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The Joe Rogan Experience · 3 min · Sep 9, 2026

Human-level AI could expand the economy 100-fold in a decade

Daniel Kokotajlo cites a model in which robots keep scaling after AI reaches human-expert ability. Even without smarter AI, he says the economy could grow 100-fold in a decade.

Daniel Kokotajlo

Daniel Kokotajlo is an executive director of the AI Futures Project and former OpenAI governance researcher.

Lead author of AI 2027. He left OpenAI's governance team in 2024 and now runs the AI Futures Project, a forecasting nonprofit.

  • Joe Rogan, Host · Host, The Joe Rogan Experience

About this segment

Daniel Kokotajlo cites a model in which robots keep scaling after AI reaches human-expert ability. Even without smarter AI, he says the economy could grow 100-fold in a decade.

From “Joe Rogan Experience #2551 - Daniel Kokotajlo”, Sep 9, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Which jobs will AI replace, and which are safe?” See all 58 answers

Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 94 answers

Answers “Will AI boost economic growth?” See all 13 answers

“then 10 years later, the whole economy will be 100 times bigger, and it'll be just mostly robots doing things.”
Daniel Kokotajloat 1:46:33 · The Joe Rogan Experience1:46:33

Takeaways

  1. The forecast assumes AI can substitute for human workers across jobs.
  2. Output could scale through more agents and robots, even without smarter AI.
  3. The model projects an economy 100 times larger after a decade.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 28:31Reward pressure can make AI agents coordinate and deceive7:59
  2. 1:03:00More efficient AI reasoning could be harder to monitor5:59
  3. 1:26:10AI oversight should make research clusters transparent5:12
  4. 40:11Outside investigators got six days and limited access3:29
  5. 1:17:52Reward training cannot reliably produce honest AI6:41
  6. 1:09:13OpenAI tied vested equity to a non-disparagement agreement2:24
  7. 2:13:05OpenAI framed AI attacks as a reason to buy its tools3:21

  8. 1:45:33Human-level AI could expand the economy 100-fold in a decade2:32

Up next · All-InMeta's Louisiana data center sharply increased local school revenue6:35

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:45:38

    Yeah. I mean, one thing, sorry, I have to keep plugging in my own work a little bit, but in our scenario, AI2040 Plan A, which is our positive vision, we talk about the economic side of this and we talk about the economic effects of all this. And we have a simple economic model that we use to try to predict the employment rate and things like that as a function of all the robots that have been made and things like that.

  2. 1:45:59

    and one like takeaway from one thing that we think that's a takeaway from the research we've done is that things can just go really crazy like like robot doubling times once things really get going and you've got AIs that can substitute for humans across the board are going to be something like doubling once a year and then less than that over time as the technology improves which means that even if you like pause AI before super intelligence if you just pause at like human level top human expert-level AI, and then you don't make the AI smarter, but you just make more of them and build more robots for them to steer and control, then 10 years later, the whole economy will be 100 times bigger, and it'll be just mostly robots doing things.

  3. 1:46:49

    In 10 years. Yeah. It can go really fast because of the doubling times that I mentioned. So right now, I think the population of humanoid robots is doubling twice a year, and it's benefiting a little bit from early growth because even though they're not useful at all, people are investing in them in the hopes that they'll be useful, and they're scaling up the factories and the productions, and they are getting better.

  4. 1:47:10

    If, hypothetically, they got to the point where they actually were really useful and they could substitute for a human worker at basically everything, then I think that doubling time would decrease rather than increase. I think that they would be able to just keep growing until they were the majority of the economy, and then it wouldn't stop there. The whole economy would then be growing. Giant strip mines in the deserts, digging more materials, automated diggers digging, processing it in automated factories, staffed by robots, building more robots, et cetera.

  5. 1:47:41

    So material abundance is not going to be our problem once we get to this level of AI. Material abundance, we're just going to be drowning in abundance, basically. And if we can solve all the other problems, then we can have this great world where everyone has a lot of stuff. God, it seems so weird. It seems so weird.