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Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely defl

• ernst_klim 2mo ago
  Exactly. I believe that growth caused by the rise of IT, be it Internet or LLM, will be marginal, because the benefits for humanity are very marginal compared to that caused by steam engine, wing, antibiotics or telegraph. 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 2mo ago
    I do believe efficiency gains have been significant. Not as big as with industrial revolution but still effective. 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 2mo ago
    Speedup in communication is fast, but the real physical work still needed to be done. Machines were very powerful with this, but not flexible. AI powered robots will be flexible (once they work reliable) ..
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Most robots are better without AI.
      • lukan 2mo ago
        A robot without AI ... is not a robot, but a (remote controlled) drone/machine.
        • inigyou 2mo ago
          How will South Africans control traffic then?
          • lukan 2mo ago
            What?
            • inigyou 2mo ago
              South Africans use robots to control traffic. They're mounted to poles and have three different colored lights which tell the cars when to go. You're saying they're actually drones?
  • blfr 2mo ago
    I think the speedups and conveniences of modern IT and the Internet have been massive: I can bank from my pocket, review the best photos out of 100k+ just when riding a tram, get virtually any good produced anywhere delivered to my doorstep in 1-3 business days (and it will be the exact kind and make I chose, not something that happened to be available), read virtually any book ever published while my appointment is delayed. 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 2mo ago
      And most of the time savings gained from all this is blown on grind clicking "social media" so net effect is, yes, close to zero (or in more modern terms, not 100x, not 10x, but 1x at most).
      • HPsquared 2mo ago
        Value is subjective, though. If you actually gave people an ultimatum to stop using AI tools for a year, with a negotiable price, I wonder what that would come out at. Many other personal goods are like this, they are valued highly but do not appear as commercial transactions.
      • mahkeiro 2mo ago
        I mean that’s to you as well as spending your time at the swimming pool.
    • ernst_klim 2mo ago
      > I can bank from my pocket My opinion on that is, it's not such a big gain compared to legacy banking with checks, phone calls etc. All the operations you can do now you could do with legacy banks, just a bit slower. Given banking is not something you do every second, the overall speedup is tiny.
      • blfr 2mo ago
  • azan_ 2mo ago
    That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering in e.g. medicine. Modern drug discovery would be impossible without advances in computation, and we are getting breakthrough drugs all the time thanks to that. > 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 2mo ago
      Clearly written by someone who's never lived without steam power (semi tongue in cheek). 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.
      • sususuuss 2mo ago
        There is more to pushing freight than just turning the ignition key. The complexity of supply-chains is overwhelming. Your fancy boat or train needs a boatload (!) of grease, oils, spare parts, maintenance, logs, not to mention fuel, accounting, insurance, the list is endless and it’s all either fully enabled by or extraordinarily simplified by digital networks.
        • darkerside 2mo ago
          You realize it wasn't always that way, right? And that whole we continue to optimize this complex supply chain, there are diminishing returns. If you roll back recent computing technology, many people die, but if you roll back the industrial revolution, modern civilization collapses.
      • azan_ 2mo ago
        Clearly written by someone how did not get cancer that was deadly few years ago but now can be effectively suppressed. I can make same argument - shipping back in time was absolutely possible, but many calculations we are performing now were not.
• lazerjesus 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• HPsquared 2mo ago
  Falling prices is a good thing for anyone not in debt. That's almost nobody today though, I suppose.
• jose-incandenza 2mo ago
  Internet is the foundation of the global almost automated distribution networks and has brought the ability to target your consumers in a way that's cheap and effective. Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger. I don't understand this stance.
  • agumonkey 2mo ago
    what kind of digital service is worth that much ?
    • literalAardvark 2mo ago
      Most of the big ones. Only issue is the US is crap at collecting tax from them.
      • deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      • agumonkey 2mo ago
        sorry i was really asking, i'm quite jaded about internet and i don't see what's so valuable (of course all i see is reddit youtube ..)
        • literalAardvark 2mo ago
          All of Amazon, Apple, all the AI stuff, Google, including YouTube, yes. They make tons of money for the US. Value is somewhat more subjective, but Amazon for instance certainly creates an enormous amount of value, as do Google's search and maps products. I would argue that the democratisation of knowledge that YouTube has enabled is also very valuable.
          • agumonkey 2mo ago
            it's funny how I don't share the appreciation they're all very mild and are not a clear improvement over previous ways, amazon is full of confusing product reviews and false advertising (they did mutualize ~free home deliveries though), youtube is also loaded with bs, the good content is not that much better than a book the rare time it can claim it is (and I'd argue most of the time it's universities uploading videos they had already made before) I did love google maps but a bit less since they've made it a store locator more than a map.
• dan_gee 2mo ago
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• daun_gee 2mo ago
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• newsclues 2mo ago
  Some people think so in the technology singularity that humanity may be approaching. 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 2mo ago
  I don't know if its something that we will be able to measure precisely or at least in aggregate at first since the positives will only come about in the long term. Anecdotally, all my recent trips to the doctor have basically been as follows: 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.
  • dimbletimbers 2mo ago
    I’m sorry but this is a bad take. We’re suffering from a healthcare crisis, globally. We don’t have nearly enough doctors. Even in the US where wait times are relatively low, it sometimes takes months to get an appointment with my PCP, let alone a specialist. And while I do sometimes feel when I see an NP at an urgent care like I could have used an LLM for all the time and attention they paid to my concerns, that’s not a compliment to the LLM. Besides that 60-70% is not an acceptable hit rate and there’s already early evidence of skill atrophy in AI saturated fields like radiology. We need way more people offering more personalized care, using more judgement and offering more compassion, not a chat interface that says “you’re totally right to push back, the post nasal drip was the smoking gun.” Maybe some forms of ML, even LLMs, become part of the solution to that shortfall, but we’re a long way from proving that’s a net positive let alone a big leap forward.
• ttctciyf 2mo ago
  The only explosive growth we're seeing out of the ongoing tech bonanza is growth in inequality, afaics.
• AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
  Don't think in terms of dollars. Think in terms of stuff and services. 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.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    > Don't need a library. This isn't as much of a positive as you seem to be implying. You can just go to a library. Or a travel agent. And it's probably better for you. It's not a downside.
    • AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
      [dead]
• TacticalCoder 2mo ago
  > The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. 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 2mo ago
    Note that GDP primarily measures price level, not productivity.
  • sususuuss 2mo ago
    As an European: ouch, but there is some truth to this. It is however crystal clear in what direction both your examples are headed and I’m not sure it’s the wonderland you seem to think it is. China is an authoritarian hell-hole and the US is.. I don’t know there is even a word for it. Let’s just say I’m glad to be on this side of the pond.
• zurfer 2mo ago
  Well, we can't have the counterfactual world but could it be that without computers, Internet or AI, there might be no/less growth? I somehow doubt that AI will accelerate growth constantly as the world has inertia and I'm not sure AI is sustainably increasing our ability to change. On the other side, if there is a technology that can do that it could be intelligence.