The Economics of Artificial Intelligence | Tyler Cowen

In this talk, economist Tyler Cowen reflects on three years of using generative AI, describing how the technology has made him feel "like an idiot" because it knows more than he does in many domains. He shares personal anecdotes of using AI for language translation, medical interpretation, legal advice, pet care, travel planning, and research, illustrating its superior performance on professional exams and its empathetic bedside manner. Cowen argues that the rapid improvement of AI models will soon outpace human expertise in any knowledge‑intensive field, making the ability to work with AI the most valuable skill. He discusses the implications for jobs, education, entrepreneurship, and geopolitics, warning that those who compete against AI will likely lose, while those who learn to train and direct it will thrive. He highlights how AI democratizes access to high‑quality information worldwide, even in low‑income countries, and how the choice between American and Chinese AI ecosystems will shape the future of smaller nations. Cowen likens AI to a super‑charged printing press, predicting profound societal disruption, changes in academic norms, and new opportunities for solo entrepreneurs to build billion‑dollar companies with AI assistance. He concludes with a call for humility, curiosity, and proactive learning to stay ahead of the AI wave.
Chapters
I've spent the last 3 years feeling like an idiot. I'm here to tell you why I have spent 3 years feeling like an idiot. So, you know, I go around with the phone, and my phone, in it I have artificial intelligence. You might have the same. So I use GPT, and I thought I'd ask it a question. I said, "Hello, do you speak Mayan at all?" "Can you say that sentence back to me in the language Mayan?" Of course it speaks Spanish, right? But does it speak Mayan? It's also a smart guy. It says, "Hello, Mayan isn't a single language, but a family of over 30 distinct languages spoken in Mesoamerica." It then lists different kinds of Mayan. I won't try to pronounce those words. Probably all of you know them. And then it says, well, okay, you know, it basically calls me an idiot in a polite way. And it says, I will answer your question in Yucatec Maya. And then it proceeds to do so. That is why for the last 3 years, I feel like an idiot. Any area where I use this, it knows more than I do and it's smarter than I am. It's not smarter in every way, but each month, sometimes even each week, it gets a bit smarter yet. So for instance, I was in Atitlán over the weekend, and I can take a photograph of a flower, a plant, a bird, whatever, and I ask my little friend here, "What's that?" And it tells me. Once I was in Buenos Aires, and I was at a Paraguayan restaurant. Now I've never been to Paraguay, and in fact a lot of the menu was not even in Spanish. It was in Guarani, which is the indigenous, or the main indigenous language of Paraguay. So I just took a photo of the menu and I asked my little friend GPT, what's this? Please translate. And also, which are the best dishes? What should I order? And it told me. So this is great. Like, I'm happy, right? I had a wonderful meal, but I kind of feel like an idiot. It's interesting, they take the desktop version of these models and they give them the bar exam for lawyers. And of course the model passes the bar exam. They give it the medical exam in the United States. For doctors. Of course, the model passes the medical exam. I could not pass either of those exams. I went to my doctor not long ago. Good news is that I'm fine, but I had this big blood test. I got this long document with all these numbers on it. I didn't understand them. I uploaded it into GPT. I said, am I fine? Because my doctor said I was fine. And it gives me a long explanation of why I'm fine. Like, there's one thing where my iron count's a little too high, but basically I'm fine. Someone— actually, this has been done a few times— they do a test. So they have human doctors diagnose patients, and they have GPT diagnose patients, and on average the AI does better. Than the humans. And it's interesting, there's one category in particular where the AI clearly does better, and that is bedside manner. Is it nice? Is it polite? Does it talk to you all sweet? Does it explain to you the right way what's wrong with you, what's right with you? AI does that better. I know many people, I mean really many people, they use this as their therapist. I've never done that. They keep on doing it. In the United States, a therapist might cost $200 an hour. It's a lot of money, right? $200 an hour seems crazy to me. Like, go to a friend, go to your priest, go, go somewhere for free. But no, people pay. But a lot of people have stopped paying and they do this. This is always available 24/7. In the United States, this costs $20 a month. I don't know what it costs here, probably the same, but it's not nothing, but it's not that much to have all that