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I don't understand why anyone expects AI to make that much of a splash. It's probably going to be the same story as computers and the like internet. Undoubtedly revolutionary technologies, whose gains went mostly to feed bureaucracy
Internet actually brought enormous amount of consumer surplus, which simply is not reflected in GDP. If you tried to value the stuff that we today get for effectively free, like ability to stream any movie you want for peanuts, or free long-distance video calls, or free mailing, or play sophisticated video games etc according to how much these costed in, say, 1970, you’d observe that we consume thousands of dollars worth of services for free.
Yeah, I remember what a big deal long distance calls were. Hell, you could rack up quite a bill just with local calls. Bank transfers were a pain in the ass, now they're instantaneous. Even governments are starting to digitize, and you can get some administrative tasks done in 5 minutes from your home, instead needing an hour or two it would take you to get to whatever office, and get it done there. That's my point! By all rights this, and many things we have not mentioned, should have resulted in exponential increases in getting actual shit done, it didn't. We still can't get people to be able to rent a place on a single income, let alone support a family. We have a few cool gizmos to show for it, and that's that.
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Because we're seeing two portents:
AI is becoming equal to or better than humans in more and more domains.
The number of domains it is getting better than humans at is increasing faster than expected.
Which for most 'experts' in the field, show that AI is now going to contribute a LOT more to the economy as we figure out how to exploit these capabilities.
Right now the most obvious gains seem to be in the programming space. Where a programmer can 10x their productivity by sloughing off a lot of their work onto the AI.
ChatGPT is already scary good at a lot of tasks. ChatGPT, hooked up to other AIs that are scary good at particular tasks will probably be an all purpose tool.
And this is without entertaining the "AGI goes FOOM" side of the equation.
I myself just recently fed a PDF of a user manual for one of my household appliances to Anthropic's "Claude" Ai and asked it to help me troubleshoot, and it got me to a step by step procedure to both identify and fix the problem I was experiencing.
This doesn't fully 'replace' the role of a repairman, of course, but it saved me a noticeable amount of time and possibly money, and that sort of benefit compounds over time.
Imagine for instance if we could replace most Teachers with an interactive AI bot.
My point is that computers did that too, for many fields. The internet did it again. It did not result in a return to 20th century growth rates. We have fundamentally the same lifestyles as we did pre- the digital / internet revolutions. I'm saying that whatever sucked up the gain from them is likely to suck up the gains from AI.
Yes, but in this case, the change is potentially going to lead to self-perpetuating improvements as each augmentation to our capabilities immediately unlocks further ones.
Think something closer to the industrial revolution.
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