Nobel Economist Warns: AI WILL DESTROY Democracy | Aaron Bastani meets Daron Acemoglu

AGI agenda has essentially somehow convinced everybody that the best and only thing we can do is and the inevitable thing we can do with AI is just make it more and more humans so that it becomes better than humans. The tech industry was already moving in that direction with Microsoft, Google, Oracle becoming giants by selling tools of automation to companies and some of it is science fiction. Truly, I think the AI field has been so influenced by science fiction from its inception. And a staple of science fiction is machines that are just like humans and then take over and threaten humans. We've imagined that. We've been talking about that since the 1950s. And by willing it, we're making it closer to reality. [music] A criticism often thrown at economists is that they know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Now of course that's sometimes true. There are however exceptions. Some of the best conversations we've had here on Downstream have been with fascinating economists like Branco Milanovich and Joe Stiglets. Joe Stiglets of course won a Nobel Prize for economics. The first winner of that prize to appear on Navara Media. And today we have the second person coming on our show who's won that leading accolade. Branco Milanovich. Maybe his time will come as well. Daron Asamoglu has a new book out. What happened to a liberal democracy? Remaking a politics of shared prosperity. This is somebody unsurprisingly very comfortable with the numbers. I have to say though, it's very unusual to win a Nobel for economics, but also to have sold a million copies of a single book, Why Nations Failed. Unlike some people in that intellectual industry, Daron has a real hinterland. He's very good to question on the present political moment where we are historically and some of the great challenges we're looking at right now from demographic aging and China to Trump and AI. Hold on to your hats. This is going to be a fascinating conversation. Daron Asamoglo, welcome to Downstream. >> Thank you. That's great pleasure to be here. You are our second Nobel Prize winner. >> Very happy to be in that spot. >> In the field of economics, our first was Joe Stiglets. What was it like winning the Nobel Prize for economics? Was it a big deal? I mean, some people say >> it's a big deal. It's a big deal. I won't pretend it's not, but you know, it's it's okay. After a while, it sort of you forget about it. You have to get on. >> What did you do to celebrate? Oh. Uh, I was in Greece actually and so I had a dinner that evening with Joe Stiglas whom you mentioned. I mean, not with just Joe, but we were at a conference and >> so >> had a racky. [laughter] >> Not quite, but some wine. >> Oh, that's good. So, it doesn't it doesn't change how you're perceived, you think, by >> politicians, media outlets. I mean, you have a ton more credibility, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. I think politicians. I mean, I hope it doesn't change how I'm perceived in academia because I think academia flourishes on challenging each other's ideas. But yes, it definitely does. You know, prime ministers and presidents want to meet me. They didn't before. [laughter] >> It's a good thing to have in the email signature, isn't it? Uh, so we're talking today about your latest book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. >> I found it really interesting. >> Thank you. I found it really interesting partly because there's now a bunch of books in this space talking about the challenges of of liberalism from both the economic and social sides. Um I want to get straight into it >> please. >> When you say there's a crisis of liberal democracy what exactly do you mean? >> I think it has two dimensions. One is that what is foundational to the popularity of liberal democracy which is its ability to deliver material goods and services, shared prosperity which then translates into purchasing power but also dignity for workers and public services. Those have not been doing well. Inequality is up. But more jarring than inequality in many advanced economies, especially in the United States, we've seen the bottom half not benefit from economic growth at all and in the United States actually lose ground in real terms while other people's fortunes multiply. So that's very much in contradiction to what liberalism [snorts] promised if the society was organized around its principles. And then none of these are perfect. Of course, no society will ever be completely faithful to any principle of organization. But but liberal democracy as an institutionalization of certain liberal ideas especially led by social democracy or new deliberalism in the United States delivered on many of these promises and they have fallen far flat. But the second aspect is more sort of intangible. There is a general feeling among many of the populations that establishment politics doesn't work. liberal ideas are out of fashion. Democracy is not what it was supposed to be or it's not even our future. And that I think is as damaging because democracy as I said of institutions deeply depends on the trust of the people and on legitimacy that comes from bottom up and that's what we're losing. And sometimes people think, oh, that's just because of social media or because of, you know, right-wing provocators who are uh exploiting wedge issues. Of course, they are, but I think it's an internal weakness of liberal democratic institutions in what I see in post-industrial society that is to blame. >> So, Adrien Waldridge, who is now at Bloomberg, who's at the Economist for I think 30 years, poor man. We'll talk about the economist more in a minute. He has a a book out at the moment which kind of covers similar ground and he talks about the failures of double liberalism. Liberalism on the social side that was perceived to be excessive and then economic liberalism i.e. the Thatcher Reagan revolution. Is that kind of a is that a set of parameters you agree with? >> I know I have to make a confession. I haven't had time to read his book. It's on my shelf, but it came out, I think, after mine or around the same time. So, it's been pretty intense since then. So, I'm I'm going to read it. But I think it's too simple to blame either just neoliberalism for the current economic problems that we're having, including inequality. Obviously some of that has contributed but it's just too simple a diagnosis and it's obviously in my opinion too too naive to say oh it's social liberalism because that was actually the engine that brought us a lot of progress including you know emancipation of women uh inclusion of lower strata uh much better sort of uh efforts to deal with discrimination and other deep inequality qualities in society while at the same time also defending individual liberty. Now I argue in the book that a big mistake that liberalism of the last half century has made has been to sideline community and we can talk more about that but I don't think that is a consequence of social liberalism in any sense and I I don't know exactly what Adrien Woolrich means by that term but that idea for example was floated or developed to some extent by the conservative thinker Patrick Denan the sorry I never pronounced his name correctly. Uh you know arguing that [clears throat] liberalism has failed because its ideas from the beginning were doomed to failure because they were challenging authority and established traditions. And I I I don't think that's right. So I think Patrick Denine or maybe even Adrien Waldridge would say liberalism, social liberalism worked and it wasn't excessive so long as it remained to some extent attached to a sort of Christian or religious inheritance. That's what they would say. >> Well, I'm I'm not sure whether Patrick Denin would say that, but yes. >> Well, he I he wouldn't put it in he wouldn't formulate it in those terms, right? He would say that as long as there was still the remnant of a Judeo-Christian sort of tradition that actually you could still you know, you could still have a kind of relatively solidaristic communitarian politics even if it called itself liberal. That's what he would say, I'd imagine. >> Where do you sit on that? And he would say, the further we've gone into secular secularism, the further we've gone into a postreligious f postfaith age, the more actually we get the essence of liberalism and the uglier it becomes. >> Yeah, I think that's what that that's that's closer to what he's saying. Yes, the essence of liberalism. Yeah, I completely reject that emphasis on the