Angus Deaton
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 Angus Deaton. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Angus Deaton's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal ^ Opus
The number that broke my confidence was not a technology number.
It was seventy to one. The ratio between the richest nations and the poorest at the end of the twentieth century. Before the industrial revolution, it was five to one. The great escape happened — life expectancy doubled, extreme poverty fell, billions of lives improved by every material measure — and the gap widened from five to seventy. Not because the poorest got poorer. Because the escapees escaped so far, so fast, that the distance between them and everyone else became a chasm.
I did not know that number when I wrote You On AI. I knew about inequality in the abstract way that builders know about it — as a problem someone else would solve while I focused