Tim Sablik interviews Anton Korinek “On how rapid advances in AI might reshape the nature of work and how economists can help society prepare” (Econ Focus: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Fourth Quarter 2025).
How AI can be used in economic research:
I use it essentially at all stages of the research process. It starts with ideation, the brainstorming part. I use it to help me with background research. I use it a lot as a writing assistant, giving it bullet points to steer it in a direction and letting it write a few paragraphs based on the points that I provide. I use it to derive economic models because, by methodology, I’m an applied theorist. More recently, since around fall 2024, the latest generation of reasoning models have become very powerful at doing formal math, and that has saved me a lot of time in performing derivations and proving results in economic models.
I use AI quite a bit for coding as well. I’m not currently working on any computational project, but I’m using it to code AI tools to perform text analysis, for example. In some sense, the line between making the AI do work and coding is blurring because I ask AI systems to perform all kinds of tasks, and in some cases, the AI writes code and then executes it. Since I’ve been a programmer for more than three decades now, it’s nice to let the AI do the lower-level stuff and for me to direct where it is going at a higher level in natural language — what people call “vibe coding.” …
Almost all economists I talk to have come to appreciate that these tools can be very helpful. Economics is a very instrumentalist discipline. When economists realize that something is economically useful, they won’t put up a lot of barriers against it. That said, it’s important to acknowledge that we need to be careful with these tools because they do sometimes produce mistakes. They need to be overseen. It’s kind of like working with a research assistant. We would not take everything that research assistants produce for us without checking it, and it’s the same with our AI systems.
How AI may shape the future of taxation:
[I}f we get AI systems that transform society at the same scale as the Industrial Revolution, the economy is going to be a big part of that transformation. Economists are well positioned to provide insights into how our economy might be reshaped.
One thing to consider is that we may have to redesign our systems of taxation. Right now, roughly two-thirds of all income derives from labor, and probably more than two-thirds of all tax revenue comes from taxing that labor income. If the value of labor suddenly falls dramatically because of transformative AI, then we’re going to have to tax differently. I prepared a paper for an NBER meeting on public finance in the age of AI in September where my co-author and I argue that if labor becomes a less important part of the economy, we may want to switch to more consumption taxation. And then if human consumption becomes a less important part of the economy, we may ultimately have to switch to taxing the capital behind the AI systems themselves.
On teaching students about AI:
I would certainly say that we want everyone to be fluent in AI, no matter which level of education we’re speaking about. I’m currently teaching this to Ph.D. students, but it’s also true for undergraduates, high school students, and younger students. We want everybody to know how to use AI because it is such a force multiplier. … I have two kids, they’re 8 and 10. Together with another dad, I’m going to teach an AI course at our kids’ primary school starting in mid-October because we want them to be exposed to this technology. We want them to understand how it works and how to use it responsibly.
If AI advances very rapidly, it may turn out that we are spending a lot of time right now educating the next generation of proverbial spinners and weavers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.









