Such confidence! The first part is of course true, but you’ll make money teaching the market that you are smarter if the latter is true.
Perfectly possible that AI kicks the economy into overdrive in the next few years and growth increases. I wouldn’t bet my house on it, but also wouldn’t bet my house against it either.
I think they are talking about AI driving growth in the broader economy, not making investment decisions.
Even still, it's not clear that AI will drive that kind of growth.
Productivity is about producing the same things faster. If AI can do part of our work for us it means we can accomplish more with the time saved.
I do think that a service-oriented economy has many, many more nooks and crannies to hide non-productive jobs, though, and that could perpetuate the “bullshit job economy” hypothesis.
Consider the steam-locomotive. It was a great invention but we didn't stop there now we have bullet-trains and hyperloops.
There is also plenty of room at the bottom as famously noted by Feynman I think. We can make products smaller to make them easier to carry around. New cheaper price points create new demand and new markets.
Also as economies improve, people will have fewer children, because they don't need them to take care of themselves at old age. So it's not like we will have too many people having nothing to do.
On the contrary I think AI can be the great equalizer: Rather than having fewer people who know how to do things, we will have more people who are able to do things with the help of AI.
The technology by itself will not produce a great society however. We need democracy to accomplish that. As people will have more free time they will have time to study and more and more people will demand democracy because they will understand it's the only way to avoid wars.
Regardless, I'd happily take a bet at even money up to a reasonable sum that we'll wake up in 20 years to find that a system using LLMs has just destroyed the market doing fundamental analysis, for 15 years.
If someone finds a way to actually predict the market, then in taking advantage of that they will add unpredictability into it again. This is part of the entire basis of how markets work!
He's saying if every atom of the economy is n% more productive, that will grow the economy by n%.
If there's a sure-fire early way to make money from AI, it's going to involve betting against people who blow it off.