Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.
Exactly. I believe that growth caused by the rise of IT, be it Internet or LLM, will be marginal, because the benefits for humanity are very marginal compared to that caused by steam engine, wing, antibiotics or telegraph.
Everything IT does is slightly simplifying things we already could do. We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
I think the speedups and conveniences of modern IT and the Internet have been massive: I can bank from my pocket, review the best photos out of 100k+ just when riding a tram, get virtually any good produced anywhere delivered to my doorstep in 1-3 business days (and it will be the exact kind and make I chose, not something that happened to be available), read virtually any book ever published while my appointment is delayed.
However, almost all of these are purely private benefits that do not show in any ledger. This is at least in part why the Internet seems to have had such small impact on gdp.
How about AI? So far, even more private benefits than the Internet.
And most of the time savings gained from all this is blown on grind clicking "social media" so net effect is, yes, close to zero (or in more modern terms, not 100x, not 10x, but 1x at most).
Value is subjective, though. If you actually gave people an ultimatum to stop using AI tools for a year, with a negotiable price, I wonder what that would come out at. Many other personal goods are like this, they are valued highly but do not appear as commercial transactions.
Internet and AI profoundly increase an individual’s potential productivity. The difference between these technologies and those of the Industrial Revolution is that the earlier advancements were essentially democratic. Everyone benefitted from them, in ways that were quite obvious. Whereas with the newer technologies, an individual can start a unicorn from his laptop, but he can also waste his life doomscrolling.
The Industrial Revolution was basically the height of western civilization, and the modern revolution is the beginning of something else. It’s not surprising that the metrics we developed in the previous civilization can’t really account for the gains we’re seeing now.
My opinion on that is, it's not such a big gain compared to legacy banking with checks, phone calls etc. All the operations you can do now you could do with legacy banks, just a bit slower. Given banking is not something you do every second, the overall speedup is tiny.
When I was a kid, my dad would schedule a monthly visit to the bank. This is one afternoon freed. With 21 in the month, solid 4% of afternoons saved to do something else. Plus the peace of mind because you can check whatever you want whenever you want.
With e-commerce my shopping is down to just groceries. Clothes, electronics, tools, spare parts, furniture, all show up at my door magically without hunting them down in stores. I remember a small repair being half a day. It's an hour now.
My dad certainly did not and could not have maintained a 12 cafe outings a month habit. I can do it with a newborn. Still probably deflationary compared to his activity.
That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering in e.g. medicine. Modern drug discovery would be impossible without advances in computation, and we are getting breakthrough drugs all the time thanks to that.
> We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
The speedup is much larger than horses vs steam power. How much time would it take you to find some scientific article if your library did not stock journal it was published in? You'd have to write request to get that issue and then wait few weeks before it arrives. Now you can get it basically instantly.
Clearly written by someone who's never lived without steam power (semi tongue in cheek).
But seriously, your ability to expediently research just doesn't compare to the ability to ship a metric ton of freight across the country without marshalling an army of people for months on end. As one example.
Clearly written by someone how did not get cancer that was deadly few years ago but now can be effectively suppressed.
I can make same argument - shipping back in time was absolutely possible, but many calculations we are performing now were not.
There is more to pushing freight than just turning the ignition key.
The complexity of supply-chains is overwhelming. Your fancy boat or train needs a boatload (!) of grease, oils, spare parts, maintenance, logs, not to mention fuel, accounting, insurance, the list is endless and it’s all either fully enabled by or extraordinarily simplified by digital networks.
> That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering ...
You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.
I did live before internet bc widespread internet came quite late to my country, and I must say it wasn't all that different. Dating, job search and social interactions were actually easier and more pleasant.
I do believe efficiency gains have been significant. Not as big as with industrial revolution but still effective.
Does not mean that some of these gains have not been wasted or there has not been in sense waste introduced to waste excess productivity and efficiency. IT certainly has made this waste lot more easy to do.
Internet is the foundation of the global almost automated distribution networks and has brought the ability to target your consumers in a way that's cheap and effective. Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger. I don't understand this stance.
The internet has certainly changed the composition of the economy a lot, so that a lot of services that used to be in-person are now available online. But GDP growth is about the difference in value production over time. Especially digital services that can be provided at high volume, because they're so cheap, don't add up to as much value when you multiply it out, and then you have to subtract the past value of the replaced services, so the GDP contribution is less than you'd naïvely expect from the growth in units sold.
> Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger.
In the accepted framework of global trade, where exchange value is either confounded or accepted as a use value, this is a correct stance. I think where we'd end up disagreeing is on that equality. I don't believe that just because you can sell targeted advertising for millions of dollar, that it's actually millions of dollars worth of social use value. We'd have to bicker about the definition of use value, obviously, but I find it hard to imagine an argument for why writing adware at Google is worth the money people are getting paid for it, relative to useful manual labour. In much the same way I don't believe the CEO's labour is worth 100x what the employee is paid, I don't believe the Google Engineer is worth 5x the gardener maintaining a park.
This spoken separation of use value and exchange value is missing from most internet opinions on the economy.
I hope that somewhat helps you understand how the stance can exist, even if I haven't explained it deeply enough for you to actually accept it.
All of Amazon, Apple, all the AI stuff, Google, including YouTube, yes.
They make tons of money for the US. Value is somewhat more subjective, but Amazon for instance certainly creates an enormous amount of value, as do Google's search and maps products.
