The AI Culture Wars

0:00David McWilliams: On the podcast this week, it is Kilkenomics Week, so we're a bit up to our eyes. Tickets at kilkenomics.com. An amazing lineup. And one of the big arguments at Kilkenomics is AI, friend or foe, evil or positive, the worst thing that ever happened to the world are a bright new future. We're talking about the new culture war over AI. That's all coming up on the podcast in a couple of minutes.

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1:35David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. Welcome to the podcast. This is a big week for me and the podcast and everybody associated with the little Mac Williams economics machine because it is Kilcanomics Week. It is the week that we are and we have put tickets on sale. Kilcanomics.com. It's all on general release. If you are not a member of either the Patreon, the Golden Ticket Club and or the David McWilliams forward slash crew club, then you've had to wait for a couple of days for Kilkenomics tickets, but they are all on sale and general release tomorrow, Friday, the 4th of September, and I am delighted with the reaction thus far and I hope to see you there.

2:36David McWilliams: So it's Kilkenomics.com Kilkenny, 6th to 8th November. Hope to see you there. Johnny boy, how are you? I'm good. You're looking particularly fine down the tube today. I am good. I'm really good, actually. Yeah, just kind of September. This is, as I've always said... Do you want to sing the song? September? I've always said that September is like the new year for me. Always has been. That kind of going back to school. So that's kind of what it feels like to me at the moment. Actually, the year ahead is looking good. Good. Well, I'm glad you weren't going to talk about your mental health or anything like that.

3:11David McWilliams: because that's all so yesterday because we're going to talk about the new culture war. If the old culture war was all about anxiety and my mental health and LGBT rights and what toilet should I use and am I trans and I'm not, all that's over, right? Yeah. We're going to talk today about the new culture war, right? The new culture war is less about parades and expressing yourself and talking about your anxieties and gendering yourself or misgendering yourself. Have you ever been misgendered, John? Not lately. He him. I have one of those man bags, but I call it my day them. Your day them. Okay. So all that stuff, John.

3:51David McWilliams: That is all over. We are into a new culture war and we are going to discuss it. And the culture war, not the first, but the most significant volleys were fired last week by no one other than The Economist magazine. The Economist magazine set up in the mid 19th century, edited by the great William Badshot, who was one of the very first men to understand central banking. B-A-J-H-O-T, I think was his name. Maybe some of our British listeners will call him, maybe he was Bajo with a silent T. But he was a very, very brilliant journalist. And he set up The Economist, or he actually made The Economist the paper of record.

4:34David McWilliams: So The Economist, about a week ago, had an extraordinary hit job. Now, this is, again, within the academy, John, within the economics fraternity. Now, what I can tell you about economists, particularly academic economists, is they have very, very long memories. Right. And when there's a pile-on and an opportunity to pile on one of them, particularly if he's the most prominent one, you get all sorts of characters saying, well, he wasn't very good, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it sounds a little bit like Love Island for economists. Exactly, exactly. Love Island for people who can do algebra. Yeah.

5:09David McWilliams: That's exactly what it is, okay? But economists give journalists a good name when it comes to generosity, and journalists give even comedians a good name when it comes to backing each other, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because every comedian I know secretly wants to see a fella die on stage, right? They secretly want to say, I mean, oh, yeah, man, he got up on stage. He was doing the fringe, and he just died, man. Oh, terrible, right? Okay, so economists are in that world, particularly academic economists. But the capo di tutti capi of all the economists at the moment is a guy called Daron Ademoglu.

5:46David McWilliams: And he is a Turkish academic. He's a Nobel Prize winner. He's a Harvard professor. He very much is the top dog. I've read lots of his stuff. It's all very readable, which is, for me, is always an asset test. Would I be able to read it? Yeah, you'd skim through it, John. You'd skim through it. You'd flick through it. But, I mean, they default always to mathematics to try and make everyone look good. As I always say, economists deploy mathematics to make themselves, not to elucidate, but to basically bully other people who can't do sums. See, hang on a sec, Max. So you're at this now as well. You're slagging off the other economists now.

6:22Of course. As you normally do, actually.

6:24David McWilliams: Of course, of course. But that's part of the job. Anyway, the point is, there was a pile-on on this guy. And it basically said he wasn't as good as everybody thinks he is. and his research is shoddy and his numbers are not great. I mean, he was really quite vicious. Oh, that's fight and talk. I read it because I read The Economist every week and I read it and I thought, oh, that's unusual. Yeah. One of the people quoted as sticking the knife into him was our old friend Noah Smith. Oh, okay. Of Kilkenomics Fave. The man who likes a rabbit or two. He does. Who's also a great thinker and he's also a very interesting blogger and he's got a really, really great take on many, many things.

7:03He's always brilliant when he comes on the podcast as well.

7:06David McWilliams: Yeah, I like Noah. I've known Noah for years. I really like him. I think he's a really spectacularly interesting person. He's got a very brilliant first-class mind that thinks in a very eclectic way. Has he come to Kilcanomics, by the way? He has not, but I'll tell you, the interesting thing, the Kilcanomics link in this thing is the guy who defended Adamoglu against Noah Smith's attacks is probably the finest Irish intellectual operating in the world at the moment, who's a guy called Henry Farrell. And he's an economic professor, political economy professor at Johns Hopkins University, right?

7:42David McWilliams: So A-lister, extremely interesting. I'm delighted he's coming to Kilkenomics. But basically the hit job was, I thought when I looked at it in the red, this is a little bit weird. Yeah. The hit job also quoted Larry Summers, whose star has fallen dramatically because Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein were very good mates. And I think if there is one moment that might destroy one's career, it is being in the Epstein files, maybe even in being on that creepy feckin' island. Anyway, Larry Summers came out and also stuck the knife in our friend Adamoglu. Now, Larry Summers had also been the top dog at Harvard.

8:20David McWilliams: Now, Adamoglu's the top dog at Harvard, and maybe there's an element of that. So anyway, all that stuff for me. Oh, my God. This is like, as you say, love island for economists, right? Yeah, or maybe it's more like Wagatha Christie, you know, Vardy Rooney thing. Except on the Wagatha Christie, nobody had the guile as much, not as, Rooney's wife came out of it very well. But the person who I thought was the most mendacious and clearly the most interesting was Jamie Vardy's missus, right? Yeah, yeah. But that... I wasn't following it though, I have to say. Ah, John, that's the sort of stuff I love.

9:01David McWilliams: You see, you think I read economics all the time. If I am ever bored with economics, I am sucked in, lured into the black hole, the cesspit, that is the sidebar of the Daily Mail online. I love it. I absolutely love it. Okay. Anyway, so enough of that. Daily Mail listeners, Daily Mail readers, subscribers, I'm all good with you, right? Particularly the sidebar of shame, right? But anyway, so it's basically, it's not unlike that. So I was thinking, this is unusual. This is economists having to go with each other. Yeah, okay, it's silly season, it's August. But then it became to dawn on me that this is the battle lines of a new culture war.

9:44Right.

9:45David McWilliams: The culture war is over AI. Because Adamoglu is an AI skeptic. He's very much, and I will go into this in a second, but his shtick is very much hold on a second. Technical progress isn't always and everywhere good for everybody. In fact, what it tends to do, it tends to accumulate enormous amounts of money in the hands of the technologists. Yeah. And unless that money is redistributed, it can be very deleterious to society. Absolutely. That's his shtick, right? I'll talk to him in a second. right? Interestingly, Noah Smith would be more on the side of the Silicon Valley guys. So the culture war is between, ironically, the economists, who people might think in stereotype are kind of right wing and liberal and neoliberal free market.

