✨ AI's phony war?
Tech CEOs promise super abundance. Economists shrug. Force both sides to actually forecast, and the divide mostly vanishes—except where it matters most
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:
Dismal scientists versus tech utopians. The two camps seem locked in an intractable dispute over what artificial intelligence will do to the American economy.
Not so surprising, perhaps, given the terms of the debate. Economics is built for a world of scarcity and trade-offs. But if AI can soon outperform humans at most valuable work, growth could be so fast it breaks every existing model. To AI’s biggest boosters—some of whom run America’s top tech companies—we’re heading for Star Trek-level abundance.1
Economists, for the most part, haven’t budged. They see no reason to radically rethink how they look at the world. Those at the CBO and Fed both project GDP growth under two percent for the next decade. Even Goldman Sachs, about the most bullish of the big banks, sees just over two percent. That hardly resembles the transformation Silicon Valley keeps promising. Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu is the leading skeptic, estimating that AI could add only about 0.07 percentage points a year to productivity growth under realistic adoption assumptions.2
Of such incremental acceleration a Singularity is not made, my friends.