knowledge at your fingertips. My wife and I, we take care of a dog. The dog's fine. If there's something wrong with the dog, We take a picture of the dog, ask the GPT, so we don't have to go to the veterinarian because the GPT tells us what's up with the dog. Again, these systems aren't perfect, but as economists, we ask the comparative question: are they better than most human knowledge, including knowledge of experts? So we also use these models as our lawyer. We were going to call a lawyer. My wife retired recently, had to sign a contract for the terms of her retirement. It's a very complicated contract. My wife is a lawyer. There were some things she wasn't sure about. Who do we ask? I don't even have to tell you at this point. So it has really changed my life. But I think if you do enough of this, you start asking yourself the question, Well, where's room for me in this picture? Like, what does this mean for me? And overall, I'm pretty optimistic. But I sometimes say, if you're not scared of the AI, you're not paying close enough attention. Because you face this future, I mean, you all seem to be students or some of you are faculty, But really quite soon you will either be competing against this or working with it, one or the other. I predict that if you're competing against this, probably you will lose. Not all of you will lose. If you want to be a football player, this is no threat, not for a long time. You know, you just go ahead and do it. But if you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an economist, anything where you work with ideas, work with words, work on a computer screen, this will change your life. And it will change your life in a very new and different way. So if you think of myself, I'm 63 years old and I started wanting to be an economist when when I was like 13 or 14. So I've been working on being an economist for 50 years. It's a long time, 50 years. What I thought that life would be like when I was 13 or 14 and what that life is like now, it's kind of the same. It's not exactly the same, but I write things. Instead of a typewriter, I have a computer. I teach, I give talks. What am I doing now? I'm giving a talk. What did I used to do? I would give a talk, go different places, great papers. Really has not changed. My students now can email me. Of course, that's a change, but the fundamentals are the same. My daughter, now she's 35. She and I started talking about careers, she was 12. That's 23 years ago. I told her about different careers, what they were like. Everything I said to her, it's still true. But we're now, for the first time in a long time, at a point where all that is changing. What it is like to be a doctor, a lawyer, an economist, a professor, work in government, uh, will be very different. And when I say it will be very different, I don't mean it will be very different 20 years from now, though that would still affect you, but it will be very different less than 2 years from now. If I think about economics, that's, you know, where I've done most of my work. As I said, I've been studying it for 50 years, and that's gone fairly well for me. But if I set up like an artificial test, 5 questions, 10 questions, Ask the AI and then ask me, who wins that competition? You're too polite to say, but I think you already know. It wins. It does not win on every single question yet. But what's striking to me is how fast these systems are improving. So about a year ago, someone tested these systems. They gave them an IQ test. I'm not sure that's a great kind of test, but look, it's what we have, right? They gave it an IQ test and it came in at about 90, which is like— would be average for a human. More recently, they gave it an IQ test and it came in at 135. It's basically a year later. Now, we don't know how fast these will improve, But if you understand something about how they are built, you will see they have the potential to improve pretty rapidly. One thing they can do is teach themselves. So you can program it, you can just tell it, well, keep on writing tests, give yourself the test, and grade your own answers. Or you can have another AI grade the answers. Once it can grade its own answers. It can just keep on getting better. And it can keep on getting better not exactly at the speed of silicon, that's misleading, you need to put some work into it, but it basically can learn at a pace no human can learn. And that's how it gets from IQ 90 to IQ 135 in a single year. What will it be a year from now? I don't know. Will it ever be a super, super genius? I suppose I don't think so, but I would say I don't know. But I do know that one year from now, two years from now, it will be noticeably smarter than IQ of 135. And it also has not quite all the world's knowledge, but all the world's knowledge that can be written down or put on video. A significant portion of that it has read, listened to, consumed. There's a game, it's called geoguessing. Do you all know that word