From an economics perspective, I think claims of double-digit GDP growth are dubious and undermine the credibility of the short AI timelines crowd. Here is a good summary of why it seems so implausible to me. To be clear, I think AI risk is a serious problem and I’m open to short timelines. But we shouldn’t be forecasting GDP growth, we should be forecasting the thing we actually care about: the possibility of catastrophic risk.
(This is a point of active disagreement where I’d expect e.g. some people at OpenPhil to believe double-digit GDP growth is plausible. So it’s more of a disagreement than a communication problem, but one that I think will particularly push away people with backgrounds in economics.)
I join you in strongly disagreeing with people who say that we should expect unprecedented GDP growth from AI which is very much like AI today but better. OTOH, at some point we’ll have AI that is like a new intelligent species arriving on our planet, and then I think all bets are off.
From an economics perspective, I think claims of double-digit GDP growth are dubious and undermine the credibility of the short AI timelines crowd. Here is a good summary of why it seems so implausible to me. To be clear, I think AI risk is a serious problem and I’m open to short timelines. But we shouldn’t be forecasting GDP growth, we should be forecasting the thing we actually care about: the possibility of catastrophic risk.
(This is a point of active disagreement where I’d expect e.g. some people at OpenPhil to believe double-digit GDP growth is plausible. So it’s more of a disagreement than a communication problem, but one that I think will particularly push away people with backgrounds in economics.)
I join you in strongly disagreeing with people who say that we should expect unprecedented GDP growth from AI which is very much like AI today but better. OTOH, at some point we’ll have AI that is like a new intelligent species arriving on our planet, and then I think all bets are off.