By Jorge Mercado Wednesday, May 27th, 2026

Artificial Intelligence was the main talking point at UC Santa Barbara’s Economic Forecast Project’s annual Santa Barbara County Economic Summit held at the Granada Theatre on May 21.

One of the keynote speakers was Zack Kass, the former Go-To-Market at OpenAI, who held an event at the same location a few months earlier to talk about the launch of his book, “The Next RenAIssance.”

During his speech on May 20, Kass hit on a lot of the points he talked about in January, mainly focusing on fears of AI taking people’s jobs.

“What I really want to say about this issue is that it is not an economic one, at least not entirely,” Kass said.

Kass argued that people might not be so worried about losing their job, but rather the identity they have tied to it. In his book, he interviewed a slew of Longshoremen after the strike of 2024, in which labor heads were not fighting for higher wages or more jobs, but rather that their jobs would not be automated.

When interviewing them, he found that most Longshoremen were people who came from a long line of people who were also Longshoremen. 

“I asked them who benefits economically if we automate the port. Some didn’t like my tone, but others were willing to answer it,” Kass said. “Everyone benefits when we automate the port, including longshoremen and their kids and the only reason we can be certain of that is that we are all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our collective economic benefit, and we never think twice about them.”

His ultimate argument was that people’s self-identity being tied to their jobs is ultimately what could be the biggest hurdle in mass AI adoption.

Kass, a Santa Barbara native, also spoke about the high cost of three things in this country: housing, healthcare and education.

“Those three things are not expensive because they must be. They are expensive because we have chosen them to be,” Kass said.

Kass said he’s had people come up to him about owning a house in Montecito, but only living in it part-time. His response: “Sell it. Let a family move in there.”

“Montecito is 56% vacant. The problem is getting worse,” he said.

He also specifically called out Santa Barbara’s role in failing to supply housing. 

“If we build more housing, we will solve plenty of our cost problems,” Kass said, who also called out the city’s recent decision to pass rent control laws instead of more housing.”

“You can build a ton more, which we should do, and you can tax people who don’t actually live here and are just speculating on our land,” he said.

Housing was the main focus of Peter Rupert’s presentation as well. Rupert, the forecast project’s executive director, highlighted many key differences in a place like Austin, Texas, which has embraced building, to California, whose stringent laws make it impossible to keep pace.

He noted that inflation-adjusted rents fell 19% in Austin from 2021 to 2025, higher than the national average of 10%. This is despite the state growing 6% in population.

Moreover, median rent went from 15% above the U.S. to 4% below in those five years. 

“The population was growing all this time during that. The demand was increasing. But supply outpaced demand in this case,” Rupert said, highlighting that between 2015 and 2024, Austin built 120,000 units, a 30% increase and three times faster than the national average.

The biggest reason Austin is able to build? Faster permitting.

On average, it takes 22 days to get a building permit in Austin. In Los Angeles, it takes, on average, 180 days. In San Francisco, it takes 760 days.

“And you wonder why they’re not building anything? It takes too damn long,” Rupert said. “We have to allow building to happen, but we also must have a permitting apparatus that takes weeks, not years.”

The other keynote speaker during the event was Igor Mezić, a distinguished professor at UCSB who has also co-founded AI companies in Santa Barbara. Mezić gave an overview of AI-driven systems and autonomous technologies, highlighting how they have improved and what is next.

Mezić spoke about the rise of data centers and how it has doubled carbon output in such a short amount of time. He noted that the one positive from it is that “the growth of need for energy, data centers, is actually driving the rise in renewable energy.”

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