geoguessing? Like someone shows you a photo and from the photo you look at the plants, the roofs, the sky, whatever, and you try to guess where it is. No one taught this thing how to geoguess, but it turns out it's the greatest geoguesser in the world. Because it's seen so many images. So it just learned this skill on its own. So it does learn things on its own, which is both wonderful and a little worrying. Uh, so again, if you're going out into the labor force, I would say the most important thing to do is simply to know how to work with AI models. There's some very good news here. The first is no one is really an expert. So you might think, oh, this is intimidating, this is terrible, there are all these geniuses out there who know this and I don't. But this is also new. So you might today know zero. I doubt if that's the case, by the way. But even if you know zero today, you're not really very much behind. Like, you're at the beginning of this, so you can catch up to the frontier. I don't know, I would guess if you apply yourself with 2 or 3 months work and you're just there doing what the top people are doing in terms of using this. To use this well, you don't need to be a computer programmer. I don't even think that helps. My hypothesis— this has not been tested— but having met many people, I believe this to be true, is that learning how to work with the AI, it's like being a dog trainer or a horse trainer. It's an alien being. You have to try to understand it. You'll never understand it fully. Mostly it wants to obey you, but not entirely. You have to learn how to teach the thing. Like, let's say, like, I'm not a dog trainer, You know, I said my wife and I have this dog. We got it from our daughter 2 years ago because she had babies. The dog, the babies, the problem. So the dog is sent to us. Like, I don't know the dog really. It's like, the dog's fine, the dog's great. I don't know anything about dogs. So if you just like brought a dog in to me here and you said, Tyler, train this dog, like, I've got nothing. I'm an idiot. So That's in a way the world we're all in. We have to learn how to train the dog. If you learn how to train the dog, call it a horse, you can't really train a cat, so dog or horse, I mean, you can be many, many times more productive. And in fact, your future job, if you are not, say, a soccer player or an auto mechanic, Your future job will be, in essence, to guide and direct this and to correct it when it's wrong. And sometimes it is wrong. You probably know this if you use it at all. It is not perfect. It needs humans sometimes to correct it or to know when to double-check. But another point I would make, like what you have in your phone— this is the cheaper model— If any of you— how many of you have it, some version of GPT? Yeah, it's like more than half of you. And you probably have the cheaper model, but there's a more expensive model. It costs $200 a month. It's a lot of money. I pay it. I'd actually pay 10 times that if I had to. And the more expensive model is much, much better. And it makes fewer mistakes. It's quicker. It knows more. It's more brilliant. So whatever impression you have of how good this is, like, there's already something much better. How many of you pay $200 a month? Show of hands. Zero. That's— I'm not saying you should right now, but, you know, maybe your employer will, or maybe you will have to. Or maybe the price will come down. But even the $200 a month model is not the frontier. You know, there's a lag between a model being built and a model being released. And now from the major companies, there are better models yet, which to me is like, whoa, better yet than the one that, you know, kicks my butt across the room when I do an economics competition. So Over time, you know, I'm a writer. I think more and more, what are the things I can write that it cannot write? Or maybe it can help me. Or what might my readers want to read that I can do and it will not be the same if the computer does it? So I'm changing the way I approach many things. One thing I can do the computer cannot I can go somewhere, show up, and talk to people face-to-face. So I do that much more. I make many more trips. I give more talks. It cannot compete with me. I write somewhat less. When I read books, I now read books very differently. It used to be if I wanted to learn a topic, maybe I would read 10 books, 12 books on the topic. Now I will just try to find maybe the best book, and I start the best book, and then I keep on asking questions of this. It's like I get a customized book, and I just keep on asking questions. So I save a lot of money on books. I get a better book. I think if they told you, like, I write books, but now I need to think like, hey, I'm not the only person who will be doing this. What kind of books can I write where people still want it? So I am myself very determined to stay ahead of this thing. I will have to make many more changes, but what I do now, I follow the latest