## Metadata - Author: [[zhengdongwang.com]] - Full Title: Why Transformative AI Is Really, Really Hard to Achieve - Category: #articles - URL: https://zhengdongwang.com/2023/06/27/why-transformative-ai-is-really-really-hard-to-achieve.html ## Highlights - Productivity growth almost definitionally captures when a new technology efficiently performs useful work. A powerful AI could one day perform all productive cognitive and physical labor. - Imagine that AI speeds up writing but not construction. Productivity increases and the economy grows. However, a think-piece is not a good substitute for a new building. So if the economy still demands what AI does not improve, like construction, those sectors become relatively more valuable and eat into the gains from writing. A 100x boost to writing speed may only lead to a 2x boost to the size of the economy -  - Note: [[Baumol Effect]] - economic growth may be constrained not by what we do well but rather by what is essential and yet hard to improve… When applied to a model in which AI automates the production of ideas, these same considerations can prevent explosive growth. - *Invention has started to resemble a class project where each student is responsible for a different part of the project and the teacher won’t let anyone leave until everyone is done… if we cannot automate everything, then the results are quite different. We don’t get acceleration at merely a slower rate*—*we get no acceleration at all.*