William Atkinson, Lara Brown and John Power
One of the things that’s still healthy about the United States, unlike Britain and France, is that the political capital, the financial capital, the technological capital are all in different places, so it is very decentred. There are places where these things overlap, but there’s some way where people are able to do things that are independent.
JP: Is tech going to come to the rescue like the Eagles [in Lord of the Rings], deus ex machina, providing abundance that can kind of smooth over some of the economic challenges? And as a rejoinder to that, do you think the AI bubble is about to pop?
PT: There are all sorts of things that I don’t particularly like about the AI revolution. It seems to be very concentrated on bigger companies, so it’s possible a lot of the returns are captured by a few companies, possibly leading to very uneven growth. While it may be a complement to human labour, it is probably more of a substitute than a complement. It will have a zero sum feel to a lot of people. At the same time if there is no other vector of growth in our society, we would be out of our minds not to take it. I don’t think it’s big enough to solve the budget deficit, but if the US embraces AI and Europe rejects it, I think the US is in somewhat better shape than Europe is.
On the question of whether or not it is a bubble, I get asked this a lot by Europeans and that is how you know that they’re not going to build a lot of AI in Europe. If it’s a bubble, then people are spending too much money on AI, and they’re building too many data centres and buying too many chips, and you’re eventually going to get seriously diminishing returns on that. During the 1990s bubble, it was mainly the telecom fibre-optic infrastructure stuff where people really spent way too much and that had to get dialled back. But maybe it’s the other way around where there are high returns to AI, enabling the automation of certain workflows and enhanced productivity.
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