10:38David McWilliams: But in actual fact, all economists I know believe in the market, but they believe most of them are actually left of center. They believe in redistribution. They believe in government intervention. They believe we can do things better, right? Because they're coming from a position, I think, that what is best for society. Not all, but most. And Adam Mugloo is part of that game. On the other side of this culture war, John, are the tech bros, the Silicon Valley characters, led really by a guy called Mark Andreessen, who is a very unusual looking chap. He actually looks like an egg. right a hard-boiled egg yeah like a hard-boiled egg with a pair of glasses right and he's a very brilliant technologist i mean and a very brilliant vc and his whole idea is that if you stand in the way of the march of technology you are a luddite yes and you are not only a luddite but you are anti-development and around him are a whole lot of people like peter thiel and all those guys Guys, and Noah Smith is arguing, not on their behalf, I would not say that, but he's very much aligned to their view, which is get out of our own way, allow the technology to do things.

11:55David McWilliams: The technology, unfettered, liberated, muscular, will change the world. And the technology, in this case, is AI. Adamoglu and the other guys are saying, hold on a second. Now, I think this is the major culture war of the next generation. Can I just ask you before you go on, where do you fall in this? I know where I fall in this. Where do you fall in this? Can I be in the wishy-washy centre until the end? Can I be in the, ooh, don't pin me down on any one thing, okay? Fair enough, okay. I want to go through the arguments, right? I want to go through the arguments because I think the arguments are good.

12:34David McWilliams: But for Irish listeners, just focus your mind. So what is most associated with AI for many people are data centers. Ireland today hosts 10 times per capita more data centers than the European average. The Ireland has almost the same amount of data centers as New York State, despite New York State being 75 % larger than Ireland. So the Irish state has bet big on data centers. Yeah. What it's basically saying is that we should be part of this world, we should be part of the AI world, etc. Now, the question is, if this becomes a culture war, where do we stand, right? And I think it is a culture war.

13:18Okay, so Mac, what are the two sides of this argument?

13:22David McWilliams: Right, so let's look at the actual individuals without being sued by anybody, John. Yes, yeah, yeah, tread carefully, Mac. I'm going to put Adam Mugloo and Henry Farrell on one side and Noah Smith and The Economist on the other. Right. Seconds out, round one. In 2033, Adam Mugloo and a guy called Simon Johnson, two MIT economists, released a book called Power and Progress, Our 1 ,000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. And in it, they argue that technological advancement does not automatically lead to shared prosperity or benefiting everybody equally. Now, this came out a year before Adam Mugloo won the Nobel Prize for his work on comparative studies of prosperities between nations.

14:08David McWilliams: And he came down with the view that you need these extraordinarily strong institutions that can act democratically in order for countries to actually prosper. That was one of his main ideas. Okay, like a tax system or regulations or... Tax system, regulations, a very strong rule of law, a very strong democratic centre, good central banks, all those sort of things, good civil servants, non-corruption, all these things. They're kind of a tick list, but it's important to go through them, right? Now, so that was in 2023. In 2024, Noah Smith, whose substack is incredibly popular, produced a scathing review of Adam Mugliel and Johnson's Power and Progress, calling it the worst book of nonfiction he'd ever read.

14:59David McWilliams: Wow, don't mince your words, Noah. Exactly, right. We can be a bitchy tribe, okay? Yeah, yeah, you sure can. And this, of course, had prompted the other individual in this group, Henry Farrell, the Irish guy, who is the professor at Hopkins, to write two long rebuttals defending A, the book, and B, the authors. Now, this kind of went unnoticed at the time. It's kind of academic shit show. They're all bitching about each other, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So about two years pass and Smith kind of nudges the bear again and reposts his piece, right? Basically kind of goading, basically saying, let's have a fight over AI.

15:39David McWilliams: and his whole idea is that AI should not be steered. So steered means managed, right? And of course, Farrell then responds again, and he even brought up the Irish famine as an example of how economists have a tendency to look to the kind of greater good in which the suffering of individuals is kind of regarded as sad. Yeah, it's difficult, but in kind of an abstract and generalized way, not necessarily, you know, they talk about building a better future because a lot of economists, certainly in the 19th century, saw the Irish famine as the result, like it's pathetic now to think of it, of our over-dependence on one crop and therefore basically it was the victim's fault that we ended up, right?

