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What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
21–30 of 199 posts
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#22I 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.
Agreed. There is very little reason to imagine a future in which the fruits of automation are widely distributed - you don't even need to bring AI into the picture, we already see massive amounts of new automation and historical levels of inequality - that wealth is flowing to a very small number of people. I think the most likely outcome is a techno-feudalist system of massive corporate alliances that own the final…
> at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
That would be a second singularity. “Equality” could essentially evaporate as a concept if we have super intelligent, super improving, independent AI’s competing directly with each other.
I see a mad unbound rush for solar system wide resource extraction.
The time to “buy a star” is now! /h
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#23I'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.
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#24The biggest change I anticipate is larger cities. When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive. Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city. While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere…
> pretty much every one mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
This is due to under supply of urban housing due to bad zoning law designed to inflate rents.
> When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city.
Suburbs are financially underwater. People don't want to pay high property taxes to live in some Levittown hellscape.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#25I think two possible effects of AI are often conflated.
On the one hand you can imagine that work gets supercharged, allowing companies to produce 10x the number of widgets at 1/10th the cost. The economy would grow rapidly, wealth inequality would presumably be exacerbated, jobs would be automated, we might need some version of universal basic income, and so on. People debate whether or not this kind of transition is imminent or if it'd take decades.
On the other hand, it's conceivable that not much would happen in the "bulk" of the economy while at the same time the frontier of humanity might be pushed forward. We may see new treatments for diseases, new types of energy production, and so on. In this version of the world, jobs would mostly remain unchanged (at least in the short to intermediate term), perhaps with some small multiplicative efficiency factor, the economy wouldn't grow rapidly, there wouldn't be any mass unemployment, and so on.
In my mind, I'm much more excited about the second kind of impact that AI might have than the first. I guess I don't really feel like I want to have 10x the stuff that I already have while I'm really excited about someone curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and so on.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#26The biggest change I anticipate is larger cities. When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive. Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city. While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere…
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development.
And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper.
Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes).
But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end.
Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#27The idea that glorified chatbots are going to somehow bootstrap humanity to a Kardashev Type I civilization is sheer insanity.
Yep, we all know that MS Excel will get us at least 60% there. (50% joking).
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#28I'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.
That world has never existed. People have always been hustling. If you are thinking of some agrarian ideal then you are looking at a world of incredible wealth and power inequality. Given the choice between moving faster and making a better life for you children and living a quiet life under the thumb of a dictator people have always chosen the former.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#29I'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.
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#30I'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.
... but trinkets! FOMO! Socially-acceptable welfare!
This industry is so wasteful that I'm convinced productivity only matters when looking to fire someone. Otherwise, Animal Farm.