all the automation we've ever seen. The fact that it's almost like some people are worried it's an accounting…
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