models, I exchange tips and advice with my friends who use this. It's changed how I write, what I write, It's changed how I read. It led me to make more trips. When I travel, you know, we were in Atitlán, I mentioned, and my wife, she does this too. We wanted to go to the best and most interesting art gallery in Atitlán. So the old days, we would Google. That's not like a very transparent piece of information. Like, what's the best? What's the most interesting? It's sort of vague, subjective. We just asked this, it told us where to go, we went there, we actually bought two pictures, it was a wonderful experience. We ask it about restaurants, uh, we don't necessarily travel with a guidebook anymore, we just travel with this. How we take care of the dog, our own health, So you might think we're a little bit ahead of this trend, but this will come to the entire world. I suspect many of you are already doing similar things. It's completely changed how I teach. So my university, the general policy is if you use the AI, you're cheating. Oh, I understand why they do that. But also, in the world to come, your work will be done with the AI. So for my class this year and last year, I told students they had to use it, and I would grade them on how well they managed to use it to produce a good paper. This is PhD level. I just thought that's the skill they need. Their future employer, boss, contractor, Like, they don't have that same notion of cheating. They just want the job done well. So a lot of education to me is very behind. I don't know about Marroquín, but if I look at my own school, like, we're a big school, 40,000 students. I know my students are ahead of their professors when it comes to AI. So sometimes people sit around and talk like, oh, The professors, should we teach our students about this thing? And I say, no, you have it backwards. They should be teaching you about the thing, because the faculty can be set in their ways. They've always written papers, a certain kind of paper, a certain way, and they're not really changing yet. At some point, the market will force them to change. So I think the future, you know, a lot of the details are very hard to predict. But here are some things I'm pretty sure of, that at least if you have a mobile phone, there will be some version of AI you can access, and it will be quite good. So if you're, you know, say in Kenya— Kenya is a very poor country, uh, Kenya though, it has good internet connections. You can go anywhere in Kenya and like get good internet. Like my wife and I, we went on safari. We were like out there with the lions, the elephants, We had better internet than at home in our living room. This was, to us, was amazing. So Kenya has great internet. That was a wise decision. So you can be almost anywhere in Kenya, and if you have mobile phone, you can get the world's best education if you want it, and in the language of your choice, including Yucatec Maya, apparently. I don't know if it knows all those other versions of Maya. So a lot of people, they won't do this, or they won't know to do it, or they will stick with traditional ways. But that's not how all humans are, as we learned from Mises and Kirzner. Human beings, they're entrepreneurs, and they want to do better in life for themselves, for their families. So we will see people around the world People otherwise in difficult situations, but they will be getting incredible educations, probably for free. Like I said, this, the one I have, GPT, it costs $20 a month. Most people in Kenya cannot afford $20 a month, but there's free versions. Uh, they're somewhat worse, they will get better. There's a free version from China, it's called Deepseek. Any of you use Deepseek? Deepseek is free. Just Google Deepseek, one word. It's a lot of fun. You know, GPT, they kind of censor it so it's not like too rude or too funny. Deepseek is like rude and funny and it knows a lot. So if you wanna have fun, use Deepseek, even though GPT like knows the most and is the smartest. So there'll be open source AI for free. You know, anywhere people want it. Already it's the case. DeepSeq, it's just online and you take it. So, uh, right now everyone in the world has access to better medical diagnosis than, like, a rich person, you know, a billionaire in America. They may not be using it, but this is not science fiction. This is not a prediction. This is a reality. It doesn't, you know, having the diagnosis doesn't mean you get the brain operation when you need it, but it's a big, big step just to know what's wrong with you, or maybe there's nothing wrong with you. Anyone who knows legal, anyone who has a legal matter can get free legal advice. When my wife did this, you know, with her retirement, we thought the legal advice, you know, was better than the human lawyers we had worked with in the past. Maybe not perfect, but just really good, free, and it answered all our questions immediately. And unlike some small, tiny number of human