261 - Tyler Cowen: The Economics of Artificial Intelligence

24:41Tyler Cowen:I think that's a good thing. It's liberating them from doing something horrible. Maybe they'll be more creative doing something else. So it's the lower tier, most routine forms of the art. become done by AI, that's great. More people can try to be the next Taylor Swift. But it's not only Taylor Swift at the top of this pinnacle. So there are thousands of creators with smaller audiences where you still want some kind of relationship with the person. Like I write a blog, I'm not anywhere close to as famous as Taylor Swift, but if I put up some GPT-generated output, but as I occasionally do with transparency, people get upset.

25:23Tyler Cowen:They're like, we want you. It doesn't matter that GPT may be as good as I am or better. That's heartening in a way. I think it's also somewhat irrational, but it is how the world works. No, it is interesting. Obviously, I have a show too that you're on right now. And right now, obviously, chat, GPT couldn't do what we're doing, but... Sure it could. My voice clone is great. And the answers, well, it's for other people to judge, but it would give you good answers. I would say better than the median human podcast guest. Whether it's better than me is for others to judge. Okay, I think you make a fair point, but in order to displace us, let's say we're listening to a comedy podcast.

26:12And maybe comedy isn't even a good example because maybe jokes made by AI, if we know that they're from AI, we won't react to them the same way that we would from an ordinary human. But say somebody is listening to a comedy podcast with real looking humans speaking in a realistic way that are saying the absolute funniest things imaginable. I wonder if that would displace real comedy podcasts with real humans. Or if, let's say you were just having an economics interview, a real one compared to one with chat GPT-10, where they're much better, much faster than any living economist, would people rather listen to the real thing or the fake thing?

27:03Tyler Cowen:I definitely think we'll have both. We do already. But, you know, take GPT-10, whatever that means. gpt5 already knows more economics than i do so if 10 is somehow way way way better the listeners are not able to appreciate the improvement so they might as well listen to me that those are the cold hard facts of life that's part of my protection here so we're already at margins we're in many many areas we cannot so readily perceive quality improvements in the AI, for better or worse. So they're going to listen to me. I'm not worried about GPT-8. I'm worried enough about GPT-5. 8, in that sense, will not be perceptibly so much better.

27:50Tyler Cowen:Maybe in comedy it will be, because right now they're not that funny, but not in economics. When you say that chat GPT-5 already knows more economics than you, What do you mean by that? Because I've been thinking, as I have taught undergraduates here in philosophy, I've often wondered, does ChatGBT know the philosophy much better than me? And in certain ways, I want to say yes, but in other ways, I want to say no. I think that's the correct answer. But it does know more than you do. And with good prompting, which of course requires your input, I mean, it will beat you. Like a simple question, if you gave GPT-5 and myself a 100-question exam on economics, who would win?

28:37Who?

28:38Tyler Cowen:What would win? Whatever. I would lose. It's pretty simple. Now, there's more to economics than just answering questions. But still, I think that tells you a lot. I would lose. And you would lose in philosophy. No slight intended, to be clear. I would absolutely lose at a certain sort of exam if it were historical questions, like what view did Kant defend in X or Spinoza in Y. GPT has read absolutely everything. But if you asked me about something that I happen to maybe know a lot about, and you really got granular on it, that's when you would see chat GPT start to crumble and say things that don't really make sense.

29:28And I wonder if it would be similar in economics for you?

29:34Tyler Cowen:I wouldn't say that it crumbles. I would put it this way. There's a lot of areas where if you asked one of the top five humans in the world about that question, you would get a better answer than from GPT. But that's the top five humans. You could still ask like a tenured professor at Harvard or Stanford in that area the same question, and odds are GPT would win, but they wouldn't beat the top five people, especially as you got into more and more depth. But man, that's a pretty thin read to hang on to. And like how many people in the audience will even know that the top five expert is ahead of the GPT?

30:14Tyler Cowen:Some, but like not 5 ,000 of them. How do you see this impacting education? This is something else that I talked with read about because up until relatively recently, my expectation had been, well, I'll just be a professor. People have always done that. It's a very old profession. It's difficult, and I don't know if I'll be able to do it. I'll get there. But it seemed like a very viable career pathway, but it really does not feel that way anymore. I don't think we know. So I view our institutions of higher education as unable to change. No one is actually delegated with the kind of power to make any real change.

