Eh, what do you think of Peter McCluskey’s story of how compute and capital substituting for labor may drive explosive growth?
Eli is correct that better technology is not a sufficient reason for predicting faster economic growth.
A key point from Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?:
A wide range of growth models predict explosive growth if capital can substitute for labor.
Another way to look at that is that economic models suggest that population growth is an important factor driving GDP growth.
What relevant meaning of population here? If software can substitute for most labor, then software likely functions as part of the population.
The industrial revolution replaced a lot of human muscle power with machine power. AI shows signs of replacing a lot of routine human mental work with machine mental work.
This does not depend too much on AI becoming as generally intelligent as humans, only that AI achieves human-equivalent abilities at an important number of widely used tasks.
Self-driving cars seem to be on track to replacing a nontrivial amount of human activity. I expect similar types of software servants to become widespread; cars are one of the first mainly because a single specialty serves a large market.
I use global computing capacity as a crude estimate of how machine mental work compares to human mental work. AI Impacts estimates that computing capacity has so far been small compared to human capacity, but that trends suggest computing capacity will become the dominant form of mental work sometime this century.
So the effective population growth (and therefore GDP growth) might be determined more by the rate at which computing capacity is built, rather than by the human birth rate.
Suppose that productivity growth remains mostly stagnant in all the big sectors that Eli mentions.
The semiconductor industry still has large room for growth. AI will dramatically increase demand for semiconductors, for uses such as better entertainment, personal assistants, therapists, yoga instructors, personal chefs, etc.
How much growth would the semiconductor industry need in order to single-handedly become the main driver of faster growth? 30% per year would get us there around 2040, 100% per year would get us there around 2030. Those scenarios seem plausible to me, but most investors seem to be treating them as too unusual to consider.
Energy use would need to increase in those scenarios. I disagree with Eli a bit there. Solar and battery productivity is improving nicely. The US probably cares enough about pushing those to overcome the roadblocks. If not, China will likely take over as the leader in economic growth.
Eh, what do you think of Peter McCluskey’s story of how compute and capital substituting for labor may drive explosive growth?