lawyers, it had no incentive to lie to us. It never said, "You need more advice, please come back in 2 weeks and I'll bill you some additional hours," right? Very different incentives. I would say more market-friendly incentives. So we all have this task of figuring out how the future will be changing. And again, I'm just talking about the very near future. I don't feel I can give you definite answers about how everything will be. Part of the wonders of the market is, uh, no one can predict it in advance. That's one reason why central planning typically Does not work. But the life I had where 50 years ago I knew what I wanted to do and 50 years later I'm doing it, very few of you will have that life. You will be figuring things out as you go. There won't be a guidebook you can pick up. A thousand different people will tell you different things. Some of them will be right, some of them will be wrong. But you'll have to make those decisions. So the onus of individual responsibility, it will be tougher and I would say more intimidating, but there will also be much more opportunity. Sam Altman, he's the head, the CEO of OpenAI, he predicts that very soon there will be companies with sales of $1 billion or more, and the whole company will be run by one person and a bunch of AIs. We're not quite at that point yet, but I and most people I know, we agree with Sam. So the notion that a single individual, by being smart, having the right vision, being an entrepreneur, and knowing AI, can start a company with one person and take in a billion dollars, that to me is a stunning opportunity. You will be able to run a research center, a think tank, I don't know, maybe not with one person, but I believe with two or three people, and it will have the heft and the output and the impact of a much larger research center, at least if you do it well. So the optimal scale of enterprises is likely to be smaller for many companies, and what you will be able to do as an individual, you will be much more potent if you choose to be. Now, a lot of people, they don't want to run the whole business. I understand that. The other option is just to sit back, let other people start these businesses for you, and enjoy the gains as a consumer. That's what most people will do. That's fine. But even in that case, you probably will need some kind of job where you earn income. And the mere fact that you are smart and got good grades, that now matters much, much less than it used to. That used to be often the main thing that mattered. Like, am I smart? Do I work hard? Did I get good grades? Which kind of means you can follow instructions and not be too much, you know, in your own mind or something. That now is greatly devalued. What has risen in value is the question like, are you a good dog trainer, horse trainer? But with this, and it's not unrelated to being smart, But again, being smart, getting good grades, no longer a guarantee of anything. So I think this will be the greatest mobility engine probably the world has seen. Many people will become much wealthier than they imagined they could be, or have greater impact, or leverage what they do. Other people, I think, will decide to be more passive They may end up knowing less. There's a kind of laziness you can choose because this will answer all your questions. So there will be these two paths: the greater impact path, the lazy path. There's also the path, "Do I learn how to work with this or do I compete against it?" And those are decisions you will have to make. They're decisions I never faced. There are decisions also my daughter never faced. She'll face them now as I face them now. But I'm obviously older than she is. Like, I could just stop now and call it quits. I'm not going to do that. Like, I'm very excited about all this. I want to be ahead of these trends and have more impact myself. But of course, a lot of people who are older, they're just going to stop. And that's fine. And I don't have to go to the doctor as much. I can ask my questions to this thing. I feel it makes me smarter. I feel when I'm in group chats, you know, we're all in group chats, right? And it used to be people would just say like BS in the group chat. Is that like an acceptable word here? I won't say the word, you know, nonsense in the group chat. Like the last year or two, the people I know, they don't say nonsense in the group chat anymore because you can just check it. And see that it's nonsense. So it's— I wouldn't say we're fundamentally more rational, but in some ways we're a little reined in, and I would say less ridiculous. Also, the current generations of the AIs— I mean, this is more of a subjective judgment, but I think they're, they're relatively objective. So if I think Should I ask the AI or should I look at the New York Times? To me, the AI is pretty objective. It's also the case if you ask the AI about the topics many of you have studied at Marroquin. You studied, right, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, this