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.

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.

If GDP increases, that’s just money left on the table by the ultra wealthy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

The same technical advances created rapid growth in non industrialized non capitalist societies once they were introduced like the USSR or China. It's silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth regardless of economic system. Producing the food easily is more fundamental than deciding who gets what amount of easily produced food allocated to them.

That might give the reader the wrong impression. It is the same labour, but spread out over more commodities. You won't get to work less.