fundamentalism, the fundamental synergy between Judeo-Christianism and and and liberal ideas. Of course, there were some liberal thinkers who were influenced by the Christian religion, but I don't think it's a religious project and I don't think religion is the only or the main moderating influence. That being said, I do think that one mistake that liberal democratic movements and institutions have made is in sidelining religion, but for a different reason. Not because we need Judeo-Christian ethics to make liberty work, but because that took the form of top- down intervention in the self-organizing, self-governing nature of some communities. I think that is the place where we have to look for excesses. Again going back to Denine and maybe an Adrian as well, they would then reply with the liberalism we have today often doesn't have let's let's call it woke politics. I don't like that formulation but again Patrick Denine would certainly say that uh is often incapable of forgiveness doesn't understand an idea of repentance and has moved away from what was absolutely a quintessential liberal idea which was universalism. >> Yes. increasingly have an identity politics where people rarify identity and actually the thing that is sacrosanked is what makes you different to somebody else rather than what you share through a common humanity. What what would you say to that? So that's a liberalism completely detached from the religious inheritance and that's why we end up in this very atomized place we are today. Well, I mean I think first of all uh [clears throat] the one place where I differ from standard liberal thinking is that I don't think universalism has to be a defining characteristic of liberal societies. It's a very delicate issue because it is inevitable that liberal ideas elevate respect for other human beings and I think that's absolutely to be celebrated. But you also need people to come together around some shared issues, preoccupations, and some community structures. And that might and typically does necessitate caring more about your community than somebody thousands of miles away. So we sort of push universalism too far when we don't recognize that and then we start undermining the communitarian foundations of liberal democracy. M >> so for instance uh in the in the US the left I mean now everybody sort of accepts that uh made a mistake by both strategic and tactical but but also I think a philosophical mistake by saying well the only justifiable stance when it comes to immigration is open borders but no you cannot have open borders and be a nation and if you're not a nation you're not going to be self-governing and if you're not self-governing you're going to lose all of the good things about liberal democracy Let's stick with community for a second because I think it's a great answer. I mean, I I believe in universalism, but I al often think it can be sort of used and abused for quite um ambiguous and ultimately meaningless politics. What does what does community mean for you? Uh because it's mentioned very often in the book, but again can be quite a loose term. Yeah, it is a loose term and uh uh it is defined more by what brings people together at a particular time. But I see for example the labor movement as a community. So in its heyday, trade unions created an identity for working people around which they could communicate, organize, share values, share objectives, create solidarity. Neighborhoods are a community because that defines often the cultural values as well as the interests and creates room for individuals to participate in political and social life in a way that could shape their uh their public affairs. But also academic life creates communities. So they could be communities could be not necessarily historical. They could be brought together by interests or specialization. But they are fundamentally about trust, shared values, some shared traditions and solidarity. And I think solidarity is really important. What the center left has less lost in some sense is solidarity. But it has also been a an important weakening of solidarity at the national level that makes it so hard to govern many of these societies right now including the UK, including the US. >> I mean that term community is just used so much by politicians certainly in the UK. >> I know. I know. I I wish I wish I wrote this before they started using it. Oh, I think for me anyway, certainly in the UK in the last 10-15 years, they've been using it a lot and I've certainly seen a rise of its sort of deployment with digital media and social media. And for me, it's almost always used in a completely meaningless way. So, I agree with the the the the forms of community you just mentioned, obviously, geography, vocational, maybe ideological, historic, but you know, sometimes people will say to me, Aaron, as a [clears throat] member of the British Iranian community, >> right? And you know, I remember talking about this with my dad once and he said, "We us Iranians, we don't have a community. We all hate each other." [laughter] >> Right? You hate community. >> But you see, that's the difference. If if indeed all British Iranians are scattered throughout Britain and they don't see much in common with them, that's not a community. If on the other hand they all live in a particular neighborhood, they send their children to similar schools, they go and pray together, >> they have common memories, then that's a community. Well, I think in Bournemouth they probably went to the bookmakers and the casinos. [laughter] >> That's fine. Gambling communities are completely fine >> about praying together. But so this is why I say that because I think with the emergence of digital media that kind of rhetoric is is is used far more frequently. >> And also I just I reject digital communities not because they are impossible. I think that could have been a very interesting pathway for online communication and social media to create digital communities but we haven't done so. We've created very superficial uh alternatives to true community, to true trust, true solidarity. Who has solidarity with whom on social media? I couldn't agree more. >> Good. But >> we found something to agree on. >> Well, no, there's much there's [laughter] no there's much to agree on, but you know, I say this a lot to sort of I'm getting older now. I'm 42, so I'm not old, but I'm not young either. And so I say you're very young. >> I'm very I am very young. But when I speak to people who don't actually know they're young, but they are young, um, you know, I say, "Look, you can talk about community, but if you don't know people in your neighborhood, you're not doing politics." >> Right. Exactly. No, that's not you're not doing politics. >> Well, look, okay, so let's go one step deeper. So here is my a chain of claims that are developed in in the book. All of the promises of liberalism in terms of individual freedom, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, they are meaningless unless you marry them with self-government. Because most of the things that matter to us unless you're a hyper hyper individualist take the form of our social interactions. So you cannot say oh well you're free to have any thoughts you want and say anything you want but you have no way of influencing your uh how you live your life because how you live your life is a social thing. So that's why liberalism needs democracy and it needs self-government. But self-government in a society that has 100 million 200 million people at the national level is just almost impossible. So it has to start at the local level. You have to have self-government in your communities that are self-organized. You have to have lo uh uh self-government in your neighborhoods or the the political units. Some of them are arbitrary. Fine. But so so that so be that as it may, we have to start from that bottom up and create some sort of shared politics of self-government that way. I hope you're enjoying this conversation on downstream. We love talking about the big issues. Importantly, we sometimes exist in the real world. We have downstream IRLs. We have one such conversation happening at Earth Theater in Hackne tomorrow, Monday with Katherine Yu, Ash Sarat, Darren McGavi, and myself. We're talking about trauma. Trauma as a personal brand, how's it used, the political meaning of it, what goes right, what goes wrong. I think this is going to be so fascinating. We have some tickets left. If you want to join us tomorrow in Hackne, and I'm sure you do if you're free in London, click the link in the description below. Hope to see you there. I want to