What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
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What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
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Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#2Until 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years. Growth has not just become the norm; it has accelerated.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#3Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#4The paroxysmal science
Assume those loops have maximum force and the economy becomes “information produced by information capital, which is produced by information, which in turn is producing information ever faster every year”, as William Nordhaus, a Nobel laureate in economics, wrote in a paper in 2021. This brings about the “singularity”—a point when output becomes infinite. The singularity is really a counterargument: proof that the model must, eventually, be proved wrong. But even the first step on the journey, a big acceleration in growth, would be a profound event.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#5I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#6Until 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20…
Real growth has stalled for decades and is only propped up with rent-seeking and money printing credit - hence the results we see...
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#7I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
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Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#8I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#9You can have really massive growth in markets along with massively wide inequality at the same time among the human population. You can also now (for the first time in global history) have laws of supply and demand start to service non-human intelligence.
Future transactions can have bots on both ends, running an economy that continually grows to service the needs of (probably more efficient) machine capitalists rather than human capitalists.
Just like when human agriculture and industrialization broke multiple organically forming food webs in the natural world, so could it be with human industry
It really is a brave new world.