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bluegatty 5 minutes ago [-]
No - the growth today is capital expenditures, not productivity.
To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework.
AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will.
A better comparison might be railroads.
throw0101a 2 minutes ago [-]
The century from 1870 is filled with many one-time only developments that will never happen again:
Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.
These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:
Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.
cheschire 30 minutes ago [-]
The growth will be in stocks and capital gains, in the consolidation of wealth by a few individuals.
If GDP increases, that’s just money left on the table by the ultra wealthy.
blfr 56 minutes ago [-]
Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.
jose-incandenza 29 minutes ago [-]
Internet is the foundation of the global almost automated distribution networks and has brought the ability to target your consumers in a way that's cheap and effective. Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger. I don't understand this stance.
agumonkey 18 minutes ago [-]
what kind of digital service is worth that much ?
literalAardvark 14 minutes ago [-]
Most of the big ones. Only issue is the US is crap at collecting tax from them.
7 minutes ago [-]
DiscourseFan 19 minutes ago [-]
I don't know if its something that we will be able to measure precisely or at least in aggregate at first since the positives will only come about in the long term. Anecdotally, all my recent trips to the doctor have basically been as follows:
1) Give some (frontier) model my symptoms, circumstances, etc.
2) Model outputs a list of possible causes, some more urgent than others
3) If its not something benign, I go to a doctor
4) Doctor orders blood work, checks me up, and I discuss possible diagnoses with them.
Around 60-70% of the time the model was correct about the illness, the doctor just confirms it with empirical evidence. This means that I am able to pretty effectively triage myself, saving me a considerable amount of time.
Now its already the case that the role of doctors is diminishing in medical practice, and Nurse Practitioners are performing the majority of the same work. Armed with AI tools, Nurse Practitioners are effectively at the same level of skill and knowledge as an actual MD, and we would need far less MDs, then to do medical care, reserving them for specialty cases, expertise where AI tends to fail. So there is both more room for particular and intricate medical research and care for the most stubborn conditions, and more capacity for care in general.
In the long run, this will lead to improved outcomes, greater cognitive and physical health, and lower costs for child rearing. All of this is an economic boon. And all of it will not be apparent in the numbers for decades. I believe this is the case for the majority of the processes that AI is improving.
HPsquared 31 minutes ago [-]
Falling prices is a good thing for anyone not in debt. That's almost nobody today though, I suppose.
ernst_klim 49 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. I believe that growth caused by the rise of IT, be it Internet or LLM, will be marginal, because the benefits for humanity are very marginal compared to that caused by steam engine, wing, antibiotics or telegraph.
Everything IT does is slightly simplifying things we already could do. We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
blfr 36 minutes ago [-]
I think the speedups and conveniences of modern IT and the Internet have been massive: I can bank from my pocket, review the best photos out of 100k+ just when riding a tram, get virtually any good produced anywhere delivered to my doorstep in 1-3 business days (and it will be the exact kind and make I chose, not something that happened to be available), read virtually any book ever published while my appointment is delayed.
However, almost all of these are purely private benefits that do not show in any ledger. This is at least in part why the Internet seems to have had such small impact on gdp.
How about AI? So far, even more private benefits than the Internet.
zapkyeskrill 30 minutes ago [-]
And most of the time savings gained from all this is blown on grind clicking "social media" so net effect is, yes, close to zero (or in more modern terms, not 100x, not 10x, but 1x at most).
mahkeiro 48 seconds ago [-]
I mean that’s to you as well as spending your time at the swimming pool.
HPsquared 21 minutes ago [-]
Value is subjective, though. If you actually gave people an ultimatum to stop using AI tools for a year, with a negotiable price, I wonder what that would come out at. Many other personal goods are like this, they are valued highly but do not appear as commercial transactions.
azan_ 17 minutes ago [-]
That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering in e.g. medicine. Modern drug discovery would be impossible without advances in computation, and we are getting breakthrough drugs all the time thanks to that.
> We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
The speedup is much larger than horses vs steam power. How much time would it take you to find some scientific article if your library did not stock journal it was published in? You'd have to write request to get that issue and then wait few weeks before it arrives. Now you can get it basically instantly.
TacticalCoder 4 minutes ago [-]
> That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering ...
You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.
darkerside 5 minutes ago [-]
Clearly written by someone who's never lived without steam power (semi tongue in cheek).
But seriously, your ability to expediently research just doesn't compare to the ability to ship a metric ton of freight across the country without marshalling an army of people for months on end. As one example.
Ekaros 43 minutes ago [-]
I do believe efficiency gains have been significant. Not as big as with industrial revolution but still effective.
Does not mean that some of these gains have not been wasted or there has not been in sense waste introduced to waste excess productivity and efficiency. IT certainly has made this waste lot more easy to do.
lukan 36 minutes ago [-]
Speedup in communication is fast, but the real physical work still needed to be done. Machines were very powerful with this, but not flexible.
