Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. If the economy grows at 3% a year, then rule of 70, that’s 20-something years. Right. But he was like, “Okay, right now we’re bottlenecked by the fact that there’s people, and you can’t double people every single year.” But in a world where you can also double the labor force every single year, how fast can the economy grow? I think it could double every single year. At the very least it would be tens of percent every single year. Okay. The rate of interest should be pretty close to the growth rate. It won’t be exactly that because of consumption, but it should be pretty similar. Then we’ll go into a world, I think in the 2030s, where the rate of interest is tens of percent. Part of my brain is like, “It might be hundreds of percent,” but let’s say it’s at least tens of percent. I’m just like, okay. Every country that is not involved in the production of AI defaults. Every stock that is not an AI stock is worth basically zero because discounted cash flows are worth nothing. If the federal government can’t figure out a way to tax AI, servicing the debt is more than the current tax revenue. And you have all these other effects that I’m sure we’re not even pricing in: you can’t get a mortgage, et cetera, et cetera. Fundamentally, what is happening in this world? This is all nerd speak, right? But let’s step back. What’s happening? Just now it started, the nerd speak?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.