I'm John Betts with my good colleagues, Alan Tonnelson, my guide on trade and manufacturing in America these

many years, and Jim McTague, former Washington editor of Barron's Magazine. And this is the

economic roundtable about where we are perceiving the economy here on the East Coast. I'm in New

England. Jim's in Keystone State, and Alan is in Maryland, the great state of

Maryland, very close, not too far from something called Washington, D.C. So gentlemen, I come to the state,

private enterprise, the markets, all of that. We push that aside and we go for the dreamy future

of artificial intelligence.

And I read from a wonderful column I recommend by Robert Armstrong in today's FT.

AI enthusiasts wave off the motion that technology will lead to mass unemployment.

A lot of people once drove horse-drawn carts and made buggy whips, they say.

Losing those jobs to

automobiles didn't lead to breadlines. On the contrary, Dumers respond, in the case of AI, we're not

the drivers, we're the horses. The optimists retort. That horses live, lives got better, didn't they?

As they went from work animals to luxury items, that's no help. Have a look at what happened to the

equine population in the first half of the 20th century. Okay,

where are the horses and we're going to have a better life ahead of us?

We're told if you're thinking your job is at risk for AI.

Alan, I'm not going to butter you up here.

I'm going to come right to you.

Your thoughts about AI, given what we know now is that it's spreading throughout the economy

and taking surprising turns, a lot of competition.

Jim mentioned the spending that's going on.

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