Intro. [Recording date: February 24, 2026.]
Russ Roberts: Today is February 24th, 2026. And, before introducing today’s guest, I want to give you the results from our survey of your favorite episodes of 2025. Here are your top 10.
10th, a tie between The Economics of Tariffs and Trade, with Doug Irwin, and Why Christianity Needs to Help Save Democracy, with Jonathan Rauch.9. How to Walk the World, with Chris Arnade.8. The Music and Magic of John and Paul, with Ian Leslie.7. Will Guidara on Unreasonable Hospitality.6. EconTalk episode #1000. That was a solo episode with me.5. Number 5: The Magic of Tokyo, with Joe McReynolds.4. Number 4: The Perfect Tuba, with Sam Quinones.3. Shampoo, Property Rights, and Civilization, with Anthony Gill.
Your second-most favorite episode was:2. A Mind-Blowing Way of Looking at Math, with David Bessis.
And, your favorite episode, listed by 33% of listeners in the survey:1. What Is Capitalism? with Mike Munger.
I want to thank everyone for voting and for your comments, which I love receiving.
And, now for today’s guest, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, Marginal Revolution, and Conversations with Tyler. This is Tyler’s 20th appearance on the program. He was last here in November of 2024, talking about the great Vasily Grossman novel, Life and Fate, which many of you read profitably and enjoyed. I appreciate hearing from you.
Tyler, welcome back to EconTalk.
Tyler Cowen: Always happy to be here, Russ.
2:10
Russ Roberts: Our topic for today was inspired by a recent talk you gave at the University of Austin that we will link to, and we’ll also link to the top 10 episodes so you can go back and revisit them if you’d like. Your talk was about how AI [artificial intelligence] will or should, or could change higher education, with some other things along the way.
Before we get there on to that topic and some of your thoughts, I want to start with your current thoughts on the disruptiveness of AI to the job market. A lot of people have been saying recently we’re in for a very tough time. We might lose all our jobs. AI could do everything better than a person except for maybe comforting someone with a warm look. Is that going to be the only occupation left for us poor humans? A lot of jobs are going to probably go away and not come back. But, how many? A lot? All of them? Are most of us going to be unemployed and very poor? There’s an immense amount of doom and gloom this week–and the last couple of weeks–on social media. And, I want to get your thoughts, Tyler. Do you agree?
Tyler Cowen: There will be plenty of new jobs under AI. Just look at the energy sector. To the extent AI takes off, we will need much, much more energy. Those jobs require people. It will change where jobs are and what individuals do. Or look at biomedical trials. Again, to the extent AI does well, it will produce all kinds of new and interesting ideas for drugs, medical devices. These will need to be tested. They will need to work their way through the regulatory process.
I also think, somewhat counterintuitively, AI will lead to more lawyers. I’m not sure that is a good thing, but we will need to write a lot of new laws for the AIs.
Now, a big part of me believes the AIs would write those laws better than humans could, but I do not think we will let them do it, rightly or wrongly. So, humans will use AI assistance in drafting those laws. I think lawyers who work in government will be a growth sector for the foreseeable future. So, those are just a few areas.
But as you well know, it can be very hard to predict where future jobs come. If you go back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution and you tell people all these agricultural jobs are going away, would you have two people sitting around the campfire saying, ‘Oh, yes, a lot more of us will become podcasters’? Well, no, right? They would have no idea. So, we are in that same position.
I do think there will be more leisure time. And, if that is what one means by fewer work, it is mostly a good thing. It may not be a good thing for everyone, but I think that will be one effect of this. There is already more leisure time because tasks you do at work, the AI can help you with more quickly. It is just not reported to the boss that this is going on.
Russ Roberts: Now, you suggested that the legislation that AI would write might be better or would likely be better than what humans would write. I do not know if this was an actual quote, but I saw something in quotation marks from Sam Altman suggesting that governance would need to be improved in a world of a much more important AI in the job market.
I do not think AI is going to be good at that kind of thing–trade-offs, the kind of things we are going to care about as human beings. You do not optimize governance. Governance is almost inherently about trade-offs. Do you agree with that? Or do you think there is a role for AI in figuring out how we ought to restructure, say, regulation in a bigger AI world?
Tyler Cowen: Well, I would vote for Claude or GPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer] over most of our current leaders or even people in the regulatory apparatus. But, that is not how it is going to work. It will be used as an aid. The real problem is whether humans will listen to it. I think it gives, on average, better governance answers. It is not exactly my point of view, the different leading models. But again, better than what we typically have in office.
I think in the short run, some governance will be worse. Just imagine the process for regulatory comments being overloaded by high-quality but pointless AI-generated comments. I think we are already seeing this. So, there will be a lot more spam. Any kind of open process that receives input will become overloaded, I think.
6:22
Russ Roberts: Are you pessimistic at all about the economic, financial implications of AI, of a world where AI is much more integrated to the workforce? At least the doom-and-gloomers are suggesting there might be a collapse of aggregate demand. Half the people will not have jobs, so they will not enjoy any of the benefits of the low prices. What is your take on that?
Tyler Cowen: There is a lot of different issues wrapped up into that. You said, am I pessimistic at all? The words ‘at all’ carry a lot of weight there. I can tell you my biggest worry, and that is: AI will change governance in ways that are hard to predict. We have worse political models than economic models in general, no matter what your point of view. And, it is possible governance becomes worse. And, if governance becomes worse, that is bad for the economy. Really, I do not rule that out at all. So, that is a significant worry.