I would argue that the democratisation of knowledge that YouTube has enabled is also very valuable.
they're all very mild and are not a clear improvement over previous ways, amazon is full of confusing product reviews and false advertising (they did mutualize ~free home deliveries though), youtube is also loaded with bs, the good content is not that much better than a book the rare time it can claim it is (and I'd argue most of the time it's universities uploading videos they had already made before)
I did love google maps but a bit less since they've made it a store locator more than a map.
I attribute this to a hazy memory of "previous ways". Either that or you're in some very well supplied area.
I remember not being able to get books, I remember walking for hours in the weather just to find a library that had what I needed, or a shop that sold some flange for the kitchen sink or a crappy 800mAh rechargeable battery for my Walkman despite 1200mAh existing.
I remember trying to figure out where the heck we are/going using rotted out of date map books.
I remember submitting CVs on foot until my legs stopped working.
I remember knowing 0 people I could nerd out with about hacking. I suppose the bright side was that hacking wasn't illegal yet.
And while I'm at it I also remember when MIT OCW came out. It was awesome, but it still sucked. YouTube is a marvel in comparison.
Has Coursera done it better since? Sure. But there's room for more than one player.
All of these digital tools have been dramatic quality of life improvements.
I don't know if its something that we will be able to measure precisely or at least in aggregate at first since the positives will only come about in the long term. Anecdotally, all my recent trips to the doctor have basically been as follows:
1) Give some (frontier) model my symptoms, circumstances, etc.
2) Model outputs a list of possible causes, some more urgent than others
3) If its not something benign, I go to a doctor
4) Doctor orders blood work, checks me up, and I discuss possible diagnoses with them.
Around 60-70% of the time the model was correct about the illness, the doctor just confirms it with empirical evidence. This means that I am able to pretty effectively triage myself, saving me a considerable amount of time.
Now its already the case that the role of doctors is diminishing in medical practice, and Nurse Practitioners are performing the majority of the same work. Armed with AI tools, Nurse Practitioners are effectively at the same level of skill and knowledge as an actual MD, and we would need far less MDs, then to do medical care, reserving them for specialty cases, expertise where AI tends to fail. So there is both more room for particular and intricate medical research and care for the most stubborn conditions, and more capacity for care in general.
In the long run, this will lead to improved outcomes, greater cognitive and physical health, and lower costs for child rearing. All of this is an economic boon. And all of it will not be apparent in the numbers for decades. I believe this is the case for the majority of the processes that AI is improving.
I’m sorry but this is a bad take. We’re suffering from a healthcare crisis, globally. We don’t have nearly enough doctors. Even in the US where wait times are relatively low, it sometimes takes months to get an appointment with my PCP, let alone a specialist. And while I do sometimes feel when I see an NP at an urgent care like I could have used an LLM for all the time and attention they paid to my concerns, that’s not a compliment to the LLM.
Besides that 60-70% is not an acceptable hit rate and there’s already early evidence of skill atrophy in AI saturated fields like radiology. We need way more people offering more personalized care, using more judgement and offering more compassion, not a chat interface that says “you’re totally right to push back, the post nasal drip was the smoking gun.”
Maybe some forms of ML, even LLMs, become part of the solution to that shortfall, but we’re a long way from proving that’s a net positive let alone a big leap forward.
Well, we can't have the counterfactual world but could it be that without computers, Internet or AI, there might be no/less growth?
I somehow doubt that AI will accelerate growth constantly as the world has inertia and I'm not sure AI is sustainably increasing our ability to change. On the other side, if there is a technology that can do that it could be intelligence.
Don't think in terms of dollars. Think in terms of stuff and services.
You don't see the internet in terms of dollars because it often makes it cheaper to do something that was possible before. That looks like a negative, in terms of GDP. In terms of what people can do, and can afford to do, though, it opens enormous doors. Want some information? Don't need a library. Want to plan a trip? Don't need a travel agent. Want to download some free software? Don't need a floppy and a friend who has a copy. And so on.
But if you look around, you see things like Amazon. They don't exist without the internet. You see Facebook. Youtube. Netflix existed, but they became a lot more convenient - no need to run to a store. There's a lot that was created that people found valuable, but didn't have to pay for (Amazon excepted). There's value, but because the nominal charge is $0, it doesn't show up in the GDP statistics.
This isn't as much of a positive as you seem to be implying. You can just go to a library. Or a travel agent. And it's probably better for you. It's not a downside.
Some people think so in the technology singularity that humanity may be approaching.
The acceleration of the speed of technological growth seems real, look how fast AI research and tools are advancing seemingly on a daily basis, rather than innovation happening in months, years or decades long timescales.
Think about the rate of progress of the steam engine, and then think about technology since the splitting of the atom. Warp speed!
> The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect.
This is both correct and incorrect.
US and China tech did totally skyrocket in the 21st century and pulled the GDPs of both the US and China up like mad.
The one western continent that had none of the Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, Tencen, Micron, SK Hynix, NVidia, that's nowhere in drones, etc. saw his GDP (in USD and inflation adjusted) barely moving and that'd be the EU.
The EU now has an economy based, as someone pointed out the other day, on selling overpriced "luxury" (at least pretending to be luxury) handbags assembled in China: in the Top 100 companies by market cap besides ASML the EU has L'Oreal and LVMH. That and fake public companies that are actual state monopolies (like spanish banks and french oil companies). It's really totally pathetic.
The EU, even though the public debt of its countries grew like mad, is where to look at to see a continent that had hardly any GDP growth in the 21st century.
