Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.
Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism. When capitalism expands (be it by replacing older modes of production, or through rebuilding after a world war), it always has steady growth. When there’s nowhere left to expand to, the machine always grips. Technical progress doesn’t prevent this outcome, it accelerates it. More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
No - the growth today is capital expenditures, not productivity.
To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework.
AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will.
Any parallel should be taken with a grain of salt.
In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.
1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that it took 80 years for the UK's job market to recover occupation and salaries seen at the beginning of the 1800s.
Europe's salaries and occupational levels were hit with a similar cataclysm as machines started appearing in the agricultural fields. That prompted millions and millions of Europeans to flee Europe for the Americas. Again, sure, the job market did recover, depending on the specific western European country between the 1960s and 1970s. That's between 50 to 70 years of slump. Almost twice the average person's career in a long lasting job market slump.
Please remind that to people that "AI will not impact job markets or will do so positively" using previous technological advancements as examples, that might be very well true but on a very undefined and likely very long time frame.
2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.
The century from 1870 is filled with many one-time only developments that will never happen again:
Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.
These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:
Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.
One things that could be done is more redistributive tax policies, like existed post-WW2, so as to better spread around the current income and wealth in a less concentrated way.
The interesting thing here, I think, is what actually drives the growth of industrialization: cheap energy, an exploitable labor force and increased automation.
Every industrial economy seems to reach a plateau of diminishing returns, and it actually seems to be reached faster the faster industrialization is implemented. We see it in Europe, in the US, in Japan, in South Korea and it seems China is well on their way there, too: Cheap energy is diminishing (shale oil fracking, increased cost of building nuclear, etc) and exploitable labor has mostly been pushed as far as it can (dwindling fertility rates across the globe). Thus, we place our hope in automation, which has also been taken incredibly far already.
LLMs really must be some magic special sauce if they're to automate us into a new era of explosive growth. So far I don't think they're living up to that promise.
Growth is unrealistic.
During the industrial revolution, people were still exploring the world and expanding their reach, establishing new colonies for raw materials.
We are living in a global economy now. There is no growth into unexplored territories left to do.
The amount of carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere is unsustainable, and will lead to more worldwide instability. The first effects have already been seen.
Remember that the "Arab Spring" (rise to IS, wars and refugee crisis) had been triggered by rising food prices.
Over the period of the industrial revolution humanity gained the ability to manipulate the material world in profound ways (convert potential energy into mechanical work, etc.). My view is information technology allows humans to continue to do that, but more efficiently. I think you’d need a breakthrough in manipulating subatomic particles and quantum mechanics to have the same level of relative impact as the industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution was a mini-quake compared to automated cognition. But we can learn some things from it.
I see the industrial revolution as the invention of the cart. It made horses more productive. Then the car replaced horses.
It is taking people longer to wrap their heads around the reality than I thought it would. If there was a competitive human species on the planet getting smarter by the day, people would get it.
It is hard to maintain awareness of something which presents questions with no obvious answers. The one answer I have, is we need to clean up the ethics in our systems. Ethics are not costs against value, they are the full accounting and optimization of all value.
More intelligent creatures than us, not held back by our our outdated biologically instincts, won't have any trouble with that game theory.
So ethical systems are not just a shield for us as individuals, but also of inherent value to new forms of self-interest.
But that won't help us, if we don't push to align and strengthen our own systems now. And reverse the concentration of power in corrupt individuals who demonstrate every day that they are not interested in the wellbeing of humans in general.
This is urgent. We do not have a lot of time to effect this change.
I figure we're not far off explosive growth but it'll be very different from the industrial revolution. At the moment AI is handy but less capable than humans in many ways so you can't just swap it in for human workers. Before long that'll change so robots can build better robots and on to infinity kinda, subject to resource and energy constraints like Kardashev II. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale). Also planning permission - I could see thing go a bit national park like.
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[ 33.3 ms ] story [ 426 ms ] threadIf GDP increases, that’s just money left on the table by the ultra wealthy.
To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework.
AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will.
A better comparison might be railroads.
In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.
1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that it took 80 years for the UK's job market to recover occupation and salaries seen at the beginning of the 1800s.
Europe's salaries and occupational levels were hit with a similar cataclysm as machines started appearing in the agricultural fields. That prompted millions and millions of Europeans to flee Europe for the Americas. Again, sure, the job market did recover, depending on the specific western European country between the 1960s and 1970s. That's between 50 to 70 years of slump. Almost twice the average person's career in a long lasting job market slump.
Please remind that to people that "AI will not impact job markets or will do so positively" using previous technological advancements as examples, that might be very well true but on a very undefined and likely very long time frame.
2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.
Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.
These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.
One things that could be done is more redistributive tax policies, like existed post-WW2, so as to better spread around the current income and wealth in a less concentrated way.
Every industrial economy seems to reach a plateau of diminishing returns, and it actually seems to be reached faster the faster industrialization is implemented. We see it in Europe, in the US, in Japan, in South Korea and it seems China is well on their way there, too: Cheap energy is diminishing (shale oil fracking, increased cost of building nuclear, etc) and exploitable labor has mostly been pushed as far as it can (dwindling fertility rates across the globe). Thus, we place our hope in automation, which has also been taken incredibly far already.
LLMs really must be some magic special sauce if they're to automate us into a new era of explosive growth. So far I don't think they're living up to that promise.
We are living in a global economy now. There is no growth into unexplored territories left to do.
The amount of carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere is unsustainable, and will lead to more worldwide instability. The first effects have already been seen. Remember that the "Arab Spring" (rise to IS, wars and refugee crisis) had been triggered by rising food prices.
The other giant growth leap mankind had happened just before the Bronze Age Collapse.
Trade, automation, labor, same recipe. The outcome was a few centuries of dark ages though.
I see the industrial revolution as the invention of the cart. It made horses more productive. Then the car replaced horses.
It is taking people longer to wrap their heads around the reality than I thought it would. If there was a competitive human species on the planet getting smarter by the day, people would get it.
It is hard to maintain awareness of something which presents questions with no obvious answers. The one answer I have, is we need to clean up the ethics in our systems. Ethics are not costs against value, they are the full accounting and optimization of all value.
More intelligent creatures than us, not held back by our our outdated biologically instincts, won't have any trouble with that game theory.
So ethical systems are not just a shield for us as individuals, but also of inherent value to new forms of self-interest.
But that won't help us, if we don't push to align and strengthen our own systems now. And reverse the concentration of power in corrupt individuals who demonstrate every day that they are not interested in the wellbeing of humans in general.
This is urgent. We do not have a lot of time to effect this change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893