I am also not an economist and this might be totally off-base, but it seems to me that if there is real innovation and we can in fact do a bunch of new stuff that we couldn’t before, then this will be reflected in the nominal GDP numbers going up. For the simple reason that in general people will be more likely to charge more for new and better goods and services rather than charging less for the same old goods and services (that can now be delivered more cheaply).
Regarding all the bottlenecks, I think there is an analogy between gradient descent and economic growth / innovation: when the function is super high-dimensional, it’s hard to get stuck in a local optimum.
So even if we stagnate on some dimensions that are currently bottlenecks, we can make progress on everything else (and then eventually the landscape may have changed enough that we can once again make progress on the previously stagnant sectors). This might look like a cost disease, where the stagnant things get more expensive. But that seems like it would go along with high nominal GDP growth rather than low.
Yeah, though I think it depends on how many people are able to buy the new goods at a better price. If most well-paid employees (ie: the employees that companies get the most value from automating) no longer have a job, then the number of people who can buy the more expensive goods and services might go down. It seems counter-intuitive to me that GDP if the number of people who lost their jobs is high enough. It feels possible that the recent tech developments was barely net positive to nominal GDP despite rapid improvements, and that fast enough technological process could cause nominal GDP to go in the other direction.
I am also not an economist and this might be totally off-base, but it seems to me that if there is real innovation and we can in fact do a bunch of new stuff that we couldn’t before, then this will be reflected in the nominal GDP numbers going up. For the simple reason that in general people will be more likely to charge more for new and better goods and services rather than charging less for the same old goods and services (that can now be delivered more cheaply).
Regarding all the bottlenecks, I think there is an analogy between gradient descent and economic growth / innovation: when the function is super high-dimensional, it’s hard to get stuck in a local optimum.
So even if we stagnate on some dimensions that are currently bottlenecks, we can make progress on everything else (and then eventually the landscape may have changed enough that we can once again make progress on the previously stagnant sectors). This might look like a cost disease, where the stagnant things get more expensive. But that seems like it would go along with high nominal GDP growth rather than low.
Yeah, though I think it depends on how many people are able to buy the new goods at a better price. If most well-paid employees (ie: the employees that companies get the most value from automating) no longer have a job, then the number of people who can buy the more expensive goods and services might go down. It seems counter-intuitive to me that GDP if the number of people who lost their jobs is high enough. It feels possible that the recent tech developments was barely net positive to nominal GDP despite rapid improvements, and that fast enough technological process could cause nominal GDP to go in the other direction.