Justin Wolfers
Professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of a widely used i...
“This AI debate is the debate of our time. I have never in my career gotten to say one economic parameter can make the difference between utopia and dystopia.”
Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers · Money & Markets · October 2026
Wolfers had just run a thought experiment about a robot that can do Stacey Vanek Smith's job. If she owns it, she gets a life of leisure; if her employer owns it, she is out of work. His point is that the technology is identical in both versions, and the only thing that changed is who it was given to.
Transcript
And I want you to notice, first of all, the problem's not technology because both of those possibilities could happen. The problem is something economic. In this case, one small thing changed. Instead of giving you the Stacey bot, I gave it to Mike Bloomberg. Right. His name we're not mentioning. I'm talking about a different Mike Bloomberg.
Right.
And so that, I think, tells us that this AI debate is the debate of our time. I have never in my career gotten to say one economic parameter can make the difference between utopia and dystopia.
But this is it.
This is it.
Here's the problem.
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