https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/the-dangerous-paradox-of-ai-abundance

Like many of Marx’s works, the passage has been interpreted in various ways. But, taken on its face, it seems to suggest that communism isn’t possible until the economy has reached a very high level of output and productivity, which will create new possibilities for organizing society. Of course, a great leap in productivity and economic growth is precisely what many developers and promoters of artificial intelligence claim will happen as A.I. gets even more powerful, and as A.I.-based technologies become more widely adopted. “Double-digit growth is coming within 12 to 18 months,” Musk wrote on X last month. “If applied intelligence is proxy for economic growth, which it should be, triple-digit is possible in ~5 years.”

Musk, Sam Altman, and other tech moguls have self-interested reasons to talk up A.I.’s economic potential: their firms are pouring huge sums of money into it. Economists are forecasting a much more modest impact. Goldman Sachs has predicted that, in the span of ten years, A.I.’s deployment could raise the level of global G.D.P. (not the growth rate) by about seven per cent. For the United States alone, the Penn Wharton Budget Model puts the boost to G.D.P. at just 1.5 per cent. Last year, I wrote about how some surveys showed that companies had struggled to generate much, if any, financial return from the A.I. investments they had made so far, raising fears of an A.I. bubble.