AI powered robots will be flexible (once they work reliable) ..
ttctciyf 18 minutes ago [-]
The only explosive growth we're seeing out of the ongoing tech bonanza is growth in inequality, afaics.
AnimalMuppet 9 minutes ago [-]
Don't think in terms of dollars. Think in terms of stuff and services.
You don't see the internet in terms of dollars because it often makes it cheaper to do something that was possible before. That looks like a negative, in terms of GDP. In terms of what people can do, and can afford to do, though, it opens enormous doors. Want some information? Don't need a library. Want to plan a trip? Don't need a travel agent. Want to download some free software? Don't need a floppy and a friend who has a copy. And so on.
But if you look around, you see things like Amazon. They don't exist without the internet. You see Facebook. Youtube. Netflix existed, but they became a lot more convenient - no need to run to a store. There's a lot that was created that people found valuable, but didn't have to pay for (Amazon excepted). There's value, but because the nominal charge is $0, it doesn't show up in the GDP statistics.
newsclues 22 minutes ago [-]
Some people think so in the technology singularity that humanity may be approaching.
The acceleration of the speed of technological growth seems real, look how fast AI research and tools are advancing seemingly on a daily basis, rather than innovation happening in months, years or decades long timescales.
Think about the rate of progress of the steam engine, and then think about technology since the splitting of the atom. Warp speed!
TacticalCoder 8 minutes ago [-]
> The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect.
This is both correct and incorrect.
US and China tech did totally skyrocket in the 21st century and pulled the GDPs of both the US and China up like mad.
The one western continent that had none of the Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, Tencen, Micron, SK Hynix, NVidia, that's nowhere in drones, etc. saw his GDP (in USD and inflation adjusted) barely moving and that'd be the EU.
The EU now has an economy based, as someone pointed out the other day, on selling overpriced "luxury" (at least pretending to be luxury) handbags assembled in China: in the Top 100 companies by market cap besides ASML the EU has L'Oreal and LVMH. That and fake public companies that are actual state monopolies (like spanish banks and french oil companies). It's really totally pathetic.
The EU, even though the public debt of its countries grew like mad, is where to look at to see a continent that had hardly any GDP growth in the 21st century.
But I'd say that it's precisely because the EU missed the Internet: it was all chinese (and now asian too) tech companies.
If this first quarter of the 21st century is of any indication, it looks like history is repeating: the EU is, once again, absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI (yay, Mistral, but we all know how that one is doing) and shall, once again, continue to see the public debt of its countries grow like there's no tomorrow (France is at 6% deficit of its GDP seen the insane spending of the state) and its GDP hardly move at all.
But AI leading to no growth in the US and in Asia? I think it's a bit early to call that.
inigyou 5 minutes ago [-]
Note that GDP primarily measures price level, not productivity.
lazerjesus 44 minutes ago [-]
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dan_gee 25 minutes ago [-]
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daun_gee 24 minutes ago [-]
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hamper653 23 minutes ago [-]
Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism. When capitalism expands (be it by replacing older modes of production, or through rebuilding after a world war), it always has steady growth. When there’s nowhere left to expand to, the machine always grips. Technical progress doesn’t prevent this outcome, it accelerates it. More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
hnhg 17 minutes ago [-]
Also bear in mind that the industrial revolution in the UK occurred under the British Empire, which extracted a lot of wealth and resources from its territories, usually under less-than-fair arrangements. It is hard to imagine the British industrial revolution without this benefit - they were not separate aspects of the economy.
hamper653 7 minutes ago [-]
Indeed.
"England was to become the ‘workshop of the world'; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was — markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect! …
But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries besides England — France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia — have coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up."
The same could be said today of the US and China.
delusional 3 minutes ago [-]
> More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
That might give the reader the wrong impression. It is the same labour, but spread out over more commodities. You won't get to work less.
avereveard 5 minutes ago [-]
agree, technology doesn't change the basic mechanism of capitalism so I don't think this will be different, the only real question is how far means of production will be in term of capital intensity from upper class, which will decide if the outcome will be victorian golden age or robber baron age
epolanski 2 minutes ago [-]
Any parallel should be taken with a grain of salt.
In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.
1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that the recovery lasted 80 years. It took 80 years for the UK job market to recover occupation and salaries as seen at the beginning of the 1800s.
Europe has also suffered a gigantic slump in occupation in the early 1900s due to machines removing the need of so many people working the fields. It's no coincidence that the peak emigration to the Americas happened as the first machines hit the fields leaving millions jobless in a short time span. Took those countries many half a century to recover.
2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.
To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework.
AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will.
A better comparison might be railroads.
Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.
These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.
If GDP increases, that’s just money left on the table by the ultra wealthy.