30:59Tyler Cowen:Forget about AI. So they're just stuck. And in the meantime, people like you and I, we freelance on our own and use AI and learn things. We kind of privatize that part of our education. And it will be that way for quite a while. Now, you're young. Let's say you live to 98 because AI, you know, cures your cancer. So what, you're 30 now? So that's like 68 years or like 60 years, 50 years you've got to worry about. I can't tell you it will be intact that whole time. Maybe it won't be. But I think it will be intact for longer than many people are expecting. So I'm not sure you should give up the plan.

31:41Here's my thinking. And don't interrupt me if you think I'm wrong. I'll just give you a variety of thoughts I have. My understanding is that graduate students are brought into universities largely because they offset teaching load for very little money relative to what a full professor would have to do. And as I was teaching ethics last quarter, and ethics is not an area in which I'm an expert at all. This was an area where if my students asked me a question, I could tell them my opinions, my understanding of the text. But ChatGPT would give them a much more canonical answer about something regarding Kant than I could.

32:41And I just see a future in which there may be humans poking their heads in here and there to supervise things. But my students would get a lot more out of getting their questions answered by ChatGPT than by me, getting the material explained to them by ChatGPT than by me. and to the extent that writing is something that's going to be valued in the future, I can't spend nearly as much time as ChatGPT can giving very good feedback on essays, especially as ChatGPT continues to improve. So I just imagine that in a place like a philosophy department, where unlike in, say, chemistry, you don't need human hands to manipulate lab equipment.

33:37This is just going to be, this labor is going to be displaced relatively soon by AI, especially in the current environment of cuts that we're undergoing. So that's just where things start to begin in my thinking.

33:52Tyler Cowen:I definitely agree with your basic description of what you said, but I'm not sure how much the world cares. that the GPT answer is better. And keep in mind, you're at Stanford. That's a highly atypical school. 80 % of the sector is state schools. So much of the sector, students don't really learn anything. They learn how to be in society. They interact with different groups of people. They learn something quite intangible by interacting with humans. And the fact that the GPT answer is better? I don't know. I think it takes a long time for that to chip away and arbitrage down what might end up paying for your salary.

34:32Tyler Cowen:I think eventually it will, but it's a very slow process. I agree that it might not, like the students might not think, wow, chat GPT is answering my questions better. I'd rather have a conversation with chat GPT. What I'm thinking is that while ideally the university is this bastion of learning, the reality I've discovered is the university is a business. I don't quite understand why universities are businesses because nobody owns them. That might be something interesting to talk about because I've been curious about it, but money rules the university. I'm using the university quite the term to cover Harvard Yale, Stanford, all of these places.

35:20And state schools.

35:20Tyler Cowen:It's completely true. But that's also a reason why it's not easy to dislodge. The key piece whose fall would wreck the system would be if employers started saying, I don't give a damn if this person went to school X. You know, let him debate with the AI or take a test with GPT and see how well they do. That's a good enough credential for me. And then the whole thing really collapses. I'm just not sure when that will happen. Again, I don't think it's soon. I can't say that I think it will be soon because a name like Harvard just has a lot of oomph to it. Well, those schools will never happen. If nothing else, they're a dating service, right?

36:05Tyler Cowen:But, you know, take away the top 10 or 15 schools. When will it happen? I think that's the question. It'll never happen for Harvard. Even Harvard, to again play the devil's advocate, A lot of the students that get in there aren't getting in there because of academic merit. And maybe that's always been the case. Always been the case. But moreover, inflation is, great inflation, is absolutely undermining. No, no one cares. That's the whole point. Stanford average, I've read it's an A minus. No one minds. It's not a problem. It's a sickness that it's not a problem. But in fact, it's not a problem.

36:47I'm going to compound what is not a problem and just say that ChadGBT makes grades even less sensitive to merit, I suppose. But you're saying that you think that people still aren't going to care. It's just the Harvard name or the Yale name that will get people employed.

