[pontus]

I think two possible effects of AI are often conflated.

On the one hand you can imagine that work gets supercharged, allowing companies to produce 10x the number of widgets at 1/10th the cost. The economy would grow rapidly, wealth inequality would presumably be exacerbated, jobs would be automated, we might need some version of universal basic income, and so on. People debate whether or not this kind of transition is imminent or if it'd take decades.

On the other hand, it's conceivable that not much would happen in the "bulk" of the economy while at the same time the frontier of humanity might be pushed forward. We may see new treatments for diseases, new types of energy production, and so on. In this version of the world, jobs would mostly remain unchanged (at least in the short to intermediate term), perhaps with some small multiplicative efficiency factor, the economy wouldn't grow rapidly, there wouldn't be any mass unemployment, and so on.

In my mind, I'm much more excited about the second kind of impact that AI might have than the first. I guess I don't really feel like I want to have 10x the stuff that I already have while I'm really excited about someone curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and so on.

[aetherson]

If stuff is 1/10th as expensive as it is now, you can also work 1/10th as hard for 1x as much stuff as you have now, instead of 1x as hard as you work now for 10x the stuff.

[pontus]

I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think this dichotomy is correct.