But I'd say that it's precisely because the EU missed the Internet: it was all chinese (and now asian too) tech companies.
If this first quarter of the 21st century is of any indication, it looks like history is repeating: the EU is, once again, absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI (yay, Mistral, but we all know how that one is doing) and shall, once again, continue to see the public debt of its countries grow like there's no tomorrow (France is at 6% deficit of its GDP seen the insane spending of the state) and its GDP hardly move at all.
But AI leading to no growth in the US and in Asia? I think it's a bit early to call that.
As an European: ouch, but there is some truth to this.
It is however crystal clear in what direction both your examples are headed and I’m not sure it’s the wonderland you seem to think it is. China is an authoritarian hell-hole and the US is.. I don’t know there is even a word for it. Let’s just say I’m glad to be on this side of the pond.
Surely you realise that average person can just buy stocks and reap benefits of it? And I'm not sure if you are serious about stock price-GDP division (typically higher stock prices are associated with INCREASE in GDP, not decrease).
If revolution happens, lives of almost everyone would become much worse. And for sure lives of IT workers which would be in kulaks category.
(disclaimer: it's first world i.e. USA/EU perspective, I know there are other places where revolution could potentially be good).
I think we are knocking on the door of almost there, at least in the US from my armchair. Things weren't "that bad" in 1917ish Russia, it was a slow gradual imperceptible decline and then we got Lenin and his entourage as accelerants. Doesn't take much to start a fire.
No - the growth today is capital expenditures, not productivity.
To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework.
AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will.
There was a great economic crash in 1873, the Panic of 1873, caused by speculative bubble in railroads bursting. Things historians attribute to helping the collapse is a widespread pandemic that incapacitated horses (the form of transportation that was needed to get the coal to the trains not humans ), raging fires (Chicago (1871) and Boston (1872)), and ...... wait for it ....... high tariffs. Fun times -- hope we never see this pattern in history again. [0]
Railroads were a legitimate innovation that reshaped industry and society, there was no doubt about that - but it required massive capital expenditures, even buy in from regular people. As a result, there was speculative bubble, massive over investment, bubble bursts.
And yet all of the track laid was ultimately put to good use, and it was transformative.
Elon's 'magic' is attracting legions of retail investors - Dentists, Lawyers, others who keep those valuations high.
Some of them believe, on some level, that he's going to put 1 million people on the moon. After all - why would he strike a deal with the board for a bonus on that target?
Because it's a fake deal, intended to give legitimacy to a scammy proclamation.
Altman's 'magic' is the nauseating narrative around 'the singularity' and 'AGI'
Tesla, Space X, AI - are all very real, they're doing materially good things, but that's actually what makes it dangerous.
'NFTs' are narrative nonsense based on nonsense.
AI and Space are narrative nonsense based on something legitimate ... which gives the backers an inch of ground to stand on, which ironically imbues some of them ridiculous cognitive impairment.
And a lot of populist fools all around, carving out niches on ideological or populist territory (aka 'Elon Bad', 'Elon God', 'AI fake', 'AI will do everything') etc.
The truth is extra hard to discern because the future does actually depend on 'the herd' - and how much they can be convinced, and in a sustainable way etc..
Some degree of 'narrative' might bode well for everyone, too much is fraud.
Railroads were a perfect opportunity for overstatement.
Our system of capitalism is partly at fault: builders have no choice but to 'play the game' to some extent, they have to balance that with reality, and hopefully morality.
And government subsidies/handouts, over building / over capitalizing relative to market demand, natural resource (over) extraction, concentration of capital
The interesting thing here, I think, is what actually drives the growth of industrialization: cheap energy, an exploitable labor force and increased automation.
Every industrial economy seems to reach a plateau of diminishing returns, and it actually seems to be reached faster the faster industrialization is implemented. We see it in Europe, in the US, in Japan, in South Korea and it seems China is well on their way there, too: Cheap energy is diminishing (shale oil fracking, increased cost of building nuclear, etc) and exploitable labor has mostly been pushed as far as it can (dwindling fertility rates across the globe). Thus, we place our hope in automation, which has also been taken incredibly far already.
LLMs really must be some magic special sauce if they're to automate us into a new era of explosive growth. So far I don't think they're living up to that promise.
The industrial revolution was a mini-quake compared to automated cognition. But we can learn some things from it.
I see the industrial revolution as the invention of the cart. It made horses more productive. Then the car replaced horses.
It is taking people longer to wrap their heads around the reality than I thought it would. If there was a competitive human species on the planet getting smarter by the day, people would get it.
It is hard to maintain awareness of something which presents questions with no obvious answers. The one answer I have, is we need to clean up the ethics in our systems. Ethics are not costs against value, they are the full accounting and optimization of all value.
More intelligent creatures than us, not held back by our our outdated biologically instincts, won't have any trouble with that game theory.
So ethical systems are not just a shield for us as individuals, but also of inherent value to new forms of self-interest.
But that won't help us, if we don't push to align and strengthen our own systems now. And reverse the concentration of power in corrupt individuals who demonstrate every day that they are not interested in the wellbeing of humans in general.
This is urgent. We do not have a lot of time to effect this change.
The ones that can change it won’t because they benefit from the system being how it is. Being a politician is a gateway to money and power.
The fundamental flaw of the constitution is that it had no ethics built in, it’s up to the voters to pick better, our press to report truthfully without bias and those have failed as well.
