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The value of increasing white collar productivity by 10% permanently would be worth every penny spent on AI. It doesn't have to singularity to be worth it. There are nonobvious questions of how to capture the wealth as a company, but the basic "total addressable market" sanity check passes. TAM = 10% total white collar labor expense (well, value of marginal 10% of labor, but similar).
Typical GDP growth in the US is about 2%/year. That means just waiting 4 years doing normal stuff gets you ~10% productivity improvement. ChatGPT was released just about 4 years ago.
There's a lot of subtleties in the economic figures. But my back-of-the-napkin math above argues that we would have had this 10% permanent productivity gain without any investment in AI.
Reminds me of straight lines on a graph. More specifically:
If the productivity-boosting effects of AI were true but society controls the overall trend to a steady 2% growth rate, you could see the effects of AI on everything but productivity. Dark Leisure is one attempt at explaining it away.
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Wasn't the "basic sanity check" for the Internet back in the 90's also passing? It's entirely possible to land on a piece of viable technology, and still crash the economy by investing in it too much and too early.
Right, that's the point of a basic sanity check. It's an easy check to rule out things that are insane, in this case "if this has a small TAM, it is not worth a large investment." AI does not have a small TAM, so this does not show that it is not worth a large investment.
But, as you said, it also doesn't show it is worth a large investment. It's a "fast rule-out" heuristic, not any kind of a "rule-in" one.
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"Crash" means a very different thing if its a sharp correction that recovers inside a couple years, vs. getting stuck in a trough of low productivity growth.
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Or consider railroads, a century prior.
This is actually my nuanced, enlightened centrist take: AI as a technology—or more precisely, a suite of technologies—is potentially as revolutionary as the internet, electricity, and steam power rolled into one, but current investments in AI may very well turn out to be myopic or premature. For one entirely plausible example, we may end up in a world where distilled models git gud and thus inference is mostly done locally on cheap, commodity hardware like smartphones, which would render the hundreds of billions being poured into data centers largely wasted.
I'm unironically rooting for the outcome where AI intelligence caps out below the super-intelligence level, but nonetheless gets more efficient and cheap, and distilled models become the general standard for everyday use. Like, your self-driving car will have one built in, your house will have one, and the absolute top tier models are mostly only used by Governments and large corpos for the highest level tasks.
Distributed, cheap artificial intelligence would be a boon, and without so much existential risk.
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