But, in terms of normal economic mechanisms, I expect we will have more wealth. We will not have fewer jobs. Many people at the very bottom will get all kinds of services for free or near free. I do think we will have more billionaires and more mega-billionaires because you will have small numbers of people building these companies that are quite large in revenue terms. That will be easier than it is today. But, those new companies will mean new projects, and that will create many new jobs. And, I do not think we are headed for anything like mass unemployment. Absolutely not. But, that does not mean I have no worries, right? I have plenty of worries.
Russ Roberts: When you said your biggest worry was governance–that it might affect the economy–is that your biggest worry in economics or your biggest worry overall?
Tyler Cowen: It is my biggest worry, with or without AI, right? That if politics gets worse, economies become worse also. There are plenty of negative mechanisms operating today. Most of them do not have to do with AI. But, if you add AI into that mix and just see it as a big change where the people in charge may not regulate it well, may not regulate it properly, may not do whatever, it is just so many scenarios where things politically get worse.
And, again, with economics, we have models like price system, Hayek, comparative advantage, Say’s Laws, often true, different ways of thinking through how things will go. Politics, I do not think we have very good models. There is median voter theorem, that is worth something, but we do not even know what the median voter wants when it comes to AI.
Russ Roberts: I guess I’m a little worried about a lot of leisure if we get some kind of nirvana of not having to work very much. The Keynes essay for his grandchildren world that he imagined if we got a lot wealthier tends not to have been a–he was right–about half-right there. He said we were going to get a lot wealthier. He was right. He thought we would take a lot more leisure. He was wrong. At least we do not take it at a point in time. We might take it over our whole lifetime. But, people still work, obviously, very hard.
I guess the question would be if AI did displace lots of skills, that could be troubling. And, also, I guess the speed. I worry a little bit about driverless cars, which I think eventually will come, and what that does to the millions of folks who drive cabs and trucks. And, if that happened quickly, it would be hard to–that transition might be politically very unpleasant. Thoughts?
Tyler Cowen: If you take something like trucking, a trucking job has a lot more to it than just driving. There are all sorts of ways in which you load, unload cargo, and deal with points of contact. I think those changes will come relatively slowly.
When will Tesla be ready to displace Waymo as a truly cheaper alternative with driverless vehicles? Again, I expect that within 10 years, but I do not think it will all happen in two or three months. So, a lot of humans still will want a taxi driver. Tesla and Waymo are not free. Taxi drivers do not earn that much. It is not completely obvious to me what the equilibrium there looks like. I know there is a difference between fixed costs and marginal costs. But, a lot of systems end up having higher marginal costs than you think at first, once you make them universal, and they have to handle all possible problems. So, we will see.
But, jobs have changed over the long sweep of human history. I think they will change somewhat faster this time. I am not that worried about additional leisure time. It is bad for some people. We saw that during COVID [Coronavirus Disease]. But, if you want to work, your chance to control, manipulate, and manage projects will be far, far higher than it ever has been in the past. And, that will keep us busy, whether it is for earning monetary income or not.
Russ Roberts: Have you been in a driverless car?
Tyler Cowen: Yes. It’s fun.
Russ Roberts: I think it is fabulous. I would never choose a human driver over a driverless car in the current situation.
Tyler Cowen: Well, you are not paying the full cost of a Waymo, right?
Russ Roberts: Fair enough.
Tyler Cowen: So, it is subsidized to you. And, people claim the Tesla network will, over time, prove better because it is accumulating data; then the marginal cost of that will be very low. But, as things change on the roads, rules change, I do not know what people expect changes. Maybe we will want people driving vehicles to be performing other services. It will be connected to package delivery. I am not sure, but we shouldn’t overpredict the future. And, if that one job truly just totally does go away, I think that will be fine.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Again, things will get cheaper in all kinds of ways if that is what ultimately happens.
12:18
Russ Roberts: I guess the thing that seems to me when I was thinking about it at some length, and I think you are sympathetic to this, as long as there is growth–and I think there is an assumption in the current world that AI will mean that there will be 11 people who will be able to make a really enormously extraordinary living, and everyone else is going to be having cheap products, and otherwise will have very little to do with their time. That is not the world I envision. As long as there is growth and there is a chance for people to improve themselves, their economic opportunity, I think the world will be in a much better place with an AI world. And, to me, that is the only question: Will there be opportunity for self-growth, career paths that are interesting? There will be things to do for humans, I think, for sure. Will there be a vision of improvement that will be possible?
Tyler Cowen: Once there are more goods and services, which is what it means to say AI is working, it is relatively hard to get to a conclusion where most people are worse off. The goods and services are sold. If need be, their prices fall. The production, marketing, and distribution of the goods and services generates income of its own. Keynes had this one scenario in mind where you produce more, but it is all hoarded in the form of currency–the liquidity trap. That is not plausible for an AI-enriched world, where there are all these new and fascinating things people want to buy. So, some version of Say’s Law is likely to hold. The production of these goods and services generates incomes and incomes for people to buy those same things. So, that is by far the most likely scenario.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. My only disagreement is that when you use the phrase ‘people will be better off,’ it sounds like what you have in mind is they will have more goods and services. That is not the only thing. They do care about it. We do care about those things.
Tyler Cowen: Your jobs will be less routine also, right?
Russ Roberts: I hope so. Well, that would be great, right?
Russ Roberts: I think work as a source of meaning is not unimportant in the modern world. So, it will be interesting to see how that plays out. I do not know.
Tyler Cowen: Many people may prefer routine jobs. That is one worry I have. Another worry I have is it is possible the people who are most displaced will be the upper, upper-middle-class white-collar workers, and they will have to move to Houston and work for energy companies. Which is not the end of the world, but politically, they will hate that. And, rather than being, say, a consulting partner for $1.4 million a year, they will be sent to Houston and they will earn $300,000 a year. And, politically, they are a very influential group. So, I do not know how we survive that, politically. What are they going to vote for? Right?
