New post on the blog, featuring the excellent @ben_moll There’s been tons of discourse on how AI will contribute to economic growth, with many people closest to the technology predicting double digit increases. Are these forecasts likely? Probably not. The blog goes through the economics for why exploding improvements in capabilities (which technologists have been largely right about) may not translate to explosive growth. Ben’s thread covers this in detail, but gist is that: 1) there is nothing in economic growth models that prevents AI from leading to explosive growth but 2) this trajectory relies on a series of assumptions that are unlikely to hold in the real world. For example, one assumptions is likely to be violated because of a pretty counterintuitive feature of structural change: the sectors that become automated become smaller parts of the economy (because they’re cheaper, people become richer, and spending moves to non-automated parts of the economy). This, plus other features of the economy, is what will likely cause the trend of huge increases in capabilities coupled with “only” 4-5% growth (which is huge, btw) to continue. Here is the link: https://aleximas.substack.com/p/will-ai-soon-lead-to-double-digit Looking forward to hearing thoughts/feedback!