alt Hacker NewsKeep in mind wealth is not a fixed thing. If AI makes their businesses more productive, it would allow the creation of more wealth, giving them more money to pay for AI with.
This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.
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> This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.
There is also the question of time scale. Growing a market takes time. Assuming the numbers above are the right order of magnitude, we are not going from 0.1 to 1 in a year. So even if the number would make sense over longer time frames, it can still be unsustainable for a significant amount of time before that.
Like the Internet at the end if the 1990s, basically.
I think you are mixin wealth with money. In the short run it is a near zero sum game: money should go from A (now obsolete) to B. For example, brick and mortar shops replaced by online shops. For example horse business going bankrupt while car business is booming. Wealth is created in the form of more convenient shopping or travelling, not as $$$. AI might help some businesses with their productivity (creating new wealth), but those business are expected to divert $6T from current expenses (wages, or non AI tooling) towards AI pockets, or steal $6T market share from non-AI business.
More productivity might translate into more revenue, but more productivity doesn't necessarily create more wealth.
For example, if I'm a landlord that uses AI to more intelligently price rental increases to maximize profit without attrition, I have created more revenue but not more wealth.
The non-zero-sum game is a concept that cuts both ways. If wealth can be created, it can also be destroyed.
No matter how productive you are, at some point producing more does not yield more return. We live in a finite world.
I think the Labor Theory of Value is going to bite these companies and the economy as a whole in the end
this also happened with the internet. 6T is possible only if AI creates more wealth. same as with internet. Its not a zero sum game.
But that's where the "Why?" comes in.
At a time when corporate CEOs are largely saying that they can't see that AI has improved office productivity at all, why should we believe that a killer productivity application of genai that's amazing enough to justify an order of magnitude increase in enterprise spending on productivity tools is just around the corner?