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Tyler Cowen: Those individuals, you could say, in a sense, run the Democratic Party, and they are not going to be happy under a lot of scenarios. So, that gets back to my main worry being the politics.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I guess my thought was that–a lot of people were saying, well, consulting firms are all going to die because AI can do–in a tiny fraction already–a tiny fraction of the costs, a really pretty good job giving you advice, companies’ advice. But, I think a lot of what people pay for when they hire a consulting firm is not the solutions because they are often, I do not think, particularly good, but for the chance to talk to real human beings about their organization and to react to the observations of an outsider and sometimes make a difference. I do not think they are paying for the report per se.
Tyler Cowen: I agree with that, but I think they could do that with, say, a third of their current employees.
Russ Roberts: Fair enough.
Tyler Cowen: And, I think in the short run, there will be a boom in consulting because everyone needs consultants to tell them how to integrate AI into their workflows, though the consultants themselves may not know how to do that. But, in the medium term, I do think the demand for consulting services will be down.
16:05
Russ Roberts: So, let’s turn to higher education, an area that many people think is going to be changed by AI. But, as you pointed out in that talk–and I think, as is the case in many industries–there is a lot of inertia. Higher education is not the most nimble institution in America.
Tyler Cowen: Those are polite words, but yes.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. So, it is not obvious to me that it’s going to be revolutionized anything like overnight, and it is not clear it can be revolutionized at all. People are paying for a variety of things when they go off to college. But, let’s think about just the education part. You start off with a piece of advice that is kind of startling: You suggest that a third of college courses should be devoted to using AI well. Explain what you meant.
Tyler Cowen: Or a third of total course-time. But, yes.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. So, explain what you meant by that.
Tyler Cowen: Well, almost every job in the future will involve knowing how to use AI well. In most schools, that isn’t taught at all in any formal sense. Particular professors might teach it, as indeed I do.
So, I think what we should do is devote a significant part of the curriculum to a skill everyone will need, and right now is quite scarce. And keep in mind, when you are teaching people how to use AI well, it’s not at the expense of teaching them other things. So, you can teach them, ‘Here is how to use AI to better read and understand Homer’s Odyssey,’ and you are teaching them Homer’s Odyssey at the same time. But you are teaching them the combination of Homer’s Odyssey and AI.
So, to take a third of curriculum time and devote it to AI, you are not pushing out other things very much. You may, in fact, be enhancing them. Everyone will be learning better.
The main problem is our own faculty do not know how to do this. And our administrators, probably even less so. So, who is going to do the teaching? The students? You could have the students maybe teach the professors because the students probably have been using it to cheat.
Russ Roberts: But–and we will come to cheating in a minute, because I think you have a really nice insight on that. But, could you really imagine–well, you could tell me about your own experience. When you say, ‘Teach people how to use AI,’ do you mean how to write a better prompt? What do you have in mind there?
Tyler Cowen: It depends what the area is. Right now, you might be teaching people something like Codex–how to use AI to program better. And programming will do your tasks. But, for some of the humanities, it is just how to write a better prompt. So, if you are asking it questions about Homer’s Odyssey, how do you ensure you get the best possible answers, the smartest answers? Which advanced model should you ask? Whatever it is you need to know. But over time, less and less of it will be about prompting. Good prompting will occur automatically. People will learn that pretty quickly.
Russ Roberts: At this stage, I think the bigger challenge is people don’t think to use it, right?
Tyler Cowen: Sure. Just telling people they need to use it. But, if Biology is the class, how to integrate AI systems into a lab would be the thing to be taught. Again, I fully recognize there is no one there to teach it yet, but that is what you will need to know. So, why should not we just be teaching people what they need to know and have that as our goal?
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well, I am going to talk about what that means in a minute–‘need to know.’
But, sticking with the question of using it, I just want to point out that you can use AI to understand the Odyssey–Homer’s Odyssey–by, you are struggling to remember what happened back in Book II, and, etc., etc. For me, the biggest value of it in reading The Odyssey is saying, ‘Give me a list of the characters. Tell me what page they first appear on in Fagles’ translation.’ And, ‘Tell me what their main characteristics are so I can keep them straight.’ Right?
I assume there are people–many of them older, but I think young people are probably pretty good at it–but older people would go, like, ‘Oh, you can use AI for that?’ But, that will all be gone in the next year or two. I think people will figure all that stuff out and how to prompt in thoughtful ways, right? It is going to be a very small time-consume–time-source.
Tyler Cowen: But there’s other questions one might have about Homer’s Odyssey. So, to teach people how to ask better questions is an unending task.
So, for instance, you probably know much more ancient history than what the students would, reading Homer’s Odyssey. You live near the Mediterranean. But, just what are the questions about the historic era of Homer that one should ask? Was it composed orally? How was it passed down? What was the role of oxen in these economies? What did they use for money? What do we know about whether these events really happened?
Maybe it’s trivial to you to know to ask those questions. You have been podcasting–how many episodes?
Russ Roberts: A lot. Over a thousand.
Tyler Cowen: A lot. But, other people need to learn how to ask questions better. That is why we are not all podcasters.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. That’s a great observation. And, I think the next set of questions would be about its impact on the rest of the world and what its legacy is and so on.
Tyler Cowen: Or if someone said–let’s say it is an archeology class–not a classics or literature class–and then you want to have good questions to ask about Homer’s Odyssey. I am not even sure that you and I would have the best questions.