37:05Tyler Cowen:Well, the networking, it's not only the name. The networking is critical. And I don't see how that ever goes away. but again a lot of schools the networking value was much smaller so i'd still draw this big distinction between the very top and lower down okay back to this question that i that i raised a few minutes ago about the university as a business what i don't understand is that say take a public corporation there are shareholders there are people who own the corporation. And so it is very important to these people that certain metrics like money in the bank or Goodwill or sales or profit go up because that increases the value that they can appoint to their shares when they want to sell it.

38:01But nobody owns the university. So nobody is personally, I mean, there are some high salaries among administrators, but if the endowment goes up, it's not like somebody's net worth is going up by billions of dollars and they highly value it. So I don't understand why universities are so governed by money.

38:28Tyler Cowen:People get paid and paid off by the system in different ways. So look at a simpler case that we understand well, hospitals. There's for-profit and there's non-profit hospitals. No one owns the non-profits, right? But you look at data, you compare the profits to the non-profits. They hardly behave any differently. They do a bit, but you can't just walk into a hospital and tell. So the non-profit has incentives. It has to raise revenue, meet market demand, raise money in capital markets. It's just not that different. It is somewhat less efficient. But the thing will continue. and we see it with non-profit hospitals.

39:08Tyler Cowen:You could say like the output of universities, what they really do, it's somewhat mysterious, but not hospitals. We know what they do, right? They operate, they fix people, they kill people, whatever. And that's how it works with non-profit hospitals. So I don't think that's such a big mystery. You expect the world to be too rational or look at churches driven by revenue. Most people in them are also sincere, but they know they have to raise revenue to pursue the mission. uh, they stick around, they have outputs, people donate, it, you know, works reasonably well, and there you go, we have churches.

39:45I guess it would make more sense to me, in a way, if I believed that administrators at a university really cared greatly about education and the pursuit of knowledge.

40:00Tyler Cowen:We do, but the word greatly is doing a lot of weight in that sentence. I would say they care about it. But at the end of the day, you face a revenue constraint. And to keep your operation going at all, you've got to meet the revenue constraint. And that shapes your behavior. How much you like care about Jane Austen up here in your little head. You can debate that. But at the end of the day, you've got to raise the revenue. Stepping back again to where we started, you don't think that becoming a professor is a totally non-viable career path. But how do you see AI changing higher education? And I'm guessing, though, you said that higher education is something that is going to be very slow to change.

40:46It never changes. But how do you see it changing, if at all, from AI?

40:52Tyler Cowen:I think over time, there will be more and more alternate means of certifying talent, which will include AI, but it doesn't have to be AI, you know, Teal Fellowship, or just you take a test, or, you know, start a company when you're 19, and the labor market will reward that, and that combined with declining enrollments, which is already in the cards because of birth rates, nothing to do with AI, will really squeeze the sector, and the sector will become worse, and more good people will leave it, and that will make it a bit worse, and there'll be the slow pain for a downward spiral. So I'm not sure I should encourage you to join a sector like that.

41:32Tyler Cowen:And furthermore, you're clearly smart enough to know that some chunk of what you're doing is a kind of fraudulent theatrical stand-in for what GPT could do better, and that might demoralize you. So if I were your age, I think I would not do higher ed. But that said, this notion that it will all just be gone in seven years, I'm quite sure that's wrong. I think it's an option you can consider, but I would want you to be very clear on the basic economics with declining enrollment hitting before AI does, right? And that's just a fact. Like it takes 18 years to produce an undergrad. No way around that.

42:07Tyler Cowen:I don't care if it's GPT-14. You bring up another aspect of the problem that I hadn't raised, which is the demoralizing nature of chat GPT's improving performance because I saw that you he written a paper with Derek Parfit which is pretty amazing and maybe it's the case that just like with with storytelling philosophers will only want to read papers written by philosophers and not AI but for people who are interested in let's say philosophy or history whatever it is to the extent that they're just interested in getting the answers to their questions. It does seem like in the future, AI will be significantly better at providing those answers than humans.