16:23Incredible. This is all going on in the sort of weird, whatever it's called,

16:29David McWilliams: the blogosphere that economists read and that I tend to dip in and out of, right? But then on the 17th of August, so two weeks ago, the economist entitled, The World's Most Influential Economist is Oddly Unconvincing. Right? It's the go at Adam Mowgli. Oh my God, the language they're using is incredible. Adam Mowgli fires back and says, publishes a letter to the economist calling the piece's central claim oddly unconvincing, itself being oddly unconvincing, and accused them of cherry picking and strategically timing the hit place to undercut. No you. No you. Yeah, yeah. Remember I said to you, never get involved in a fight on Twitter, right?

17:11Yeah.

17:12David McWilliams: Because a fight on Twitter is like, remember I gave you that image, it's like waiting for a bus and there's a fellow on the top of the bus and just as the bus is about to take off and you are at the bus stop, okay, in the queue of the bus stop, the bus is leaving so you've missed the bus, your man on the bus says, you're a fucking idiot and the bus leaves, right? Okay. And you have two choices. One is you can chase the bus and be a total moron and start banging on the bus and saying, I'm going to have a go with your man, or you can just drop it and leave. Having been accused of being a fucking idiot loads of time, you just leave it, right?

17:43David McWilliams: But these guys can't do that. So they're all having a go with each other, right? Henry Farrell then coined the phrase, the Adamooglu Wars, arguing, and this is the interesting thing, it's Farrell who argued the thing and kind of, he said the whole thing, the whole spat, is really a proxy war over AI regulation. This is what I think is interesting. So explain that then. Because there is, in academic circles, in political circles, in the tech world, and as a result of that, in the economic world, a brewing culture war over AI. So Adam Mugloo, the Nobel Prize winner, first of all says that AI is complete hype.

18:31David McWilliams: It'll probably only, in his view, contribute less than 1 % to total factor productivity over the next decade. Wow. Because there's nothing in comparison to Wall Street and the tech bros who are talking about transforming the world. Yeah. And his view is that only about 5 % of tasks will be profitably automated near term by AI. And he rates about 80 % of all the current AI commentary as what he calls brainless. Yeah. More speculative fiction than serious analysis. And he reserves particular scorn both for, but particularly for AI boosterism. His main point is that a truly transformative productivity gain would require something close to AGI.

19:18David McWilliams: You know, this agentic AI. Yeah. Where the AI is more intelligent than us. At the moment, he says, the models are good at kind of easily defined tasks, but they're bad when it comes to messy, content-heavy, judgment. Basically, they're bad at being proxy humans. That's what he says. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And therefore, his argument is that all automation is not equal, and some automation merely does the same tasks as humans do, slightly cheaper and slightly faster, and he calls it as kind of a so-so technology. It kind of displaces workers, but it doesn't generate any big gains. And he's saying that real complementarity means AI creating new tasks that humans couldn't do before.

20:00David McWilliams: That's his idea, that a real technological breakthrough is when a technology allows humans to do things they could never do before. Well, there was always the promise, you know, a few years ago when people were talking about AI and the boosters were saying that, you know, it's going to help us cure cancer and climate change and even nuclear fusion was the one I was most excited by. But, you know, that has not come to pass. I don't know how far along the way they are with that. But go on anyway. I haven't a rashes either, right? Yeah. But I'm glad to see that on the, almost in the anniversary of Hiroshima, you hail nuclear fusion, John.

20:42Which is fusion as opposed to fission.

20:44David McWilliams: Oh, right. Okay. So this is the big breakthrough in nuclear, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be endless energy. The endless energy. You see, endless, interesting you mentioned that word. Endless is a word that all the tech bros use all the time. But I'll come back to them. So this is the anti-AI view. So in his book, Adam Udala's book, Why Nations Fail, the one that won the Nobel Prize, he says that institutions rather than technology decides the outcome. And he says technology's effect can depend on whether it's inclusive or extractive. So, for example, you take the mining industry, the technology of mining coal.