Russ Roberts: Fair. Fair enough.
Tyler Cowen: And we need to learn how to do that. In fact, you can learn it using the AI.
Russ Roberts: I would ask them what are the good questions. It’s kind of easy.
Tyler Cowen: But, you need to put more structure on it.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, for sure.
Tyler Cowen: Like, what are the good questions, for which purposes? How do I follow up? And so on.
21:48
Russ Roberts: So, I want to talk about writing, because I think about that a lot. You had some suggestions on how we ought to deal with writing in a modern curriculum that has AI in it and how to think about how to catch people who are overusing AI, perhaps to their own detriment, but in pursuit of a credential or a better grade.
Tyler Cowen: The cheating problem with AI is much overrated. We are simply unwilling to do something about it. Now, it’s not that you can detect AI-style, necessarily. Maybe you can now, maybe you can’t. But over time, you will not be able to.
But just take students, and for, say, 2 or 3% of their output over the course of their college career, lock them in a room and test them. And, if what they are handing in and how they do on the test diverge dramatically, just call them in for a chat. I am not saying send them to jail, but look into the matter. And, it requires a certain harshness that you are actually willing to pursue, you know, a strong differential performance. I do not think you have to kick them out, but I think as an incentive against cheating, it will work much better than anything we are doing right now.
Russ Roberts: So, you are saying that you put them in a room where they cannot have access to AI or the Internet. You make them write an essay. And then, you compare that to an essay they have written where they have the freedom to not be in the room. And, if the essay is much better when they have the freedom to not be in the room, it suggests they have used AI. That is the claim, right?
Tyler Cowen: Exactly. It is just a sampling problem.
And, you could just make them write more of their essays locked in a room if you think something fishy is going on. You do not have to expel them. You do not have to write this up in a manner where they cannot get a job in the future–because some people just get nervous when they are locked in a room, right? Nonetheless, I think there is much more cheating today than there would be under my recommended scheme.
Russ Roberts: But, I want to define what cheating is and push back on that a little bit. I think in the same talk we are discussing, you point out that you do not use AI for your writing for the columns that you write. Which I get. But, most people use it for their writing, and they use it anywhere from 0 to 100. Zero might be your style: ‘I don’t want to have my style tampered at all with by AI. I am not going to even have it look at it.’ At the other end, you say, ‘I have to write a piece on how AI is going to affect employment. Please write that, Claude.’ And, Claude spits out a perfect 500-word, 750-word op-ed piece.
But in between, there would be all kinds of things where I would say–in theory: I do not use it either, but that is because I am old and set in my ways. But I could say, ‘I feel like this is a little disorganized. Could you reorganize it for me?’ Is that cheating? Or I could say, ‘Is there a sentence here that you find awkward or confusing? Could you fix it for me?’ Is the definition going to be you cannot use it for anything in those writing classes that you are talking about?
Tyler Cowen: Well, I think you need to split up the tasks. So, a big portion of those writing classes, you force the students to write with AI. This is what I am doing with my current History of Economic Thought class. And you just say: ‘Well, the standard for a good paper is higher. Use AI. You have to use AI.’ Try to teach them how to do it. And you grade the joint product.
So, you should teach them that and how to write on their own. And, you are teaching them how to write on their own mostly as a way of teaching them how to think. Most people may not need to know how to write on their own for its own sake, but they will need to know how to think. And, writing is a great path to thinking, as you and I both know.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. That’s a strange thing, by the way, right? It is not a separate skill, but I think people tend to think of it as a separate skill. But, obviously, my ability to think comes greatly from my ability to write, and they get all tangled up. I can’t disentangle them.
Tyler Cowen: I cannot think in the shower. I hear these stories of people, ‘The idea came to me in the shower.’ Like, I’m just wet. I’m showering. That’s my thing. Nothing else comes. The soap comes. So, I need to write to think, or I need to talk to people.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. We did an episode with Lorne Buchman on that topic. We will link to it. I happen to agree. I think it probably depends on the person.
26:16
Russ Roberts: So, then the question would be the following. So, as I think, here at Shalem College, we have a core curriculum where people sit in most of their first-year classes studying the same thing in groups of 25 or fewer. They might be reading a great book. They might be reading Plato’s Dialogues. They might be reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. They might be reading The Iliad or the Odyssey. And, they are struggling alongside their classmates to grapple with the meaning of the text, the import of the text, the lessons to be gleaned from the text, the questions that could be raised that cannot be answered with a yes or a no about the text and its import.
And, that is an extraordinary experience that most of us–and I cannot speak for you, Tyler–but there was very little of that in my undergraduate education and my own personal experience. In fact, the only thing that probably parallels that in my lifetime as a student was in graduate school when we would sit in our study group of four people and struggle to answer problem sets that had no clear answers. And, a huge portion of my education as a graduate student came from those sessions. No instructor. Just four of us arguing, struggling. Has a huge impact. And, seminars also have an impact. AI can’t do that, I don’t think. And when I say ‘that,’ I mean: help you internalize deep lessons and understandings and what we might call wisdom and common sense through the process itself. Or do you disagree?
Tyler Cowen: Well, you and I were both fans of Adam Smith, right?
Russ Roberts: Yes.
Tyler Cowen: And, we know what Adam Smith’s proposal was: that different classes and different professors compete with each other. So, I gave my talk at U. Austin–which is not UT Austin [University of Texas at Austin]. It is University of Austin. It is a small school. In a semester, they told me they offer 30 classes. Thirty is not a lot. It does not cover the entire sweep of human knowledge.
