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- Hacker News
- Funny how people are optimistic.
The other giant growth leap mankind had happened just before the Bronze Age Collapse.
Trade, automation, labor, same recipe. The outcome was a few centuries of dark ages though.
by gaigalas - This is the closest analogy for what's about to happenby mikewarot
- Growth is unrealistic. During the industrial revolution, people were still exploring the world and expanding their reach, establishing new colonies for raw materials.
We are living in a global economy now. There is no growth into unexplored territories left to do.
The amount of carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere is unsustainable, and will lead to more worldwide instability. The first effects have already been seen. Remember that the "Arab Spring" (rise to IS, wars and refugee crisis) had been triggered by rising food prices.
by Findecanor - Over the period of the industrial revolution humanity gained the ability to manipulate the material world in profound ways (convert potential energy into mechanical work, etc.). My view is information technology allows humans to continue to do that, but more efficiently. I think you’d need a breakthrough in manipulating subatomic particles and quantum mechanics to have the same level of relative impact as the industrial revolution.
- 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.by hamper653
- 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 ageby avereveard
- > More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
Rising productivity either means more stuff or lower prices.
- > 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.
by delusional - > Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism.
The same technical advances created rapid growth in non industrialized non capitalist societies once they were introduced like the USSR or China. It's silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth regardless of economic system. Producing the food easily is more fundamental than deciding who gets what amount of easily produced food allocated to them.
- 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.by hnhg
- I figure we're not far off explosive growth but it'll be very different from the industrial revolution. At the moment AI is handy but less capable than humans in many ways so you can't just swap it in for human workers. Before long that'll change so robots can build better robots and on to infinity kinda, subject to resource and energy constraints like Kardashev II. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale). Also planning permission - I could see thing go a bit national park like.by tim333
- 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:
* 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.
One things that could be done is more redistributive tax policies, like existed post-WW2, so as to better spread around the current income and wealth in a less concentrated way.
by throw0101a - I think we had a lot of jumps left in biology. We will have true immortality within 500 years at this rate. We've just switched over to artificial light without burning things, as we were burning things for light the whole time until recently.by inigyou
- The industrial revolution was a mini-quake compared to automated cognition. But we can learn some things from it.
I see the industrial revolution as the invention of the cart. It made horses more productive. Then the car replaced horses.
It is taking people longer to wrap their heads around the reality than I thought it would. If there was a competitive human species on the planet getting smarter by the day, people would get it.
It is hard to maintain awareness of something which presents questions with no obvious answers. The one answer I have, is we need to clean up the ethics in our systems. Ethics are not costs against value, they are the full accounting and optimization of all value.
More intelligent creatures than us, not held back by our our outdated biologically instincts, won't have any trouble with that game theory.
So ethical systems are not just a shield for us as individuals, but also of inherent value to new forms of self-interest.
But that won't help us, if we don't push to align and strengthen our own systems now. And reverse the concentration of power in corrupt individuals who demonstrate every day that they are not interested in the wellbeing of humans in general.
This is urgent. We do not have a lot of time to effect this change.
by Nevermark - The ones that can change it won’t because they benefit from the system being how it is. Being a politician is a gateway to money and power.
The fundamental flaw of the constitution is that it had no ethics built in, it’s up to the voters to pick better, our press to report truthfully without bias and those have failed as well.
by b3ing - The interesting thing here, I think, is what actually drives the growth of industrialization: cheap energy, an exploitable labor force and increased automation.
Every industrial economy seems to reach a plateau of diminishing returns, and it actually seems to be reached faster the faster industrialization is implemented. We see it in Europe, in the US, in Japan, in South Korea and it seems China is well on their way there, too: Cheap energy is diminishing (shale oil fracking, increased cost of building nuclear, etc) and exploitable labor has mostly been pushed as far as it can (dwindling fertility rates across the globe). Thus, we place our hope in automation, which has also been taken incredibly far already.
LLMs really must be some magic special sauce if they're to automate us into a new era of explosive growth. So far I don't think they're living up to that promise.
by arexxbifs - 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.
by bluegatty - Why is railroad a better comparison?by chii
- 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.
by cheschire - I wonder if I will witness the real revolution in my lifetime.by LeBit
- Surely you realise that average person can just buy stocks and reap benefits of it? And I'm not sure if you are serious about stock price-GDP division (typically higher stock prices are associated with INCREASE in GDP, not decrease).by azan_
- 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.by blfr
- > 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.
- Well, we can't have the counterfactual world but could it be that without computers, Internet or AI, there might be no/less growth?
I somehow doubt that AI will accelerate growth constantly as the world has inertia and I'm not sure AI is sustainably increasing our ability to change. On the other side, if there is a technology that can do that it could be intelligence.
by zurfer - 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!
by newsclues - Falling prices is a good thing for anyone not in debt. That's almost nobody today though, I suppose.by HPsquared
- 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.
by DiscourseFan - 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.
- 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.
by AnimalMuppet - 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.
by ernst_klim