You think, you know, there still really is a role for the human being in that kind of economic production?

Yes, I think what we've seen is that machines of different kinds take over more and more of what sort of simple labor has been doing.

So if we go back several hundred years, we all toiled in the fields and we all pulled the plow ourselves and then we used animals for it.

And then there was the tractor that replaced us as doing this sort of manual, tedious labor.

And then we've come much further than that, of course, so that we have started to replace also white collar work.

So a lot of the information creation, the pushing of papers back and forth, the control of processes and things like that, the figuring out of which way to go when we already have the alternatives.

AI can help us figure that out much quicker and using more data and more information that is already existent, but it can't figure out where to deviate from what we already know.

You know, what does that reaction function look like? as we move towards an entrepreneurship-based economy? And how does that process take place over X amount of years, or how do you think about that?

And so to put a bow on this, you know, can you walk us through, you know, your perspective on how we've seen the incentives for trade develop over time and what you're seeing out there currently?

Well, I mean, in some sense, what we're seeing right now is that over the past few years, we've been taking many steps backwards.

So people who support stopping or limiting international trade, they talk about globalism as sort of an ideology, but trade really comes down to the individual exchange.

And every individual exchange has... two winners, both gain or it doesn't happen.

So it's really, really simple.

I mean, when I teach this to entrepreneurship students too, why would someone buy your product is the first question we ask, right? And well, they say, well, because they like it, because they value it.

Okay.

But I digress a little bit, but please continue.

Does the market still work the way Austrians describe if we see this major acceleration and transformation with AI?

Yeah, absolutely it does.

And I think it actually is enhanced by it quite a bit because it's true that the market is sort of a discovery process with competition, trying to figure out what works and what does not work between different companies and between entrepreneurs and so forth.

But I think By just describing it as such, you forget that what is actually the driving force behind all this is the entrepreneur that is imagining how to serve consumers better by some new product that has not been tried before, that might be of value and that they speculate will be of value.

So the discovery is sort of what worked before, so the discovery is about the past and not about the future.

And you can exploit that for as long as something is of value.

But what could be of value requires sort of empathy and a way of placing yourself in the consumer's shoes and also trying to figure out where is the economy headed.

Talk to us about your perspective on AI and consciousness and whether these machines can or not become conscious.