I’m pretty sure the “what if” in that article was meant in earnest. That article was playing out a scenario, in a nod to the ai maximalists. I don’t think it was making any sort of prediction or actually agreeing with those maximalists.

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jcranmer 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI.

If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.

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AnIrishDuck 4 days ago | parent [-]

This doesn't seem right to me. From the article I believe you are referencing ("What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?"):

> If investors thought all this was likely, asset prices would already be shifting accordingly. Yet, despite the sky-high valuations of tech firms, markets are very far from pricing in explosive growth. “Markets are not forecasting it with high probability,” says Basil Halperin of Stanford, one of Mr Chow’s co-authors. A draft paper released on July 15th by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi of mit finds that bond yields have on average declined around the release of new ai models by the likes of Openai and DeepSeek, rather than rising.

It absolutely (beyond being clearly titled "what if") presented real counterarguments to its core premise.

There are plenty of other scenarios that they have explored since then, including the totally contrary "What if the AI stock market blows up?" article.

This is pretty typical for them IME. They definitely have a bias, but they do try to explore multiple sides of the same idea in earnest.

	▲	naasking 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think any improvements to productivity AI brings will also create uncertainty and disruption to employment, and maybe the latter is greater than the former, and investors see that.

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tootie 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And a tacit admission that absolutely nobody knows for sure what will happen so maybe let's just game out a few scenarios and be prepared.