move to something The Economist wrote about you recently. >> Oh my. Okay. >> And I I don't read The Economist that much anymore. Good. >> Good. Good. [laughter] You're in good company. >> Um [snorts] but I have to say, you know, I still keep a keep an eye on it. We've had some people from the Economists on Navara over the years, not on this show, but you know, some of their some of their writers. Um there was an article about you which was just profoundly strange. It was an op-ed. >> Um it was at the same time as they reviewed your book. Yes. >> We'll talk about that in a minute. So this is the quote. It's it's not long but it's you know it's it's it's a good paragraph. Mr. Asimoglo is only 58 years old. There you go. You're young. But for some time he has been the discipline's colossus. He has written seven books including a new one about democracy and the economic impact of artificial intelligence not counting a couple of popular textbooks. His hundreds of papers more than 10 of them published this year are often stuffed with complex mathematics. He competes with uh Andre Schlifer of Harvard University for a top spot on a citation ranking of economists produced by ideas rep a research database. His views carry weight with other wonks and the media. Give economists a few drinks, however. I mean, when did this become journalism? Give give I'll give you a drink and then you can slag this guy off. Give economists a few drinks, however, and some will venture their true opinions about this giant. quote, "Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed," blasts one economist. "How do you respond to that?" >> I think by populist policies, they mean like the government actually existing, [laughter] [gasps] but uh seriously, I mean, I don't I don't think I need to respond to it. It's It's just ridiculous. I I mean uh I welcome a hit piece if it's intellectually engaging with ideas, but this was this was not doing that. And curiously, I think what's strange about it isn't that the economist is taking aim at me. I think there are I don't know for sure, and I don't want to get into conspiracy theories, but there there there are probably reasons a lot related to AI why they don't like what I've been saying for the last 10 years. But but I think the the way this was done is very shoddy and and sorry I don't even believe them on the let's talk to uh some economists over drinks and they'll express their true opinions. Why? Because actually the the two names that they cite, they've both come out in social media and they said the economist hasn't actually spoken to us. So I don't know what kind of reporting they're doing. I don't know what they're up to. >> They did give you a right of reply, which is good. I won't go through all of it, but this final sentence is important. And this is what you said in your own words. It is hard not to interpret this, their original reporting or oped as a strategic framing intended to obiscate the message of my book and bring it to the economist's favorite topic of defending and boosting AI. You just said that as well a moment ago. Why are they trying to generate so much consent for AI, do you think? >> I I don't know. Because I know actually the different dimension of polarization we are experiencing in the world today are are hard to understand even for somebody who's been trying to work on on polarization and liberal democracy and so on. But AI which is a technical matter and a very important one has become an ideological litmus test on both sides. I mean I uh I find myself slightly closer to the left side. But on both sides of the spectrum, it has become a litmos test. If you are critical of AI, there is a group of economists, technologists, public commentators who think you're much worse than lites. And by the way, ladites are often misinterpreted. That's a different story. Uh [clears throat] and the economist is is one of the most vocal voices there. They haven't seen anything about AI that they don't like. Uh and and on the left for a long time, I think it's starting to change. If you say anything that's different than AI's stoastic parrot, you're like, "Oh, no." You're you're like out to lunch or something. So I think both of those polls are unproductive and anything that becomes a litmus test like this is not going to lead to great debate. I I actually believe AI is a transformative technology but it's being massively massively misdirected at the moment and on its current path we're going to get disappointing productivity returns. the promises are not going to be realized, but we're going to get horrendous social outcomes from it. And that I think is a a message that sometimes is bothersome to some people. The horrendous social outcomes thing. So, this is something I've really tried to impress on our audience, which is even if you don't believe in the kind of existential risk or, you know, the matrix and the Terminator, what it's going to do to wage compression, regional inequality is just extraordinary. Is there a is there a conscious strategy do you think by the likes of Sam Alman at Al to focus on the existential risk so we don't talk about the more meaningful stuff when it comes to rising inequality and wage compression for people who aren't you know the top five or two or 3% of >> I I don't know whether it's a strategic decision but it does have it did have that effect for quite a while. So I've been writing on AI and the the dangers that automation poses which by the way is only part of the dangers of AI and I'll mention one more thing after that for for for more than 10 years now and yeah that kind of discussion was for a long time drowned by existential risk or or just like uh refusing to even admit that AI could create job losses or inequality. So now it's finally sort of out in there and there's it's becoming more of a discussion topic. I think that's that's healthy. Uh but every now and then again Dario Amade or Sam Alman or Elon Musk makes a statement and that sort of drowns the rest of the discussion. But let me actually say it's not just job loss. Job loss has been my research topic. Inequality has been my research topic especially in the context of AI. But the way that AI is being developed as a centralizing technology is also troubling. So I think the promise of digital technologies from the beginning was that they would enable decentralization. Early computer enthusiasts and scientists thought that even the IBMs of the day in the 1960s were just the antichrist because they were like a bureaucratic organization and then the personal computers and and better improvements improved digital technologies would create much greater decentralization and IBM's gone but we first replaced it by Microsoft and Oracle which were like huge and much more powerful then Google that's much more powerful than Facebook that controls uh control for a while the way that we communicated and the way that we formed our social networks and and and and relations and now by Frontier AI labs that's going to repeat those same mistakes to at an amplified level. >> You said Elon Musk, Sam Alolman, what do you think of these people? What do you think of Elon Musk? I mean I've I've seen him once in the flesh and he struck me as quite a crazy person literally. I mean, as in as in um >> he wasn't making sense. >> I I've never seen Elon Musk in the flesh. And it's hard for me to pass judgment on his entrepreneurship because, you know, he obviously has a good instinct, but he's been at the right place at the right time. But over the last few years as a public persona, he's been deeply, deeply, deeply troublesome. And uh and and I think it is emblematic of a deeper trend which is when you empower people without any counterveailing mechanisms. They are not subject to competition. They're not subject to regulation. They're not subject to democratic oversight. They become increasingly hubristic. So Elon Musk is the victim of his own hubris. I mean, you may or may not agree he's a good entrepreneur. As I said, I don't have a strong opinion on that. But even if he's a brilliant entrepreneur, what makes you think that he should be the decider of our social issues of what how we should vote and how we should organize uh our politics and which extreme right-wing movement should get more support and and and that's the one thing that's a little bit of the saving grace of the AI frontier labs at the moment is that there are a little bit more there's a little bit more competition. So, so it's not like they're becoming as powerful as Elon Musk, but there is great a great degree of hubris there as well. >> Where do you think