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What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

economist.com

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Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#41

Post by whatshisface »

coldtea wrote: post #6
andsoitis wrote: post #2

Until 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...

Here's a chart of real growth over the past few decades:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#42

Post by stocksinsmocks »

dcreater wrote: post #12

I am yet to see any strong micro econ or macro econ mechanistic explanation detailing how AI is going to create more wealth.

Paid services becoming basically free is wealth creation. You have the goods but none of the old cost of production. This is patently obvious, so I assume there’s some well-practiced remarks inspired by or borrowed from early 20th century socialists you would like to share? HN comments wouldn’t be complete with an homage to the class struggle. I would rather take the win and be happy about it.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#43

Post by aydyn »

solumunus wrote: post #40
Teever wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You think people own cars because they’re unfit? Would it be more efficient for them to ditch their car and cycle 4 hours per day to and from work?

The most common number of passengers in a car is 1, but nearly all cars are big enough for 4.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#44

Post by whatshisface »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #8

I'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.

Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from accuracy, or if they could somehow keep the human beings out of meetings, the forces keeping labor concentrated could abate.

On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#45

Post by mempko »

It's can't without an explosion of energy use. An explosion of economic activity will create an explosion of resource extraction and pollution. Since we are already going beyond many planetary boundaries we likely risk destroying organized human life because we destroyed our ecology.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#46

Post by pontus »

aetherson wrote: post #31
pontus wrote: post #25

I 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 i…

If stuff is 1/10th as expensive as it is now, you can also work 1/10th as hard for 1x as much stuff as you have now, instead of 1x as hard as you work now for 10x the stuff.

I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think this dichotomy is correct.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#47

Post by joules77 »

karim79 wrote: post #34
Tyrubias wrote: post #5

I 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.

I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund. If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum. I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.

AI's are all not going to get along with each other or think the same way or have the same agenda. Just like people. Very different things will emerge.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#48

Post by keiferski »

Naming LLMs as "AI" is really proving to be a colossal mistake and/or a deliberately misleading strategy that has (very successfully) helped acquire capital. Because it brings in all of the cultural tropes about superintelligent robots and gives them a veneer of respectability; e.g., The Matrix, 2001, The Terminator, etc.

Conflating the two is a massive category error. It's perfectly possible for LLMs / current-generation "AI" to have a massive economic impact without thinking there are going to be digital human replacements in the next 5 years.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#49

Post by Animats »

"The measured economy becomes dominated by whatever it is that cannot be made more efficiently" Which is why health care support operations are the fastest growing labor category in the US.[1] And why medical care has become such a huge part of the Federal budget. Meanwhile, farming is down below 2% and manufacturing is tiny. That's because those were the areas with the biggest productivity improvements.

AI will come first for those for whom everything they do for income goes in and out over a wire.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#50

Post by tangent-man »

Nevermark wrote: post #19
vouaobrasil wrote: post #8

I'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.

With enough money/capital growing, you can live however reasonably paced you like!

Only if you have found an end to old age, sickness and death.

Until this ^ there are no guarantees in life.

You cant eat money

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