What happens when AI is better than humans at every single job task? Work disappears, right? Wrong. David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - makes the case that even superintelligent AI won't end human work, thanks to the oldest non-trivial idea in economics.

In part one of a two-part series, David retells the story of the mathematician who escaped Poland days before the German invasion and spent years daring Paul Samuelson to name one true, non-trivial proposition in the social sciences. Then the math on why a collaborator who is worse at everything still adds value. Humanity's edge turns out to be the way we learn - we pick up new tasks from tiny amounts of data at almost no cost, while a frontier model burns a billion dollars in training and still has to search the web to name the current president. Comparative advantage holds no matter how good AI gets - as long as compute isn't free.

Next week in part two: the skills and jobs that will matter most in the age of AI.

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