AI with Anton Korinek

March 14, 2019

Listen in to an in-depth conversation with leading artificial intelligence/macroeconomics researcher Anton Korinek, who will discuss the rise of artificially intelligent agents; the implications of near- or above-human level machine intelligence for the economy and for society.

Much of today’s artificial intelligence discussion focuses on specific applications, such as autonomous vehicles or facial recognition. In contrast, Anton is at the forefront of work on the broader implications for the macro economy, suggesting that the emergence of artificially intelligent agents will require a fundamental rethink of economic concepts. One of his key focuses is the labor market and distribution of income, in a world where current forms of human labor are continuously replaced by machines.

Anton Korinek bio:

Anton is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia as well as a Research Associate at the NBER. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2007 after several years of work in finance and technology, where he worked on creating neural nets. He has also worked at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Maryland and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, the World Bank, the IMF, the BIS and numerous central banks. In April of 2018, he organized the IMF conference: The Macroeconomics of AI (http://www.korinek.com/macroai).

His area of expertise is macroeconomics, international finance, and inequality. His most recent research investigates the effects of progress in automation and artificial intelligence for macroeconomic dynamics and inequality. Korinek also focuses on capital controls and macroprudential regulation as policy instruments to reduce the risk of financial crises. He investigates the global spillover effects of such policy measures as well as their implications for income inequality. He has won several fellowships and awards for this work, including from the Institute for New Economic Thinking.