We Recreated a Dead Economist With A.I. Here Is His Warning.

A seven-minute Times Opinion video built around a chatbot. The Princeton economist Markus Brunnermeier and Pablo Balsinde, a PhD student at the Stockholm School of Economics, set up a model to answer as John Maynard Keynes, drawing on his writings and the few recordings of him. The description says it runs on ChatGPT and more than 12,000 pages. Brunnermeier interviewed it; the Times cut the conversation down and, as the narrator says, updated some of the language to contemporary English. The Times also says it ran the idea past the family, and that Skandar Keynes, his great-great-nephew, and three relatives gave the go-ahead.

The hook is Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It predicted that living standards in “progressive countries” would be four to eight times higher in a century, and that the work left over might be spread as a fifteen-hour week. The video scores the first as a win and the second as a miss, then asks the bot whether AI will deliver the leisure.

The bot says no, and what it describes is a split. AI concentrates expertise in a few hands, leaving “skilled and overworked professionals with money, but no time” and the rest “with time, but no money”. Asked about the essay’s fear of a general “nervous breakdown” once scarcity ends, it gives each group its own. Those still employed make work their identity and grind harder at whatever the machine cannot do yet. The displaced lose the daily reassurance that someone needs them and, if the gains are not shared, stay poor as well. It adds a strain on democracy. None of this is fixed by the technology, it says: the outcome depends on whether governments use law and tax to spread the gains. The narrator closes by calling regulation and intervention obvious.

The warning is model output, prompted by Brunnermeier and then cut and reworded by the Times. The video is open about how the bot was built, and still presents its answers as what Keynes would say.

The essay is quoted fairly. The four-to-eight range, the fifteen-hour week and the “nervous breakdown” are all there, though Keynes offered three-hour shifts as a way to share out what work remained, not as a forecast of hours. “Already eight times richer” holds on one series (official US real GDP per head, 1930 to 2026) and not on another (about 5.5 times on the Maddison data to 2022). It lands at the top of his range, not past it. “More than a billion” lifted out of poverty is true since 1990. Against 1930 the number of very poor people has fallen by about half a billion, while their share fell from about two-thirds of humanity to a tenth. Americans in private jobs are paid for 34.4 hours a week on average. The Times is suing OpenAI over copyright, which the description discloses.