I made them a simple proposal. Each year, let a student take one class with artificial intelligence. No more than one: just one, or even one every two years, or even one every four years, just once, and see what they think. If you want, you can have the students take the class in a small group. Well, you need to recruit three people to do it with you. And, you choose the topic of Tudor England, which they do not currently offer a class in. It is an important topic.
I asked the student body in my talk, ‘How many of you want a class in Tudor England?’ Seven or eight hands went up. So, let those people try with AI and just see what they think. See what works; let different groups of students design different kinds of AI-driven classes. If they do not like it, they will just stop doing it. This is Adam Smith’s point. So, let people in your institution–and I will pose the same challenge to you–just try it once and see what they think.
29:15
Russ Roberts: But lay out–to be clear, we are very proud of the fact that we are not selling a credential per se. Obviously, we provide a credential. Our students graduate from an accredited institution, but that is not what we are selling. We are selling transformation here, right? I like to say that people come to Shalem not to study something, but to become something. So, it is a very different environment here in terms of competitiveness and grade consciousness. We are not so big on all that. So, that is great for your experiment, because I want to put that to the side. That clouds the conversation.
But I want you to elaborate for listeners who did not maybe hear your talk at University of Austin: When you say take a class with AI, let’s get into the weeds a little bit. For your talk, you generated a syllabus. So, talk about that and then how it would be. Assignments would be done and so on.
Tyler Cowen: You would, at least at first, work with a coach. Let’s say the class is in Tudor England. The coach does not have to be an expert in Tudor England, but they have to know something about how a class should be structured. So, you prompt the AI; it generates a reading list. You go off and you do those readings. You prompt the AI to generate quizzes. I did all this for the audience during my talk. There is a link where one can do this. The AI can grade the quizzes for you.
And again, students would decide: Should this class have a paper, only quizzes, three short papers, one long paper? But, the AI would grade the papers, the quizzes, whatever you have. And, at the end of it all, if you want, you can reintroduce a human to grade the whole thing. I do not think you need to, but I understand people will feel a lot better if we have the coach come along and just certify that somehow the AIs were not insane lunatics here. And then, you have a grade and you have a course of study. And, there you go.
Now, I have more radical ideas that I think are actually better. But, let’s just start by having AI try to copy a human class. My more radical idea is you just chat with the AI for, say, three months, 15 weeks, whatever. And, at the end of it all, you have a different AI grade your chat with the first AI. Like, what did the person learn from this chat? A lot, a little? B-, A+? I think that is eventually how it will work.
But I know that is too radical. Let’s start just by copying how a human would teach a class, but put in an AI instead. It has zero marginal cost to you. And again, if it is missing in human warmth, or insight, or depth, or in-person discussion, and that really matters, students won’t take it. But, I think you will have a lot of students who want to learn about, say, Tudor England. And, I suspect your college also does not teach a class in Tudor England.
Russ Roberts: We do not.
Tyler Cowen: And, they will do that instead for one of their classes. And then, just see over time, where are the students flocking? Do they want more AI or less? I think as Hayekians, we can say we are not sure, but let us let a kind of market discover that, as Adam Smith himself had indicated.
32:30
Russ Roberts: So, I think the fascinating example of having the conversation, which, by the way, when you first do it, it is really extraordinary, right? When you first–I am sure you have done this; I have done it. There is a topic you wish you knew more about. So, you approach AI and you say, ‘Treat me like a high school student,’ or ‘treat me like a freshman in college,’ or ‘treat me like a novice.’ And, you start going back and forth. And then, you say, ‘Give me three examples so I can see whether I really understand it.’ And then, you say, ‘I did not really get it, I do not think. Can you make it clearer for me?’ And, it never gets tired, never gets bored. It just relentlessly is waiting for you to talk to it. It is kind of an amazing thing.
Now, whether you could sustain that over the 13, 14 weeks you are talking about, I think, is a little harder. Maybe we will get used to it, but that strikes me as difficult. And, it would be hard because you would not know exactly what you should be talking about. So, part of the challenge would be setting it up so you told the AI what you wanted to talk about to help you learn something from that, because you know you have got the exam at the end from the other AI.
But, I think the creativity is going to come for educational entrepreneurs in doing more than that, as you point out. That is a great, interesting pilot, first step. And, it is a particularly important pilot for stuff where you are trying to transfer information. Right? So, if you are trying to understand, say, how the cell works, you need lectures. You are not going to figure that out sitting around a room with a coach in the absence of anything else and acquire the kind of information you need to have an understanding of biology.
But, if you are reading the Odyssey, or just take a poignant example, my students who have come back from war, literally, and are reading the Iliad, which is about wrath, and vengeance, and bloodshed, and the challenges and trauma of war, doing that on your own in a 15-week conversation with a machine is not the same as doing it alongside people who have gone through that as well. So, the question is–
Tyler Cowen: But, keep in mind, my initial proposal: if the topic so requires, you can mandate groups of 2, 3, 5, 10, whatever, if that is important–and it may be for the Iliad, especially in Israel–so, that is fine. You can do that.
Russ Roberts: Well, that is my–
Tyler Cowen: The person does not have to be alone. Furthermore, we are going to see the whole 15-week thing as highly artificial, right?
Russ Roberts: You think?
Tyler Cowen: We are going to move away from that over time.
Russ Roberts: You think?
Russ Roberts: It is a weird thing, isn’t it? It is such a weird thing. And, you got to fill it up somehow, even if it does not deserve being filled up, given the topic of the class. You got to teach it the whole time.
Tyler Cowen: Imagine the class in the Iliad, and you have everyone read it in six weeks, and then they move on to another text on warfare. So, there is so much more flexibility in the AI model. But, just to pose you this as a challenge: You are a president of a college. Will you allow this experiment, that a student can take one class with AI and just see how they like it, as Adam Smith more or less recommended?