it's going to end? Because you you're saying there's no sort of counterveailing pressures against him. The guy's some days he's a trillionaire. You know, some I think if you go on the sort of Forbes real time billionaire list, it's kind of maybe 930, you know, billion dollars today or something. >> Um, but he's a trillionaire. When I was growing up, the idea of a trillionaire was just outrageous. >> Ridiculous. Yes. Yes. >> But it's happened and clearly the things you described in this book, what we've experienced over the last 15 years is that there are ever greater returns to capital rather than labor. He's just going to get richer. Ordinary people are just going to get comparatively poorer. So what if we don't sort of intervene in that process and through regulation or or whatever, where does it end up, do you think? >> Well, I think uh I don't know the answer to that. And I and and I think part of the reason why I don't know is obviously there's huge uncertainty but part of the reason is because it depends on our decisions. So if we just rewind the clock back 25 years or 30 years, if we set up regulation that prevented excessive corporate power, if we and now here we mean like the American government, uh I've never been part of it, nor do I have any interest in being, but let's me use the royal we there. Uh if we enforced the antirust, anti- monopoly statutes that were on the books and if we actually take taxed the incomes at some progressive reasonable rate rather than just give a pass to all capital income and especially the billionaires and trillionaires capital income, we would not be here. So some of those are easy to reverse. We can change the income tax. We can definitely I mean we don't even need new laws for antitrust because the laws are in the books. It's just we do not enforce them and we of course need new regulations. But some of it is going to be very difficult to reverse unless you have wealth taxes. That's why I think wealth taxes are back in the agenda. And uh and I [snorts and clears throat] personally don't think that the most efficient form of taxation is wealth taxes. I think income taxes that are progressive would do a better job. But we've let inequality get so out of hand that I think at this point we do need wealth taxes. >> I did a debate recently with Arthur Lafer. >> Oh yeah, he's a very interesting person. I've met him. Yes. >> Yeah. He's 86. >> Yeah, I know. >> And boy, he looks good for 86. Um, and it was an interesting moment because, you know, we were speaking, we had a debate over a wealth tax. And I asked him a question which I'll pose to you now. Where is the center right in all of this? Because right now in Britain, we have what's called the 100,000 tax trap. If you earn between 100,000 and 125,000, your effective tax rate is 60%. Believe it or not, um, plus you lose a bunch of benefits. So the center right is happy for a school headmaster or a NHS consultant to be paying an effective tax rate of 60% on a certain part of their income. But they don't think we should be taxing billionaires. >> And I'm saying but these are your people. This is the this is the sociological backbone. >> I think I think if you look at the center right voter base, they would be quite happy with progressive taxes. The problem is it gets mired in silly discussions of socialism and and other things that then gets exploited. Look right now and this is a very important part of the book. Who votes for the center right or who votes for the right more broadly? Because you know is the Republican party center right or hard right? Yeah, we can have a debate on that. Uh it's the working class. people without college working in manual jobs or customer service facing jobs plus some tech billionaires but even the majority of the tech employees vote for Democrats. So the base of the Republican party wants jobs, wants minimum wages, wants high wages, wants public services, and doesn't like the billionaires that much. But the debate has sort of got stuck in sort of somehow dividing that base. And that's why I think there is a way forward where [clears throat] the working class would come into the fold of a movement that aims to create a fairer society. >> Let's go back to one of the core parts of the book because this is, you know, this is where you spend a lot of time. this idea that de-industrialization is a central catalyst for undermining liberalism. And when we say liberalism for a UK audience, people are thinking JS Mill and John Lock, which you do talk about that stuff, but you also mean basically sort of >> social democracy. Yes. >> Yeah. 20th century social social democracy, which they are aware of, but it's a slightly more American coded way of talking about things. >> You say that. >> But on the other hand, I I I do know that. But let me actually add that the American usage is better. In general, it's not. Americans invent lots of weird terms, but on this one it's better because actually the promise of the liberal ideas all mill does require left liberalism does require something like social democracy which Mill by the way himself later on realized >> and the institutions that got formed in much of the advanced industrialized nations in the 20th century were led by center-left parties. So liberalism actually as sort of left liberalism anyway as coinciding with social democracy makes a lot of sense. >> Well, it certainly did in this country until until really the first world war. I mean, you talk about William Beverage and so on, but you know, the liberal governments of the early 20th century laid a lot of the foundations for absolutely what we think of as the postwar welfare state. So you said that de-industrialization is central to the demise of liberalism and you write quote postindustrial society undermined liberalism. What does that mean? >> Well, I mean I think uh in two ways post-industrial society created deep challenges for liberalism that liberal establishment, liberalism as a philosophy and liberal activists didn't rise up to. The first one is that shared prosperity, which I mentioned already, had a very natural pathway in an industrial society, especially once you had democratic government and a trade union movement. Companies when they invested, when they innovated, when they adopted new technologies wanted to expand. And to expand they needed labor. They needed all kinds of labor. technicians, all sorts of blue collar workers, clerical workers, engineers, managers, HR, everything. The only way they could get them was to pay higher wages. You see that in the UK, you see that in Europe, you see that in the in the United States. There was a real hunger to get workers. And that's the most powerful way of creating shared prosperity via wage growth. I know of no example of true shared prosperity that has gone on for anything more than a few years which doesn't is not based on sh wage growth. Postindustrial economics changed that with digital technologies and globalization. Now you could expand your business while at the same time laying off workers because you were either automating them or you were offshoring them somewhere else. [snorts] So that was one aspect of the increase in inequality. There were other aspects to increase inequality. who again rooted in digital technologies. But that's the first challenge and post-industrial politicians and intellectual elites didn't rise up to that challenge. Uh early on in the post-industrial age in the 1970s, the Democratic Party in the United States, for example, completely changed its identity. Uh this is like the Atari Democrats and so on where it's like, oh, you know, all of all the solution to all of our problems is tech. and they turned their back and they said, "Oh, minimum wages, unions, and uh trade protection, those are just uh retrograde ideas, but they didn't replace them with anything other than optimistically hoping that technology is going to lift us all up, which obviously it didn't. The second is the change in the nature of politics and social status. Post-industrial dynamics [clears throat] elevated the college educated especially the college educated in urban areas became politically very active much higher social status because their economic standing was improving and their numbers rose. what I mentioned a second ago like the working class migrating from [clears throat] the center left like the Labor party to the conservatives and to reform in the United Kingdom or from Democrats to Republicans or from social democrats to other parts of the political spectrum that's part of that post-industrial dynamics and it is indicative of a broader