What does economics actually tell us about AGI? – Phil Trammell

Stanford economist Phil Trammell has been rigorously thinking about the intersection of economic theory and AI (incl. AGI) for over five years, long before the recent surge of interest in large language models.

In this episode of Epoch After Hours, Phil Trammell and Epoch AI researcher Anson Ho discuss what economic theory really has to say about the development and impacts of AGI: what current economic models get wrong, the odds of explosive economic growth, what “GDP” actually measures, and much more!

-- Episode links --
Transcript: https://epoch.ai/epoch-after-hours/economics-of-ai

-- Timestamps --
00:00 Problems with existing work on the economics of AI
10:18 Declining returns to R&D
18:28 What real GDP misses
26:57 Task-based models & AI automation
49:32 The limits of economic theory
01:09:11 How to detect an economic singularity
01:23:32 Increasing returns to scale

-- Credits --
Design: Robert Sandler
Podcast Production & Editing: Caroline Falkman Olsson & Anson Ho
 
Special thanks to The Producer’s Loft for their support with recording and editing this episode — https://theproducersloft.com/