Daron Acemoglu, a winner of the 2024 Nobel in economic science, gave me some answers. “There is a lot of hype in the industry,” he told me in a telephone conversation. Yes, he said, A.I. companies have made some “impressive achievements,” but he added that many financial and economic calculations were being based on mere “projections into the future that are sometimes exaggerated.”
Professor Acemoglu, an M.I.T. economist with an interest in the impact of technical innovations on global economics, is skeptical about the more fervent A.I. claims. He ranks A.I. as a significant advance, perhaps with a macroeconomic effect akin to the telephone, which was no small thing.
But don’t get carried away, he said, at least not yet. He doubts that full, advanced artificial general intelligence “that can do anything a human can do, but more,” will be achieved. Therefore, over the next decade, he estimated, increased productivity from the diffusion of impressive, but limited, A.I. engines will increase the size of the U.S. economy by only about 1 percent, or roughly 0.1 percent a year.
That doesn’t seem like enough to count as a technological revolution in economic terms, I said.
“Well, it’s not trivial,” Professor Acemoglu said, “but it’s one or two orders of magnitude less” than A.I. bulls “would like you to hear.” Of course, he added, if one or more companies achieve true, complete, artificial general intelligence within the next several years, then his estimates will turn out to be far too low.
Relentlessly Upbeat
It’s earnings season on Wall Street, and over the last two weeks, some of the U.S. companies that are developing and investing heavily in A.I. have offered entirely positive — and, frankly, self-serving — estimates of the A.I. future.