Dwarkesh Patel

You think it's continuous with this hyper-exponential trend?

Yes.

Are you saying that what will happen is, so if you look at the trend before the Industrial Revolution to currently, you have a hyper-exponential where you go from 0% growth to then 10,000 years ago, 0.02% growth, and then currently we're at 2% growth.

So that's a hyper-exponential, and you're saying if you're charting AI on there, then it's like AI takes you to 20% growth or 200% growth.

Mm-hmm.

Or you could be saying, if you look at the last 300 years, what you've been seeing is you have technology after technology, computers, electrification, steam, steam engines, railways, et cetera.

But the rate of growth is the exact same.

It's 2%.

So are you saying the rate of growth will... No, I basically, I expect the rate of growth has also stayed roughly constant, right?

For only the last 200, 300 years.

But over the course of human history, it's like exploded, right?

It's like gone from like 0% basically to like faster, faster, faster, industrial explosion, 2%.

But just to clarify, you're saying that the rate of growth will not change.

Like, you know, the intelligence explosion will show up as like... It just enabled us to continue staying on the 2% growth trajectory just as the internet helped us stay on the 2% growth trajectory.

Yeah.

I mean, just to throw the opposite argument against you...

My expectation is that it like blows up because I think true AGI, and I'm not talking about LLM coding bots, I'm talking about like actual, this is like a replacement of a human in a server, is qualitatively different from these other productivity improving technologies.

Because it's labor itself, right?

I think we live in a very labor-constrained world.

If you talk to any startup founder or any person, you can just be like, okay, what do you need more of?