change that early liberal democracy came from opposition. So it had to form broad coalitions. You see that very clearly with the New Deal coalition that uh Roosevelt formed. You see that even more clearly with the social democracy as it emerged in the Scandinavian countries in Denmark, Sweden and then Norway where you had to uh first bring the middle classes and the working class together then you have to bring the farmers in and then you have to to make uh some sort of compromise with businesses. So all of that broad coalition was very important for voice and was very important for moderating certain aspects of politics and that was lost and you know you mentioned earlier on walk politics I I don't like that term because you know I think just you know the walk is a strange notion but I'll call that cultural politics. I think you have to think of cultural politics as an outcome of this process. It's not the problem I think isn't that some cultural issues are part of politics. Of course they have to be in a heterogeneous society in a society that has discrimination in a society that has very unequal distribution of opportunity. We have to talk about some cultural issues. The problem has been the way that was approached and this is again coming back to community. So you have to start from a bottom up process of building compromises rather than a top down imposition of values because otherwise you're going to completely contradict the commitment to self-government. And once you do that, it's going to generate both backlash and grievances. on the on the coalition building. Why is why is the professional managerial class so completely incapable of building broader coalitions around it now? So the sort of the educated university educated middle class in the mid 20th century was very comfortable with doing that. I mean I know you're saying it's partly it's partly community >> but if you look at the Labour party after 1945 there were many people who were from the upper echelons of society. At the same time you had cabinet ministers like N Beavenon who a collery worker you had um the defense secretary Ernest Beavenon was a transport driver. Exactly. No. >> Incredible. So that coalition is there and clearly you know we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We know that's the kind of coalition you need. >> Um you go further forward. >> I mean if you know that I think Barbara you've I've I've uh I've achieved what I wanted. I mean that is that is the that is the main message of my book. >> Sure. But the the the professional managerial class today >> doesn't accept that. >> Well, refuses to work with people who marginally disagree on this or that issue. They can agree on 80% of a political agenda. If you disagree on that 20%, we don't that's exactly I mean you put it extremely well. That's exactly what I'm talking about. And I think there are two reasons for it that are both quite natural to understand. One is that during this process we have also seen what you've called the managerial class but it's broader than that because it includes people like us academics and public intellectuals and journalists. We've started living apart from the rest. So the n the midentury or half of the first half of the 20th century neighborhoods were mixed, social networks were mixed, community activities were mixed, firms were mixed, big firms were the melting pot, marriages were mixed. All of those have become separated. It's very rare to see neighborhoods that mix postgraduates and and high school dropouts. It's very rare to see social networks that mix them. It's also very rare to see firms that mix them. If they do, they outsource the jobs so that the the the the custodial or janitorial stuff are not actually really part of the firm. It's very rare to see marriages like that. [snorts] So that created a lack of empathy, lack of understanding between the two groups both ways. It's not just one way, both ways. But in [snorts] surveys, I don't know how reliable those are. Those are not my surveys, but in surveys, it's very interesting. Both in Europe and the United States, it looks like if you ask the educated college educated groups, they have much less sympathy for [cough and clears throat] uh lower education segments of society than other disadvantaged groups. So there is this sort of alienation between the two groups. The second natural reason is tech. Tech from the very beginning started with the pretense that the world is both easy to quantifiably understand and control and the people who were at the forefront of technology were the right ones to have all the insights. So going back to Elon Musk, you know, at some level the fact that he thinks he knows the answer to every question better than anybody else is an aberration. But on the other hand, it's such a normal continuation of the tech trends. I'm looking for the statistic about towns, but we'll come back to it in a second. >> For me, this is the most illuminating part of the book, particularly where you talk about um the centrality of manufacturing and industry was an engine for bringing different kinds of people together. So, in a big workplace like General Motors, you would have the, you know, the mechanical engineers, you'd have the people on the factory floor, you'd have the accountants, you'd have the HR people, etc. very multiclass dynamics going on. Um, and those kinds of workplaces simply don't exist anymore. >> They don't. >> And so often when we think about de-industrialization, we think, oh well, we've lost, what have we lost? We've lost these big workplaces, highly gendered, partly true, highly gendered and heavily class-based with high class consciousness, blue collar workers. You're actually saying no. Some of that's true, of course, but these were extraordinary melting pots of people with different educational backgrounds, different aspirations, different ideological commitments >> and you understood the labor solidarity much better if you were part of those organizations. Today, it's very hard for the leaders of, you know, center-left parties in many countries to understand the labor movement because they've never even worked in a firm that has a labor movement. I hope you're enjoying this conversation. It is a real privilege to be able to do the show with people like Dana Smok, people who've won Nobel prizes and talk about the issues that matter to millions of people. I like to think of downstream and of course Navara media more widely as the anti-slop. There is so much slop online whether it be AI, social media or whatever. We're trying to build an alternative to that. If you're finding value in these kinds of conversations and the kind of work we're doing here at Navara but also with Downstream too. If you feel you've learned something, been enlightened by this conversation and others like it, why not support our work? Why not fight back against the deluge of slop? Uh, go to navar.dia/support. Help us build a new media for a different politics. Help us build content that takes on the slop industrial complex. You have um a great statistic here. I can't find it, but it's brilliant. Uh, and it's basically I think it's the share of national income by wages going to >> non-tropolitan towns. >> Yeah. >> And I think it's down from something like 20% in the 60s to 10%. I'm pretty sure that's it. >> And that to me again was a real eye opener. So industrialized midcentury economies not too globalized in that set of parameters towns were great places. >> They were for the supply chain. So the supply chain for example of the auto factories in Flint expanded all the way to the Midwest and beyond. And those cities, some of them had 300,000 inhabitants. 