43:02I agree. Now, if somebody's very interested just in, let's say, the very act of doing the research, of solving the math problems, then that's maybe rewarding and a luxury in a way. But it doesn't change the fact that chat gbt could much more easily provide the output of the research

43:27Tyler Cowen:that's right that's why if i were you i would not become an academic but i think it's a it's an option worth pondering you have to think about how do i feel about that fact you're not only doing economics for the love of economics you're doing it for getting the answers to the questions And if the answers can be had so cheaply, it's not worth doing the work or it's just no longer going to be economically rewarded. Well, I'm age 63, which is older than you are. I'm also much better known. AI has massively changed how I allocate my time. I spend much more time going around, meeting with people. You could call it evangelizing, in large part evangelizing for AI.

44:13Tyler Cowen:and I think I have a high value doing that for now. But if we're in some kind of steady state and everyone has figured out the value of AI and we're at GPT-9 and it's just better than I am flat out, I would in fact retire from doing economics. And it's quite possible that comes about. It's a kind of race. There's my age, the speed of improvement. I'm not really sure, but I can definitely imagine saying, well, I'm only going to do the mentoring part of this job and I'm not going to do the producing economic answers part of the job. I can easily imagine that. I kind of expect it. But I don't have to sustain the 50, 60-year career that you do.

44:55Tyler Cowen:So, like, I'm home free. I can run at the clock and just stop and not need another job. So I'm in a different position. Some sectors of the economy are stagnant. Some that revolve around computation are moving much more quickly. They're no longer stagnant. But earlier this year, you still wrote that the AI takeoff looks very slow, even as these capabilities leap. What is it about the takeoff that is slow versus what we expected? I mean, the sarcastic answer would be humans suck. But there's this new paper out of MIT. I've only read the abstract. But it basically says, in current corporations, and this is looking at a pretty exalted set of companies, in 95 % of cases, AI has not yet boosted profits because people don't really know what to do with this stuff.

45:58Tyler Cowen:So I think you'll need something close to a whole generational turnover of companies where new companies arise being built upon and centered around using AI. And the current companies just aren't that good at the transition. And that could be right there 20 years. Now, not in all areas. Programming, it's gone very quickly. Graphic design, chess, it happened some while ago. But that's what I think it looks like. And we see it already. The idea maybe is that, sure, in a law firm, ChatGPT is speeding the rate at which people are writing perfunctory emails. But it's not really creating meaningful increases in profits.

46:48and corporations need to really restructure their operations around AI to unlock its benefits.

46:58Tyler Cowen:Yes, and I think there's enough status quo bias in human behavior that in companies full of 47-year-olds, some will adjust, some have adjusted great already. But basically, you'll need a new set of law firms or medical practices, whatever, before it really sticks as fundamental to the enterprise rather than just, oh, the doctor talked with me, the AI took notes, which is great, right? But it's not that revolutionary at all. It hardly saves much money. Okay. And I'm guessing that if you had an idea of just what law firms would need to do to unlock unlock this revolutionary capability of AI, then it probably would have been done by now or would be doing.

47:45So is it more just you have a hunch that AI will do these things or you have an idea of how they will be done in just like a law firm, for instance?

47:55Tyler Cowen:Well, I know some people in law firms and they tell me that right now, for legal reasons, the firms insist they do not send any confidential material into LLMs. And I understand fully why. So the first thing you need is for LLMs to be good enough that when they're housed on the law firm's hard drive rather than in the cloud, it's still super good. And we're a ways from that. And it won't even get started much until that happens. I don't know how far away that is, maybe five years, not some eternity, but that's what you need even to get started because you can't just dump your confidential information into the cloud.

48:35Tyler Cowen:So that's a huge barrier and we're not about to break it. Well, since law has now come up, I'm starting law school here at Stanford in next week. Great. And one reason for that is my existential dread about academia. but it's the same i mean law is actually a competitive sector so i would worry more about law than academia could you tell me more about why that is i know that paralegals are are really seeing their work reduced but why law firms or why lawyers what you might call senior partners who can bring in clients will be 10 or 20x more valuable than they are today and they're already the most valuable asset because the legal work can be done by GPT.