all— this is some Austrian economics, who? Yeah. It knows all those things. You can ask it a detailed question about Mises and get a pretty good answer. You can't do that with mainstream media. So my hope is this makes us all more objective. I'm not convinced that's the future. You could imagine further on people build AIs that are very biased and less objective. There's a good chance that happens. The constraint on that is that if you build what I would call a stupider AI, you have an AI that's stupider. So there's actually some market incentive to want the smartest AI, because it's better in other ways, and the smartest AI is more likely to be objective. So, you know, my country, most countries I visit, I look at media, TV, newspaper, internet, like a lot of it's not that great. My hope is that will get better. It's a speculative hope. I'm not convinced, but I can at least see a path where it will get better. Some other news for you. I think I said this at the graduation ceremony, but I guess you all are not the graduating ones. Uh, you know, if you're a student here, you can expect to live much longer than you thought. I don't know life expectancy in Guatemala. In the U.S., it's in the low 80s. 76. Okay, that's like pretty good. My guess is you could expect something close to 100, at least if you stay out of trouble. So the return to staying out of trouble has gone up, right? Buckle your seatbelt, take other precautions, and so on. But the AIs will accelerate progress in science. I'm not sure by how much, but I know people who work applying AI to biology, to biomedical science. Many of them think that in the next 40 years we can use AI, say, to model the cell, to test out ideas in the computer, and that medical science will advance much more quickly. And most of the things that kill us now, things like cancer, probably will mostly be fixed. You might still get cancer, but it will be controllable or maybe curable. So you will die most likely of old age. What's that limit? Depends on your genes. You know, some of you maybe have a grandmother who lived to 103 and you think that's a kind of miracle, but that will be a new norm for many people. So whatever you learn now as an education, it's just going to be there for more years than you thought, maybe 15, 20 more years in some of your cases. Some of you, you know, still might just die at 76, have bad luck or bad genes, but that will make the world very different. There'll be many more old people, we hope. There's also cure for Alzheimer's dementia. But we don't know, you know, the different rates at which these cures arrive. It'd be great to cure Alzheimer's first. If you cure cancer first and a lot of old people get Alzheimer's, that itself is a problem. So these are impossible to predict, but just ways in which the future will be very, very different. A lot of the unsolved theorems in mathematics we might solve. Many, you know, central banks in economic policymaking, people already, as do I, I consult the AI frequently. I think in my introduction they mentioned I have a co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok. I wrote a textbook with him. He and I do those videos together. Alex and I get in arguments. He's been white-pilled on AI, but our arguments are totally different now. We used to like yell at each other. Now we just send each other links back and forth from the AI. The AI is on my side. It's like, no, you wrote the prompt wrong, it's on my side. That's our argument now. I told you I've spent the last 3 years feeling like an idiot. That's another manifestation of that. But I think it's also a recognition of the limits of one's own rationality, of a kind of humility You should not accede uncritically to the AI, but it is relevant evidence in any debate. And Alex and I know that sometimes he'll ask one model, I'll ask the other, and then, oh, which model is better? We'll get into that debate. That's one question you can't ask any model: what's the best model? They'll either say they're the best model or they'll just refuse to answer. So that's like the new way we argue. If one model Like if Gemini 2.5 agrees with him and Claude agrees with me, I'm like, "Oh, Claude's better." He's like, "No, Gemini's better." That's the new argument. We're used to that now. Just a very small example of how our lives will change. For government, I think a lot of functions of government will be more and more run by AI. For the United States, of course, these will be American companies. For China, they will be Chinese companies. But for a smaller country such as Guatemala, or smaller yet El Salvador, I think there will be big, big decisions to be made. So let's say you're running the education system of Guatemala, the national defense of Guatemala, the treasury of Guatemala, monetary policy of Guatemala through an AI. You can pick the American system of AIs or you can pick the Chinese system of AIs. It's a big, big choice. If you pick