Will AI transform growth prospects for the world and usher in an era of greater abundance? That is what business executives and management consultants would have us believe. But serious economists are sceptical. Let me cite a few:
Daren Acemoglu of MIT cited here:
The professor ...... anticipates AI will boost GDP growth by only 0.93 percent to 1.16 percent over the next decade.
But even that figure may be too optimistic, he argues, because productivity estimates come from automating "easy tasks" – future tasks may be more complicated and less amenable to automation. He therefore contends there will be a more modest increase in TFP and GDP in the next ten years – on the order of 0.53 percent and 0.90 percent, respectively.
Nobel Laureate David Romer of NYU quoted here:
We’ve benefited from scaling up compute and ingesting a whole lot of data.... ....Scaling up compute is pretty easy. It’s just more machines, more chips. But what’s going to happen is we’re not going to have enough data.
Charles I Jones of Stanford in a paper at the Jackson Hole Symposium last year:
*Automation has been ongoing for 200 years — stable growth ◦
*Steam engine, electricity, internal combustion, semiconductors ◦
*Maybe A.I. is the latest great idea that will allow 2% growth to be sustained a bit longer
Jones notes that long-term productivity growth in the US has been stable at 2 per cent. He reckons AI will help maintain that rate at best and prevent it from falling.
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