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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?

#151

Post by munksbeer »

idiotsecant wrote: post #15
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.

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…

I bet if you saw the reality, you wouldn't swap your current life for a life 100 or 200 years ago.

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

#152

Post by danaris »

gruez wrote: post #130
danaris wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're asking "what caused the change?" the answer is "Ronald Reagan". If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". Just to expand on that a bit, in case it isn't fully clear: There is a level of productivity per worker required to support everyone in the society. This level fluctuates some with the overall standard of liv…

>If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". >[...] I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. [...] GDP per capita has been growing exponentially for centuries[1]. Is t…

This isn't about GDP in a currency sense. It's about Creating Enough Stuff that people can thrive.

Like I said: there is a threshold of Stuff Created Per Person above which providing a comfortable life for every person is purely a distribution problem. For most of human history, we have not been above that threshold.

"Subsistence farming", for instance, is effectively defined by only being able to meet the much lower threshold of "enough that people can survive".

A post-scarcity society is, broadly speaking, defined by being able to produce enough for everyone to thrive with minimal work from anyone.

We are somewhere between the two, but we are reaching the point where we're closer to the latter than the former. Technological advancements have, for some time, ensured that we have enough food for everyone on earth (again, there's still a distribution problem; that part is nearly 100% about politics, not about scarcity). If the very wealthy had not captured all the productivity increases since 1980, I don't know what else we could have achieved, but it wouldn't have been small.

> Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured.

Look at any graph of income growth by quintile that goes back to the middle of the 20th century or earlier, and you'll see it starts with some roughly parallel lines, and then one line that keeps going up at about the same slope, while the rest stay nearly flat.

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

#156

Post by spwa4 »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #104
spwa4 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing stopping you from moving to a smaller community, and in the west there's tons of them around. And if you're willing to take the (very low) wages that go with that, you can live there for the rest of your life easily. Hell, I know people who've done this. Several actually. Well, only one that's still alive (they retired there, wanted to grow old and die there ... and did), but still. But ... why bothe…

> But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself? Well, first I already have, so I don't know where you got "never accept doing so yourself", which is something you made up. Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature, which in my opinion is on the same level as actively targeting people. So I do want that to stop. If nature was…

> Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature

Is it? If you put it this dramatically, it's bullshit. Nature will survive us, rather than the other way around, guaranteed. MAYBE we can kill large animals if we tried, but probably not even that (they'd just shrink and then grow large again, wouldn't be the first, or second, or even the tenth time that happened).

Life on earth is being sustained by the sun and by nuclear reactions inside the earth. Nothing we do makes the tiniest of difference in the long run.

Increased temperature and increased CO2 and climate change essentially make more chemical and solar energy available in the environment. Life is chemical in nature and is limited by available energy. That means there would be more life, more green, if more energy was available. Life would have to be pretty damn badly designed if this damaged it, rather than what we actually see happening: life is spreading to much more of the planet than even 100 years ago.

So, first, you can rest assured: it is just people messing up their own little world.

Second: it would be seriously unnatural if we stopped. After all competing and using up all available resources is literally the sole goal of all life on earth. And if you compare humans to an average ocean-bound bacterial species, we're not even particularly good at it.

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

#157

Post by wrp »

Balgair wrote: post #84

I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that. Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at…

Very well put. I expect the same thing is coming in Linguistics, though at a slower rate because linguists are even more tech/math-phobic than biologists.

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

#158

Post by wrp »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #86
Balgair wrote: post #84

I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that. Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at…

My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are. So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields wit…

> ...what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?

Cynically, there are plenty of people who don't care so long as they can get it published.

Pragmatically, the quality of work is frequently so poor, leading to so much random variation in results, I doubt that frequent errors in AI-produced work would significantly change the quality range in many fields.

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

#159

Post by dyauspitr »

andrewstuart wrote: post #32

Japan is the economy to idealize. Almost no growth. Yet people are mostly happy. Government makes mostly wise decisions. There’s not too much poverty. They have not devalued and destroyed their own culture. So yeah, growth maybe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The price is too high. It benefits mainly politicians, corporations and the rich.

>They have not devalued and destroyed their own culture.

I feel like this is the only point you really care about.

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

#160

Post by Dig1t »

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.

There should be a new modern-day version of the Amish, where we freeze technology at the 1999 level. Amish 2.0
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