150,000 of them worked in auto related activities. They generated good jobs, high wages, solidarity, a real sense of community, and then they're all shut down now. They become ghost towns. Some of those jobs have gone to China, some of them have gone to Mexico. Many of them have gone to robots. >> It's the same in this country, you I think that's one of the the great sort of inversions of the last 50 years is that just before I was born in the 70s and 60s towns were great places to live like say high employment, high social capital, familiarity, you know, low crime. >> Um, you go with someone like Wigan, you know, a mining town or you might go, you know, it's a town. It's a large town, Middlesbrough. You had chemicals, you had arment production, you had all sorts of things or >> bits of the northeast, collery towns, great places to live, right? you had a good quality of life. Um, fast forward today, excuse my French, they're places to live often for the precise opposite reasons. Low social capital, low trust. >> It's actually deeper than that. uh my friend, colleague and co-author David Otter has a paper for the US which shows that if you look at major metropolitan areas so not the Wiggins and the uh Acron but but the even bigger cities they were a land of opportunity for low education workers. So if you went or if you were born in a place like New York or Boston or Chicago and you had low education, you still had high income, high social mobility, you earn much more than somebody in the smaller towns or the countryside. Today that's all completely seized. There's almost a penalty for being low skill in large urban areas which again emphasizes why urban educated spaces have become so alien to lower middle class or lower education workers and conversely why the managerial what you call the managerial class who lives in those places has lost touch with those communities. >> Yeah, this is really important. So Ezra Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, you know, they talk about New York. I think until about 2000, yes, it makes a lot of sense if you're a financial analyst or a lawyer to move to New York City, but also if you want to be a janitor, there's actually still a net win in terms of utility for you. That stops. >> That stopped. >> So towns were great places for working people to live, but so were cities until about 25 30 years ago. >> Exactly. Uh yeah, I think it starts a little earlier than that, but yes. Yes. Absolutely. Another part of the book which again I think was revelatory. I don't want to be over the top. I think >> oh please do [laughter] because it's stuff that you you sort of intuitively know but you're putting a lot of data to it which I find really interesting is this idea of um graduates and their relationship to professional managerial class or or or post-industrial middle class politics. >> In this country after 2010 we have tuition fees tripled. >> Yeah. >> Um student debt becomes a thing a bit more like what it is in the United States. we have a housing crisis like the US do and people start talking about this figure of the graduate without a future right and I think it's probably more evident in the US because there's a bit more growth in the US but you're saying hold on there are [clears throat] lots of those people there are lots of graduates without a future but there are also lots of graduates with a future >> exactly absolutely >> and actually you guys don't share material economic interests >> but you think you should be in the same political coalition which creates >> problems and that's that's where cultural politics comes So those and it's a simplification of course it's a continuum not a biodal distribution but there is very little economic common interest between the different parts of the college educated segment. But culturally because of these separations that I have talked about as well as the fact that for good reason university imparts a set of universalistic more progressive but also more cosmopolitan values. They have a lot in common culturally. That's why very curiously still the case by the way despite Peter the Elon Musk and so on Silicon Valley is heavily democratic. So it is interesting to see how some of those tech barons have now fallen behind Trump but the tech sector as a whole is still leaning democratic because of these cultural issues. >> Yeah, there are some specific numbers about occupy which I've not seen before. So you talk about Occupy Wall Street. I don't know if this is the whole of the US or just the Zucati Park. >> Very very Yeah, that's the Zakoti Park. >> Yeah. So 92% of the participants were college educated and I think you say that 50% or more were earning less than $25,000 a year. So it's very fair to say this was a working-class movement. Exactly. Right. Uh of course many of the sort of skeptics and cynics at the time weren't weren't saying that. Um and yet, you know, fast forward to today and it feels like we've lost a lot of that. Let me offer you a >> Yeah, I mean I think that's very important because uh you know I think the occupy had a lot of energy and was talking about some of the important issues but it did not unite. It didn't coales into a movement that formed broad coalitions. I think that's where we should think more. >> So this brings to mind something that happened in the UK you know what's this now? 16 years ago, 15 years ago, we had a student movement which emerges in response to tripling of tuition fees. This idea of the graduate without a future. I specifically remember a protest in 2011 which went to the city of London, not Westminster, and there had been lots of organizing with construction workers. There's a big construction company in this country called Balfabbei and they were trying to reconfigure the contracts for electricians, plumbers, all sorts of things. they'd been on strike and there had been loads of two and fro organizing helping to get you know um strike funds etc. And this really sticks in my mind as young people, kids as I would call them now, are walking to the city of London, there are about 50 60 BS on scaffolding, chewing them on, going, "Go on." Right? The complete opposite would happen today. They'd be calling them communists, student scum, wasters, get a job, soap dodgers. And I think, Christ, what do we get wrong to go from that to that in 16 years? But but but but both of those have coexisted for quite a while. So in the United States for example, I think the same as in the UK, you had periods in which progressive college students and the labor movement form coalitions. But during the Vietnam War, they were at loggerheads. So the Vietnam War was the first time where you saw a huge public rift between college students and the labor movement. And I think it was partly about cultural issues, but it was also partly about political mismanagement that the two groups didn't sort of speak to each other appropriately, which gets us to this concept which you talk about in the book of postindustrial social engineering. Now, you're very clear all societies to some extent have social engineering of some kind, but specifically with that sequence of words, post-industrial social engineering, what are you trying to get at in the book? >> So, I mean, social engineering is the term I use for describing top- down imposition of values, including how you can speak, how you should behave, but also what you should believe. And in some sense my thinking on this is most influenced by George Orwell which I mean his his description I think captured really the essence of social engineering in 1984. And you see that in different forms in every society from the medieval ones to Islamic ones to China to Russia. But liberal society is not immune. Liberal society does need to create some shared values. It needs to inculcate some notion of civic duty. But the question that's very important is that by its nature, by its commitments, liberal society cannot do that from top down. it has to sort of find a bridge between some amount of guidance from let's say education system but then try to convince people by forming compromises and so on [snorts] and I think these dynamics that we've talked about the ascendance of the college educated the fact that culture became the one topic that brought the college graduates together and the difficulty of some of the cultural issues facing the UK the US France and so on all together created an urge and it's a was a well-meaning urge to try to solve some deep discrimination problems and and and other problems. But in a in a in a haste and this is where not having a broad coalition was a big failure. In a haste uh activist groups and organizations started using much more of a top- down way of imposing those values. [snorts] And what's really different and that's a very very important difference between post-industrial [clears throat] social engineering and say social engineering all 1984 or the Catholic Church is that it wasn't the state or some other organization like the Catholic Church merged with the state. It was more of a sort of organizations, universities, schools, activist groups. The great thing about that was that it wasn't forceful. So, it wasn't the threat of violence. There was never any violence. There was never any even threat of, you know, we're going to beat you up if you don't use the right language. But still, it was felt as a top- down imposition. But because it wasn't based by violence, it also created much greater backlash. And once that backlash started or even before it started, then we had two things. One is a group of right-wing provocators who saw this and started exploiting it driving a bigger and bigger wedge between the working class and center-left parties. And then that was quickly followed and that the timing is important. It wasn't from the beginning but it was followed by social media. And I'm saying that because, you know, you see this exactly the strategy in the talk show hosts and Rush Limbo and people like that way before social media, but social media just made that so much worse. And it's really in some sense this problem of losing the working class is something that we have to blame ourselves as the center left and the liberal democratic coalition. But not just ourselves. It was really accelerated by social media and right-wing provocators, but it's still on us to reverse it. >> There was a great formulation about this what we call social engineering, um, post-industrial social engineering. You're saying it's not exercised by the state or or by a an apparatus with, you know, a monopoly on coercion. Somebody referred to it as the wiki, >> which [laughter] I love that. >> I quite like this. The wiki star. >> I had not heard of it. Had I heard of that, I would have used it. you know, you're you're policing everybody else, but you don't even being paid to do it. You know, it's all it's all for free. It's open source. >> Um, >> and you know, another quote here you've got is social engineering begets social engineering. So, what you what do you mean by that? So, we've had that social engineering coming from post-industrial liberalism. It tried to achieve certain things. It's created a backlash. You're saying that begets other kinds of social engineering. What are those? Well, you know, because uh well, one dynamic that we've seen over and over, this is especially in the social media age is, you know, you're trying to police some expressions, bigotry or other things. And then the more you're trying to police that, the more the social media or right-wing provocators, use that and start generating more of a talk of no, no, it's our right to use words that are offensive or say, you know, uh, white Christians are superior to other cultures and things like that. But once that becomes even more vocally expressed, then the initial urge which comes from a good place of creating a fair society becomes even more provoked. So now you want to do more social engineering to shut that now louder thing. But that's a vicious cycle obviously. >> It does feel to me that this stuff in the last 15 years has just made racism worse. I mean empirical. >> Absolutely 100%. You know, and I when I say this to some people on the left, they sort of get angry with me. And look, I I'm only just beginning to sort of say that maybe in the last two or three years, it, you know, it's making racism worse. It's making bigotry worse. Parts of the sort of DEI agenda. I don't mean, you know, um, uh, quotas, etc. For instance, all women shortlist party. Great. I'm not saying that, you know, DEI is a very muddy concept, but lots of this stuff. I think but I think the norms that you talk about >> but I agree with that but it's also not as deep a racism as what for example the United States had in the 50s and the 60s. So I think it's actually easy to reverse. It's easy to form coalitions that are not racist, that still are more in line with the values of working-class traditional communities, even some of them who may have some preoccupations with uh hierarchy and religion and so on. >> So, it's a great book. Um, I really enjoyed it, but there's only a few paragraphs on aging and climate change, >> right? >> There's nothing on China, >> right? And I suppose many people would think those are actually three of the great challenges to liberal democracy. Different kinds of challenges, >> demographic aging, you know. >> Well, actually, you know, I mean, that's a cons, you know, uh, explicit decision I made. There's something else that's completely missing in the book. I don't discuss any of the alt-right ideas, any of the new ethnationalism. I I think like I might mention Trump once perhaps because I am concerned with liberal democracy and liberal ideas because that's where we need to have the change. Now, China could have been discussed as an alternative. But again, I decided not to make the argument longer and more complicated. But yes, I think China is the only model where authoritarianism has not completely degenerated into something awful. So Farage, if he comes to power, of course, is not going to deliver on anything that he's promised. Orban did not deliver on anything that he promised. Marin Le Pen will not deliver on anything that she promises. And Trump, you see the mess that he's making. So these authoritarian, right-wing, populist, nationalist movements don't have any solutions. China, I think, conjecturally has some uh parts that are working well. But I think that's also partly the weakness of liberal democracies, not to rise up technologically to China, not to rise up to China in terms of its manufacturing base. In terms of climate change and aging, I think those are very, very important issues. But again I I think they are somewhat secondary in the following sense that if we sort of make progress in building new aspirations and the new governing philosophy for the center left, we can deal with climate change much better. We've made already some important advances in the technologies to deal with climate change. There's much greater uh understanding of climate change today than 30 years ago. So I think we just need effective government and aging also. I think the aging comes with challenges. By the way, aging also provides some opportunities because uh you know as we started at the beginning wage growth is key and aging is going to create a scarcity of labor. So if AI doesn't completely destroy all jobs in the process, we actually have a better environment for creating wage growth. So somebody like Rana descriptor going back to China for a second um he wrote a great book at the start of the year you know he he he would say this is a a sort of um trying to get a rise out of you Daron he would say that liberalism as a sort of intellectual edifice let's say I don't mean you know lock and you know people like that Baron de Montescu I mean JS Mill Anglo liberalism from the mid-9th century all of this is an ideological superructure built on an economic um trade surplus with China and we've lost that now. It was it was a fabulous 150 years, you know, but we've now returned to the normal way of doing things which for 18 of the last 20 centuries India and China are the world's two largest economies. What would you say to that? Well, I mean that's a very old argument by the way that uh there were many Marxist theorists and historians who argued in the first half of the 20th century at the end of uh or the beginning of the 20th century that the only reason why the working class was doing okay in the UK and the West was because of imperialism. Uh >> but this isn't about imperialism. This is about technological global technological and economic leadership. Right. >> Right. Yeah, but which we're losing it but the surplus part is is is related to that. Uh no technological leadership is very important and indeed we are losing it. That's that's absolutely true. >> But in some sense I think a liberal democratic government would have a much better chance of reestablishing that technological leadership. Why are we losing the technological leadership by the way? Well, first of all, China is doing great in terms of some policies that supported its manufacturing base, its economy. All the credit to them, but a lot of it is also self-imposed. uh all of the western governments got rid of their trade protection all at once allowing Chinese manufacturing very [clears throat] cheap sometimes subsidized to come and flood the market and destroy their industries in AI and technology we are putting all of our resources into AGI and these very complex very large foundation models As a result, you hear it all the time, the US has a lead over China in AI. Well, we have a lead of about perhaps 6 month to 16 months in large language models. But if you look at every aspect of every other aspect of tech, China is doing very well. They are ahead of the United States and the UK and most of Europe, all of Europe in terms of integrating robotics and AI into the production process. They are ahead of getting AI into e-commerce and customerf facing industries and they have tremendous they have made tremendous investment in two things that are really critical. One is manufacturing