Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedTyler Cowen: belief
9 Jan 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans
“Classical economics figured that out. They were too pessimistic, I would say. But they understood the pessimism intrinsic in diminishing returns in a way that people in the Bay Area do not.”
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 model is that you can have AIs make more AIs, right? That you can have returns. Ricardo knew this, right? He didn't call it AI, but Malthus and Ricardo, they all talked about this. It was just humans for them. Well, people then would breed. They would breed at some pretty rapid rate. There were diminishing returns to that. You had these other scarce factors. Classical economics figured that out. They were too pessimistic, I would say. But they understood the pessimism intrinsic in diminishing returns in a way that people in the Bay Area do not. And it's better for them that they don't know it. But if you're just trying to inject truth into their veins rather than ambition, diminishing returns is a very important idea. In what sense was that pessimism correct? Because we do have seven billion people, and we have a lot more ideas as a result. We have a lot more industries.…
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