Tyler Cowen

But I think a side result of that is that people here overvalue intelligence and their models of the world are built on intelligence mattering much, much more than it really does.

Now people in Washington don't have that problem.

We have another problem.

And that needs to be corrected too.

But I just think if you could root that out of your minds, it would be pretty easy to glide into this expert consensus view that tech diffusion is universally pretty slow, and that's not gonna change.

No one's built a real model to show why it should change, other than sort of hyperventilating blog posts about everything's gonna change right away.

Ricardo knew this, right?

He didn't call it AI, but Malthus, Ricardo, they all talked about this.

It was just humans for them.

Well, people then would breed.

They would breed at some pretty rapid rate.

There were diminishing returns to that.

You had these other scarce factors.

Classical economics figured that out.

They were too pessimistic, I would say, but they understood the pessimism intrinsic in diminishing returns in a way that people in the Bay Area do not, and it's better for them that they don't know it, but if you're just trying to inject truth into their veins rather than ambition, diminishing returns is a very important idea.

Yeah, I said they were too pessimistic, but they understood something about the logic of diffusion.

where if they could see AI today, I don't think they would be so blown away by, oh, you know, I read Malthus, Ricardo would say, Malthus and I used to send letters back and forth.

We talked about diminishing returns.

This will be nice, it'll extend the frontier, but it's not gonna solve all our problems.

Well, Smith thought it would be.