Is There Going to Be Limits?

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Is it going to be possible to ever understand what that grandmaster is doing through a chemical analysis of what's going on in the brain? That's an unanswerable question, but I don't know. There's a big debate among our artificial intelligence researchers about how you could go about trying to master human activities with machinery. Some think we have to learn from biology itself; others say all we need is sort of a conceptual world and then machinery can work based on those models.

David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of work and the role that automation and smart machines might play in the workforce. Autor stresses the importance of Michael Polanyi's insight that many of the things we know and understand cannot be easily written down or communicated. Those kinds of tacit knowledge will be difficult for smart machines to access and use. In addition, Autor argues that fundamentally, the gains from machine productivity will accrue to humans. The conversation closes with a discussion of the distributional implications of a world with a vastly larger role for smart machines.