35:38
Russ Roberts: But, what I was trying to get to–which, you beat me to it, but we agree–is that if you think that doing it in a group is important, that can be part of the experience. And, of course, the extraordinary part of this that is–as a president of college, I am very aware of–is that the coach might be cheaper than somebody with a Ph.D. [Doctor of Philosophy] in classics, right? So–
Tyler Cowen: Much cheaper. And, they won’t insist on all kinds of other treatment.
Russ Roberts: And, they won’t insist on passing on their own pet theory of the Iliad that they learned from whatever. It is a very appealing vision, but I am just trying to think out loud about how this group experience could be captured. So, if the four of us–me, you, and two others, say–we are going to read the Odyssey together, right?
Russ Roberts: Some of the time we are going to be alone. We will be reading the text alone. Usually. Not always. We might read it aloud together, parts of it, harder parts, challenging parts, provocative parts, but a lot of it we would read alone. A lot of it, we would talk to the AI back and forth on our own where we couldn’t understand something, we are trying to clarify. What would we do when we come back together, and what could the coach do that would make that more akin to what is the current experience of a great teacher and a great class?
Tyler Cowen: We could help each other with our papers.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Sure.
Tyler Cowen: And help directly, but help use the AI to learn about the topic your paper is on. Just discuss with each other, and you could have the AI record a group discussion and then just ask it, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And then, say, ‘Well, people made these points. Were there any factual errors in the points people made?’ Or, ‘Would you add something to this?’ And, it can speak out loud if you want. It could have your voice, right? We can do this.
Russ Roberts: Sure.
Tyler Cowen: Everyone could take a class with the president. We could ask the AI, ‘What do you think Russ Roberts would say here?’ Everyone would get to have some weird version of a class with you on Homer. There is so much material from Russ Roberts. The AI is an excellent model of you. So, the possibilities are endless.
37:50
Russ Roberts: Well, let’s talk about your History of Economics class. What do you do in there? Do you talk?
Tyler Cowen: I do. I lecture. I also–
Russ Roberts: Why?
Tyler Cowen: I think there is something about the vividness of human face-to-face communication. But, I gave them an assignment last week. I said, ‘Use AI to teach yourself the Ricardian model.’ And, they have all been doing this. And then, I said, ‘This week,’ which is later today, ‘I am going to go in and I am going to teach you the Ricardian model.’ And, I said, ‘You do not have to report back, but I just want you to mentally compare how it did and how I did. You do not ever have to say anything.’ But, that is a big part of the lesson.
Russ Roberts: It is fabulous.
Tyler Cowen: And, that is what we are doing.
Russ Roberts: Your jokes will be better, but that may be your only advantage, Tyler, I worry.
Tyler Cowen: We’ll see. But, clearly over time, I will lose some number of what might be my current advantages. And, if I end up doing different things than what I do now, I am fine with that. I am ready to adapt. I do much more podcasting because of competition from AI, which competes with my writing more than my podcasting. And, I do more personal appearances, which the AI can’t do at all. So, I would say I have adapted at least half of my time usage already because of what you might call AI competition. So, I am very ready for this.
Russ Roberts: You mention an application or a company-I do not know what it is called-0-LearnLM, which is trying to improve the quality of tutoring of AI. What are your thoughts on what that is going to actually do? Do you know anything about that in terms of nuts and bolts, what they are trying to achieve?
Tyler Cowen: Only a little. I mean, I have seen quite a few projects of people who take an AI, there is a base model, and they modify the base model so it will not tell you the answer right away, or it talks you through the steps of learning, or 30 different other things. There are a lot of EdTech startups.
My intuition is none of those–few [?a few?] of those will succeed. The people are just going to use the basic foundation model. I am not even saying that is better, but it is what they are used to. And, I do not think the bells and whistles on top will be the equilibrium. So, when I teach using AI, I just stress, not, ‘Here is some company with a neat little thing that will walk you through, talk you through,’ just, ‘Here is the base model, here is how to use it.’ That is what I think we will be doing. People want one model to work with, I think.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, that is true.
40:22
Russ Roberts: Let’s be a little more radical, even, than the last version you gave. So, as you say, I am president. So, let’s pretend I can do whatever I want, which, as we know, is not true– even in a corporation, let alone a college. Let me say it differently. Tyler, let’s say you start a college, okay?
Russ Roberts: The college is–you have to design your own major, your own curriculum. It is all AI, everything, with some coaches. Let’s have some human coaches, and let’s have the potential for interaction with the other students as well, either socially as well as educationally.
But, 15 weeks is artificial. Four years is artificial. Eight semesters is artificial. If I walked into your college–I am 18 years old, and I am bright and curious, which are the two things I care usually the most about when I think about education–and I say, ‘I want to be transformed. I want to become something. I do not want to just become a–I do not want to know the base of knowledge of, say, economists.’ And as you and I both know, most economic education is telling people what economists think about how the world works. It is not teaching people about how to think about how the world works, which should be the same, but they are not.
So, let’s say I am that person. Let’s narrow it down. Let’s do economics. I come to you and I say, ‘I want to know what you know, more or less, about how the economy and how economics works and what I can learn from it.’ I am an idiot, right? I am a tabula rasa. I might need your advice. But, would you let me–I want you to imagine a world where I then get to not just create my own class on Tudor England, but my own class on economics.