49:25Tyler Cowen:I already use it as my lawyer. It does great. My wife's a lawyer. She's impressed by it. But partners, partner-client relationships, that will just become so important. So if you can end up doing that, wonderful. But exactly how you get to that without having climbed the previous ladders that we've had before. That's what I think we don't understand. And I don't have a good forecast for how that will go. But I would think that's the critical variable. Something interesting that's coming out of this conversation for me is that it sounds like in addition to the obvious, which would be having skills for working with AI, one of or the most valuable skill people can have for making it in this coming age is people skills.

50:15Tyler Cowen:Correct. I said this in my book, Average is Over, in 2013. Charisma, being personable, connecting people, understanding other people's talents, just so much more important. And it's why I'm not worried about me not having a future job. I can always do some mixes of those things, which I have a lot of experience at. I don't need economics per se. Why did you write about this already in 2013. Well, this will sound immodest, but I saw it coming. I wrote a whole book called Average is Over, and I think the predictions of that book have held up quite well. It sounds like there's a thesis in the title, Average is Over.

50:58What is the thesis of the book?

51:00Tyler Cowen:If you're able to work well with AI, you can do incredibly well. That's a sector open to everyone. It's genuinely open, right? Like everyone's GPT or Claude is really good. Something's stopping you from being great with it. But a lot of people, they're not motivated or they're caught up in other battles. And those people, if they end up having to compete with the AI, they won't do so well. And I think it's a voluntarist question. How many of us will rise to the occasion, learn how to work with AI and do really well? I'm not sure what the answer is. I would say overall, I've been heartened by the rapid rate of adoption in the United States.

51:39Tyler Cowen:I think it's a very good sign. Earlier, you said that, I mean, it was a joke, but Harvard is kind of like a dating app. It's not a joke. I mean, it's a joke, but it's a true joke. Not that Harvard's value wasn't always in part its networking role, but that going forward, that's just going to be its dominant function. You got it. Stanford also. Now, Stanford, you network in different ways. You're more likely to network with the startup world than you are at Harvard. But, you know, different schools are different. They're both incredible for networking. How do you advise young people who are going into this world and going to college now?

52:26Do you tell them, look, spend less time studying math, spend less time studying computer science, worry about joining the frat, the good frat, making good friends, maybe interning at the right businesses. Like you say, that's what's really important now going forward?

52:44Tyler Cowen:Well, I think being interesting at math or computer science is the best way to network with other people who are very, very smart. So I don't tell people to study less. You may be studying with a slightly different path in mind. But also, studying is fun. It's your chance in life to learn those things. It is, I think, of high intrinsic value to know certain things about how the world works. So I don't discourage that at all. In fact, it may be a luxury that more people can afford in a world with a lot of strong AI. But I do tell people you need to network much, much more. So more networking, but I don't want to say less math.

53:23Tyler Cowen:More of both. Do you have an opinion about, I mean, obviously one's individual preferences are going to be king in the end, but whether or not it would be more worth somebody's while to study music or literature than math or computer science? because, like we said, nobody's going to replace Taylor Swift, but computer scientists, just entry-level programmers or mathematicians are being replaced on some level and will be more so. Well, Taylor Swift did not study music in the academic sense. I know this sounds corny, but I think you should actually study what you love. Now, if your parents are immigrants, You came to this country when you're eight.

54:13Tyler Cowen:Your family is no savings. Maybe you just need a very practical major. You know, you can't study what you love. There's a lot of cases like that. Of course, you just need to be practical. But if you're in the position where the choice is a luxury at all, I would just tell people the old school corny advice. Do what you love. Work it out. You know, try to work it out later. Uncertainty right now is really quite high. You can't figure it all out in advance anyway. and do what makes sense for you. One of the big, large-scale economic problems or worries I have, or lots of people have, is widening wage disparities in the coming AI revolution.

54:59And I'm wondering how you would, well, one, what your attitude toward that is right now, whether it's just inevitable and one where the capital is going to coalesce, but also how people who aren't already wealthy can still achieve mobility in that arena going forward.

55:23Tyler Cowen:I don't expect widening wage disparities. I think gardeners, carpenters, plumbers, people in the energy sector who do physical work, they're going to earn great. It doesn't mean every, you know, manual labor job will do well, but I think there are some of the biggest gainers. And the people who are, you know, word sales, a lot of the upper middle class maybe should worry some more. What do you think the upper class positions will be going forward? I'm not talking about old money, but people trying to create new money. People who start new businesses with a super small number of workers and hardly any dilution.

