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Why Does Jevons Paradox Fit White-collar Jobs?

Arvind Narayanan says most white-collar jobs follow Jevons paradox because demand for them is not fixed. When production gets easier and incomes rise, people spend more on those less necessary, more luxury kinds of things. Most jobs today sit higher up Maslow's hierarchy than basic needs. He says truck-driver jobs, where demand is finite, are the exception rather than the rule.

Transcript

Intelligence Isn't Power ·

The Ezra Klein Show

More from this episode

  1. Why Does Arvind Narayanan See No Intelligence Switch?Arvind Narayanan describes a view that a moment will come when superintelligence is built and will change everything on the economic front and the safety front.
  2. Did Bug-finding Tools Improve Cybersecurity?Arvind Narayanan says that more than 20 years ago, automated systems became superhuman at finding software vulnerabilities.
  3. Why Does OpenAI Have Trouble Making Every Sandbox Verifiably Safe?OpenAI builds many sandboxes with dynamic compute, network access, hundreds of tools, package downloads, sub processes, graphical user interfaces and more…
  4. Why Does Arvind Narayanan Call Power Seeking Engineered?Arvind Narayanan says there is evidence for many harmful capabilities, and no evidence yet for power seeking.
  5. Are OpenAI and Anthropic Choosing Not to Slow Down?Arvind Narayanan says the companies can unilaterally slow down and are choosing not to.
  6. Are Hospitals Using AI to Inflate Medical Bills?Arvind Narayanan cites an insurance-company report from last week that said AI has added a billion dollars to medical expenses, because hospitals use it to…
  7. Why Does the Physical World Slow AI Down?Ezra Klein says the economy will be very jagged because things have to happen physically.

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