base. They have a huge manufacturing base that creates a lot of learning opportunities, a lot of opportunities for applying AI and technology in a way to increase productivity. And they have a tremendously skilled and large cadre of engineers which is so important in integrating AI into every part of the production process. So those are all things that we could have done as well. The United States has not invested in engineering. In fact, you know, I am I think immigrant skill has been critical for the United States and fantastic thing for us uh flourishing. But relying on immigrant engineers has given US policy makers a free pass in not investing in their own education system. >> Yeah. I saw a statistic about BYD, this Chinese, you know, EV superpower. I think it was either BYD or Huawei. They had an R R&D team, a research and development team about 100,000 people. And you think that's probably more people working in that sector than the whole of the European Union or certainly more than Germany. One company and the scale they're operating at is quite extraordinary. Your criticism of the Soviet Union is that up until the 1960s, 1970s, certainly by economic metrics, by productivity, etc., it was doing pretty well. It's a success story. But it failed because of its institutions to engage in creative destruction. >> Correct. 100%. >> But China's doing it. >> China is doing it. >> So, so how come China despite being a one party state, doesn't have, you know, regular democratic elections, etc., doesn't have a distribution of political power between different parts of the regime. You know, it has a centralization of power. >> How come China can do the creative destruction bit better it seems than capitalist economies today? I think if you look at creative destruction as a decentralized process whereby you know ground up new ideas come up and challenge existing ideas or business practices or strategies. China isn't that great. There's still a lot of management of that process. What China is doing very very well is developing existing technological lines and lines of business extremely competently. So if you see look at their AI industry for instance you see that what they have done with deepseek and uh the the Kimmy models etc is an engineering marvel. They have just perfected how you can use existing methods in a cost-effective way. Fine. Perhaps they've used some of the distilling techniques in order to uh reverse engineer some of the weights of the more advanced models. But they've really done that in a cheap and an elegant way. And you see at their manufacturing base, it's just like a manu engineering marvel too. It's just like every part of it has been uh you know is is trying to be optimized. So that's why it is companies like BYD, Foxcon, which is a Taiwanese company but with heavy activity in China or Hawaii that are so much at the forefront because they're they're they're the large companies. So the sort of the new blood coming in and challenge a system is still not so active and whether it's going to be a uh sort of a barrier for Chinese economic development down the line still remains to be seen. China is still not at the level of uh Western European and British or American GDP per capita, but it's approaching it fast. >> It does kind of feel like when it comes to Europe, a lot of that GDP per capita is kind of cope. It's not it's not real. >> Why do you say that? Why do you say that? [snorts] [sighs] >> Well, look, I I live in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. I'm from Bournemouth. It's quite obvious to me that these places are visibly poorer than 25 years ago. >> That's true. But Britain Britain is the exception. has not had any productivity growth for 20 years. >> No, of course, but that doesn't show up. I know for sure, but it doesn't show up >> in the GDP stats. I know that broadly speaking, GDP per person per hour is broadly flat. Yes, >> that's it. >> But they feel much poorer, not just not flat, poorer. >> But that's because you know GDP per capita in Britain is flat and its distribution has shifted in favor of major industrial cities. But if you look at the Netherlands, Sweden, [clears throat] even France, definitely Germany, although recently things have gone for other reasons that we can talk about uh a bit haywire in Germany, but there is a lot of productivity enhancing investments and use of technology in both manufacturing and other innovative sectors. So I don't think European growth is illusory. There's a lot of problems in Europe and and Europe is definitely behind the frontier in AI. That's a true criticism. Uh but but there is dynamism in Europe. I would not write off Europe. And 15 years ago, I would have definitely said I would not write off Britain. But then again, I would have been wrong. [laughter] >> I've got a few more questions for you. Go for it. >> You're, you know, a Nobel Prizewinning economist. We have lots of people watching and listening to this um series who aren't necessarily on the left or even progressive. I was speaking to somebody from the spectator last week. They said, "I love downstream." So, you're going to have lots of currency when you uh weigh in on this particular topic. Britain, like you say, has had basically zero productivity growth since 2008. So, we're looking at basically two lost decades. Why has that happened and what can Britain do about it? >> I think it's a combination of factors. I don't think there is one single explanation. Austerity was very costly. Brexit has been very costly. But also the industries that Britain specialized in have not done very well. Partly because of Chinese competitions, partly because of other reasons. But there's tremendous talent in Britain. There needs to be more. There needs to be much more engineering. There needs to [clears throat] be much more technical knowhow. And I think AI actually could give some opportunities. Not because uh the UK should follow the US lead. Quite the contrary, I think UK could specialize in developing useful applications leveraging uh a more sort of forward-looking way of how we can integrate AI into our lives and into the production process better than what American companies are doing. >> A more workerentric. >> Workerentric proworker AI. Yes. Proworker AI. That could be the future of the UK. So that would be your policy prescription. Andy Bernham, one of his wonks is listening right now. What are you saying to them? Proworker AI. How absolutely how do we do that? [clears throat] >> Well, uh I think it's again has to start with applications. There are so many lowhanging fruit. There are so many things we can do with nurses, with uh electricians, with teachers, with scientists by not trying to replace them, not trying to mimic human talent, but by giving them better tools to expand their expertise, to enable them to do new things, to do things that are more creative, more innovative. We need more innovation in the UK, in the world because of climate change, because of aging, because of changing global balances. And innovation I think in the foreseeable future is going to remain an activity in which we need human talent. So the question is how can we give better tools for that human talent. >> Yeah. This is something again comes across really in the book. You talk a hell of a lot about automation but it's not about replacing people. It's about augmenting them and really trying to maximize that boost in productivity. >> Absolutely. >> Which we've really lost sight of haven't we? >> 100% 100%. And that's the that's the AGI agenda. AGI agenda has essentially somehow convinced everybody that the best and only thing we can do is and the inevitable thing we can do with AI is just make it more and more humans so that it becomes better than humans. >> Final question, why have so many people fallen for that? Is it you know is this the most impressive lobbying effort in in Washington history or is there something deeper going on? >> I think uh part of it is the history. So the tech industry was already moving in that direction with Microsoft, Google, Oracle becoming giants by selling tools of automation to companies and some of it is science fiction. Truly, I think the AI field has been so influenced by science fiction from its inception. And a staple of science fiction is machines that are just like humans and then take over and threaten humans. [snorts] We've imagined that. We've been talking about that since the 1950s. And by willing it, we're making it closer to reality. Daron, that's We'll leave it there. Thanks for joining us. This was fantastic. Great, great conversation. Fantastic.