Another problem with using GDP to predict something like “continuously increasing impact on the world” is that it seems like new technologies often lead to huge surplus that wouldn’t get captured in a GDP metric. Search engines are ridiculously useful, people say they would pay a lot to not lose them, and yet they’re free.
(This is arguably the same problem as you identify, in that as you mention you have to quantify the value of a search engine or a smartphone to include it in a GDP metric, and there isn’t an obvious way to assign a value in 1960-dollars to a search engine, so you just go with what people pay for it now.)
Personally, the main evidence I rely on for “no discontinuities in impact” is that it seems like across a range of industries / technologies, after the first zero-to-one transition in which the technology is invented, the improvements on the technology tend to be continuous / incremental, and so too is its impact on the world.
(This needs to be combined with a claim that the zero-to-one transition for AI will lead to AI systems that are subhuman and so not very impactful. My impression is that some people disagree with this, seeing current AI systems as qualitatively-different-from-AGI, and expecting a completely different zero-to-one transition to AGI, in which the resulting AGI is immediately much better than humans on some important axis, like ability to self-improve. I’m not sure why they think this, if in fact this is an accurate representation of their beliefs.)
To me, it seems like the “obvious” equivalent to a search engine in 1960 is a librarian or other professional researcher, much in the same way than the 1860 equivalent of a clothes washing machine was a domestic servant.
Another problem with using GDP to predict something like “continuously increasing impact on the world” is that it seems like new technologies often lead to huge surplus that wouldn’t get captured in a GDP metric. Search engines are ridiculously useful, people say they would pay a lot to not lose them, and yet they’re free.
(This is arguably the same problem as you identify, in that as you mention you have to quantify the value of a search engine or a smartphone to include it in a GDP metric, and there isn’t an obvious way to assign a value in 1960-dollars to a search engine, so you just go with what people pay for it now.)
Personally, the main evidence I rely on for “no discontinuities in impact” is that it seems like across a range of industries / technologies, after the first zero-to-one transition in which the technology is invented, the improvements on the technology tend to be continuous / incremental, and so too is its impact on the world.
(This needs to be combined with a claim that the zero-to-one transition for AI will lead to AI systems that are subhuman and so not very impactful. My impression is that some people disagree with this, seeing current AI systems as qualitatively-different-from-AGI, and expecting a completely different zero-to-one transition to AGI, in which the resulting AGI is immediately much better than humans on some important axis, like ability to self-improve. I’m not sure why they think this, if in fact this is an accurate representation of their beliefs.)
To me, it seems like the “obvious” equivalent to a search engine in 1960 is a librarian or other professional researcher, much in the same way than the 1860 equivalent of a clothes washing machine was a domestic servant.