Danielle Wood is an Australian economist and the current chair of the Australian Productivity Commission.

Had a lot of fun chatting with Dani about how she's making sense of AI and its implications for policy. We discuss:

• whether AI will be more like the internet or the Industrial Revolution,
• where in the AI stack the profits will ultimately flow (and why it might not be the model layer),
• why diffusion is the "main game" for Australian policymakers,
• whether there's a case for government support of data centres,
• why the AI jobpocalypse story is too crude (and why humans may still have jobs even under transformative AI),
• whether AI will turn out to be a normal or abnormal technology, or both,
• and why in either case Australia shouldn't follow the EU in legislating an AI Act.

Sponsors

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• e61: a non-partisan economic research institute focused on Australian public policy. To receive a copy of the new essay I co-authored with e61 on data centres and the compute economy, go to https://www.e61.in/joewalker.
• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at https://www.vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

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