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There\\u2019s a minor mystery in economics that may suggest that things are about to get really, really weird for humanity.

And that mystery is this: many economic models predict that, at some point, human economic output will become infinite.

Now, infinities really don\\u2019t tend to happen in the real world. But when they\\u2019re predicted by otherwise sound theories, they tend to indicate a point at which the assumptions of these theories break down in some fundamental way. Often, that\\u2019s because of things like phase transitions: when gases condense or liquids evaporate, some of their thermodynamic parameters go to infinity \\u2014 not because anything \\u201cinfinite\\u201d is really happening, but because the equations that define a gas cease to apply when those gases become liquids and vice-versa.

So how should we think of economic models that tell us that human economic output will one day reach infinity? Is it reasonable to interpret them as predicting a phase transition in the human economy \\u2014 and if so, what might that transition look like? These are hard questions to answer, but they\\u2019re questions that my guest David Roodman, a Senior Advisor at Open Philanthropy, has thought about a lot.

David has centered his investigations on what he considers to be a plausible culprit for a potential economic phase transition: the rise of transformative AI technology. His work explores a powerful way to think about how, and even when, transformative AI may change how the economy works in a fundamental way.