🤖👴 AI vs. age: The great offset
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Demographic transition
13 min read
The article's core argument revolves around demographics offsetting AI gains. Understanding the demographic transition model—how societies move through stages of birth and death rates—provides essential context for why rich nations face aging populations and workforce decline.
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Solow–Swan model
13 min read
The JPMorgan analysis discussed in the article implicitly relies on growth accounting frameworks. The Solow model explains how labor, capital, and technology contribute to economic growth—directly relevant to understanding how AI productivity gains might or might not offset demographic decline.
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Technological singularity
12 min read
The article references 'techno-rapture' and 'superintelligence' scenarios from Silicon Valley. The technological singularity concept—the hypothetical point where AI surpasses human intelligence and triggers runaway growth—is the specific idea being critiqued as possibly overheated speculation.
🤖👴 AI vs. age: The great offset
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
Lots of folks have talked themselves into something approximating a techno-rapture. And not just on r/singularity over at Reddit.
Silicon Valley spins scenarios of superintelligence. Washington whispers a growth surge that might fund guns, butter, and a senior safety net without trade-offs. Investors imagine a market boom like a never-ending 1990s.
All in all, American civilization on the brink of reinvention — or so the pitch goes.
But there’s another side to that tempting trade, one worth considering.
A new analysis from JPMorgan’s long-term strategy team, “The race between AI and demographics,” dumps a half bucket of room-temp water on possibly overheated speculation. I think even the most AI-optimistic — including me, I guess — should give it a fair hearing.
The gist of the bank’s harsh math: Whatever artificial intelligence economically bestows, demographics are primed to reclaim. What’s more (depressingly for ultimate Up Wingers), the two forces look roughly equal and opposite. The rich world’s AI awakening may simply hold economies in place, more or less.
Ugh, what fun is that?
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