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.
Everything IT does is slightly simplifying things we already could do. We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
Does not mean that some of these gains have not been wasted or there has not been in sense waste introduced to waste excess productivity and efficiency. IT certainly has made this waste lot more easy to do.
AI powered robots will be flexible (once they work reliable) ..
However, almost all of these are purely private benefits that do not show in any ledger. This is at least in part why the Internet seems to have had such small impact on gdp.
How about AI? So far, even more private benefits than the Internet.
My opinion on that is, it's not such a big gain compared to legacy banking with checks, phone calls etc. All the operations you can do now you could do with legacy banks, just a bit slower. Given banking is not something you do every second, the overall speedup is tiny.
With e-commerce my shopping is down to just groceries. Clothes, electronics, tools, spare parts, furniture, all show up at my door magically without hunting them down in stores. I remember a small repair being half a day. It's an hour now.
My dad certainly did not and could not have maintained a 12 cafe outings a month habit. I can do it with a newborn. Still probably deflationary compared to his activity.
The Industrial Revolution was basically the height of western civilization, and the modern revolution is the beginning of something else. It’s not surprising that the metrics we developed in the previous civilization can’t really account for the gains we’re seeing now.
"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." — Robert Solow (1987), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
A revisit in 1999:
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
> We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
The speedup is much larger than horses vs steam power. How much time would it take you to find some scientific article if your library did not stock journal it was published in? You'd have to write request to get that issue and then wait few weeks before it arrives. Now you can get it basically instantly.
But seriously, your ability to expediently research just doesn't compare to the ability to ship a metric ton of freight across the country without marshalling an army of people for months on end. As one example.
The complexity of supply-chains is overwhelming. Your fancy boat or train needs a boatload (!) of grease, oils, spare parts, maintenance, logs, not to mention fuel, accounting, insurance, the list is endless and it’s all either fully enabled by or extraordinarily simplified by digital networks.
You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.
You don't see the internet in terms of dollars because it often makes it cheaper to do something that was possible before. That looks like a negative, in terms of GDP. In terms of what people can do, and can afford to do, though, it opens enormous doors. Want some information? Don't need a library. Want to plan a trip? Don't need a travel agent. Want to download some free software? Don't need a floppy and a friend who has a copy. And so on.
But if you look around, you see things like Amazon. They don't exist without the internet. You see Facebook. Youtube. Netflix existed, but they became a lot more convenient - no need to run to a store. There's a lot that was created that people found valuable, but didn't have to pay for (Amazon excepted). There's value, but because the nominal charge is $0, it doesn't show up in the GDP statistics.
This isn't as much of a positive as you seem to be implying. You can just go to a library. Or a travel agent. And it's probably better for you. It's not a downside.
They make tons of money for the US. Value is somewhat more subjective, but Amazon for instance certainly creates an enormous amount of value, as do Google's search and maps products.
I would argue that the democratisation of knowledge that YouTube has enabled is also very valuable.
they're all very mild and are not a clear improvement over previous ways, amazon is full of confusing product reviews and false advertising (they did mutualize ~free home deliveries though), youtube is also loaded with bs, the good content is not that much better than a book the rare time it can claim it is (and I'd argue most of the time it's universities uploading videos they had already made before)
I did love google maps but a bit less since they've made it a store locator more than a map.
I remember not being able to get books, I remember walking for hours in the weather just to find a library that had what I needed, or a shop that sold some flange for the kitchen sink or a crappy 800mAh rechargeable battery for my Walkman despite 1200mAh existing.
I remember trying to figure out where the heck we are/going using rotted out of date map books.
I remember submitting CVs on foot until my legs stopped working.
I remember knowing 0 people I could nerd out with about hacking. I suppose the bright side was that hacking wasn't illegal yet.
And while I'm at it I also remember when MIT OCW came out. It was awesome, but it still sucked. YouTube is a marvel in comparison.
Has Coursera done it better since? Sure. But there's room for more than one player.
All of these digital tools have been dramatic quality of life improvements.
I remember everyone singing along to songs.
I remember when products where safe. Amazon sell fuses that don't work. Food that is doctored. Fake versions of everything. AI generated books.
I remember when businesses were small enough we could and would boycott one that forced them employees to piss in bottles because 'efficiency'.
I remember a ton of times Google maps just fed me straight bullshit.
I remember when CVs weren't automatically rejected based on bullshit criteria/AI decisions without ever being looked at by a human being.
I remember a thousand percent different/more authentic nerding out/hacking community than todays 'embraced' nerd/geek culture.
All of these tools have a horrible side, and because of scale there's not much we can do about it (how do you verify what Google tells you isn't going to get you killed? https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/google-map-res...
and the horrible side keeps growing, while the improvement seems to have mostly happened over a decade ago at this point, with techno optimism beaten out of most of us since then by the very companies that improved our lives a decade ago.
