Please don’t overly index on Tyler Cowen. He’s been clearly not trying very hard to be correct on things in this area. There’s probably better examples of economists who have bad takes and are more serious about it.
You might look at Hal Varian’s takes. They do seem similar to what the exchange between Patel and Cowen were touching on. There was also some discussion here, or at least linked here, that I don’t have a ready reference for (sorry) about rate of adoption of the existing (as of maybe 9 months to a year back) models in corporations. The bottle necks were not really model ability or powers but fitting them into the existing production and supply chains.
If we see some rouge model that goes out and takes over the production at some of the big, highly automated factories, and probably down stream for the needed inputs (much less likely I suspect as a lot of those are relatively small, non-automated production processes but human dependent) that starts making everything faster and cheaper (or making things it wants and causes some type or retooling and different output) I don’t think the rapid transformation by AI will occur. When does that happen? I’m sure others are better suited to estimate but my guess is more like 30 years than 5 years.
My filter here is that Cowen isn’t trying to be serious based on his past communications and outright dismissal of certain positions. If you take 10 random economists, I’d expect that maybe 9⁄10 or so would be happy to properly engage on hypothetical scenarios.
It’s also a simple issue of sampling from the most extreme end of a distribution (extremely opinionated + high visibility) rather than from the distribution itself.
Perhaps partially a weak man, but real economists think stuff like this:
Please don’t overly index on Tyler Cowen. He’s been clearly not trying very hard to be correct on things in this area. There’s probably better examples of economists who have bad takes and are more serious about it.
Who are some economists who are “serious” about it? I don’t really know what filter to run here.
Here are a few examples. Not sure how many more there are.
You might look at Hal Varian’s takes. They do seem similar to what the exchange between Patel and Cowen were touching on. There was also some discussion here, or at least linked here, that I don’t have a ready reference for (sorry) about rate of adoption of the existing (as of maybe 9 months to a year back) models in corporations. The bottle necks were not really model ability or powers but fitting them into the existing production and supply chains.
If we see some rouge model that goes out and takes over the production at some of the big, highly automated factories, and probably down stream for the needed inputs (much less likely I suspect as a lot of those are relatively small, non-automated production processes but human dependent) that starts making everything faster and cheaper (or making things it wants and causes some type or retooling and different output) I don’t think the rapid transformation by AI will occur. When does that happen? I’m sure others are better suited to estimate but my guess is more like 30 years than 5 years.
My filter here is that Cowen isn’t trying to be serious based on his past communications and outright dismissal of certain positions. If you take 10 random economists, I’d expect that maybe 9⁄10 or so would be happy to properly engage on hypothetical scenarios.
It’s also a simple issue of sampling from the most extreme end of a distribution (extremely opinionated + high visibility) rather than from the distribution itself.
Seems plausible but my baseline expectation of most academics of any sort would be similarly dismissive.
Who?
FTFY
Are there handy links for what they think would happen if mass skilled immigration happens?