> The fundamental flaw of the constitution is that it had no ethics built in
Yes, that would have been a really good intent to make explicit, to guide the courts.
I think of that when the Supreme Court or a state court rules process is more important than a convicts demonstrable (with new evidence that has come to light) innocence. Really horrific given that one out of eight death row inmates are exonerated. That level of bad convictions being overturned despite all the difficulties doing that, strongly suggests that a great many innocent people are still executed.
Another thing I wish the constitution did: Explicitly and universally enshrine decentralization. Not just the implicit decentralization of checks and balances only within the government.
I.e. party seat limits, independent federal and state parties, etc. For any kind of political group or coordination.
Where enough decentralization is enforced, a stable majority interest is maintained (even as who is the majority may change) for no minority to be able to break those requirements.
But where centralization is allowed, it is an eternal fight to hold it back.
The century from 1870 is filled with many one-time only developments that will never happen again:
Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.
These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:
Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.
One things that could be done is more redistributive tax policies, like existed post-WW2, so as to better spread around the current income and wealth in a less concentrated way.
I think we had a lot of jumps left in biology. We will have true immortality within 500 years at this rate. We've just switched over to artificial light without burning things, as we were burning things for light the whole time until recently.
Over the period of the industrial revolution humanity gained the ability to manipulate the material world in profound ways (convert potential energy into mechanical work, etc.). My view is information technology allows humans to continue to do that, but more efficiently. I think you’d need a breakthrough in manipulating subatomic particles and quantum mechanics to have the same level of relative impact as the industrial revolution.
Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism. When capitalism expands (be it by replacing older modes of production, or through rebuilding after a world war), it always has steady growth. When there’s nowhere left to expand to, the machine always grips. Technical progress doesn’t prevent this outcome, it accelerates it. More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
Also bear in mind that the industrial revolution in the UK occurred under the British Empire, which extracted a lot of wealth and resources from its territories, usually under less-than-fair arrangements. It is hard to imagine the British industrial revolution without this benefit - they were not separate aspects of the economy.
"England was to become the ‘workshop of the world'; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was — markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect! …
But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries besides England — France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia — have coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up."
> Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism.
The same technical advances created rapid growth in non industrialized non capitalist societies once they were introduced like the USSR or China. It's silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth regardless of economic system. Producing the food easily is more fundamental than deciding who gets what amount of easily produced food allocated to them.
> The same technical advances created rapid growth in non industrialized non capitalist societies once they were introduced like the USSR or China.
What created rapid growth in both the USSR and China is precisely their respective transitions from non capitalist societies to capitalist societies. Regardless of the technical advances of the (very different) times.
> It's silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth regardless of economic system.
No, what’s silly is to talk about "economic growth" regardless of the economic system. The growth in "economic growth" is a growth of exchange value produced in a given year. It makes sense only where production is meant for exchange, i.e. in capitalism.
And no, it is not silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth in capitalism. It is silly that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth in capitalism. Capitalism is silly.
> Producing the food easily is more fundamental than deciding who gets what amount of easily produced food allocated to them.
Now that’s a silly thing to say. Producing food easily is useless if the producers themselves can’t access it.
agree, technology doesn't change the basic mechanism of capitalism so I don't think this will be different, the only real question is how far means of production will be in term of capital intensity from upper class, which will decide if the outcome will be victorian golden age or robber baron age
Growth is unrealistic.
During the industrial revolution, people were still exploring the world and expanding their reach, establishing new colonies for raw materials.
We are living in a global economy now. There is no growth into unexplored territories left to do.
The amount of carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere is unsustainable, and will lead to more worldwide instability. The first effects have already been seen.
Remember that the "Arab Spring" (rise to IS, wars and refugee crisis) had been triggered by rising food prices.
Any parallel should be taken with a grain of salt.
In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.
1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that it took 80 years for the UK's job market to recover occupation and salaries seen at the beginning of the 1800s.
Europe's salaries and occupational levels were hit with a similar cataclysm as machines started appearing in the agricultural fields. That prompted millions and millions of Europeans to flee Europe for the Americas. Again, sure, the job market did recover, depending on the specific western European country between the 1960s and 1970s. That's between 50 to 70 years of slump. Almost twice the average person's career in a long lasting job market slump.
Please remind that to people that "AI will not impact job markets or will do so positively" using previous technological advancements as examples, that might be very well true but on a very undefined and likely very long time frame.
2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.
Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.
Exactly. I believe that growth caused by the rise of IT, be it Internet or LLM, will be marginal, because the benefits for humanity are very marginal compared to that caused by steam engine, wing, antibiotics or telegraph.
Everything IT does is slightly simplifying things we already could do. We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
I think the speedups and conveniences of modern IT and the Internet have been massive: I can bank from my pocket, review the best photos out of 100k+ just when riding a tram, get virtually any good produced anywhere delivered to my doorstep in 1-3 business days (and it will be the exact kind and make I chose, not something that happened to be available), read virtually any book ever published while my appointment is delayed.
However, almost all of these are purely private benefits that do not show in any ledger. This is at least in part why the Internet seems to have had such small impact on gdp.
How about AI? So far, even more private benefits than the Internet.
And most of the time savings gained from all this is blown on grind clicking "social media" so net effect is, yes, close to zero (or in more modern terms, not 100x, not 10x, but 1x at most).
Value is subjective, though. If you actually gave people an ultimatum to stop using AI tools for a year, with a negotiable price, I wonder what that would come out at. Many other personal goods are like this, they are valued highly but do not appear as commercial transactions.
