Scientific discovery could drive unusually fast growth

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 21:12

   So do you think that the economy will really grow 17% per year, which is the, I believe, the median expectation of anthropic employees by 2030? um well i hope so you know uh it's it's really funny right so um we in in the in the western world we're very used to our economy growing at only a few percent per year right that's the way it's been for many many many decades and if you like zoom in a lot of it is because we our economy is extremely developed right we don't really have like an incredible scientific advance or a million scientific advances every year to like really jump us like get us jumped forward um a lot of the time our economic growth really comes from like a private equity shop like buying a supermarket and figuring out how figuring out how to make its logistics two percent more efficient

2. 22:12

   um and that's all great like that's in in the long run that's a really big and winning combination but you're not going to get 17 economic growth out of that sure um i do think though that if you are a gi pill then if you expect lms to start discovering seriously like novel things in science you know drug discovery material science you know uh discover how to operate robots and like go to space and colonize the moon what have you um if you think of big scientific discoveries being made at scale and what you can do with that you know like for all kinds of aspects of the economy right like like imagine just people like living longer by 30 years on average and having more productive careers at vertel and it could unlock huge huge economic growth um so i am not really sure that expectations based on our priors from the past couple of

3. 23:23

   decades are really the right way to look at it um i will say that um for example like china after Mao Zedong's death in the 1980s and the 1990s, it was pretty common for China to be growing at 10% or more per year. It was a smaller economy back then, but a lot of it was because under real, like under Maoist communism, there wasn't much the economy was not very advanced, right? And so you could land in the middle of China.

4. 24:00

   Built a fast food restaurant or something. And it just created so much net new value, but the economy grew rapidly. And I think that if you substitute new scientific discovery, like a new drug for fast food restaurant, that you could get that kind of analogy. I don't know if it's 17%. I don't know if it's by 2030. But I would not be surprised if we did see some major economic growth. right well we're at time but it's been really interesting having you on prince thanks so much