Scaling Laws

Deger Turan, CEO of Metaculus, joins Kevin Frazier to unpack new forecasts on how AI could reshape the labor market over the next decade.
The conversation centers on a striking divergence between Metaculus forecasts and projections from institutions like the Bureau of Labor Statistics—raising fundamental questions about whether existing tools for understanding the economy can keep pace with rapid technological change.

Deger walks through key findings from the Labor Automation Forecasting Hub, including:
A potential decline in overall employment by 2035
Increased pressure on entry-level workers and early-career pipelines
The emergence of “lean” firms generating more value with fewer employees
A counterintuitive “wage paradox,” where fewer jobs may coincide with higher wages
The growing role of political power, regulation, and licensing in shaping labor outcomes
The discussion also explores second-order effects, including how contraction in high-paying sectors could ripple through local economies, and what a shift away from traditional four-year degrees might mean for students and policymakers.

Finally, Deger situates these forecasts within a broader vision: forecasting as a form of epistemic infrastructure. As AI accelerates change, the ability to form accurate beliefs about the future—and update them quickly—may become a core component of effective governance.

*** - This episode was recorded on April 23, 2026. Metaculus is a live platform. It's likely that forecasts mentioned have subsequently changed.

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Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Research Director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Dean Ball, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, about the Trump administration's reported plans to vet frontier AI models before public release.

They discussed how Anthropic's Mythos model reshaped the administration's posture on AI risk; why the executive branch lacks clear legal authority for a mandatory pre-deployment vetting regime; the voluntary "kick the tires" framework Frazier and Ball have proposed using CAISI and the Cyber Resilience Fund; whether an FDA-style licensing regime is ultimately inevitable for frontier AI; and the institutional design challenges of building AI oversight that can scale with rapidly improving model capabilities.

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Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare, speaks with Justin Curl, a third-year J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, and Arvind Narayanan, professor of computer science at Princeton University and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, about their new Lawfare research report, “AI Won't Automatically Make Legal Services Cheaper,” co-authored with Princeton Ph.D. candidate Sayash Kapoor.

The report argues that despite AI's impressive capabilities, structural features of the legal profession will prevent the technology from delivering dramatic cost savings anytime soon. The conversation covered the "AI as normal technology" framework and why technological diffusion takes longer than capability gains suggest; why legal services are expensive due to their nature as credence goods, adversarial dynamics, and professional regulations; three bottlenecks preventing AI from reducing legal costs, including unauthorized practice of law rules, arms-race dynamics in litigation, and the need for human oversight; proposed reforms such as regulatory sandboxes and regulatory markets; and the normative case for keeping human decision-makers in the judicial system.
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In this episode of Scaling Laws, Kate Klonick, Associate Professor of Law at St. John’s University and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, are joined by Marietje Schaake, the International Policy Director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. A former Member of the European Parliament, Schaake has long been a leading architect of digital rights and tech governance.

Their conversation explores the central thesis of her work: that a handful of tech giants have effectively staged a "coup" over democratic functions, from national security to the very infrastructure of public discourse. They examine the democratic implications of AI development, the "privatization of policy," and why Schaake believes that without urgent intervention, the "rule of law" is being replaced by the "rule of code."

To get in touch with us, email [email protected]. Logan Le-Jeffries, a member of the AI Wranglers student program at the University of Texas School of Law, provided research assistance with this episode.
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Bennett Borden, Founder and CEO of Clarion AI Partners, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at UT and a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, to discuss AI adoption as well as the future of the law and legal practice. The two explore Bennett’s unique background, Clarion’s AI interdisciplinary approach, and the importance of AI adoption. They also cover innovative work underway at major AI labs to align model use with user expectations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.