I mean that’s to you as well as spending your time at the swimming pool.
Internet and AI profoundly increase an individual’s potential productivity. The difference between these technologies and those of the Industrial Revolution is that the earlier advancements were essentially democratic. Everyone benefitted from them, in ways that were quite obvious. Whereas with the newer technologies, an individual can start a unicorn from his laptop, but he can also waste his life doomscrolling.
The Industrial Revolution was basically the height of western civilization, and the modern revolution is the beginning of something else. It’s not surprising that the metrics we developed in the previous civilization can’t really account for the gains we’re seeing now.
> I can bank from my pocket
My opinion on that is, it's not such a big gain compared to legacy banking with checks, phone calls etc. All the operations you can do now you could do with legacy banks, just a bit slower. Given banking is not something you do every second, the overall speedup is tiny.
When I was a kid, my dad would schedule a monthly visit to the bank. This is one afternoon freed. With 21 in the month, solid 4% of afternoons saved to do something else. Plus the peace of mind because you can check whatever you want whenever you want.
With e-commerce my shopping is down to just groceries. Clothes, electronics, tools, spare parts, furniture, all show up at my door magically without hunting them down in stores. I remember a small repair being half a day. It's an hour now.
My dad certainly did not and could not have maintained a 12 cafe outings a month habit. I can do it with a newborn. Still probably deflationary compared to his activity.
That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering in e.g. medicine. Modern drug discovery would be impossible without advances in computation, and we are getting breakthrough drugs all the time thanks to that.
> We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.
The speedup is much larger than horses vs steam power. How much time would it take you to find some scientific article if your library did not stock journal it was published in? You'd have to write request to get that issue and then wait few weeks before it arrives. Now you can get it basically instantly.
Clearly written by someone who's never lived without steam power (semi tongue in cheek).
But seriously, your ability to expediently research just doesn't compare to the ability to ship a metric ton of freight across the country without marshalling an army of people for months on end. As one example.
Clearly written by someone how did not get cancer that was deadly few years ago but now can be effectively suppressed. I can make same argument - shipping back in time was absolutely possible, but many calculations we are performing now were not.
There is more to pushing freight than just turning the ignition key.
The complexity of supply-chains is overwhelming. Your fancy boat or train needs a boatload (!) of grease, oils, spare parts, maintenance, logs, not to mention fuel, accounting, insurance, the list is endless and it’s all either fully enabled by or extraordinarily simplified by digital networks.
> That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering ...
You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.
I wonder if people saying this really had an active life before Internet because if you do the change is so massive that it’s difficult to comprehend.
I did live before internet bc widespread internet came quite late to my country, and I must say it wasn't all that different. Dating, job search and social interactions were actually easier and more pleasant.
I do believe efficiency gains have been significant. Not as big as with industrial revolution but still effective.
Does not mean that some of these gains have not been wasted or there has not been in sense waste introduced to waste excess productivity and efficiency. IT certainly has made this waste lot more easy to do.
Speedup in communication is fast, but the real physical work still needed to be done. Machines were very powerful with this, but not flexible.
AI powered robots will be flexible (once they work reliable) ..
Most robots are better without AI.
A robot without AI ... is not a robot, but a (remote controlled) drone/machine.
How will South Africans control traffic then?
What?
Internet is the foundation of the global almost automated distribution networks and has brought the ability to target your consumers in a way that's cheap and effective. Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger. I don't understand this stance.
The internet has certainly changed the composition of the economy a lot, so that a lot of services that used to be in-person are now available online. But GDP growth is about the difference in value production over time. Especially digital services that can be provided at high volume, because they're so cheap, don't add up to as much value when you multiply it out, and then you have to subtract the past value of the replaced services, so the GDP contribution is less than you'd naïvely expect from the growth in units sold.
This is why I say GDP is a measure of price level.
So the added value is that all of us are now being targeted? That doesn't sound that good.
> Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger.
In the accepted framework of global trade, where exchange value is either confounded or accepted as a use value, this is a correct stance. I think where we'd end up disagreeing is on that equality. I don't believe that just because you can sell targeted advertising for millions of dollar, that it's actually millions of dollars worth of social use value. We'd have to bicker about the definition of use value, obviously, but I find it hard to imagine an argument for why writing adware at Google is worth the money people are getting paid for it, relative to useful manual labour. In much the same way I don't believe the CEO's labour is worth 100x what the employee is paid, I don't believe the Google Engineer is worth 5x the gardener maintaining a park.
This spoken separation of use value and exchange value is missing from most internet opinions on the economy.
I hope that somewhat helps you understand how the stance can exist, even if I haven't explained it deeply enough for you to actually accept it.
what kind of digital service is worth that much ?
Most of the big ones. Only issue is the US is crap at collecting tax from them.
sorry i was really asking, i'm quite jaded about internet and i don't see what's so valuable (of course all i see is reddit youtube ..)
All of Amazon, Apple, all the AI stuff, Google, including YouTube, yes.
They make tons of money for the US. Value is somewhat more subjective, but Amazon for instance certainly creates an enormous amount of value, as do Google's search and maps products.
I would argue that the democratisation of knowledge that YouTube has enabled is also very valuable.
it's funny how I don't share the appreciation
they're all very mild and are not a clear improvement over previous ways, amazon is full of confusing product reviews and false advertising (they did mutualize ~free home deliveries though), youtube is also loaded with bs, the good content is not that much better than a book the rare time it can claim it is (and I'd argue most of the time it's universities uploading videos they had already made before)
I did love google maps but a bit less since they've made it a store locator more than a map.
