Callum Williams: Economics, AI, and Technological Progress — #82

Callum Williams is a senior economics writer for The Economist. He was educated at Oxford, Harvard, and Cambridge, and is the author of The Classical School: The Birth of Economics in 20 Enlightened Lives.(00:00) - Introduction (02:07) - US-Russia Relations (03:18) - Trump and US Foreign Policy (05:30) - Sanctions and Their Impact on Russia (09:28) - Economic Resilience and Sanctions Evasion (14:14) - Historical Context and Predictions (29:37) - US Wealth Inequality (40:37) - Debating Wealth Inequality and Welfare States (42:35) - Homelessness and Government Intervention (45:18) - Employment Rates and Economic Behavior (50:12) - San Francisco's Homelessness Crisis (53:46) - US vs. Europe: Economic Divergence (01:06:06) - Cultural Differences in Economic Growth (01:10:48) - AI and Job Market Transformation (01:13:50) - Challenges in AI Adoption (01:15:16) - Consumer vs. Business Tech Adoption (01:15:56) - Slow AI Integration in Businesses (01:17:34) - AI in Customer Service (01:23:48) - Resistance to AI (01:26:36) - AI and Productivity (01:37:35) - Debates on Technological Progress Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.–Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.