Anton Korinek is an economist at UVA and the Brookings Institution who focuses on the macroeconomics of AI. This is a lightly edited transcript of a recent lecture where he lays out what economics actually predicts about transformative AI — in our view it's the best introductory resource on the topic, and basically anyone discussing post-labour economics should be familiar with this.

The talk covers historical development of what the bottlenecks are: for most of history, land was the bottleneck and humans were disposable. The Industrial Revolution flipped this. AI may flip it again: if labor becomes reproducible, humans are no longer the bottleneck.

Korinek walks through what this implies for growth (potentially dramatic), for wages (likely positive effects until some threshold of automation, then a sudden collapse), and for policy (e.g. our entire tax system assumes labor income exists). He also addresses some confusions: "prices falling" and "productivity rising"; "post-scarcity" is a misnomer since even cheap resources have prices; and no, there's no economic law that technology must create jobs—that was just an empirical regularity when humans were the bottleneck.