Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…The whole vibe of this progress studies thing is, look, we've got all these low-hanging fruits or medium-hanging fruits that if we fix our institutions, if we made these changes to regulations, to institutions, we could rapidly boost the rate of economic growth. You're okay, so we can fix the NIH and get increases in economic growth. But we have a billion extra people, 10 billion extra people, the smartest people, the most conscientious people, and that has an iota of difference of economic growth. Isn't there a contradiction between how much that rate of economic growth can increase between these two perspectives? There's diminishing marginal returns to most of these factors. A simple one is how it interacts with regulation, law, and the government. Another huge one is energy usage. How good is our country in particular at expanding energy supply? I've seen a few encouraging signs lately with nuclear power. That's great. Most places won't do it. And even those reports, exactly how many years it will take, I know what the press releases say. We'll see, you know, it could be 10 years or more. That will just be a smidgen of what we'll need to implement the kind of vision you're describing. So yeah, they're going to be bottlenecks all along the way, the whole way. It's going to be a tough slog, like the printing press, like electricity. The people who study diffusion of new technologies never think there will be rapid takeoff. My view is I'm always siding with the experts. Economists, social scientists, most of them are blind and asleep to the promise of strong AI. They're just out to lunch. I think they're wrong. I trust the AI experts. But when you talk about, say, diffusion of new technologies, the people who do AI are basically totally wrong. The people who study that issue, I trust the experts. If you put together the two views where in each area you trust the experts, then you get my view, which is amazing in the long run, will take a long time, tough slog, all these bottlenecks in the short run. The fact that there's like a billion of your GPT whatevers, which I'm all in love with, I promise you it's going to take a while. What would the experts say if you said, look, we're going to have, forget about AI, because I feel like when people hear AI, they think of GPT-4, not the humans, not the things that are going to be as smart as humans. What would the experts say if you said tomorrow the world population, the labor force, is going to double? What impact would that have?…

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