The Evaporating Promise of AGI: An Economist’s View

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Astronomy, Life Sciences, Science, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2026

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

ID The Future listeners now get to enjoy two episodes each month from our sister podcast Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. The Mind Matters News podcast brings you insight from computer scientists, engineers, inventors, neurosurgeons, and other experts who bring sanity to the conversation about natural and artificial intelligence, going beyond the hype to explore the undercurrents of these important ideas. And although the Mind Matters News podcast will not often explicitly discuss intelligent design, it regularly explores the nature of intelligence, the origin of information, and the things that make us uniquely human, all concepts that are central to the theory of intelligent design. Enjoy today’s offering of Mind Matters News! In this installment of the Mind Matters News podcast, host Robert J. Marks welcomes economics professor and author Gary Smith to discuss the hype around artificial general intelligence (AGI) and AI's impact on the market. Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Ponoma College and a frequent contributor to Mind Matters News. Smith argues that generative AI, embodied in services like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, exhibits many characteristics of past market bubbles, including excessive hype, lack of profitability, and unrealistic expectations. Smith holds that generative AI models have limited practical economic value. They may be good at finding statistical patterns but struggle to distinguish meaningful, useful correlations from coincidental ones. Smith describes the fundamental challenge of teaching machines true understanding that goes beyond mere pattern recognition. A number of examples and stories are shared throughout.

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott.
0:03.5	Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
0:14.0	You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at mindmatters.a.I.
0:24.2	Greetings. other episodes at mindmatters.a.I. Greetings and welcome to Mind Matters News.
0:26.4	I'm your bubble boy host, Robert J. Marks.
0:29.8	I'm not an economist, but I've always found fascinating stories about bubbles in the market.
0:36.9	Market bubbles are marked by cycles of incredible,
0:40.3	excessive speculation followed by dramatic collapses. One of the earliest recorded bubbles
0:46.3	that everybody talks about in introductory courses is something which is totally beyond
0:52.3	my comprehension, totally beyond my understanding.
0:55.1	And it's called the Dutch Chulip Mania.
0:58.1	And it happened in the 1630s where the prices for Chulip bulbs just soared to
1:02.8	extraordinary levels before they began to crash.
1:05.3	And I read at least in one place that at the height of this bubble before a pop,
1:12.8	a tulip could cost in today's money at like a million dollars.
1:16.8	It was really ridiculous.
1:19.0	So that was one of the earliest bubbles.
1:21.4	There's been others in the 18th century, the South Sea bubble in Britain promised lots of
1:27.3	profit from trade ventures. But there was just
1:30.6	over-exuberant, rampant speculation, and that led to catastrophic collapse, and that was another
1:36.7	bubble that popped. Similarly, the 1929 stock market crash ended the roaring 20s with the
1:43.4	sharp decline, and it triggered the Great Depression.
	...

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