Prediction · economics & deployment
No GDP boom before doom
Predicted in 2021 from takeoff debate with Paul Christiano, Nov 2021
“My mainline view is that growth stays at 5%/year and then everybody falls over dead in 3 seconds and the world gets transformed into paperclips”
Resolution
falsified by events. The prediction was resolved as falsified by events in 2025.
The working premise that AI stays economically invisible
is dead: AI is the growth story, the capex, the market.
Timeline
- Prediction made
- 2021
- Resolution date
- 2025
- Chapter
- Chapter 05: MIRI: Research
- Verdict
- falsified by events
Context and outcome
The claim depended on transformative AI arriving as a sharp break from the existing economic trend, rather than through a period of visible deployment that markets could absorb. World GDP would remain roughly on trend until a sharp capability jump carried events entirely “off the track.” His illustrative scenario was: “if all hell breaks loose in 2025.”
That is not what happened. AI was already showing up in corporate investment, market valuations, and economic growth. The technology was arriving through an expensive, highly visible industrial buildout, the opposite of the mechanism his prediction described. There is no reason to postpone that judgment until some later deadline. And, for the record, all hell did not break loose in 2025.
Supporting receipts
“My mainline view is that growth stays at 5%/year and then everybody falls over dead in 3 seconds and the world gets transformed into paperclips; there's never a point with 3000%/year.”
Liveblog response to Christiano's slow-takeoff framing of growth accelerating 3% -> 30% -> 3000%/year. This is EY's flattest statement that GDP stays boring right up until instant doom.
“Things feel crazy in the AI field and the world ends less than 4 years later, well before the world economy doubles.”
Sep 14 chat with Christiano, explaining why his model permits 'final descent' beginning in 2025 without ever passing through Paul's economy-doubling phase.
“If doubling GDP is such a big deal, go open borders and build houses. Oh, that's illegal? Well, so will be AIs building houses!”
From his 'Deployment lag' commentary. The bureaucracy thesis holds that regulation, not AI capability, is what keeps AI out of GDP until the world ends.
“Oh, come on. That is straight-up not how simple continuous toy models of RSI work. Between a neutron multiplication factor of 0.999 and 1.001 there is a very huge gap in output behavior.”
Yudkowsky's criticality analogy for recursive self-improvement, against Christiano's smooth-takeoff picture.
“it isn't transforming society because it's not over the social-transformation threshold. AlphaFold presaged AlphaFold 2 but AlphaFold 2 is good enough to start replacing other ways of determining protein conformations…”
Yudkowsky arguing capabilities only register socially past a threshold, so GDP lags the real action.
“in the real world we can already design a vaccine in a day and the rest of the time is bureaucratic time rather than technology time, and that goes on until we have an AI over the threshold to bypass bureaucracy.”
Yudkowsky on why transformative AI would not show up in GDP statistics before the end.