At the economic level, what is the economic logic of AI? To what extent and at what pace will it affect the economy?
Thomas Sargent, the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Economics and New York University Economics Professor, had a Dialogue with SFC journalist recently. He thinks the economic logic of AI is simple. "It's like getting a machine to do things that people don't like to do or don't do that well. And more and more it's doing that."
"What pace is it going to be? No one knows," Sargent added. "People are trying to figure out still what it does well and what it doesn't do well. They're also trying to figure out how people can help it do the things it doesn't do well. That's going to create new jobs."
Sargent specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics and time series econometrics. As of 2020, he ranks as the 29th most-cited economist in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims for their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
