Sunday, February 02, 2025

Dwarkesh and Tyler

It is always a joy when two people from my sidebar come in contact. This is Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Tyler Cowen . They are both good interviewers, very smart, joyfully arguing with each other at rapid pace as to how transformative AI will be.  They are both funny. Cowen is always persuasive. His view is that AI will be transformative, but not explosively and quickly, but at a steady additional 0.5%/year to other technological improvements.  So in 30-40 years.

Dwarkesh Patel

...So why would the cost disease mechanism still work here?

Tyler Cowen
 
Cost disease is more general than that. Let's say you have a bunch of factors of production, say five of them. Now, all of a sudden, we get a lot more intelligence, which has already been happening, to be clear, right? Well, that just means the other constraints in your system become a lot more binding,
that the marginal importance of those goes up and the marginal value of more and more IQ or intelligence goes down. So that also is self-limiting on growth. And the cost disease, just one particular instantiation of that more general problem that we illustrate quartets and the like.
 
Dwarkesh Patel
 
If you were talking to a farmer in 2000 BC and you told them that growth rates were 10x, 100x, you'd have 2% economic growth after the Industrial Revolution, and then he started talking about bottlenecks, what do you say to him in retrospect?
 
Tyler Cowen
 
He and I would agree, I hope, I think, I would tell him, hey, it's going to take a long time. And he'd say, hmm, I don't see it happening yet. I think it's going to take a long time. And we'd shake hands and walk off into the sunset. And then I'd eat some of his rice or wheat or whatever, and that would be awesome.

 Dwarkesh is only 24, BTW.

Tyler Cowen - the #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans by Dwarkesh Patel

Why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth

Read on Substack

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