1) Give some (frontier) model my symptoms, circumstances, etc.
2) Model outputs a list of possible causes, some more urgent than others
3) If its not something benign, I go to a doctor
4) Doctor orders blood work, checks me up, and I discuss possible diagnoses with them.
Around 60-70% of the time the model was correct about the illness, the doctor just confirms it with empirical evidence. This means that I am able to pretty effectively triage myself, saving me a considerable amount of time.
Now its already the case that the role of doctors is diminishing in medical practice, and Nurse Practitioners are performing the majority of the same work. Armed with AI tools, Nurse Practitioners are effectively at the same level of skill and knowledge as an actual MD, and we would need far less MDs, then to do medical care, reserving them for specialty cases, expertise where AI tends to fail. So there is both more room for particular and intricate medical research and care for the most stubborn conditions, and more capacity for care in general.
In the long run, this will lead to improved outcomes, greater cognitive and physical health, and lower costs for child rearing. All of this is an economic boon. And all of it will not be apparent in the numbers for decades. I believe this is the case for the majority of the processes that AI is improving.
Everything IT does is slightly simplifying things we already could do. We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
However, almost all of these are purely private benefits that do not show in any ledger. This is at least in part why the Internet seems to have had such small impact on gdp.
How about AI? So far, even more private benefits than the Internet.
> We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
The speedup is much larger than horses vs steam power. How much time would it take you to find some scientific article if your library did not stock journal it was published in? You'd have to write request to get that issue and then wait few weeks before it arrives. Now you can get it basically instantly.
You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.
But seriously, your ability to expediently research just doesn't compare to the ability to ship a metric ton of freight across the country without marshalling an army of people for months on end. As one example.
Does not mean that some of these gains have not been wasted or there has not been in sense waste introduced to waste excess productivity and efficiency. IT certainly has made this waste lot more easy to do.
AI powered robots will be flexible (once they work reliable) ..
You don't see the internet in terms of dollars because it often makes it cheaper to do something that was possible before. That looks like a negative, in terms of GDP. In terms of what people can do, and can afford to do, though, it opens enormous doors. Want some information? Don't need a library. Want to plan a trip? Don't need a travel agent. Want to download some free software? Don't need a floppy and a friend who has a copy. And so on.
But if you look around, you see things like Amazon. They don't exist without the internet. You see Facebook. Youtube. Netflix existed, but they became a lot more convenient - no need to run to a store. There's a lot that was created that people found valuable, but didn't have to pay for (Amazon excepted). There's value, but because the nominal charge is $0, it doesn't show up in the GDP statistics.
The acceleration of the speed of technological growth seems real, look how fast AI research and tools are advancing seemingly on a daily basis, rather than innovation happening in months, years or decades long timescales.
Think about the rate of progress of the steam engine, and then think about technology since the splitting of the atom. Warp speed!
This is both correct and incorrect.
US and China tech did totally skyrocket in the 21st century and pulled the GDPs of both the US and China up like mad.
The one western continent that had none of the Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, Tencen, Micron, SK Hynix, NVidia, that's nowhere in drones, etc. saw his GDP (in USD and inflation adjusted) barely moving and that'd be the EU.
The EU now has an economy based, as someone pointed out the other day, on selling overpriced "luxury" (at least pretending to be luxury) handbags assembled in China: in the Top 100 companies by market cap besides ASML the EU has L'Oreal and LVMH. That and fake public companies that are actual state monopolies (like spanish banks and french oil companies). It's really totally pathetic.
The EU, even though the public debt of its countries grew like mad, is where to look at to see a continent that had hardly any GDP growth in the 21st century.
But I'd say that it's precisely because the EU missed the Internet: it was all chinese (and now asian too) tech companies.
If this first quarter of the 21st century is of any indication, it looks like history is repeating: the EU is, once again, absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI (yay, Mistral, but we all know how that one is doing) and shall, once again, continue to see the public debt of its countries grow like there's no tomorrow (France is at 6% deficit of its GDP seen the insane spending of the state) and its GDP hardly move at all.
But AI leading to no growth in the US and in Asia? I think it's a bit early to call that.
"England was to become the ‘workshop of the world'; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was — markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect! …
But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries besides England — France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia — have coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up."
The same could be said today of the US and China.
That might give the reader the wrong impression. It is the same labour, but spread out over more commodities. You won't get to work less.
In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.
1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that the recovery lasted 80 years. It took 80 years for the UK job market to recover occupation and salaries as seen at the beginning of the 1800s.
Europe has also suffered a gigantic slump in occupation in the early 1900s due to machines removing the need of so many people working the fields. It's no coincidence that the peak emigration to the Americas happened as the first machines hit the fields leaving millions jobless in a short time span. Took those countries many half a century to recover.
2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.