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AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
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Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#92I’ll do the Minority Report here: I loved the article, the point being that rich people hyping AI for their own enrichment have somewhat shutdown rational arguments of benefits vs. costs, the costs being: energy use, environmental impact of using environmentally unfriendly energy sources out of desperation, water pollution from by products of electronics production and recycling and from water use in data centers, di…
I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.
Where are they?
Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing. When will conscious, actual intelligence be called 'synthetic intelligence' instead of 'artificial'?
Incidentally, this comment was written by AI.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#93I completely agree. If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job. And most jobs that can be automated already has been automated using traditional software.
A lot of jobs that can be automated haven't been because it's not worth it is because the people with domain knowledge can't imagine automating it is other related problems.
I'm not sure if LLMs will change that or not
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#94It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
For the U.S. economy, productivity is defined as (output measured in $)/(input measured in $). Typically, new technologies (computers, internet, AI) reduce input costs, and due to competition in the market, companies are required to reduce their prices, thereby having an overall deflationary effect on the economy. It's entirely possible that AI will have a small or no effect on productivity as measured above, but society will benefit by getting access to inexpensive products and services powered by inexpensive AI. Individual companies won't use AI to improve their productivity but will need to use AI just to stay competitive.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but you have to consider Carl Sagan's point, "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Some truly useful technologies start out slow and the question is asked if they are fads or bubbles even though they end up having huge im…
Columbus was not a genius. He was an idiot who believed the earth was smaller than the scientists of his day, and the scientists were right. Columbus became successful through pure luck, genocide and cruelty. Most idiots like Columbus died in obscurity.
Yeah the inclusion of Columbus is admittedly not great, but it's part of the original quote and the overall point is still a good one.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not saying this to be sarcastic - the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI. It's not good enough to just say oreo ceos say we need to more oreos. There's a real grey area where these tools are useful in some capacity, and in that confusion we're spending billions. Too may peopl…
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> Superintelligence in 3 years doesn't really sound that crazy given how quickly I can write code with Claude. I mean we're 90%-95% of the way there already.
Yeah? So you must have a clear idea of where "there" is, and of the route from here to there?
Forgive me my skepticism, but I don't believe you. I don't believe that you actually know.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#97I completely agree. If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job. And most jobs that can be automated already has been automated using traditional software.
You can replace it with a much lower paid employee though.
That's not growth. Growth is having the existing employee do more.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd maybe think twice about assuming Meta knows what they're doing after they just pissed $75 billion up the wall on a Metaverse dream that went nowhere.
if it was just Meta perhaps I’d think twice but it is not just Meta, it is all of them
"The lemmings can't be wrong, they're all doing it". I think you're overlooking the incentive structures here.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#99I guess this is trend now because it's a contrarian / attention grabbing headline. See: - "Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity..." https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/ai-productivity-paradox-ceo-s... - “Over 80% of companies report no productivity gains from AI…” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... But fundamentally, large shifts like this are like ste…
I keep seeing the "Productivity Paradox" highlighted over an over again. I think one thing people are missing with this specific technology is that unlike many of the comparisons (computers, internet, broadband, etc), AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.
There will be a period like we are in now where dramatic capability gain (like recent coding gains) take a while for people to adapt to, however, I think the change will be much faster. Even the speed of uptake in coding tools over the last 3 months has been faster than I predicted. I think we'll see other shifts like this in different sectors where it changes almost over a series of a few months.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#100There really need to be better metrics about the state of an economy than GDP.