21:22David McWilliams: That was an extractive industry that absolutely helped the United Kingdom get rich years and years ago. But ultimately, it was extractive in the sense that it depleted and ran out. Yeah. And therefore, the big boost disappeared. So he's talking about technology that is inclusive. And he thinks that today's AI hyperscalers, NVIDIA's, you know, OpenAI, all those are extractive. He says they concentrate ownership. They want to make as much money as possible. They want to capture the regulation. And they want to extract data and attention at a super scale. But he's not wrong. So this is his argument, right?

22:03David McWilliams: Yeah. And his argument is that if, looking back over a thousand years, innovation is a story of elites capturing the high moral and physical and political and monetary ground then it's not the story of shared prosperity yeah so he gives examples like cotton you know the haberbosch the idea of fertilizers the process of enabling chemical weapons workers only gain you know he gives lots and lots of examples right yeah yeah but his basic idea is that in order for AI or any technology to be totally useful and add to shared prosperity, it needs to be managed, it needs to be regulated. So his real worry isn't productivity and economics, narrow gauge, what I would call economistic worldviews.

22:53David McWilliams: His real thing, John, is the survival of democracy, of peace and society. He warns that if a large part of graduates lose their jobs, as some AI guys are saying, you're going to have a revolution. What's he saying? He said it's very simple. Yeah, well, we spoke about that very thing on a recent podcast, where these revolutions doesn't necessarily come from the ground up, from the working class. It comes from the highly educated graduates who have invested in their education and kind of have nothing to show for it. What was the term again? What did you call that again? Elite overproduction at a time of high technological change equals, you know, elite overproduction plus technological change equals disaster.

23:36David McWilliams: That's the John Davis equation for the world, okay? Yes, it is. So his solution is what he calls pro-worker AI, which steers the development of AI towards making people better at things rather than replacing people. Genuine public debate on what AI is rather than just a self-selecting elite telling us that we need it. And he talks about international cooperation that America and China need to cooperate together on standards and safety and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. So his main proponent or mate in this is our Irish friend Henry Farrell, who's coming to Kilcanomics. Yeah. And Henry Farrell argues that technological progress is not a single force that is either accelerated or throttled, but there are multiple trajectories, right?

24:28David McWilliams: There's multiple ways in which technological progress affects society, right? And his basic idea is the notion that let the market decide. You know what economists say and investors and, you know, lab tech guys say, let the market decide. He says that is articulated and argued as if it is a neutral proposition. But he's saying that one particular steering mechanism is usually run by a particular group. It's the idea that every statistic has an agenda. So every free market idea has an agenda. He's basically saying that, look, the way society is set up, the people who are arguing for AI are not neutral about its outcomes.

25:12David McWilliams: They are totally vested in it. Yeah, yeah. And he's saying, right, he's saying that, look, we need to have a political and social order that looks at this technology and regulates it. And it's not that the solution is not no markets, but he's saying it's a mix of markets, democracies, bureaucracies, all that thing that the decisions that basically are really consequential for the world need to be arrived at by broad input, not some elite technocratic judgment coming from Silicon Valley. So the fight isn't that AI is good or bad. It's should AI's direction be decided by the market stroke, the founders, the Elon Musks of this world, or by some more democratic process.

25:59David McWilliams: And he says right now, the direction in which AI is going in the West is being decided by a mixture of people who want to get really rich, who want to destroy the public sector through increased productivity, and who are accelerating the AI game because of a fear of China getting there first. So they are the first movers and they want to be protected. So you're essentially talking about Trump and the Trump administration, not just Trump himself, but the Trump administration. All the rich. Yeah, it's so in the pocket of the tech bros. And that in itself, in turn, is creating this culture war, as you're talking about between the current American administration and Europe.

26:46David McWilliams: And lots of other places as well. So the thing about the tech bros is interesting. If you look back to the Obama days, when those tech bros were younger men, they were all liberals. They were all Democrats. They were all on the LGBTQ train, right? Yeah. Then they flipped. Now, why did they flip? They flipped, A, because of money, but B, because another ideology became very current within the Silicon Valley nexus. And that ideology was probably most clearly manifest in an essay by Marc Andreessen, our chap who looks like an egg. So he's the leading voice in the optimistic view there. So I've just given you the Adamooglu's negative view.

