Quote · Dwarkesh Podcast

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?

Explore episode Jun 4, 2026

You just need a couple of agents that think this way for this to be the dominant thing determining the preferences of the whole economy, because this part is growing much faster than the other parts of the economy.

Dwarkesh Patel

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What rema…

Where this was said

What if some humans (or AIs) value wealth accumulation intrinsically?

At 56:30 · chapter starts 43:08

Discussion of selection pressure favoring non-satiating capital accumulators — tech billionaires, AI agents, von Neumann probes. Even a few such agents could dominate economic preferences and drive labor share toward zero.^{[1]

— Dwarkesh Patel

"If even a small number of agents — whether AI firms, humans like Elon Musk, or von Neumann probes — have effectively unlimited demand for c…"

43:50}

Business

Greedy Optimizers and the Future of Capital Share

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI? · Jun 4, 2026 Business

If even a small number of agents — whether AI firms, humans like Elon Musk, or von Neumann probes — have effectively unlimited demand for capital accumulation, they will compound faster than everyone else and gradually dominate the economy's preference structure. Labor share could go to zero through selection alone.

Most of his wealth is just stock in Meta, and he as a controlling shareholder could say, hey Meta, just give me all this income, or turn all this wealth into dividend income, and I will just spend that on consumption. But instead, he rather would have his wealth compound, and Meta to build more data centers, basically.

Dwarkesh Patel

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What rema…

Business

Investment-specific technical change: robots compound but ballerinas don't

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI? · Jun 4, 2026

Phil Trammell explained that in a world of investment-specific technical change, one robot today becomes many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas stays the same — a dynamic most macro models miss.