I saw something like the average anthropic employee thinks there will be 5% GDP growth because of AI, which is totally insane when a 1-2% extra growth will be an incredibly good result.

▲

mullingitover 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I suspect there is a lot of demand destruction that AI will end up causing, so many companies are running with inefficiencies that it's really easy to ferret out and fix with agents.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a 5% GDP drop with all the wasteful spend that will end up getting deleted.

▲

judge2020 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you're mistaken. The US uses the expenditure approach to GDP, so (I believe) it doesn't matter if it's a LLM or an engineer doing the work to generate revenue.

(Of course this breaks down heavily if the human buying power stops constantly rising and there's de-facto less demand for goods and services)

▲

mullingitover 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> (Of course this breaks down heavily if the human buying power stops constantly rising and there's de-facto less demand for goods and services)

This is what I'm talking about. I can easily envision waves of layoffs in areas like the service industry that historically have been highly resistant to productivity increases in the past. Hell, there's a whole industry based on arguing with insurance companies over billing that could potentially evaporate overnight[1]. That alone is hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's just one example.

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/excess-administrati...

	▲	toomuchtodo 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That industry would evaporate just as easily with single payer healthcare.