GreenPlease wrote:
I actually strongly doubt that Ai will dwarf the impact of demographics. It's just really hard to mute the lifecycle-driven borrowing, saving, investment, and consumption decisions of 7 Billion+ consumers. I've read up on the topic of Ai quite a bit and it doesn't seem we're any closer to General Ai than we were a decade ago. Narrow Ai's have come a long ways and have already started affecting the job markets in certain professions... but I don't see the world suddenly lurching because of Ai.
Quantum computing is worth watching as that field has the potential to revolutionize several industries (healthcare in particular) by solving once intractable, incalculable problems in a matter of seconds (I'm simplifying here).
But neither Quantum Computing nor Ai will fix the imbalance between young and old, male and female in China. Question: how long does it take to increase the number of twenty-year -olds in a country? Answer: twenty years and nine months. The architecture of our global financial system was built on a certain lifecycle of production and consumption and therefore for it to function properly in the long run it needs a certain demographic profile. For the past 100 years life expectancies have steadily increased around the world and this has led to increased capital formation and therefore cheaper capital. Again, this isn't a one-way street. Keep pushing up life expectancies and eventually you get to a point where it makes capital more expensive.
Could you imagine a large European employer like Peugot or ThyssenKrupp suddenly having to pay "normal" interest rates while demand for their products drops? That's the sort of future they face.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I don't have a crystal ball, of course, but I disagree a bit with some of your analysis. FWIW, here's my take:
I predict general AI in about 20 years that will able to do *any* job a human can do better than any human. The socioeconomic ramifications of that are staggering, if true.
But even setting that aside, narrow AI will continue to grow over that time period, displacing jobs, shifting wealth, transforming society, etc., and strongly affecting the demographic trends you've mentioned.
My investment portfolio (conservatively -- I'm not some kind of AI zealot) reflects my faith in AI's future.
Personally, I don't think QC (quantum computing) will ever mature enough to solve useful problems better than traditional computing architectures (mostly due to fundamental problems with de-coherence). That said, I've placed a couple of investment bets on QC in case I'm wrong.
To put my opinions in context, I'm an EE with a long industry background designing datacomm and embedded systems. I also teach undergrad Engineering, Computer Science, and occasionally Physics. Both QC and AI are topical interests of mine and I've followed their developments closely for decades, even doing early research in Computer Vision back in the '80's.
Cheers,
-Mike
"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."