Jess Riedel: Baumol's cost disease won't stop explosive AI-era growth in energy and materials
Jess_Riedel · x · 2026-10-30
Jess Riedel argues Baumol's cost disease — the assumption that humans demand human-provided services regardless of substitutes — may keep human wages a nontrivial economic share but cannot prevent explosive growth in energy and raw material usage. If we fly to other stars at 50% light speed in 2050 while GDP grows 'only' 20% a year, no one will call that stagnation. Technical economic definitions, he argues, badly understate AI-era transformation.
Related event: Debate: Will Robots Be Consumers or Just Producers in the AI Economy(8 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Stanford's TaskNet builds occupational task inventories from worker interviews at scale — stanfordnlp · 2026-10-31
- StudentBench: AI tutoring matches human GRE gains at 918x lower cost — gharik · 2026-10-31
- Box CEO Aaron Levie: AI progress is 'going vertical,' widening the frontier gap — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-31
- Model Collapse May Not Hit LLMs, But Perhaps Human Culture or Souls — generativist · 2026-10-31
- Nina Schick: who builds intelligence and how it's distributed is the defining question of our lives — NinaDSchick · 2026-10-31
- Martin Casado: AI's dazzling 80% makes everyone skip the hard 20% — martin_casado · 2026-10-31