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- Marginal Revolution Read
AI, Redistribution, and the Size of the Pie
Anthropic’s economic team, including Anton Korinek and Chad Jones, have a valuable new paper, Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI. They make their assumptions explicit and provide a scenario explorer that lets you change them. How capable will AI become? How quickly will firms adopt it? Will it augment workers or automate their tasks? You can
- Marginal Revolution Read
Is it the screens? Or education systems?
The Dark Ages implies television and phones are the main cause of cognitive decline. This fails to explain the patterns in PISA scores. Why did England and Scotland fall so precipitously from 2000 to 2005 whilst America improved? Why did England and Estonia hold steady after 2015 whilst most other OECD countries declined? How have Singapore,
- Marginal Revolution Read
Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise?
From a new NBER working paper: Whether AI assistance builds or erodes professional expertise is unsettled. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, we gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access to a custom AI drafting assistant and measured both their performance while using AI and their professional judgment
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Sunday assorted links
1. Scott Sumner as regional thinker. 2. The economists who work on “Productivity and Innovation” are most likely to use AI for their writing. 3. Michael Levin defends neo-neo-Platonism? 4. Look for and try to limit agent collusion. 5. Do orangutans like Indian classical music? 6. “Our results demonstrate that LLM-evolved constitutions significantly outperform both
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Diversity Is Our Strength?
Diversity is our strength is a common motto. Indeed it is one of GMU’s core values but what is the scientific evidence for this thesis? A new scoping review: Recent years have witnessed many strong claims that ‘diversity’ leads to more original and impactful science, which is a science-focused form of what we call “The
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A simple model of AI-aided economic growth
The Solow model has its uses, but it fails when it comes to major changes stemming from AI. Consider instead an economy with (at least) two factors of production: 1. Intelligence. Yes, formal smarts. Playing chess, proving math theorems, and doing well on evals. Don’t forget humans can do those things too, though AIs are
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The mathematicians rebel against AI
Here is the statement, signed by Terry Tao among many other math notables, most of you probably have read it by now. I do not accept the most cynical interpretations of this proclamation. Some of you for instance may recall that I made and indeed stressed a similar point in the last chapter of my
- Marginal Revolution Read
Dario Calls for a Pause
My second concern is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the
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UK fact of the day
The UK economy grew 0.4 per cent in July as the global AI boom helped deliver an unexpectedly robust start to the third quarter, in a boost to Prime Minister Andy Burnham as he prepares for a tough first Budget next month. Friday’s figure from the Office for National Statistics was far above the zero
- Marginal Revolution Read
The Prediction Archive
The Prediction Archive is a public database of tens of thousands of world predictions. Using AI it tracks predictions over many decades and marks to market. I was surprised to discover that I am currently the highest ranked individual predictor in the world! Huh, I would not have predicted that. Ranks are based on the
- Marginal Revolution Read
Labor reallocation during the Industrial Revolution
New technologies swept through Britain during the Second Industrial Revolution, destroying old jobs and creating new ones. We know little about how workers reallocated. Using 170 million full-count British census observations (1851-1911), I construct new task-level data on occupation and investigate English bootmaking as it mechanized. 153,000 artisanal jobs disappeared as skills became obsolete; 140,000 specialized jobs emerged. Incumbent artisans did not take the new jobs, nor were they displaced.
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The excess pessimism of early nuclear bomb designers
From GPT Pro: The Manhattan Project scientists were remarkably good technological and arms-race forecasters. They correctly rejected the idea that America’s nuclear monopoly could be maintained; the Soviet bomb arrived in 1949. They anticipated thermonuclear weapons, huge arsenals and the extreme vulnerability of cities. Where many of them went wrong was in moving from “a
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The Allocative Cost of War
Why is war so economically costly? Our answer is that modern war lowers output not only by destroying productive factors, but also by making the surviving economy work less efficiently. Using uniquely comprehensive firm-level data collected during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we document a dramatic collapse in allocative productivity in Ukraine. To
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Friday assorted links
1. Some Princeton philosophers are converting to Catholicism. 2. New Ada Palmer podcast. 3. Nice statement of how intelligence is overrated in the AI debates. 4. Joshua Rothman on the phones and mental health (New Yorker). 5. How different are philosophers?
- Marginal Revolution Read
Markets do respond to AGI news
Here is the link. What are the changes in the other market prices telling you?
- Marginal Revolution Read
Is there now a better trend in youth mental health?
A key U.S. government report on mental health, substance use and addiction showed continued improvements in several metrics, especially among young people. There was some uncertainty about the future of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health last year, when the entire 17-member team responsible for it was laid off by the Trump administration. But the
- Marginal Revolution Read
My short interview with Julia Willemyns
Here is the link, here is the end bit: Who is the most important thinker of our time? It’s not about individual thinkers any more. It’s about the internet as this vast organ of knowledge that you can play like a musical instrument, and combining the internet with AI. You can figure out things to an unprecedented degree, and it’s great in a way how much we’ve removed that process from any individual thinker. What’s your favourite podcast? My own! It would be weird if it wasn’t, right? Fun throughout, from the Centre for British Progress.
- Marginal Revolution Read
Thursday assorted links
1. On India’s new gdp statistics. 2. Reasons why robotics are hard. 3. On 20th century music. 4. Is the inflation picture shifting? (correct link) 5. The importance of nuclear risk. 6. Call for AI safety start-ups. Project Tailwind. 7. Do the doomers have a good forecasting record? 8. OAI employees are contributing significantly to
- Marginal Revolution Read
Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI
By Anton Korinek, Charles I. Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, and Peter McCrory, a strong line-up from Anthropic. They are sober, reasoned, scientific, and (for the most part) dynamically consistent. Here is the paper, here is the abstract: This paper presents a framework for assessing the economic consequences of AI between 2026 and 2030. In
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