56:04Tyler Cowen:And the AIs do 85 % of the work. They will earn a ton and be very high status. And there'll be a lot of it. It sounds like going forward, entrepreneurship is going to be an extremely... As it has been, yeah. More so than before, if professions like being a lawyer, which have been the stable professions going forward that everybody's wanted their child to be are no longer viable. And rather than your tech company having a payroll of 4 ,000 people, you know, maybe it will be 80 people. And you'll earn a lot more money. Until you sell your company. But again, I guess that's when you make the money.

56:44Tyler Cowen:Yeah, sure. But that's not new. And again, all these new projects, I think the people who make it work on the ground, they will learn more. Your janitor. You recently wrote in a piece that what we're writing, everything we're writing, especially on social media, the primary audience is now going to be AI, or at least it's going to be AI as much as regular humans. And what are the implications of this? You don't have to be as clear a writer because the AI understands your background context. So you could talk about, you know, Frege, say whatever about Frege, and not have to explain to your silly human readers why Frege was important.

57:35Tyler Cowen:You can just say Frege this, Frege that, and the AI knows. It makes it easier in a way for people who like to get to the point. This makes sense to me if you're typing directly into the terminal to chat GPT. You don't have to be as specific, but if you're posting on your blog, for instance, and you expect the blog itself to be read by humans, then it seems like you would probably be writing the exact same way you always have. No, I've changed somewhat. And I also know that humans can ask the AI if they need to learn who Frege is. Well, they had Wikipedia, but I think asking current AI is better.

58:17Tyler Cowen:So again, I can take some more shortcuts and I do. It is funny. I, in, because law school is starting and I know that my life is going to be kind of over for a

58:31books I've wanted to read. And I'm reading The Sound and the Fury right now. And today, I had to copy a bunch of passages and put them into ChatGPT because I had no idea what was going on. And I wanted to say, nobody's going to put your words into ChatGPT and ask what this means, where I'm already doing it today.

58:49Tyler Cowen:And people email me all the time, like, oh, Tyler, you wrote this. I put it into ChatGPT. Here's what it said. What do you think? I get emails like that multiple times a week. Do you notice with your students that writing quality is going way down? Well, my particular students, I tell them to work with AI when they write their papers. So the writing quality is going way up. I grade them more harshly because I know they have assistants, but they're way better than they were three years ago. That's such a fascinating attitude to take because I hear from other educators, especially like one of my cousins who's teaching high school, that their students' writing is pretty deplorable.

59:39And like you, I know my students' writing is terrific because I know that they're all using ChatGPT. But I take that as a bad sign because it indicates that maybe they're not developing personally the way that I would like them to be developing, but I suppose they're just developing in a very different way.

1:00:02Tyler Cowen:I agree there's a bad side to it. I think we need to restructure all of our education so there's quite a high percentage of time spent writing in the classroom with no aids. So you learn how to write as a way of learning how to think. We don't really do that. We focus on assignments. And I think that utterly has to end. There should be writing on your own. We should like 5x that more. And then writing with GPT, we should teach that too. And we've got to do both. Right now in this way, it's a halfway house where we don't really do either. You've recently told universities that they should devote chunks of their curricula to teaching students how to write and work and learn with AI.

1:00:49Tyler Cowen:Of course. And I do this in my class. It's one reason why I feel I'm still adding value. How do you do it? I teach them prompting. I teach them strengths and weaknesses of different models. I teach them when hallucinations are most likely. I teach them how to stay current on a sector that, as you know, changes very rapidly. I just teach them, you know, different tricks. What's very funny to me is that this is so clearly highly valuable and I've never considered doing it and nobody has ever suggested that I do it or... And I say to my students, is anyone else teaching you this? Everyone says no.

1:01:31Tyler Cowen:Like it's not even mentioned. It's crazy. I guess I'm a Luddite and I'm kind of, even though I begrudgingly use ChatGP today with the sound and the fury, it was kind of like an experiment. But I feel this hostility toward AI. Maybe it is deep in my subconscious, this resentment that it might be coming for my future career or coming for my friend as a graphic designer. diner, but I do see how willfully ignoring it and not trying to learn how to work with it could be in the long term, very detrimental, like an ostrich sticking their head in the sand. Average is over, like I said, right? What side of the distribution do you want to be on?

1:02:21You must have thought about this a lot more than I have. I know that food is a big part of your life. It's a big part of my life. Have you thought much about the impact of AI on the food world?

1:02:35Tyler Cowen:I don't think it's that much in the short run. In the same way, like housing, it's just a, it's just a not an obvious avenue for AI deployment. In the short run, food will be modestly more expensive because energy costs are up. So in the short run, there's a penalty on food. Some more distant long run will have more robust crops and seeds and genetically modified this, that, and the other. Food will be more nutritious, will improve GLP-1 drugs, so you'll be able to eat irresponsibly, not pay the penalty. A lot of long run effects, but they seem somewhat distant to me. The GLP-1 drugs, I'm curious about that.

1:03:17Have you read or are you aware specifically of people who are trying to improve them with AI?

1:03:24Tyler Cowen:You know, AI is not very well defined. If you mean tools of computational biology, this is happening all the time. Just like mRNA vaccines are designed with computational biology, but not with LLMs. and this is already underway. And supposedly next year, there'll be a version of GLP-1 that's just a pill. For a lot of people, that will be less painful. In other ways, it will be better, minimize side effects. Like, is it correlated with thyroid cancer? We're not sure yet. We'll learn that, probably come up with a way to fix that if it's true. So a lot of improvements can be had. But I think they'll all take time.

1:04:07Maybe I'm not up on this, but the GLP-1 drugs are the ones that inhibit appetite, right? Or suppress appetite?

1:04:15Tyler Cowen:That's one way of putting it. They do much more than that, but that's a true statement. Do they inhibit compulsion or do they inhibit appetite? Like some of the drugs, there's two different channels. One is that anticipatory pleasures more generally become weaker. Another is that your stomach feels like it's fuller for longer and the two different channels. So it's complicated, but some version of what you're saying is correct. It doesn't sound then to me like these drugs help people enjoy food. Maybe that's not what you said. Maybe I misheard or am misrecalling what you said. It sounds like people are just eating less food.

1:04:54I'm wondering if these new variants or new drugs would actually enable people to eat more food and not worry about gaining weight. So I used to have a show that was called Robinson Eats, where every day I would eat a pint of ice cream on the show. So I'm very in favor of eating copious quantities of food. And I would love it if there were some drug, assisted by the aid of computation, that were available to help me eat more without suffering the consequences.

1:05:29Tyler Cowen:I don't know what we'll get, but I can say with the drugs we have now, I mean, you're currently thin, no issue for you, but say you were older and not inclined to be so thin, you could eat all the ice cream you would want and you wouldn't put on weight. That's the case now. Will you be able to eat more of everything? That's much less clear. But why ice cream? Well, anything. You could eat more of anything you really craved without putting on weight. And under the status quo. Because you eat less of other things. It may or may not be good for you, but it won't make you fat. Yeah, but if you wanted to eat like 10 ,000 calories of ice cream a day, it would make you fat.

1:06:08Tyler Cowen:Well, you couldn't eat 10 ,000 calories, but you could have a big serving of ice cream every day and still lose weight. Yes, that is true. But I guess in a fantasy world, I mean, I've heard that there was once this product called Olestra. Does that sound ring a bell? I've heard of it. I think it was some artificial fat that was added to food that you wouldn't digest. It ended up just being like a laxative, so it didn't work. but if AI is going to do one thing for us, it would be helping to develop a really good synthetic sugar and fat that they could put in ice cream and other foods that we could just eat without obtaining calories from.

1:06:55That would be my dream ask.

1:06:57Tyler Cowen:Someday. But when you think about processes of approval, discovering it, again, it seems like 20 years away or more. I could wait 20 years for that. You will. That'd be great. 20 more years of working out wouldn't be too terrible. Yeah. Okay, Tyler, thank you. This is a much more fast-paced conversation than I'm used to, but we covered a lot of ground. And it was really a pleasure to have you on. So thanks a lot for joining me. Great chatting with you. Let me know how things go.