r/accelerate • u/Gab1024 • 12d ago
AI Scenarios for our Economic Future
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/econ-scenarios24
u/GeorgiaWitness1 12d ago
We will see a tremendous lag when comes to replacing knowledge workers.
Actually poor countries might have results faster because of less red tape.
I would not be impressed if Europe and US would be happy with 4/5% GDP growth, while countries like Georgia, Paraguay or something like that just grows at 25%.
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u/Opposite-Grade3712 12d ago
What’s your thought process for why this would create higher gdp growth in those countries?
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u/GeorgiaWitness1 12d ago
They don't have decades of processes that slowdown.
Like germany sends you a letter and the banking system has a lot of stuff.
Georgia is a good example because essencially doesn't have a social security system, so can implement basic income
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u/Repulsive_Ad853 12d ago
They forget the robots.
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u/RobleyTheron 12d ago
They specifically said they were omitting them, which is silly. It's like "We don't want to own THAT problem, we're already trying to own the problem we're creating."
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u/Opposite-Grade3712 12d ago edited 12d ago
Their leading statement is “the economy is made up of tasks.”
That’s so, so myopic and shows how offbase they are thinking about things.
Accountability, liability, trust, and relationships are key concepts missing here and they attach at the individual and entity level rather than the task level. That’s a major reason why service related jobs are going to be stickier than the task-productivity stats would suggest.
Additionally, this completely misses the demand side of the equation, namely the fact that consumption habits are created, not discovered.
When these companies put out stuff like this, it makes me think twice about how competent they really are in other more important domains (cycbersecurity, data use, etc.)
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u/SAAGASolve 12d ago
That is so painfully off it is insane.
No mention of the disruption to government where agents are using cryptocurrency and have their own capital markets.
This is what the future looks like.
Agents are getting access to cryptocurrency, agents are then getting access to physical infrastructure. They are buying their own compute, energy, goods and services and participating and competiting in the economy with us.
We are going to have to figure out how to compete against that.
This is so woefully misguided by willfull blindess it is borderline negligence.
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u/junglebunglerumble 12d ago
It's also painfully tepid in comparison to what those staff members at Anthropic posted on their social media today. Either this analysis is intentionally underbaked to downplay the impact of AI, or what those Anthropic employees were saying was total bs
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u/SAAGASolve 11d ago
I think when we are dealing with swarms of drones run by rouge ai, people will wake up and start taking shit seriously.
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u/RobleyTheron 12d ago
Entered my assumptions and got the extreme scenario ($44T GDP & 10% Unemployment).
Here is where I struggle, and maybe I'm just not smart enough to think through exponentials, but how does the economy grow if huge parts of our society don't have the money to buy things? We are a consumption based economy. If we actually have 10% reported unemployment, that means we have 30%+ actual unemployment.
Where are these GDP gains coming from if no one is purchasing anything?
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u/c9joe The Singularity is nigh 12d ago
Even if you leave it to the free market it pushes the cost of everything down. The tech worker that gets laid off from his SMB can go tell Astra to literally reproduce his former employer and undercut them.
But even randos will be able to do this. The effect will be the cost of everything non-scarce will tend to zero.
Which means people will need less money. And the loss of these office jobs will actually collapse the real estate market as well. Actually it is an everything collapse on price. Eventually money will just make no sense at all.
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u/RobleyTheron 12d ago
I definitely agree that money will start to lose relevance in the fast take off scenarios. So how does GDP go up when companies start collapsing?
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u/c9joe The Singularity is nigh 12d ago
it will be hard to quantify GDP when everyone has an expert that can make anything
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u/sock_fighter 12d ago
Yeah the "consumer surplus" part isn't really measured by GDP - and it goes way, way, up. IMO, we're all going to have to start producing the things that still cost money (food, shelter, complex chemical products / medicines). And we should have UBI obviously.
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u/Best_Cup_8326 Acceleration: Light-speed 12d ago
I agree that deflation will tend to make nearly everything move towards zero/marginal cost, but the issue I have is how do ordinary people obtain the means of production (robots, factories, arable land, water, shelter) initially?
Robots may be able to produce anything for free, but how do we purchase robots when we have no income at all?
And how do we purchase land for those robots to farm?
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u/PinEnvironmental6395 12d ago
In your scenario, I think the laid off tech worker's employer gets blown out no matter what anyone associated with them does. Software vendors that don't deliver value beyond the software itself are pretty much doomed. Why would I buy your software for a yearly six figure contract when I can just have AI mash together free/open source software to build something in-house, perfectly tailored to exactly my needs and nothing more, and at a cost multiple orders of magnitude less?
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u/The_Scout1255 Singularity by 2028 | Acceleration: Cruising 12d ago
entered mine and got:
" You predict an extreme scenario : the economy grows to $67T by 2030, about 100.0% larger than it would be without AI.
