Thank you for this post. As an economist trying to engage seriously with the topic of AGI/TAI/ASI, I generally agree with you. I confirm that it is very hard to challenge any of the implicit assumptions and century-long traditions in (macro)economics. Reviewers hate unfamiliar setups, journal editors prefer to play it safe, and because of that publishing academic papers on transformative AI is a nightmare. By contrast, if you go the “safe” way of incremental modifications over the established literature, your work can be published much more easily, but then it probably ends up being “irrelevant or actively misleading”.
Thank you for this post. As an economist trying to engage seriously with the topic of AGI/TAI/ASI, I generally agree with you. I confirm that it is very hard to challenge any of the implicit assumptions and century-long traditions in (macro)economics. Reviewers hate unfamiliar setups, journal editors prefer to play it safe, and because of that publishing academic papers on transformative AI is a nightmare. By contrast, if you go the “safe” way of incremental modifications over the established literature, your work can be published much more easily, but then it probably ends up being “irrelevant or actively misleading”.
One of my main ideas which I came across while trying not to be “irrelevant or actively misleading”, is The Hardware-Software Framework: A New Perspective on Economic Growth with AI. It challenges the “capital vs. labor” distinction, pretty much along the lines that you mentioned.