Roundup #80: All AI, all the time

I promise I’ll write something soon about the flaming, crashing disaster that is the Trump administration — and about other topics of interest. But before I do that, here’s a roundup full of short takes and stories about AI.

First, though, an episode of Econ 102! Officially the podcast is over, but we still occasionally do a reprise episode. This one, fittingly, is about AI biosecurity:

What AI Means for Anthropic, Washington, and Jobs Turpentine Episode

Anyway, here are six other interesting AI-related items:

1. Forecasting the effect of AI on growth

No one really knows what effect AI is going to have on economic growth, but maybe each “expert” knows a tiny, tiny bit. And maybe, if you combine all of those weak signals, you can get some actual information about the economic effects of AI.

That’s the idea behind a new study by the Forecasting Research Institute. They survey a whole bunch of different people about what they think AI’s capabilities will be in the future, and what that implies for economic growth. Specifically, the groups they survey are:

• Economists

• AI experts

• Superforecasters

• The general public

The results are kind of surprising, actually:

Forecasting Research Institute

Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI

There is widespread disagreement over the impact that AI will—or won’t—have on the U.S. economy: some prominent voices warn of a transformative upheaval and large-scale job losses, while others predict modest boosts to productivity at best. But there has been little work attempting to systematically understand expert views on the economic impacts of AI…

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5 days ago · 49 likes · 1 comment · Forecasting Research Institute

For one thing, all the groups have about the same forecasts for AI capabilities by 2030:

This looks like a forecast of modest progress, but it’s not. The “moderate” scenario here would have AI able to write high-quality novels, handle coding tasks that would take humans five days, create semi-autonomous labs, and use robots to perform basic household tasks. So basically, every group of forecasters in this survey thinks stunning AI progress is likely over the next few years.

And yet of all the groups, only the AI experts predict a major growth acceleration in any of these scenarios — and even then, it’s only an acceleration to 4 or 5 percent, not to the 10 or 20 percent scenarios that some people have thrown around: