Does Advanced AI Lead to 10x Faster Economic Growth?

A Debate with Tamay Besiroglu for Asterisk Magazine

Dear readers,

I’m still writing the next New Things Under the Sun post, but in the interim, I hope you’ll probably find this debate I had with Tamay Besiroglu as fascinating as I did.¹ It’s about the claim that, once we develop AI that can do anything (mental) a human worker can do, the economy will start to grow much, much, much faster. This claim is actually implied by some pretty mainstream models of economic growth! Tamay and I had this debate in slow motion, in a shared google doc, over a few months, and it was published in Asterisk Magazine Friday.

In the debate, I’m the skeptic and Tamay the advocate. While I think it’s pretty likely sufficiently advanced AI would lead to (somewhat) faster economic growth, I think growth of 20% per year and up is pretty unlikely. In contrast, Tamay thinks 20% annual growth and faster is pretty likely, if we successfully develop AI that can do every kind of human mental work. If you’re unfamiliar with this debate, I think we cover the fundamentals well. But even if you are familiar I think we also push past the basics and articulate some novel arguments too.

You can read the whole piece over at Asterisk right now.

If you prefer audio, Tamay and I also recorded a podcast version where we each perform our parts of the dialogue, available at this link. That podcast also includes an extra 40 minutes of discussion on related topics that we didn’t have space for in the Asterisk debate.

Cheers,

Matt

1. I actually covered some of Tamay’s work on New Things Under the Sun here!