🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review #47
The dystopian world of 'Silo'; AGI in reality; the economics of population decline
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
— Dystopian 'Silo' gives a glimpse of a degrowth world
— Analyzing AGI: What would the world of artificial general intelligence look like?
— Faster, Please! — The FAQBest of 5QQ
— 5 Quick Questions for … economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on AI and economic growthBest of the Pod
— A conversation with economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on the economics of population decline
Essay Highlights
⤵ Dystopian 'Silo' gives a glimpse of a degrowth world
“The dystopian sci-fi show Silo is helping Apple TV+ hit all-time highs for viewership. Based on the Wool/Shift/Dust series from Hugh Howey, Silo’s premise (you learn all the following in the first episode) is that hundreds of years in the future, thousands of people are living in a massive underground silo, basically an upside-down, 144-floor skyscraper (though seemingly much deeper than that) with each floor connected by a winding, open-air central staircase. And what people can see of the surface is via a large wall-screen showing a lethally toxic environment. Think of that fictional wall-screen as the view of the world presented by the media and Hollywood for the past half-century. What has been the function of that filter? What has it done to us? Have we become more wary of exploration? What has it done to our sense of hope?”
🤖 Analyzing AGI: What would the world of artificial general intelligence look like?
“My humble contention: A big reason why opinion polls suggest considerable concern about recent AI advances is that our culture has produced few visions of a positive future with supersmart computers. So we all wonder: What will our society be like in a world where computers can do much of what we currently do (weak artificial general intelligence), can do all of what currently do (strong AGI), and, finally, can do what we can’t even imagine doing (artificial superintelligence)? Of course, it’s probably as difficult to predict life in the world of AGI as it is to predict how technology in general will affect our lives or, say, what jobs it will create. But there’s no good reason to paint purely dystopian visions. Right, the balance is way too far to the negative.”
“What are you trying to accomplish with this newsletter? I’m trying to encourage a wealthier, healthier, and more fun America and world through ideas that promote greater and more significant scientific discovery and invention … leading to greater and more significant business innovation … leading to faster worker productivity growth … leading to faster overall economic growth. Much faster. (Also important: a pro-progress, techno-optimist culture.) Let’s get the cool sci-fi future we were promised! Flying cars? Sure. But also a world where every economy is an “advanced” economy, where lifespans and healthspans are longer, where abundant clean energy and a space economy mean humanity is limited only by our effort and imagination. A world of less suffering and more freedom, choice, and opportunity. Faster, please!”
Best of 5QQ
5 Quick Questions for … economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on AI and economic growth
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets. He’s also the John H. Makin Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
2/ And how will AI help us innovate better by combining ideas?
What artificial intelligence is fantastic at is searching for patterns among all existing ideas and helping us to become so much better at sorting them out and recombining them. What is the problem we have faced over the last 20 or 25 years? It has become harder and harder to even know the ideas that already exist. I try to teach graduate students what the frontier of the field is. In my area of economics, once you finish the regular PhD courses, in 1996 or 1997, it would take you 12 months to learn all that’s out there. Now it takes you at least 24 months. It's much harder just to understand everything, to keep track of everything. What artificial intelligence is great at is helping you explore what already exists, find it out, and combine it in much more innovative ways. So artificial intelligence can definitely help us grow more.
Best of the Pod
👶 A conversation with economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on the economics of population decline
The key findings of that paper have to do with the speed and the depth of that transition? What are you saying that is different from what people previously believed about the demographic transition?
You're absolutely right: It's about the speed. If you stop any economist or demographer and you ask them what is happening with fertility on the planet, they will tell you it's falling. That's well known. What we add is a twist; we say it's falling much faster than anyone had realized before. And it's falling at a speed that is going to fundamentally transform many of our societies and the planet as a whole in ways that most policymakers are not really taking into consideration. So it's the speed. It's not that it's falling; it is falling immensely fast.
People and policymakers may have a general knowledge, but what you're saying is that they're dramatically underestimating how fast that is happening across the world.
Exactly. Let me give you a couple of numbers which personally I think are mind-blowing. Usually, we talk about the replacement rate. The replacement rate is how many children does a woman need to have on average to keep population constant in the long run? And many listeners may have heard the number 2.1. Why 2.1? Because under natural circumstances, without any type of selective abortion, there are around 105 boys born per 100 girls. And a few of the girls that are born are not going to complete their fertility age. So that's why you need a little bit more than two.
In fact, 2.1 is a very good number for the United States. It’s not a good number for the planet. Why is it not a good number for the planet? Because of two reasons. Reason one: selective abortions. You go to China, you go to India — and these are huge countries, demographically speaking — there is a lot of selective abortions. In India or China, you have around 110 kids per 100 girls. Second, because in Africa, another big part of the demographic future of humanity, infant mortalities is still sufficiently high that it makes a little bit of a difference. For the planet as a whole, the replacement rate is not 2.1. It's more like 2.2, 2.25. It’s kind of hard to know the exact number.
So I go to the planet and I look at the fertility of the planet as a whole in 2023. According to my calculations, it’s already 2.2. That means that the planet in 2023 — I'm not talking about the United States, I'm not talking about North America, I'm not talking about the advanced economies, I'm talking about the planet — is already below replacement rate. Which means that the world population will start falling some moment around the late 2050s to early 2060s. Of course, this depends on how people will react over the next few decades, how mortality will evolve. But what I want the listeners to understand is, for the very first time in the history of humanity — humans have been around for 200,000 years — we are below replacement rate in terms of fertility.