the American system, you are linked to us kind of forever in a very strong way. I don't feel entirely comfortable about that. I'm not Guatemalan, but it worries me a bit. If you pick the Chinese system, Well, you're linked to them in a pretty big way. My guess is you'll end up choosing American AI systems, like a bunch of you already have GPT and you don't have Deepseek, which is Chinese. You're so close to U.S., like, it's pretty likely you're going to pick the American system. But Guatemala will become more dependent on us in a way that will have big benefits but also may not be entirely comfortable because a lot of smaller countries fought very hard to attain their independence. In your case, a war against the Spanish colonials, but more generally, US has been like imperialist. We push you around. We used to invade, did some bad things, uh, and the world will return, I think, to some new order where smaller countries will be in the orbits of larger countries, and you will have to choose your larger country. Now again, Guatemala has strong ties to the U.S., but if you're a country in Africa, you're Nigeria, you're Kenya, wherever, and you have Chinese offer, American offer, that's a big, big decision. And I think it will fundamentally change our world, which AI systems will become the dominant ones. And there'll be this competition. So that's why America and China were so much racing to have the better systems, because we know we're competing against them. U.S. and China, of course, is a rivalry. That rivalry may help small countries, like you'll get better terms But Guatemala may not get better terms. Like, Kenya might get better terms because no one really knows which way Kenya will go. But China might just think like, eh, Guatemala, they're going to go with U.S., we're not going to really bother making them a competitive offer. So in this way, Guatemala, though it will get benefits, may not get like full market competitive benefits because you're so close to the United States. It's possible over time small countries might be able to build their own systems, but that to me seems pretty far away. For a while at least, the main systems: US, China. For Europe, it's a problem. There is not a major European system that is a serious contender. The European Union passes a lot of laws, regulations that hinder entrepreneurship in tech and in AI. So Western Europe right now is kind of rebelling against the United States. I understand why, uh, but that too will come to an end. So you will have these AI systems in Western Europe, probably not from China, probably from the American companies. And those companies, I wouldn't say they will have power— power is the wrong word. But they will just have a lot of influence over ideas. They'll be like the world's major publishers, in a sense, of ideas, of words, of answers, of math. You can think of AI, if you view it historically, as a bit like the printing press. So the world before the printing press and the world after the printing press, they're very, very different. So with the printing press, People could read the Bible. You could write pamphlets. You know, even the world of Francisco Marroquín himself, the idea of speaking up for Indigenous rights, the Spanish friars who defended the rights of the Indigenous people, they wrote things that other people could then read because there was a printing press. And that idea had a lot of impact. A major change in the world. With AI systems, It's like the printing press on steroids. Much smarter, very quick, everyone has it. You can basically press a button, just talk into your phone, get any book, essay, piece of information you want. And I think that will be at least as revolutionary as the printing press. So again, this notion that we have these unbroken, highly predictable lives with your generation. And I'm sorry if you don't like it, but I just— my truthful opinion is that is coming to an end. And I think on net it will be a very good thing for younger people and older people. But again, the printing press brings a lot of change, a lot of disruption. These are never good things for everyone. And simply the stress of having to deal with new choices, new paths new opportunities. A lot of people just don't like that. Like I said, it's very intimidating, and that if you're not a bit scared by the AI, you've been asleep, is maybe the most fundamental takeaway. But, you know, we're in a world— we still have a fair degree of capitalism left. The AIs are from private companies. Those are companies that want to make money by serving their customers. Those are about the best incentives we have in this world. The AI systems will do wonderful things for us, advance science, and if we choose, make us much smarter and much, much more productive. The rest of it is up to us. And with those words, I leave you and we move now to question and answer. Thank you all for coming and listening.
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