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Stephen Barrows

Stephen Barrows

Stephen P. Barrows, Ph.D., is an economist and Chief Operating Officer of the Acton Institute and a frequent Acton Line guest.

Sep 24, 2026

4:57
And is it so easy to untangle those things?
5:00
Yeah, you know, it seems that he may very well be underselling what had happened in the past with previous technologies.
5:07
I think with any technological advance, you're going to see the same thing, which is to say you're going to see augmentation and you're going to see displacement.
5:14
And what I think is interesting, so he goes through a list of risks or downsides.
5:20
As I recall, one is that he thinks that there's going to be catastrophic job losses is one thing.
5:26
He even alludes to the Great Depression as an example of historical catastrophic job losses.
5:32
He talks about bad agents running autonomously, getting this technology into the wrong hands.
10:01
What do you make of these, you know, maybe they would be Microsoft old-time fund villages where people could potentially practice the traditional crafts? What do you make of that? This struck me as one of the stranger things in this piece.
10:53
they created.
10:55
Absolutely.
10:55
As is China.
10:56
China the same way.
10:57
They moved it from one child policy to three child policy.
11:00
There was a one year bump when they removed the one child policy.
11:03
And it's been downhill ever since.
12:56
For

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