“On Dwarkesh Patel’s 4th Podcast With Tyler Cowen” by Zvi

Dwarkesh Patel again interviewed Tyler Cowen, largely about AI, so here we go.

Note that I take it as a given that the entire discussion is taking place in some form of an ‘AI Fizzle’ and ‘economic normal’ world, where AI does not advance too much in capability from its current form, in meaningful senses, and we do not get superintelligence [because of reasons]. It's still massive additional progress by the standards of any other technology, but painfully slow by the ‘AGI is coming soon’ crowd.

That's the only way I can make the discussion make at least some sense, with Tyler Cowen predicting 0.5%/year additional RGDP growth from AI. That level of capabilities progress is a possible world, although the various elements stated here seem like they are sometimes from different possible worlds.

I note that this conversation was recorded prior to o3 and all [...]

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Outline:

(02:01) AI and Economic Growth

(02:28) Cost Disease

(09:03) The Lump of Intelligence Fallacy

(10:56) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is False

(13:05) Not Sending Your Best People

(20:49) Energy as the Bottleneck

(22:31) The Experts are Wrong But Trust Them Anyway

(25:41) AI as Additional Population

(26:51) Opposition to AI as the Bottleneck

(29:10) China as Existence Proof for Rapid Growth

(29:56) Second Derivatives

(31:05) Talent and Leadership

(33:26) Adapting to the Age of AI

(35:37) Identifying Alpha

(37:39) Old Man Yells at Crowd

(41:59) Some Statements for Everyone to Ponder

(43:13) No Royal Road to Wisdom

(47:29) Concluding Thoughts

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First published:
January 10th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esWbhgHd6bcfsTjGL/on-dwarkesh-patel-s-4th-podcast-with-tyler-cowen

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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