[Terr_]

> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.

Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes."

You're right that humans don't have a good intuition for non-linear growth, but that common thread doesn't heal over those other differences.

[actuallyalys]

Yeah, for this analogy to work, we’d have to see AI causing a small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.

[mitthrowaway2]

If that were happening right now, how would we know? COVID-19 cases were tracked imperfectly but pretty well; is there any equivalent for AI-related job losses?

[actuallyalys]

Right, my point is that we don't have the data to make a similar exponential argument. We can't rule out the possibility that we're currently in the early stages of exponential growth based on direct measurement. If it is exponential, once it doubles enough times, it will show up in overall economic data.

We can also look at the tools, which have improved relatively quickly but don't appear to be improving exponentially. GPT-4 and GPT-4o came out about a year after their predecessors. Is GPT-4o a bigger leap that GPT-4 was? Are GPT-4.5 or 4.1 a bigger leap than GPT-4 was? I honestly don't know, but the general reception suggests otherwise. The biggest leaps recently seem to be making models that perform roughly as well as past ones but are much smaller. That has advantages from the standpoint of democratization and energy consumption, but those kinds of improvements seems to favor a situation where AI augments workers rather than replaces them.