AI’s White‑Collar Shake‑Up | David Shapiro’s Deep Dive on Post‑Labor Economics
AI Pod by Wes Roth and Dylan Curious | Artificial Intelligence News and Interviews With Experts
Wes Roth and Dylan Curious
5.0 • 2 Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2025
⏱️ 104 minutes
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Summary
Automation is speeding toward a “post‑labor” world, and it may arrive sooner than anyone expects. Author‑researcher David Shapiro joins Dylan and Wes to test whether the AI boom is hype or a true turning point, explore what happens if 40 % of jobs vanish, and map the real timelines for farm bots, factory robots, and billions of humanoids. They tackle energy abundance, AI safety, China‑US competition, brain‑computer interfaces, and the shift from wage income to property dividends—arguing that the future hinges on democratic ownership rather than runaway doom.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If a good chunk of today's jobs go away, then what do you do if you have 20, 30, 40% unemployment rate? |
| 0:06.5 | That requires an entirely new economic paradigm. |
| 0:09.0 | The Golden Age of Athens, about 10% of the citizens were landowning wealthy men. |
| 0:14.0 | And what did they do? |
| 0:15.1 | They went to the Elysinian mysteries to trip balls, and then they debated politics. |
| 0:19.2 | The universe seems to, when you look at delayed choice and retrocausality and those |
| 0:24.1 | sorts of things, non-locality, you look at all those experiments, and it seems like the |
| 0:28.1 | universe doesn't make a calculation until it absolutely needs to, which is what we do with |
| 0:32.4 | video game engines. |
| 0:33.5 | Okay, so Dave, thanks so much for joining us for this kind of emergency session, because I know a lot of people are very kind of scared right now. Dario Amadee was on CNN with Anderson Cooper. And right next to it is an article saying, oh, what Dario has been saying is just hype. It's AI hype. And I'm like, how can people not be confused about what's about to happen? So first question, is it just AI hype or should people start thinking about where this |
| 0:59.2 | is going? |
| 1:00.3 | Yeah, I mean, to not really add much clarity, it's a little bit of both. |
| 1:05.8 | You know, there's always inflated expectations when there's a new technology. |
| 1:10.2 | And Silicon Valley is the worst, namely because it's, you know, the technologists themselves are always saying like, oh, this is going to solve literally everything. |
| 1:18.5 | And if you ask a developer, like what is their definition of everything? |
| 1:22.0 | It's, you know, it's a very small subset of reality. |
| 1:26.6 | And so that, you know, from a certain point of view, right, it is going to change a lot of things. |
| 1:33.3 | At the same time, you know, to just kind of answer the question directly, I've been doing a ton of research for my books on post-labor economics. |
| 1:41.4 | And we've actually found evidence that there's been about seven decades of demand for human |
| 1:47.7 | labor slowly being eroded by automation. |
| 1:50.4 | Now, AI and robots, or humanoid robots, are just the latest iteration. |
| 1:54.7 | But industrial automation is nothing new. |
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