Robert Inklaar

I've been thinking about this for a few days. It's an interesting framing. Everyone (OG AI economists, new AI economists, non-economists) should be constrained by their other explanatory commitments, their model of the world. This is a necessary part of model-based thinking, so you don't just make stuff up anew each time. For me (and I think many other economists), the most basic commitment are things like scarcity, trade-offs, constraints, and then equilibrium adjustments. Don't assume away these things. When you bring this to growth, you don't ignore scarcity, even if economic growth has made scarcity a lot less binding than it was in 1500. You start to think about how improvements (falling prices) interact with other scarce resources and trade-offs. The responses generate other innovations. Growth is the net interaction of all this. This doesn't magically go out the window when we say AGI. It maybe should but we need a reason, grounded in higher level intellectual commitments. Take @ChadJonesEcon. If you spend a career thinking about growth through new ideas, nonrivalrous knowledge, allocating goods to research, those don't go out the window. That's your framework for thinking about what drives growth. But also so are the constraints. If you spend your time thinking about bottlenecks as a part of past growth, that's your starting point. Lo and behold, he starts writing AI papers and that's the starting point. That doesn't mean the framework is "AI as a normal technology". It doesn't mean its the exact same in an AGI world as a non-AGI world but you have a model-based approach to thinking about what changes. The feedback is endogenous, and the same framework can generate explosive growth. We don't want to like an approach simply because it generates big growth or dislike because it doesn't. You can't simply choose the conclusion you want independently of your account of how the world works. Building from familiar economics models, even ones with labor and capital, aren't a failure to take AGI seriously. You can still think some things are no longer scarce. That's a huge change. Of course, we can always use a model badly. Maybe your past model had land as a big constraint and that fit the data in a world where land is a constraint, but then the Industrial Revolution happens and ideas/trade are the constraint. But we want to be clear in the model, what is the constraint that is doing the real work and will that be the same in the future? Maybe it is or maybe it isn't. We should be very hesitant, and I'm not saying Jan is doing this, of confusing "taking AGI seriously" with arriving at sufficiently radical conclusions. That's not a good epistemic standard. You can't choose the conclusion you want independently of your account of how the world works. The model/account of the world constrains you the student of the world and theorist.