The Economics of AGI: Why Verification Is the New Scarcity w/ Christian Catalini
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Welcome to Bankless, where today we explore the frontier of AI. Is it gonna take our job and how can we survive the transformation? This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David and I read a paper and a thread corresponding to that paper. It's called the simple economics of AGI. And one of the writers of that paper is on the podcast today. His name is Christian Catalini. He's an economist. He is an MIT scientist. Fun fact, David. He was actually one of the creators of the original Diem project over at Facebook. Do you remember that
Oh, wow. I I did not know that. Yeah. The whole time we just interviewed him.
He's been in cryptocurrency for over a decade. In fact, about ten years ago, he wrote a paper called the some simple economics of the blockchain. So he was all over crypto when it was new, and now he's coming back to AI talking about economics yet again.
Yeah. He seems a little bit like a Robin Hanson type of he's putting models onto cultural phenomena and trying to provide answers to him. Mainly, knowledge that we tried to get out of him is if AI is going to commoditize a lot of, you know, easy tasks, where does the value go? If we're if we're just automating the, you know, the the foundations of like the push button jobs of society?
What do we do?
Where where do people go next? And that's basically the theme of the episode and the question that Christian answers in the pod.
Really important episode. I think it's on everyone's mind. The core argument of this paper is that the scarce resource is no longer intelligence, the things between our ears, our brains. It's verification and the human capacity to check on AI and its output. There's a lot of implications following that from that idea. So let's get right to that episode. But before we do, I wanna thank the sponsors that made this possible.
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