I attribute this to a hazy memory of "previous ways". Either that or you're in some very well supplied area.
I remember not being able to get books, I remember walking for hours in the weather just to find a library that had what I needed, or a shop that sold some flange for the kitchen sink or a crappy 800mAh rechargeable battery for my Walkman despite 1200mAh existing.
I remember trying to figure out where the heck we are/going using rotted out of date map books.
I remember submitting CVs on foot until my legs stopped working.
I remember knowing 0 people I could nerd out with about hacking. I suppose the bright side was that hacking wasn't illegal yet.
And while I'm at it I also remember when MIT OCW came out. It was awesome, but it still sucked. YouTube is a marvel in comparison.
Has Coursera done it better since? Sure. But there's room for more than one player.
All of these digital tools have been dramatic quality of life improvements.
I don't know if its something that we will be able to measure precisely or at least in aggregate at first since the positives will only come about in the long term. Anecdotally, all my recent trips to the doctor have basically been as follows:
1) Give some (frontier) model my symptoms, circumstances, etc.
2) Model outputs a list of possible causes, some more urgent than others
3) If its not something benign, I go to a doctor
4) Doctor orders blood work, checks me up, and I discuss possible diagnoses with them.
Around 60-70% of the time the model was correct about the illness, the doctor just confirms it with empirical evidence. This means that I am able to pretty effectively triage myself, saving me a considerable amount of time.
Now its already the case that the role of doctors is diminishing in medical practice, and Nurse Practitioners are performing the majority of the same work. Armed with AI tools, Nurse Practitioners are effectively at the same level of skill and knowledge as an actual MD, and we would need far less MDs, then to do medical care, reserving them for specialty cases, expertise where AI tends to fail. So there is both more room for particular and intricate medical research and care for the most stubborn conditions, and more capacity for care in general.
In the long run, this will lead to improved outcomes, greater cognitive and physical health, and lower costs for child rearing. All of this is an economic boon. And all of it will not be apparent in the numbers for decades. I believe this is the case for the majority of the processes that AI is improving.
I’m sorry but this is a bad take. We’re suffering from a healthcare crisis, globally. We don’t have nearly enough doctors. Even in the US where wait times are relatively low, it sometimes takes months to get an appointment with my PCP, let alone a specialist. And while I do sometimes feel when I see an NP at an urgent care like I could have used an LLM for all the time and attention they paid to my concerns, that’s not a compliment to the LLM.
Besides that 60-70% is not an acceptable hit rate and there’s already early evidence of skill atrophy in AI saturated fields like radiology. We need way more people offering more personalized care, using more judgement and offering more compassion, not a chat interface that says “you’re totally right to push back, the post nasal drip was the smoking gun.”
Maybe some forms of ML, even LLMs, become part of the solution to that shortfall, but we’re a long way from proving that’s a net positive let alone a big leap forward.
Falling prices is a good thing for anyone not in debt. That's almost nobody today though, I suppose.
Well, we can't have the counterfactual world but could it be that without computers, Internet or AI, there might be no/less growth?
I somehow doubt that AI will accelerate growth constantly as the world has inertia and I'm not sure AI is sustainably increasing our ability to change. On the other side, if there is a technology that can do that it could be intelligence.
The only explosive growth we're seeing out of the ongoing tech bonanza is growth in inequality, afaics.
Don't think in terms of dollars. Think in terms of stuff and services.
You don't see the internet in terms of dollars because it often makes it cheaper to do something that was possible before. That looks like a negative, in terms of GDP. In terms of what people can do, and can afford to do, though, it opens enormous doors. Want some information? Don't need a library. Want to plan a trip? Don't need a travel agent. Want to download some free software? Don't need a floppy and a friend who has a copy. And so on.
But if you look around, you see things like Amazon. They don't exist without the internet. You see Facebook. Youtube. Netflix existed, but they became a lot more convenient - no need to run to a store. There's a lot that was created that people found valuable, but didn't have to pay for (Amazon excepted). There's value, but because the nominal charge is $0, it doesn't show up in the GDP statistics.
> Don't need a library.
This isn't as much of a positive as you seem to be implying. You can just go to a library. Or a travel agent. And it's probably better for you. It's not a downside.
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Some people think so in the technology singularity that humanity may be approaching.
The acceleration of the speed of technological growth seems real, look how fast AI research and tools are advancing seemingly on a daily basis, rather than innovation happening in months, years or decades long timescales.
Think about the rate of progress of the steam engine, and then think about technology since the splitting of the atom. Warp speed!
> The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect.
This is both correct and incorrect.
US and China tech did totally skyrocket in the 21st century and pulled the GDPs of both the US and China up like mad.
The one western continent that had none of the Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, Tencen, Micron, SK Hynix, NVidia, that's nowhere in drones, etc. saw his GDP (in USD and inflation adjusted) barely moving and that'd be the EU.
The EU now has an economy based, as someone pointed out the other day, on selling overpriced "luxury" (at least pretending to be luxury) handbags assembled in China: in the Top 100 companies by market cap besides ASML the EU has L'Oreal and LVMH. That and fake public companies that are actual state monopolies (like spanish banks and french oil companies). It's really totally pathetic.
The EU, even though the public debt of its countries grew like mad, is where to look at to see a continent that had hardly any GDP growth in the 21st century.
