Tyler Cowen
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Tyler Cowen. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Tyler Cowen's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The number that rewired my intuition was not large. It was half a percentage point.
Tyler Cowen's estimate for how much AI will boost annual economic growth. I heard it and felt deflated. Half a point? I had just watched twenty engineers in Trivandrum operate with the output of a hundred. I had built a product in thirty days that should have taken a year. Half a point felt like someone had measured a hurricane and reported a gentle breeze.
Then I ran the compound math. Half a percentage point sustained over thirty years is a different civilization. Not a slightly improved version of this one. A fundamentally different one — the way the 1970s were unrecognizable from the 1930s, not through a single
