Well, let's listen to Peter Howard and then Philippe Aguillon talk about these links to current debates.

Everybody immediately thinks of AI when they hear the words creative destruction, and appropriately so.

You know, there is some relevance.

People, of course, expect that I'm an expert on everything, including AI, and I'm not.

I don't really know the detailed working of

AI models and so on.

But I have had a lot of experience thinking about disruptive technologies, obviously, and particularly big general purpose technologies, you know.

Apart from, well, the place, MIT, a good start, what was it that was right about that year that made everything click for you?

Sure.

It was, uh...

At, at its peak, it was about the third largest corporation in the United States by revenue.

It employed about 150,000 people around the world.

Uh, it was rendered, uh, bankrupt basically by the invention of digital photography.

Nobody needed their film anymore.

And, uh, uh, so-- But not only the, the businesses that, uh, suffered from, from this creative destruction, but also people whose skills and human capital are tied to old technologies.

Mm-hmm

Why don't you start?

Okay, well, we've known for a long time that in order to sustain growth in the long run, economic growth, you need technological progress.

In the short run, there are lots of measures that you can do to make the economy grow faster by stimulating demand, by removing various inefficiencies from regulation and taxes and so on.

But there's a limit to how much output you can get with those measures, with a given technological framework.

You need sustained technological progress, and new technologies inevitably render previous technologies obsolete.

And that creates a conflict between those whose fortunes are enhanced by the new technologies, not just the innovators themselves, but those who would be producing goods that are complementary to the new goods.

and to the many consumers who would ultimately benefit from having a broader variety of goods at lower prices.

Peter.

How does the current technology of AI, who is that going to displace? And what can we learn from the history of other displaced industries, whether it's the internet disintermediating travel agents or the automobile disintermediating horses? Open-ended question, take it wherever you want.

Well, first of all, I think it's too early to tell.

Generative AI is obviously a very powerful technology that's going to have ramifications throughout the economy, not just in a few sectors.

It's like a handful of other really big, what we would call general purpose technologies, starting from the steam engine, going through electrification of manufacturing, through the computer and the internet in the mid to late 20th century.

And now we've got artificial intelligence.

And in all of those cases, although there's just a handful of them, What we see is that when these technologies first arrive, it seems that they have a tremendous potential for creation and for destruction.

It's obvious that these new technologies are going to displace workers in a lot of places.

But is that just a pattern? Might it be different this time? How are you thinking about this and why?