But I'd say that it's precisely because the EU missed the Internet: it was all chinese (and now asian too) tech companies.
If this first quarter of the 21st century is of any indication, it looks like history is repeating: the EU is, once again, absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI (yay, Mistral, but we all know how that one is doing) and shall, once again, continue to see the public debt of its countries grow like there's no tomorrow (France is at 6% deficit of its GDP seen the insane spending of the state) and its GDP hardly move at all.
But AI leading to no growth in the US and in Asia? I think it's a bit early to call that.
Note that GDP primarily measures price level, not productivity.
As an European: ouch, but there is some truth to this.
It is however crystal clear in what direction both your examples are headed and I’m not sure it’s the wonderland you seem to think it is. China is an authoritarian hell-hole and the US is.. I don’t know there is even a word for it. Let’s just say I’m glad to be on this side of the pond.
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The growth will be in stocks and capital gains, in the consolidation of wealth by a few individuals.
If GDP increases, that’s just money left on the table by the ultra wealthy.
Surely you realise that average person can just buy stocks and reap benefits of it? And I'm not sure if you are serious about stock price-GDP division (typically higher stock prices are associated with INCREASE in GDP, not decrease).
I wonder if I will witness the real revolution in my lifetime.
If revolution happens, lives of almost everyone would become much worse. And for sure lives of IT workers which would be in kulaks category. (disclaimer: it's first world i.e. USA/EU perspective, I know there are other places where revolution could potentially be good).
Things have to get very bad before people start to act, it’s not there yet
I think we are knocking on the door of almost there, at least in the US from my armchair. Things weren't "that bad" in 1917ish Russia, it was a slow gradual imperceptible decline and then we got Lenin and his entourage as accelerants. Doesn't take much to start a fire.
What is "bad"? Hunger?
No - the growth today is capital expenditures, not productivity.
To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework.
AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will.
A better comparison might be railroads.
Why is railroad a better comparison?
There was a great economic crash in 1873, the Panic of 1873, caused by speculative bubble in railroads bursting. Things historians attribute to helping the collapse is a widespread pandemic that incapacitated horses (the form of transportation that was needed to get the coal to the trains not humans ), raging fires (Chicago (1871) and Boston (1872)), and ...... wait for it ....... high tariffs. Fun times -- hope we never see this pattern in history again. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873
Railroads were a legitimate innovation that reshaped industry and society, there was no doubt about that - but it required massive capital expenditures, even buy in from regular people. As a result, there was speculative bubble, massive over investment, bubble bursts.
And yet all of the track laid was ultimately put to good use, and it was transformative.
Elon's 'magic' is attracting legions of retail investors - Dentists, Lawyers, others who keep those valuations high.
Some of them believe, on some level, that he's going to put 1 million people on the moon. After all - why would he strike a deal with the board for a bonus on that target?
Because it's a fake deal, intended to give legitimacy to a scammy proclamation.
Altman's 'magic' is the nauseating narrative around 'the singularity' and 'AGI'
Tesla, Space X, AI - are all very real, they're doing materially good things, but that's actually what makes it dangerous.
'NFTs' are narrative nonsense based on nonsense.
AI and Space are narrative nonsense based on something legitimate ... which gives the backers an inch of ground to stand on, which ironically imbues some of them ridiculous cognitive impairment.
And a lot of populist fools all around, carving out niches on ideological or populist territory (aka 'Elon Bad', 'Elon God', 'AI fake', 'AI will do everything') etc.
The truth is extra hard to discern because the future does actually depend on 'the herd' - and how much they can be convinced, and in a sustainable way etc..
Some degree of 'narrative' might bode well for everyone, too much is fraud.
Railroads were a perfect opportunity for overstatement.
Our system of capitalism is partly at fault: builders have no choice but to 'play the game' to some extent, they have to balance that with reality, and hopefully morality.
Railroads were meaningful to the development of the country. Replacing labor with cheap slop and pocketing the savings isn't.
railroads were a lot of stolen labor so I'm not sure that's a difference worth noting
labor exploitation
And government subsidies/handouts, over building / over capitalizing relative to market demand, natural resource (over) extraction, concentration of capital
The interesting thing here, I think, is what actually drives the growth of industrialization: cheap energy, an exploitable labor force and increased automation.
Every industrial economy seems to reach a plateau of diminishing returns, and it actually seems to be reached faster the faster industrialization is implemented. We see it in Europe, in the US, in Japan, in South Korea and it seems China is well on their way there, too: Cheap energy is diminishing (shale oil fracking, increased cost of building nuclear, etc) and exploitable labor has mostly been pushed as far as it can (dwindling fertility rates across the globe). Thus, we place our hope in automation, which has also been taken incredibly far already.
LLMs really must be some magic special sauce if they're to automate us into a new era of explosive growth. So far I don't think they're living up to that promise.
The industrial revolution was a mini-quake compared to automated cognition. But we can learn some things from it.
I see the industrial revolution as the invention of the cart. It made horses more productive. Then the car replaced horses.
It is taking people longer to wrap their heads around the reality than I thought it would. If there was a competitive human species on the planet getting smarter by the day, people would get it.
It is hard to maintain awareness of something which presents questions with no obvious answers. The one answer I have, is we need to clean up the ethics in our systems. Ethics are not costs against value, they are the full accounting and optimization of all value.
More intelligent creatures than us, not held back by our our outdated biologically instincts, won't have any trouble with that game theory.
