✨ How fast is transformative AI approaching?

The San Francisco optimists see an impending discontinuity. The Acela Corridor skeptics see an early-days buildout. A new Fed paper maps where we might really be

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

I work at a public-policy research organization in Washington, DC. That means I work within the Acela Corridor (though I prefer “BosWash megalopolis,” a term coined by techno-futurist Herman Kahn).

From that railway-inspired nickname, I derive my term for the constellation of (mostly) economists at big banks (JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley), government institutions (Federal Reserve, Congressional Budget Office), and think tanks (AEI, Brookings) who (generally) take a cautious view of the potential capabilities and thus socioeconomic impact of generative artificial intelligence.

I give you the “Acela Corridor Consensus,” or ACC (not to be confused with the Atlantic Coast Conference of college sports). It describes a view that while GenAI is almost certainly an important general-purpose technology that’s the next stage of the Information and Communication Technology Revolution … alas, there’s no strong evidence GenAI is now or will be anytime soon a history-breaking technological discontinuity that will cause a radical transformation of life as we know it, for good or ill.

The folks on the other side of that trade—superintelligence soon-ish, for good or ill—form the “San Francisco Consensus,” or SFC.

Because I operate inside the ACC, both geographically and intellectually, I make a constant effort to find evidence that the ACC is perhaps too cautious in its assessment, as a way of fact-checking possible personal bias. To that end, I’m not sure any of the following data points is dispositive, but taken together—and more happen every day—they are suggestive of a direction of continuous AI improvement with considerable upside potential.