Toby Ord skeptical that an endless succession of consumer goods can absorb the AI datacenter boom
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-21
Philosopher Toby Ord engages on X with binarybits, Ryan Greenblatt, and Pawel Trammell about demand after an AI datacenter explosion. The debate centers on Trammell's thesis that a succession of increasingly amazing consumer goods will keep overall demand growing even as individual goods saturate. Ord finds such scenarios theoretically possible but hard to evaluate probabilistically — and remains skeptical.
Related event: Debate: Can Consumer Demand Absorb an AI Compute Explosion?(5 posts)→
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