The manufacturing sector have been heavily into automation without AI for quite some time.<p>Take a tour of a modern auto assembly line and if you're like me, you'll be shocked by 2 things --- how few people are involved and the lack of lights (robots don't need them).<p>At the Hyundai assembly plant in Mobile Alabama, only about 24 hours of human labor goes into building each car.<p>At an average rate of about $30 per hour, less than $1000 of human labor goes into each new car.<p>This doesn't leave a lot of room for AI to have a major impact.
> Still, while it is basically impossible to predict with any confidence what AI will do in 20 or 30 years, one can say something about the next decade, because most of these near-term economic effects must involve existing technologies and improvements to them.<p>I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who was making adequate predictions about where we would be now back in 2020, much less 2015, and if you did, I doubt many people would have taken them seriously.<p>I’d argue that we can currently speak with some level of confidence about what things will be like in three years. After that, who knows?
This is the same Nobel Prize-winning economist who hyped the fake AI-revolutionizes-materials-science paper by one of his students just a few months ago.<p><a href="https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/ai-materials-and-fraud-oh-my" rel="nofollow">https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/ai-materials-and-fraud-...</a>
I’m reminded of the 1998 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman quote:<p>> “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”<p>The internets impact on society and business didn’t happen overnight. Naive studies on how people are using it today miss the point. I remember a clip from David letterman where he was mocking bill gates about the internet. Gates said you can get baseball recaps, to which letterman replied “have you ever heard of a radio?”<p>But maybe I’m just more optimistic because these tools have made a huge impact on my life and productivity gain is more than low single digits. I’m not typical, but I imagine others will catch up.
Value impact is always hard to predict.<p>1) It is, of course, hard to predict major capability advances.<p>2) But it is also hard to predict capability -> value thresholds. Some large advances won't cross a threshold. While some incremental advancements do.<p>3) This is all made infinitely harder, because the value chain has many layers and links, each with their own thresholds.<p>Major capability advances upstream may cross dramatic thresholds, generating reasonable hype, yet still hit downstream thresholds that stymie their impact.<p>And crossing a few small downstream thresholds can unlock massive latent upstream value, resulting in cascades of impact.<p>(This is something Apple aims to leverage. Not over-prioritizing major advances vs. the careful identification and clearing of numerous "trivial", but critical, downstream bottlenecks.)