The list doesn’t exclude Baumal effects as these are just the implication of:
Physical bottlenecks and delays prevent growth. Intelligence only goes so far.
Regulatory and social bottlenecks prevent growth this fast, INT only goes so far.
Like Baumal effects are just some area of the economy with more limited growth bottlenecking the rest of the economy. So, we might as well just directly name the bottleneck.
Your argument seems to imply you think there might be some other bottleneck like:
There will be some cognitive labor sector of the economy which AIs can’t do.
But, this is just a special case of “will there be superintelligence which exceeds human cognitive performance in all domains”.
In other words, it stipulates what Vollrath (in the first quote below) calls “[the] truly unbelievable assumption that [AI] can innovate precisely equally across every product in existence.” Of course, if you do assume this “truly unbelievable” thing, then you don’t get Baumol effects – but this would be a striking difference from what has happened in every historical automation wave, and also just sort of prima facie bizarre.
Huh? It doesn’t require equal innovation across all products, it just requires that the bottlenecking sectors have sufficiently high innovation/growth that the overall economy can grow. Sufficient innovation in all potentially bottlenecking sectors != equal innovation.
Suppose world population was 100,000x higher, but these additional people magically didn’t consume anything or need office space. I think this would result in very fast economic growth due to advancing all sectors simultaneously. Imagining population growth increases seems to be to set a lower bound on the implications of highly advanced AI (and robotics).
As far as I can tell, this Baumol effect argument is equally good at predicting that 3% or 10% growth rates are impossible from the perspective of people in agricultural societies with much lower growth rates.
So, I think you have to be quantitative and argue about the exact scale of the bottleneck and why it will prevent some rate of progress. The true physical limits (doubling time on the order of days or less, dyson sphere or even consuming solar mass faster than this) are extremely high, so this can’t be the bottleneck—it must be something about the rate of innovation or physical capital accumulation leading up to true limits.
Perhaps your view is: “Sure, we’ll quickly have a Dyson sphere and ungodly amounts of compute, but this won’t really result in explosive GDP growth as GDP will be limited by sectors that directly interface with humans like education (presumably for fun?) or services where the limits are much lower.” But, this isn’t a crux for the vast majority of arguments which depend on the potential for explosive growth!
The list doesn’t exclude Baumal effects as these are just the implication of:
Like Baumal effects are just some area of the economy with more limited growth bottlenecking the rest of the economy. So, we might as well just directly name the bottleneck.
Your argument seems to imply you think there might be some other bottleneck like:
But, this is just a special case of “will there be superintelligence which exceeds human cognitive performance in all domains”.
Huh? It doesn’t require equal innovation across all products, it just requires that the bottlenecking sectors have sufficiently high innovation/growth that the overall economy can grow. Sufficient innovation in all potentially bottlenecking sectors != equal innovation.
Suppose world population was 100,000x higher, but these additional people magically didn’t consume anything or need office space. I think this would result in very fast economic growth due to advancing all sectors simultaneously. Imagining population growth increases seems to be to set a lower bound on the implications of highly advanced AI (and robotics).
As far as I can tell, this Baumol effect argument is equally good at predicting that 3% or 10% growth rates are impossible from the perspective of people in agricultural societies with much lower growth rates.
So, I think you have to be quantitative and argue about the exact scale of the bottleneck and why it will prevent some rate of progress. The true physical limits (doubling time on the order of days or less, dyson sphere or even consuming solar mass faster than this) are extremely high, so this can’t be the bottleneck—it must be something about the rate of innovation or physical capital accumulation leading up to true limits.
Perhaps your view is: “Sure, we’ll quickly have a Dyson sphere and ungodly amounts of compute, but this won’t really result in explosive GDP growth as GDP will be limited by sectors that directly interface with humans like education (presumably for fun?) or services where the limits are much lower.” But, this isn’t a crux for the vast majority of arguments which depend on the potential for explosive growth!
Sorry if my comment was triggering @nostalgebraist. : (