Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedTyler Cowen: belief
9 Jan 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans
“The delta is a killer, right? This is one thing we learned from macro. The delta and the levels really interact.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Tyler Cowen
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 9 Jan 2025
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…The world economy today is some hundred trillion something. If the world population was one-tenth of what it is now, if we only had 1 billion people, 100 million people, you think we could have the world economy at this level with our level of technology? No. The delta is a killer, right? This is one thing we learned from macro. The delta and the levels really interact. So shrinking can kill you. Just like companies, nonprofits, if they shrink too much, often they just blow up and disappear. They implode. But that doesn't mean that growing them gets you 3x, 4x, whatever, proportional to how they grow. It's oddly asymmetric. It's very hard to internalize emotionally that intuition in your understanding of the real world. But I think we need to. What are the specific bottlenecks? Like, why?…
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