So ethical systems are not just a shield for us as individuals, but also of inherent value to new forms of self-interest.
But that won't help us, if we don't push to align and strengthen our own systems now. And reverse the concentration of power in corrupt individuals who demonstrate every day that they are not interested in the wellbeing of humans in general.
This is urgent. We do not have a lot of time to effect this change.
The ones that can change it won’t because they benefit from the system being how it is. Being a politician is a gateway to money and power.
The fundamental flaw of the constitution is that it had no ethics built in, it’s up to the voters to pick better, our press to report truthfully without bias and those have failed as well.
> The fundamental flaw of the constitution is that it had no ethics built in
Yes, that would have been a really good intent to make explicit, to guide the courts.
I think of that when the Supreme Court or a state court rules process is more important than a convicts demonstrable (with new evidence that has come to light) innocence. Really horrific given that one out of eight death row inmates are exonerated. That level of bad convictions being overturned despite all the difficulties doing that, strongly suggests that a great many innocent people are still executed.
Another thing I wish the constitution did: Explicitly and universally enshrine decentralization. Not just the implicit decentralization of checks and balances only within the government.
I.e. party seat limits, independent federal and state parties, etc. For any kind of political group or coordination.
Where enough decentralization is enforced, a stable majority interest is maintained (even as who is the majority may change) for no minority to be able to break those requirements.
But where centralization is allowed, it is an eternal fight to hold it back.
Of course the founding fathers didn’t have time to do that or address slavery either
The century from 1870 is filled with many one-time only developments that will never happen again:
Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.
These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.
One things that could be done is more redistributive tax policies, like existed post-WW2, so as to better spread around the current income and wealth in a less concentrated way.
I think we had a lot of jumps left in biology. We will have true immortality within 500 years at this rate. We've just switched over to artificial light without burning things, as we were burning things for light the whole time until recently.
Over the period of the industrial revolution humanity gained the ability to manipulate the material world in profound ways (convert potential energy into mechanical work, etc.). My view is information technology allows humans to continue to do that, but more efficiently. I think you’d need a breakthrough in manipulating subatomic particles and quantum mechanics to have the same level of relative impact as the industrial revolution.
This is the closest analogy for what's about to happen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893
Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism. When capitalism expands (be it by replacing older modes of production, or through rebuilding after a world war), it always has steady growth. When there’s nowhere left to expand to, the machine always grips. Technical progress doesn’t prevent this outcome, it accelerates it. More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
Also bear in mind that the industrial revolution in the UK occurred under the British Empire, which extracted a lot of wealth and resources from its territories, usually under less-than-fair arrangements. It is hard to imagine the British industrial revolution without this benefit - they were not separate aspects of the economy.
Indeed.
"England was to become the ‘workshop of the world'; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was — markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect! …
But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries besides England — France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia — have coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up."
The same could be said today of the US and China.
> More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
Rising productivity either means more stuff or lower prices.
> Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism.
The same technical advances created rapid growth in non industrialized non capitalist societies once they were introduced like the USSR or China. It's silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth regardless of economic system. Producing the food easily is more fundamental than deciding who gets what amount of easily produced food allocated to them.
> The same technical advances created rapid growth in non industrialized non capitalist societies once they were introduced like the USSR or China.
What created rapid growth in both the USSR and China is precisely their respective transitions from non capitalist societies to capitalist societies. Regardless of the technical advances of the (very different) times.
> It's silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth regardless of economic system.
No, what’s silly is to talk about "economic growth" regardless of the economic system. The growth in "economic growth" is a growth of exchange value produced in a given year. It makes sense only where production is meant for exchange, i.e. in capitalism.
And no, it is not silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth in capitalism. It is silly that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth in capitalism. Capitalism is silly.
> Producing the food easily is more fundamental than deciding who gets what amount of easily produced food allocated to them.
Now that’s a silly thing to say. Producing food easily is useless if the producers themselves can’t access it.
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> More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.
That might give the reader the wrong impression. It is the same labour, but spread out over more commodities. You won't get to work less.
agree, technology doesn't change the basic mechanism of capitalism so I don't think this will be different, the only real question is how far means of production will be in term of capital intensity from upper class, which will decide if the outcome will be victorian golden age or robber baron age
Growth is unrealistic. During the industrial revolution, people were still exploring the world and expanding their reach, establishing new colonies for raw materials.
We are living in a global economy now. There is no growth into unexplored territories left to do.
The amount of carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere is unsustainable, and will lead to more worldwide instability. The first effects have already been seen. Remember that the "Arab Spring" (rise to IS, wars and refugee crisis) had been triggered by rising food prices.
Funny how people are optimistic.
The other giant growth leap mankind had happened just before the Bronze Age Collapse.
Trade, automation, labor, same recipe. The outcome was a few centuries of dark ages though.
Any parallel should be taken with a grain of salt.
In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.
1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that it took 80 years for the UK's job market to recover occupation and salaries seen at the beginning of the 1800s.
Europe's salaries and occupational levels were hit with a similar cataclysm as machines started appearing in the agricultural fields. That prompted millions and millions of Europeans to flee Europe for the Americas. Again, sure, the job market did recover, depending on the specific western European country between the 1960s and 1970s. That's between 50 to 70 years of slump. Almost twice the average person's career in a long lasting job market slump.
Please remind that to people that "AI will not impact job markets or will do so positively" using previous technological advancements as examples, that might be very well true but on a very undefined and likely very long time frame.
2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.
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