And, maybe our former colleague, the late Walter Williams–this is one of my favorite things–he would give out on the first day of his graduate class, I think, 100 questions, maybe a little more than 100. Over time, it grew. And, he would say, ‘The final exam will be 25 or 10 of these questions.’ So, you got the questions in advance. The problem is they are not questions like, ‘What is the capital of England?’ They are really hard questions. And, you can find these online. We will put a link to them. It is a fabulous educational resource because it says, ‘To answer these questions, you have to know a lot about how to think like an economist, and you will learn a lot about how the world works.’
So, could you imagine a world where I give a degree in economics based on something creative? What would it be? Now that I have this incredible tutoring tool, how would I certify mastery?
Tyler Cowen: You just test people, grade their papers. I mean, the British have a tutoring system to this day in many parts of the country.
Russ Roberts: It’s true. Yeah.
Tyler Cowen: It works acceptably well. It could be 10 or 20 times better with AI assistance. So, we know some version of that works, right? We can just do it now much better.
Now, it may be possible to improve on it further yet. I would say, get a few years of data, feed it into the AIs that have been doing this, and ask them how to improve it. You don’t really quite have that same possibility without the AIs. So, they will be figuring out what works and what does not. That is another reason to do this. You are feeding them the actual data.
Russ Roberts: When education was somewhat elite and not expected to be the–I am talking about higher education. When higher education was for a small part of the country, small part of the population, a lot of these issues weren’t relevant. People came to, quote, “be educated”–to get mastery of a set of subjects. It is so many different things in America right now and in most places. The acquisition of wisdom is not the focus of most education. Is there room for a college, a startup that would certify that experience? You think that would sell like hotcakes? Is it not here because–
Tyler Cowen: Well, does not your college do that? You know much more about that than I do. Does not University of Austin do that?
Russ Roberts: I don’t know. I mean, I know what we do, but I do not–no, I don’t think so. I think–the phrase I used before, I think, is worth thinking a lot about, to become something rather than to study something. A lot of what I think we do here at Shalem is to help people figure out what they want to become, not just to help them become that thing. It is both. It is happening at the same time.
People come here with–if I can use a fancy word, I think it is the right word–inchoate ambition to make their country better. They are not sure how to get there from here. We do not give them a path, but we try to give them the education that will equip them to make a difference in their country and to make it better.
That is such a crazy goal, right? It is not anything related to what we normally think of, I think, as education in America when I was going through that experience as a faculty member. But, it is an amazing goal. It is an amazing goal. It is a fabulous goal. It is what everybody would want if they believed it would work. And, if they believed they could still get a job, and our students do, and they do very well. But there is anxiety about that, naturally, by many people.
Tyler Cowen: A lot of people do that off campus, of course. That is how you and I mainly learn.
Russ Roberts: It is called life. Yeah.
Tyler Cowen: It is called life. So, there is life, which includes the Internet and AI, right? And, we do not learn in 15-week batches, you and I. We pick up things as we wish. We learn, we stop, we go forward, we stop, we pick up another thing. So, we are the supposed experts, and that is what we are doing, and we insist that everyone else has to do it some quite different way. That, to me, is what is weird.
Russ Roberts: But, isn’t that because we were in this second business of certification, right? We want to stamp on their forehead that they have acquired some minimal level of competence, either in knowledge or in mastery. Not complete mastery, obviously, but some minimum level of competence. And, once you contaminate the educational experience–and I will use that word ‘contaminate’–with that side project of telling, say, employers that this person is either smart or knows this set of stuff, it changes everything, right?
Tyler Cowen: The AI can outcompete us in certification, easily. We are not doing that yet, but it is the future equilibrium. Just have a person spend a day with the AI. And, in this case, you have the AI prearranged to be testing the person across a number of areas. You will get great certification: strengths, weaknesses, temperament, what they know, what they do not know. Way better than these As and Bs–or I guess at Harvard and Stanford, it is only As you get. So, again, there is only an issue of will. We can solve that problem whenever we want to. I get that we do not want to do it because we do not want to unravel the bundle. But, sooner or later, that is what will happen.
47:41
Russ Roberts: I asked a high-ranking former member of the Israeli military establishment how they would, if they were in my job, change the admissions process to help select for leadership. So, I care about two things here, right? I care about intellectual aptitude, which is a combination of brain power and curiosity. And then, I care about ambition to make the country better and the capability of actually achieving that. So, I was asking him, ‘How do you do that second thing? How would you interview people? What would you do differently?’ He said, ‘Well, I would take them for three days. I would put them in the woods.’ I am thinking, ‘I do not think that is going to be an effective marketing strategy for my college.’ It is interesting. It might appeal to a certain group of people, but probably not going to be what I can do.
But, I am thinking about you. We had a great conversation about talent, and you have to seek out talent for your philanthropy project, Emergent Ventures, which is an incredible project. And, we talked about how do you interview people, how do you–so, have you thought about, and maybe you already do, using AI for that? I mean, do you say to people, ‘Go off for a day and send me the transcript. Let the AI get to know you’?
Tyler Cowen: They use AI for it.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, of course.
Tyler Cowen: That makes it harder for me.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Tyler Cowen: They ask the AI, ‘Well, what is Tyler going to ask me?’ Right?
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler Cowen: So, I need new questions all the time. I think AI soon will be better than most human interviewers. It may well be already. I am not sure it will soon be better than the best human interviewers. But, again, if it beats most, we have gotten somewhere.
Russ Roberts: It seems a lot of the challenge of that would be the fact that it is awfully obsequious.
Tyler Cowen: Well, you can change that very easily.
Russ Roberts: Right. You can, but I am just saying, if you told me to go off and talk to an AI, I guess you would have to ensure that I told it, ‘Do not suck up to me too much because I need this to be somewhat objective.’ Right?