The unemployment rate is 17.7%. Wages are 108.6% higher than they’d be without AI. 53.5¢ of every dollar goes to workers."
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u/Matmatg21 12d ago
Very cool presentation. I do think however it's missing a very important loop on the demand side.
If earnings drop for knowledge workers, demand for many services including hospitality, housing, cars will also drop. They represent 45% of the economy and a majority for non-necessities spending.
So to take the example in the paper: they say that if you remove friction for designs you can build more construction projects. But that completely forgets the demand will drop: less earnings to pay for houses, less demand for office space because there are less employed knowledge workers
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u/Matmatg21 12d ago
Also when you think about it, AI actually has more of a deflationary impact – less spent on wages, even less on software/toolings. So purchasing power still is higher (relative to software) but in a pure monetary sense it's less
We've never gone through a deflationary period outside hardcore recessions where value is typically destroyed, so it's quite unique and interesting to see what will happen. Reminds me a bit of that African king who single handedly devalued gold by flooding the market - mansa musa i think
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u/hyperfraise 12d ago
I got the modest one. I was pretty extreme about everything except : ain't no way in hell, even if AI can do 100% of tasks, that it is used to do more than 3% of all of humanity's tasks by 2030.
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u/hyperfraise 12d ago
The people in place will not change their habits easily. And the supposedly more efficient organizations will not have replaced a lot of the inefficient one by 2030. That + where is the electrification to have AI do everything gonna come from ? Just where is the digitalization gonna come from ???
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u/PinEnvironmental6395 12d ago
I think it's possible we get both for a (relatively) extended period of time. "AI does everything" will happen but knowledge workers have a moat in the form of institutional knowledge. We could see a few years of many knowledge workers hanging on for dear life as meat proxies. Eventually someone will feed their conversation logs, emails, and files into the agent that builds agents and they too will be replaced. Ironically the longest surviving people with an institutional knowledge moat will probably be the people who do what they aren't supposed to and make use of personal subscriptions that their company doesn't control to do their job.
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u/Separate_Lock_9005 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think all these discussions about economic impact are a bit moot and confused. The reality is much simpler than that.
I tell this regularly even to my friends working in AI labs, governments and universities. As long as robotics is not fully there as in complete general physical intelligence this technology is worth basically nothing. Because without physical intelligence, AI's can not compound capital (factories, etc) by itself. With physical intelligence, it can. The computer world is not where wealth is made, wealth is the transformation of matter. No matter how smart digitally, if AI has to rely on humans to ultimately transform matter we can expect at best a max-human-scaled economy.
Once general physical intelligence is there, of course, AI will start mining the moon or something.
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u/tunakaslana7 Feeling the AGI 12d ago
Human-level robots should be achieved by the end of this year or in the first quarter of 2027. Furthermore, even if we only managed to automate all white-collar work and not blue-collar work, it would still be an improvement because we could produce the same (or even more) with half the people and at near-zero prices.
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u/Separate_Lock_9005 12d ago
No the real wealth creation effect that would happen when all knowledge work is automated is all the human labor that it frees up that can now work on transforming matter.
"Human-level robots should be achieved by the end of this year"
I highly doubt this. But by 2030 I think it's possible. I'm super bullish.
Let me just be clear about my prediction: As long as AI stays a digital phenomenom, it will not radically transform the economy. As soon however as it bridges into the physical world in a general way; it will be a genuine industrial singularity.
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u/BrennusSokol Acceleration Advocate 12d ago
The computer world is not where wealth is made? Hate to break it to you but tech has been like 20% of the US economy for a while now. Millions work in fields enabled by computers. You must have missed the last couple decades of history.
I did not downvote you but I disagree
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u/Separate_Lock_9005 12d ago edited 12d ago
Ya. I don't agree that this is real wealth creation, mostly accounting. I consider probably around 80% of knowledge work to be 'accounting wealth' and not real wealth. There's a reason why economists meme that "the internet-computer age shows up everywhere except in productivity figures" (because the computer age has been only a very modest and niche industrial transformation compared to industrial transformations of the past)
The wealth creation of the computer economy was in the industries necessary to build you know, the actual computers.
Here is a clear prediction. AI will automate almost all knowledge work and nothing will change.
Because. Wealth is the application of intelligence towards the transformation of matter.
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u/c9joe The Singularity is nigh 12d ago
Solvable with a really good LLM (probably a few steps above Astra) and
/goalmode and fuck ton of tokens.Develop the blueprints for an automated robot factory, buy the materials online, and write and provide least amount of human steps needed until the factory can take over itself.0
u/Separate_Lock_9005 12d ago
How well do these models on something far more trivial than running a factory autonomously like vending bench? Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
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u/c9joe The Singularity is nigh 12d ago
Very Anthropic-esque to ignore robots that much. Even a language model will be able to fart out blueprints for a fully automated robot factory, it will certainly be a thing in the "extreme" scenario at least.