27:35David McWilliams: Yeah. And now the optimistic view comes from Mark Andreessen, who released an essay in 2023 entitled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. And this serves as a sort of a movement's foundational text. It's kind of the Bible of Silicon Valley. And he frames technology as the glory of human ambition with deceleration and AI regulation framed as almost a moral crime against humanity. Right? Yeah. And this is the constituency that Henry Farrell is casting as the other side of a war. So it's a loose alliance of founders, VCs, people who go to Web Summit, economic bloggers, commentators, all of whom see steering AI as itself a danger.

28:22David McWilliams: Right. Now, into this comes The Economist magazine. so there are many people who see the economist magazine as over the last 10 years there's been a change at the top there and it used to be a liberal magazine which always cleaved to the liberal center basically believed in kind of common sense right didn't really take positions now I always thought it was very anti-european myself I thought it was actually very much part of the background noise that created Brexit. They would say never. But I always, it was very easy to blame my friends in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and the sort of the more rabid end of the Tory press for stirring up anti-EU sentiment.

29:13David McWilliams: But there was, and there is a column in The Economist called Charlemagne, which is the Brussels correspondence column. And the thing about The Economist is everyone's anonymous in The Economist. So nobody can actually be fingered for writing these articles. And I always felt that the Charlemagne, I'm going a bit of a side here, but the Charlemagne article did more to reinforce the city of London's pomposity when it came to the European Union than any article in the Telegraph. But that's a side. Right, you don't know who wrote that. No, I don't. I don't. If you're listening, by all means, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

29:53David McWilliams: right let's get Charlemagne on the pod right it'd be great to get on the pod but so this this is so the philosophical debate about technological progress right which is what we're talking about now I think the economist has gone over to the Silicon Valley side of this rather than the more democracy side Noah Smith as I said who's argued a lot that basically automation technology that's the way forward he is very very interesting. He basically says, look, if increasing the capital stock is deleterious to democracy, right, because it gives more money to the rich people who own the capital, then how do you explain that the capital stock in the United States has been rising for decades, like since the 1900s, at the same time civil rights, voting rights, special freedoms have all expanded.

30:51David McWilliams: So you can't just say that the more capital, the more repression. He says, hold on a second, the evidence is the opposite. And I happen to agree with that. I think the evidence is the opposite. Yeah, but it's the inequality, though, that has grown. The disparity between the rich and poor has grown enormously. And that's the Adamoglu view. So it's all, they're all kind of splitting the hairs here, John. They're all splitting the hairs, right? But what is interesting is, lining up on one side are Elon Musk, Sam Alfman, your friend and mine, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel described critics of AI as legionnaires of the Antichrist.

31:32David McWilliams: Yeah. Okay. Now, of course, Peter Thiel financed J.D. Vance. Yeah. And Kushner and Besant participate in his exclusive retreat called Dialogue, dialogue, which apparently was going to be up in Enniskerry a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. In Paris court somewhere. So Thiel's whole idea is, and I'm persuaded a little bit by this thesis, right? Yeah. He's got a thesis on stagnation, and he basically says that in the 1970s, people wanted flying cars, and we got 140 characters, i.e. we wanted, in the 50s, we thought we could have flying cars, and what have we got? We got fucking Twitter, right?

32:11Yeah, yeah.

32:12David McWilliams: And his long-standing argument, John, is we have been technologically stagnant since the 1970s. Little bits of the internet here and there, but real technological advancing, like we saw in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, has gone off the table. And the reason he believes it is because we have gone soft on technology and we have allowed lawyers to run the world. We have allowed people who say no rather than people who say yes to run the world. and our political systems have led to gridlock. So when somebody says, build a train, build a high-speed this, rather than listening to the technologists and the engineers, we listen to the lawyers and the defenders of the status quo.