Funny
For instance, why would you blame Google for unattended kids dumb enough to go on a "5h" wilderness trip with 0.5L of water?
I've always hated holiday consumerism.
Products have never been safe, and we're also better at finding out when they're unsafe. I agree that commingling, which has stopped, was bad.
People reject CVs with even less scrutiny than AI.
In the accepted framework of global trade, where exchange value is either confounded or accepted as a use value, this is a correct stance. I think where we'd end up disagreeing is on that equality. I don't believe that just because you can sell targeted advertising for millions of dollar, that it's actually millions of dollars worth of social use value. We'd have to bicker about the definition of use value, obviously, but I find it hard to imagine an argument for why writing adware at Google is worth the money people are getting paid for it, relative to useful manual labour. In much the same way I don't believe the CEO's labour is worth 100x what the employee is paid, I don't believe the Google Engineer is worth 5x the gardener maintaining a park.
This spoken separation of use value and exchange value is missing from most internet opinions on the economy.
I hope that somewhat helps you understand how the stance can exist, even if I haven't explained it deeply enough for you to actually accept it.
1) Give some (frontier) model my symptoms, circumstances, etc.
2) Model outputs a list of possible causes, some more urgent than others
3) If its not something benign, I go to a doctor
4) Doctor orders blood work, checks me up, and I discuss possible diagnoses with them.
Around 60-70% of the time the model was correct about the illness, the doctor just confirms it with empirical evidence. This means that I am able to pretty effectively triage myself, saving me a considerable amount of time.
Now its already the case that the role of doctors is diminishing in medical practice, and Nurse Practitioners are performing the majority of the same work. Armed with AI tools, Nurse Practitioners are effectively at the same level of skill and knowledge as an actual MD, and we would need far less MDs, then to do medical care, reserving them for specialty cases, expertise where AI tends to fail. So there is both more room for particular and intricate medical research and care for the most stubborn conditions, and more capacity for care in general.
In the long run, this will lead to improved outcomes, greater cognitive and physical health, and lower costs for child rearing. All of this is an economic boon. And all of it will not be apparent in the numbers for decades. I believe this is the case for the majority of the processes that AI is improving.
Besides that 60-70% is not an acceptable hit rate and there’s already early evidence of skill atrophy in AI saturated fields like radiology. We need way more people offering more personalized care, using more judgement and offering more compassion, not a chat interface that says “you’re totally right to push back, the post nasal drip was the smoking gun.”
Maybe some forms of ML, even LLMs, become part of the solution to that shortfall, but we’re a long way from proving that’s a net positive let alone a big leap forward.
The acceleration of the speed of technological growth seems real, look how fast AI research and tools are advancing seemingly on a daily basis, rather than innovation happening in months, years or decades long timescales.
Think about the rate of progress of the steam engine, and then think about technology since the splitting of the atom. Warp speed!
I somehow doubt that AI will accelerate growth constantly as the world has inertia and I'm not sure AI is sustainably increasing our ability to change. On the other side, if there is a technology that can do that it could be intelligence.
This is both correct and incorrect.
US and China tech did totally skyrocket in the 21st century and pulled the GDPs of both the US and China up like mad.
The one western continent that had none of the Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, Tencen, Micron, SK Hynix, NVidia, that's nowhere in drones, etc. saw his GDP (in USD and inflation adjusted) barely moving and that'd be the EU.
The EU now has an economy based, as someone pointed out the other day, on selling overpriced "luxury" (at least pretending to be luxury) handbags assembled in China: in the Top 100 companies by market cap besides ASML the EU has L'Oreal and LVMH. That and fake public companies that are actual state monopolies (like spanish banks and french oil companies). It's really totally pathetic.
The EU, even though the public debt of its countries grew like mad, is where to look at to see a continent that had hardly any GDP growth in the 21st century.
But I'd say that it's precisely because the EU missed the Internet: it was all chinese (and now asian too) tech companies.
If this first quarter of the 21st century is of any indication, it looks like history is repeating: the EU is, once again, absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI (yay, Mistral, but we all know how that one is doing) and shall, once again, continue to see the public debt of its countries grow like there's no tomorrow (France is at 6% deficit of its GDP seen the insane spending of the state) and its GDP hardly move at all.
But AI leading to no growth in the US and in Asia? I think it's a bit early to call that.
It is however crystal clear in what direction both your examples are headed and I’m not sure it’s the wonderland you seem to think it is. China is an authoritarian hell-hole and the US is.. I don’t know there is even a word for it. Let’s just say I’m glad to be on this side of the pond.