Aug 17, 2026 · 52 min · 19 segments
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The third video we ever made on this channel was about automation.
This was way before AI as we know it today, before LLMs and chat GPT made a big splash, and before AI tools became something that could write a legal brief or pass a medical exam on a Tuesday afternoon.
Back then, when we talked about automation, we were referring to robots on factory floors and software making rows of accountants redundant.
The future felt like a question of if and when rather than now and how fast.
So we did what economists do and we ran a thought experiment.
What would a fully automated world actually look like? That was July 2019.
In November 2022, ChatGPT launched and almost overnight, the automation debate shifted from something economists worried about in academic papers to something people were experiencing on their lunch break.
Now a lot of good economics is really just looking back at the theories you put forward and asking how well they held up to reality.
That's exactly what this compilation is.
We've put together three videos from this channel spanning seven years.
That original thought experiment from 2019, with three possible futures for a world where machines do most of the work, a reckoning with what AI is already doing to real economies from 2025, and an MIT study from earlier this year that changed how we measure what this technology is actually doing to us.
Together, they trace how our understanding of this has evolved and how much we're still only beginning to figure out.
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The third video we ever made on this channel was about automation.
This was way before AI as we know it today, before LLMs and chat GPT made a big splash, and before AI tools became something that could write a legal brief or pass a medical exam on a Tuesday afternoon.
Back then, when we talked about automation, we were referring to robots on factory floors and software making rows of accountants redundant.
The future felt like a question of if and when rather than now and how fast.
So we did what economists do and we ran a thought experiment.
What would a fully automated world actually look like? That was July 2019.
In November 2022, ChatGPT launched and almost overnight, the automation debate shifted from something economists worried about in academic papers to something people were experiencing on their lunch break.
Now a lot of good economics is really just looking back at the theories you put forward and asking how well they held up to reality.
That's exactly what this compilation is.
We've put together three videos from this channel spanning seven years.
That original thought experiment from 2019, with three possible futures for a world where machines do most of the work, a reckoning with what AI is already doing to real economies from 2025, and an MIT study from earlier this year that changed how we measure what this technology is actually doing to us.
Together, they trace how our understanding of this has evolved and how much we're still only beginning to figure out.