32:55And his view is the status quo rewards a drone class,

33:00David McWilliams: not a technologically advanced class. And it's the drone class who basically have the society by the balls, right? Right. Now, that is, John, that is the culture war, right? Yeah, yeah. And this is what's playing out at the moment. And I find it really fascinating. Yeah, it is fascinating and complex. But having said all that, like, as you mentioned earlier on, we have been here before many, many times. Every time there's a leap in technology, whether it's the printing press or the Industrial Revolution or whatever, there's always the initial technologists who make all the gains. And there are the usurped employees or whatever who fall away and get all the struggle.

33:52And then it takes time for society to kind of catch up and it all to even out again. But it's the transition that's really painful and not always fair. So we've been through this cycle before. This feels slightly different insofar as, you know, you spoke about democracy and all the rest. This feels slightly different because AI in itself can distort and disrupt the very democracy that would apply the regulation and management and steering, as you say. So, question is... Big question. Big question. Where do you think we're heading? How do you think this is all going to pan out? But hang on a second.

34:33Before you answer that, let's do a bit of this.

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36:21Okay, Mac. In short, where do you think we're heading? How do you think this is all going to pan out?

36:27David McWilliams: John, you know what? I have an image in my head. You know who invented the wheel? The Sumerians. Yeah. So I have an image in my head of the fellas who invented the wheel versus the fellas who carried things for a living. Right? Right. The fellas who carried things for a living. They had a very good gig. he could carry stuff he had a lot of slaves who carried things and they were valuable and then some fella comes to this freaking thing this roadie thing and says look man see this wheel thing if we put an axle in the middle of it do you know what we can move things so I've always thought that you're absolutely right that technology always has winners and losers and all that sort of stuff and I mean you know I just I quite like it's the sort of sort of life of Brian way the way my mind thinks it's the sort of Monty Python Down with that sort of stuff.

37:12David McWilliams: Down with the wheel and things like that. But I'll come back to one of my favourite economists, J.M. Keynes, who wrote a very interesting piece in 1930 called Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren. And he coined this term technological unemployment. And he warned of the joblessness that might come from labour saving efficiencies. He said that basically, what are we going to do? He said in the long term, we'd have like a 15-hour working week. We would be much richer than we were. previously. We'd be out fishing. All of which is true, but his big idea was, what are we going to do? Yeah. What is the purpose of life?

37:50David McWilliams: If your purpose, your work is taken away from you. So that's one way of looking at it. The Industrial Revolution, of course, had the Luddites and all these various people, all of whom were defending themselves naturally. And of course, in the 1950s and 60s, nuclear power was the AI of its time, because nuclear power was going to solve all our problems until it didn't. And my sense as a wishy-washy centrist, John, is to misquote, as I always do, Moussy Tung, who was allegedly, when asked, I bet you now, lots of people say it wasn't Moussy Tung who said this at all, when asked, what do you think of the French Revolution?

38:29David McWilliams: He said, it's far too early to tell. I think we need to stand back. I think there's merits in both arguments. I think my heart goes with the democracy arguments. I think my head is also persuaded a bit by the stagnation argument that we do need to move forward. But what I will end is that luckily, John, at Kilkenomics we will be discussing this with people who know what they're talking about. Henry Farrell being one of them, John. That'd be great. I'm looking forward to that. That'll be really interesting. I think what we'll do is we will leave it there. I will be the wishy-washy I can't believe you didn't take sides on this, Mike Williams.

39:08David McWilliams: What class of Egypt are you? And I will say, if you want to talk more AI, we have Corry Doctorow, who believes it will lead to even worse in shittification of everything. Yeah. And we have some AI, I wouldn't say evangelists, but people like Des Treanor, who sold his big company recently, Intercom, then became an AI company, Finn. So we'll have a lot of people who know a lot more than you and I, about it and we will listen to them at Kilconomics.com. In the meantime, Mac, I'm going out to burn the place down. Burn the place down, pitchforks! Pitchforks! Talk to you next week.

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