Tyler Cowen: And, that is part of what we will teach people in the third of the curriculum devoted to teaching them AI: How do you get different moods from it? Right? But, it is not hard. And, eventually, there will be a greater diversity of models available. So, it will be easier yet.
50:00
Russ Roberts: So, I don’t know if you saw this post from former, past EconTalk guest, Noah Smith. He said, ‘I get the kind of pleasure from using AI that I used to get when I first started using social media. And then, I found out that social media is ruining the country and corrupting our institutions.’ And, I do not remember the exact wording he used, and I apologize if I am getting it wrong, but what he meant was: ‘The social consequences of social media were not as attractive as they were for me sitting by myself, scrolling.’
Do you think about that about AI at all? I mean, it is obvious, I think, to me and probably to listeners, that you really enjoy this world, this door we have walked through. And, there are parts of me that–I just find it so extraordinary, right? I love using it when it is–a lot of it is just that it can do it at all, what you ask it to do. It is so fun. And, it is going to get better. And, as you point out–this is an important thing I want you to talk about–most people do not really know what its capabilities are because you are using the free model.
Tyler Cowen: That’s right. Very important.
Russ Roberts: There are a lot of users of it, but most of them are using free model. And, there are very, very few people using the higher-end models, and they are very, very different. Are you confident this world we are walking through is going to be a world we are going to be happy to live in?
Tyler Cowen: I do not know what the word ‘confident’ means here. I think people on the whole do not love change, and these are big changes. Did people love the Industrial Revolution at the time? No. Some did. Is it arguably the best thing that ever happened to humans? Basically, yes. So, I think it will be like that.
I said, once in some other interview, like, the more people are upset, the better we’ll know that things are going. That was tongue in cheek. But, there is some truth to that. And, it will just change expectations about what jobs will be like or what future your kids will have in a way that the people who are clued in will find quite unsettling. I wouldn’t deny that at all. It worries me. It gets back to this point: We do not know how the politics of this will evolve. Including in China. We are only talking about America, but China faces its own version of this; the EU [European Union] does; the rest of the world. We are going to have a lot of different decisions made. But, I think for the most part, it will prove too difficult or too costly to stop.
Russ Roberts: I think that is true. You wrote a book a while back that we talked about, called Stubborn Attachments. Which–it’s one of my favorite books of yours, maybe my favorite book. It’s a defense of growth. And, I hear the echoes of this in your assessment of where we are: that, we are going to have more stuff. I have no doubt about it. Maybe an enormously larger amount of stuff. And so, when you say the Industrial Revolution was maybe one of the greatest things that ever happened to humanity, I assume that is what you have in mind.
Tyler Cowen: No, I will take out the ‘maybe,’ but it is not just stuff. It’s creativity. It’s opportunity. It’s liberation of women. It’s human rights. It’s much more than just stuff. That’s part of the core message of Stubborn Attachments.
Russ Roberts: Expand. Expand.
Tyler Cowen: You need resources to pay for making people’s lives better in all kinds of humanitarian ways. Very poor societies typically do not have a lot of tolerance, do not grant rights to women very readily. They are worse places to live, not just because they do not have the flat-screen televisions. They are worse on human rights, and dignity, and most of the other things we care about. So, GDP [Gross Domestic Product] per capita and what you might call non-GDP gains, they seem to correlate by about 0.95, which, to me, is quite striking.
So, you want economic growth. And, for Israel in particular, there is a national security angle. If you do not have AI, I mean, you are toast. Now, if you are Brazil, you might be safe anyway. But you are not Brazil.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I remember very vividly you told me in, I think, probably our first conversation about AI, that Israel should have its own AI initiative. And I thought, ‘That is interesting.’ And, obviously, over the last two years, I have thought a lot about that comment. There is an immense amount of AI happening, research happening here.
Russ Roberts: So, there is nothing to worry about, at least in terms of effort. I am pretty confident we are on the cutting edge or very close to it. It is kind of an amazing, amazing technology society, innovation society here. Doesn’t mean we may always make the right choices, but–
Tyler Cowen: A lot of small countries don’t have that option. Most do not.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, it is unusual. It is very striking.
Tyler Cowen: So, geopolitics will change radically.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
55:04
Russ Roberts: Let’s close with advice. So, there was some point–my youngest child is, I think, 26 or 27 right now. Eight years ago, when he was thinking of going to college, there was a part of me that said, ‘Maybe he shouldn’t go. Does he really need to go in today’s world? Would he not be better off taking four years to do something extraordinary? Doing something he couldn’t do because he was sitting in those 15-week-long classes in that four-year rigid experience?’ But, I didn’t give him that advice. He went. He got a lot out of it, I think, both educationally and life-wise. But, it’s an interesting question, whether a person should go to college these days.
But, what is clear is that some of the advice we were giving 18-year-olds five years ago was not good advice: ‘You have got to learn how to code.’ Well, that turned out not to be good. By the way, I was told that about Shalem. ‘It should be a required class at Shalem, coding, because in the modern world, that is where all the–so much is happening in it. You have to understand it.’ So, that probably wasn’t good advice.
But, how do you tell a young person, an 18-year-old today, about this brave new world there that is about to hit them? What are your thoughts?
Tyler Cowen: Tell them to learn AI. Tell them to look for what Luis Garicano called messy jobs, in a very good online essay. He said, ‘In the AI world, the premium will be on messy jobs where you do many different things that cannot be routinized or turned into formula, and that involve a lot of face-to-face contact, and solving difficult problems with and/or caused by other human beings.’ So, that would be my advice. That is my advice. I get this question really, literally every day. [More to come, 57:07]
