If GDP increases, that’s just money left on the table by the ultra wealthy.
"England was to become the ‘workshop of the world'; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was — markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect! …
But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries besides England — France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia — have coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up."
The same could be said today of the US and China.
To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework.
AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will.
A better comparison might be railroads.
In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.
1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that the recovery lasted 80 years. It took 80 years for the UK job market to recover occupation and salaries as seen at the beginning of the 1800s.
Europe has also suffered a gigantic slump in occupation in the early 1900s due to machines removing the need of so many people working the fields. It's no coincidence that the peak emigration to the Americas happened as the first machines hit the fields leaving millions jobless in a short time span. Took those countries many half a century to recover.
2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.
Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.
These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.
One things that could be done is more redistributive tax policies, like existed post-WW2, so as to better spread around the current income and wealth in a less concentrated way.
That might give the reader the wrong impression. It is the same labour, but spread out over more commodities. You won't get to work less.
blfr•1h ago
ernst_klim•54m ago
Everything IT does is slightly simplifying things we already could do. We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
Ekaros•49m ago
Does not mean that some of these gains have not been wasted or there has not been in sense waste introduced to waste excess productivity and efficiency. IT certainly has made this waste lot more easy to do.
lukan•41m ago
AI powered robots will be flexible (once they work reliable) ..
blfr•41m ago
However, almost all of these are purely private benefits that do not show in any ledger. This is at least in part why the Internet seems to have had such small impact on gdp.
How about AI? So far, even more private benefits than the Internet.
zapkyeskrill•35m ago
HPsquared•26m ago
mahkeiro•6m ago
azan_•22m ago
> We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
The speedup is much larger than horses vs steam power. How much time would it take you to find some scientific article if your library did not stock journal it was published in? You'd have to write request to get that issue and then wait few weeks before it arrives. Now you can get it basically instantly.
darkerside•11m ago
But seriously, your ability to expediently research just doesn't compare to the ability to ship a metric ton of freight across the country without marshalling an army of people for months on end. As one example.
TacticalCoder•9m ago
You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.
mahkeiro•4m ago
HPsquared•36m ago
jose-incandenza•34m ago
agumonkey•23m ago
literalAardvark•19m ago
newsclues•27m ago
The acceleration of the speed of technological growth seems real, look how fast AI research and tools are advancing seemingly on a daily basis, rather than innovation happening in months, years or decades long timescales.
Think about the rate of progress of the steam engine, and then think about technology since the splitting of the atom. Warp speed!
DiscourseFan•24m ago
1) Give some (frontier) model my symptoms, circumstances, etc.
2) Model outputs a list of possible causes, some more urgent than others
3) If its not something benign, I go to a doctor
4) Doctor orders blood work, checks me up, and I discuss possible diagnoses with them.
Around 60-70% of the time the model was correct about the illness, the doctor just confirms it with empirical evidence. This means that I am able to pretty effectively triage myself, saving me a considerable amount of time.
Now its already the case that the role of doctors is diminishing in medical practice, and Nurse Practitioners are performing the majority of the same work. Armed with AI tools, Nurse Practitioners are effectively at the same level of skill and knowledge as an actual MD, and we would need far less MDs, then to do medical care, reserving them for specialty cases, expertise where AI tends to fail. So there is both more room for particular and intricate medical research and care for the most stubborn conditions, and more capacity for care in general.
In the long run, this will lead to improved outcomes, greater cognitive and physical health, and lower costs for child rearing. All of this is an economic boon. And all of it will not be apparent in the numbers for decades. I believe this is the case for the majority of the processes that AI is improving.
ttctciyf•23m ago
AnimalMuppet•15m ago
You don't see the internet in terms of dollars because it often makes it cheaper to do something that was possible before. That looks like a negative, in terms of GDP. In terms of what people can do, and can afford to do, though, it opens enormous doors. Want some information? Don't need a library. Want to plan a trip? Don't need a travel agent. Want to download some free software? Don't need a floppy and a friend who has a copy. And so on.
But if you look around, you see things like Amazon. They don't exist without the internet. You see Facebook. Youtube. Netflix existed, but they became a lot more convenient - no need to run to a store. There's a lot that was created that people found valuable, but didn't have to pay for (Amazon excepted). There's value, but because the nominal charge is $0, it doesn't show up in the GDP statistics.
TacticalCoder•13m ago
This is both correct and incorrect.
US and China tech did totally skyrocket in the 21st century and pulled the GDPs of both the US and China up like mad.
The one western continent that had none of the Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, Tencen, Micron, SK Hynix, NVidia, that's nowhere in drones, etc. saw his GDP (in USD and inflation adjusted) barely moving and that'd be the EU.
The EU now has an economy based, as someone pointed out the other day, on selling overpriced "luxury" (at least pretending to be luxury) handbags assembled in China: in the Top 100 companies by market cap besides ASML the EU has L'Oreal and LVMH. That and fake public companies that are actual state monopolies (like spanish banks and french oil companies). It's really totally pathetic.
The EU, even though the public debt of its countries grew like mad, is where to look at to see a continent that had hardly any GDP growth in the 21st century.
But I'd say that it's precisely because the EU missed the Internet: it was all chinese (and now asian too) tech companies.
If this first quarter of the 21st century is of any indication, it looks like history is repeating: the EU is, once again, absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI (yay, Mistral, but we all know how that one is doing) and shall, once again, continue to see the public debt of its countries grow like there's no tomorrow (France is at 6% deficit of its GDP seen the insane spending of the state) and its GDP hardly move at all.
But AI leading to no growth in the US and in Asia? I think it's a bit early to call that.
inigyou•10m ago