Anthropic's model predicts AI could boost US GDP by up to 32% by 2030

I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars.

I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.

> The result: the nurse’s job changes

> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.

Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.

Finding 4 is a must-read:

> Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital

> Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital.

Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points)

Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points)

Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 14.8 points)

So all the growth goes to capital. For knowledge workers: substantial unemployment and declining wages. For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power. (note: all of their estimates are for 2030, not for a distant future)

Very dystopic indeed.

It's funny that this is missing the negative effects or the possibility of an economic crisis scenario. Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all. This is why XAI is already renting compute to Anthropic. This goes as well without saying that in few years, compute pricing will drop heavily.

Another effect is increased inequality in the US and other Western countries as software/AI/hardware companies are able to do more with less.

The increase in manual labor wages is not systemic. It affects only the labor used to build data centers.

> Only humans can do some tasks

> For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.

Until there are robots. Or the AI gets creative in an attempt to find a solution to this "problem" and orders a fatal dose of morphine for the patient.

> And new tasks will appear

> Historically, new technologies have also created new tasks for workers. For a nurse, that might be checking how well an AI triages patients, or reviewing an AI-proposed care plan.

You can see where they're going with this.

> At the individual level, it means coders and call service center agents may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse, which are less exposed to AI.

It's weird they call nurses "less exposed to AI" when the earlier section discusses how AI could turn nurses into underlings for AI taskmasters.

> How might powerful AI change the economy?

Worth noting that this discussion is built around 2030, which is now less than 3.5 years away.

The hedges that make the Extreme scenario sound less bad fail to explain how anyone is going to pay electricians when the highest paid group (human knowledge workers) is being decimated. It sounds like the theory is that everyone is either going to become an electrician or a totally fair and efficient wealth redistribution scheme will magically appear.

> Like any economic model, this one has limits. For example, we did not include scenarios where humanity develops hyper-capable robots.

I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.

Feels like we're going to read a blog soon enough that mirrors Wendell Berry's opening to The Unsettling of America:

The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.

> Ultimately, what the economy looks like in 2030 depends on many factors, like what AI can do, and how companies and workers choose to adopt it.

So the answer is basically "beats me lol"

I think we have a real problem because we know what we still need to build and as soon as it is build, it will work.

Software development for example is enhanced with running your claude locally.

But lets be honest, the right way to adjust 'project' is by writing some spec in a text field as an input, letting the ai do whatever it wants, having expert ais make sure its secure, then you do the last review and its done.

What do we need for this? A full end to end integration. Its just something we need to build, nothing we need to invent.

The nurse example is the same. We only need to build the computer end to end flow and plugin AI in the right spots and finetune for country specific requirements.

The industry is building this 'agentic layer' today. The Hyperscaler are building this layer too.

There is a golden phase were we will build all of this and were we cleanup old stuff and were we adjust with the current model capabilities and change systems and this will take a little bit of time, but the bottom line is already loosing left and right.

The Blender support from Fable and Astra? Probably kills a lot of peoples jobs on fiverr.

The small software someone needs? Got already killed by earlier models. Just a few days ago some architect (never written software) talked about how he vibecoded some tool for tracking working hours.

Man even a basic website was expesnive to build just 2 years ago.

The smaller, easier and better the code base, the easier it is to remove people from […]