Patrick Grady

Striking image from the new Anthropic labor market impact report.

Touchdown

I really want people to see the story above the story here, which is that whether you're reading Citrini, or listening to Jamie Dimon at a cocktial party, the conversation about AI is a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. That's not to say I think the technology is a parlor trick. But rather that the level of uncertainty is so high, and the quality and supply of real-world, real-time information about AI's macroeconomic effects so paltry, that very serious conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical. And I think that observation sets up another important point: I feel lucky to be able to have conversations about the frontier of AI with executives and builders at frontier labs; economists at AI conferences; investors in AI; and other AI folks at off-the-record dinners where important truths can theoretically be shared without risk. I can't emphasize enough that "nobody knows anything" is about as close to the reality here as three words are going to get you. Nobody what's going to happen this year, or next year, or the year after that. There is no secret cigar-filled room of people who have unique access to some authentic postcard from the future. When you drill down underneath the bluster, the boosterism, the fear, the anxiety, what's there at the bottom is genuine uncertainty, a vacuum into which storytelling is flooding. The frontier labs don't really know what they're building exactly, and economists don't really know how to model the thing they claim they're building (genuine recursively self-improving AI agency isn't really analogous to something we know about). I wish more people talked about and thought about this subject thru that sort of lens: We're trying to model the economy-wide effects of a technology whose properties the frontier labs can't even really describe yet. Whatever you think about AI today, be prepared to change your mind soon.