cowboycwr said:
whiterock said:
cowboycwr said:
whiterock said:
boognish_bear said:
geez what a dumb statement. by definition, every dollar spent on investment is a contribution to the final GDP number.
Probably not. When you account for all the laid off people who stopped spending money towards GDP and the fact that AI isn't paid and doesn't contribute to GDP other than a slight bump in one company profits at a time it seems reasonable to say that when you take it all into account the effect was minimal.
GDP = C + I + G + T.
Investment dollars (the "I" number) go straight to GDP, which is the benchmark statistic for "economic growth." Literally every penny of it "adds" to GDP.
The best that can be said is that they failed the English writing part of the economics exam. At worst, it's bad spin.
But again you are missing the point. Laying off 10,000 workers to be replaced by AI will have a huge negative impact on GDP across the board compared to the slight bump in a company saving some money to go to the bank accounts of company big whigs.
That wasn't the argument the statement made. It said "massive investment contributed basically zero" to economic growth. Massive investment does indeed contribute to economic growth, as a matter of simple mathematical calculation of GDP. Now, they may have
meant to say what you referred to, but as a simple matter of English composition skills they failed bigly. They might as well have said "yesterday's thunderstorm contributed nothing to annual rainfall."
Beyond that, beware of Luddite thinking. Destruction of old jobs and creation of new ones is an economic dynamic as old as time. The only variance is the rate of change - slow & steady marked by periodic great leaps forward. For most of history, the pace of change was glacial....millennia passed between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The pace of change accelerated significantly in the Industrial Revolution. Again, it tended to be incremental over the years, with great leaps along the decades and centuries. The one constant is that at each new threshold of rapid change, critics insisted the world is coming to an end. But it never does. At every transition point the cacophony of doom first went mainstream and then threatened to become conventional wisdom. Yet at each inflection point we emerged healthier, wealthier, and wiser.....in spite of the modern-day witch doctors predicting that our actions will provoke the gods to destroy us.
