Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Hibbeck Chibber, a professor of sociology

at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal theory and strategy.

How's it going, V?

Good as always.

Always look on the bright side of life, as Monty Python said.

Maybe that's why this podcast works.

You're sunny and I just think everything is terrible all the time.

We average out.

When you put the two together, it averages out to about normal.

Yeah.

Which is still shit.

So speaking of my general pessimistic outlook, today I thought we would talk about some of the dire pronouncements about AI that people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fond of making which is that

AI is coming to essentially completely remake the entire American economy.

And we're all just going to be replaced by robots run on artificial intelligence.

And supposedly they say, well, I'll just be able to kick up our heels and live in a postwork utopia, which I think there is reason to be suspicious of.

Do you think that these sorts of predictions could actually come true?

I am very skeptical that they could come true, even though I think AI at least has a promise

of being a new type of technology. And the reason

I'm skeptical that they could come true is that we've seen waves of technological change in the past.

We've seen revolutionary technologies in the past. We've seen all these same doubts and these fears

expressed in those contexts, and they have not come true in the past. It's certainly

...