Source: EconLog
by Valentin Boboc
“Much of the panic around AI rests on pointing out absolute advantages. LLMs can write clearly and convincingly. They summarise large documents quickly. They generate passable Python scripts in seconds. In these discrete tasks, AI is a direct competitor. If a job is merely a collection of such tasks, the human worker is in trouble. The Ricardian challenge, however, is to identify where AI has a comparative advantage and whether this manifests itself at the job level. Comparative advantage is determined by opportunity costs. For humans, the binding constraint is time. For AI, the constraint is compute. These are very different constraints, and they are different enough to keep humans in the picture.” (05/15/26)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/ai-and-comparative-advantage