The Impossibility of Automating Economic Flourishing.
By Matt Statler, Lauri Pietinalho, and Jukka Luoma
Whether rooted in science or metaphysics, people throughout history have often held a belief that hidden patterns beneath everyday life set the world’s course, and that revealing those patterns can unlock flourishing and prosperity.
Today, a version of this belief frequently appears in the public statements of major artificial intelligence company executives. For instance, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, extolling the future impact of the work being done by his company, asked, “How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?” and answered, “humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying ‘rules’ that produce any distribution of data).”
Ilya Sutskever of Safe Superintelligence described training a large language model as “learning a world model” that captures an increasingly granular representation “of the human condition.” Coming from a slightly different angle, Dario Amodei of Anthropic portrayed the slow pace of change in the “outside world” as a bottleneck for AI’s pattern-recognition-based innovation.
Read the full Stanford Social Innovation Review article.
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Matt Statler is Richman Family Director of Business Ethics and Social Impact Programming and Clinical Professor of Business and Society at NYU Stern.