Podcast Notes Playlist: Business Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy
Key Takeaways
- Human labor may become less valuable, but the property that humans own – such as the S&P 500 – will experience significant value growth
- Value will accrue to property owners, via capital income
- A practical definition of AGI: AI that can do 98% of jobs as well as humans and can automate 95% of white collar work
- People often think of AI replacing human jobs as a perfect substitute, but typically, new technological adoption is complementary to human labor
- The key capability of learning on the job has not been unlocked; this is a technological unlock that could supersede the brand effect
- So while OpenAI is leading on brand, it could be usurped by a lab that makes a technical breakthrough
- Unless more compute comes online to continue the growth, we will have to rely on advancements in AI algorithms to carry the torch
- With AI, capital and labor are functionally equivalent; we can just build more data centers and robot factories (which can build even more data centers and robot factories), thus creating an explosive dynamic
- The optimistic vision for humanity’s role in an AI-driven future mirrors how we currently treat retirees: valuing their past contributions and supporting them even as they step back from direct economic productivity
- The emergence of AGI will resemble the Industrial Revolution more than it will the creation of the atom bomb
- There was not ‘one machine’ that enabled the Industrial Revolution; there was a broader process of growth and automation due to many complementary innovations
- A sovereign-wealth fund type structure may describe the future of human work: Humans buy shares in investment firms that manage the investment of AI stuff and then become broad-based shareholders in the development of AI
- This is what Alaska does with oil
Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org
In this episode, Erik Torenberg is joined in the studio by Dwarkesh Patel and Noah Smith to explore one of the biggest questions in tech: what exactly is artificial general intelligence (AGI), and how close are we to achieving it?
They break down:
- Competing definitions of AGI — economic vs. cognitive vs. “godlike”
- Why reasoning alone isn’t enough — and what capabilities models still lack
- The debate over substitution vs. complementarity between AI and human labor
- What an AI-saturated economy might look like — from growth projections to UBI, sovereign wealth funds, and galaxy-colonizing robots
- How AGI could reshape global power, geopolitics, and the future of work
Along the way, they tackle failed predictions, surprising AI limitations, and the philosophical and economic consequences of building machines that think, and perhaps one day, act, like us.
Timecodes:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Defining AGI and General Intelligence
2:38 Human and AI Capabilities Compared
7:00 AI Replacing Jobs and Shifting Employment
15:00 Economic Growth Trajectories After AGI
17:15 Consumer Demand in an AI-Driven Economy
31:00 Redistribution, UBI, and the Future of Income
31:58 Human Roles and the Evolving Meaning of Work
41:21 Technology, Society, and the Human Future
45:43 AGI Timelines and Forecasting Horizons
54:04 The Challenge of Predicting AI's Path
57:37 Nationalization, Geopolitics, and the Global AI Race
1:07:10 Brand and Network Effects in AI Dominance
1:09:31 Final Thoughts
Resources:
Find Dwarkesh on X: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp
Find Dwarkesh on YT: https://www.youtube.com/c/DwarkeshPatel
Subscribe to Dwarkesh’s Substack: https://www.dwarkesh.com/
Find Noah on X: https://x.com/noahpinion
Subscribe to Noah’s Substack: https://www.noahpinion.blog/
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