Many people seem surprised by the prediction in this report that even rapid AI progress won't lead to explosive GDP growth. Couldn't AI be different from past patterns?

In my view the fundamental barriers aren't technological or even regulatory but social. Explosive economic growth implies a pace of social change that I predict the public in most countries will vehemently reject.

Take self-driving cars. Assuming continued rapid AI progress, there will soon come a time when it would be great for growth if you could get human drivers off the roads. Freed from the need to accommodate the limitations of human drivers, roads could be dramatically redesigned and land use patterns transformed.

But my head hurts even trying to imagine the backlash. I think banning human driving will remain completely outside the Overton window no matter the daily death toll. The actual debate we're having now is whether to allow self-driving cars at all.

AI boosters are right that regulation is not a fixed constraint, and that if AI is powerful enough, it will be a force for change. But they get the direction wrong! It is true that regulation is largely a reflection of social preferences, but those preferences tend to be even more strongly opposed to rapid change than is reflected in policy at any given time. As AI-driven social change kicks in, we will see regulation start to change — in the direction of erecting more barriers, not tearing them down.

If your mental model of AI impacts starts and ends with capability growth, you'll miss the layer that actually matters. Far from AI being a wild west, the diffusion layer is already highly constrained, and it's quite possible that those constraints will tighten.