The economic growth of the last 200 years has been astounding, but I think we're at an even bigger inflection point now. If you can have AI that is better than human experts in every field, and you can deploy that AI at enormous scale, you can have things like a brilliant doctor, lawyer, financial advisor, whatever, available to everyone on the planet. And what that means for human wellbeing, for eliminating poverty, for doing things that we've never been able to do, I think is just difficult to overstate.
The economic growth we've had in the last 200 years is this extraordinary exception in human history. And yet, I think we're about to look back on that and think it was just this tiny little warmup. I think we can do the equivalent of that again in a very small number of years.
The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation, and if we can make those cheap and abundant, the world will be able to solve the problems that have plagued us for millennia. And I think that within a not crazy long period of time, we will look back at the current time the way we look back at other transitions in history and think this is when things really changed.
I think we may be approaching a moment where many instances of AI are out running experiments, doing the work of scientists, and humanity could potentially compress decades of scientific progress into just a few years. We could run experiments to defeat diseases that have plagued us for millennia, independently develop and test solutions to mental health crises, and actively drive economic growth in a way that could lift billions out of poverty.
I think we're at an inflection point where the economic growth of the next 15 years could be larger than all prior economic growth combined. And if that's true, and I believe it is, the question of how that wealth gets distributed really matters.
The economic system of the world is roughly a zero-sum battle for existing resources, and the story of the next hundred years is making the transition to a world where there's enough for everyone and we're no longer fighting each other for pieces of a very slowly growing pie. I think there's a chance that AI and cheap energy together create a qualitatively different world where we have enough resources that it's not a zero-sum game anymore.
The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation. And for most of human history, we've had a very fixed amount of each. But if we can take the cap off of intelligence — if we can have, you know, billions of agents running around solving problems — the potential upside here is just staggering.
I think we are at the beginning of what may be the most transformative period in human history. The economic growth we've had over the past few centuries—which felt fast—may look very slow compared to what's coming. And I think we have a chance to lift a billion people out of poverty, to cure diseases, to solve mental health problems at scale, in ways that have seemed impossible.
The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation. And we have, in AI, a way to potentially radically expand the amount of intelligence available to humanity. If we can do that, and if we can find a way to get cheap, abundant energy, I think the world looks totally different in 20 to 30 years than most people are imagining.
Throughout history, productivity-enhancing technologies have transformed work, created new industries, and expanded living standards, even as they disrupted existing jobs and institutions.
Probably the most obvious investment in the middle class is investments in infrastructure. Because when people can get to work, when people have more opportunities, when people can spend more time with their families, when people have an absence of stress, when they can take their kids to Disneyland, you know, that's that's accretive to the prosperity of their life.
4mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
