A Stanford economist just proved what we’ve been saying all along. Not with opinions. With math. Charles I. Jones, one of the world’s leading growth economists, published a paper this month that should be required reading for every executive drowning in AI hype. The title: “A.I. and Our Economic Future.” The finding: Even if we could automate every piece of knowledge work with infinite productivity, GDP would only rise by 50%. Not 10x. Not infinite growth. Fifty percent. And that’s the ceiling. This isn’t pessimism. It’s physics. And it explains why the organisations that will win the AI era aren’t the ones automating everything — they’re the ones identifying what can’t be automated and investing there. Let me show you why. The Chain That Breaks at Its Weakest Point Jones introduces what he calls the “weak links” framework. It comes from a branch of economics that treats production as a series of complementary tasks. Here’s the core insight: When tasks are complements — when you need all of them to create output — your total production is limited by your worst bottleneck. Think of it like a chain. You can make 99 links infinitely strong. The chain still breaks at link 100. Jones formalises this with a beautifully simple formula. If you automate a task that costs share s of GDP to infinite productivity, your total gain is: Gain = 1 / (1 - s) Let’s run the numbers: Infinitely productive software gives you a 2% gain. This isn’t a bug in AI. It’s how complementary systems work. And every organization is a complementary system. The Radiologist Who Didn’t Disappear In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton — the “godfather of AI” — made a prediction that became infamous. “We should stop training radiologists now,” he said. “It’s just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” It’s now 2026. There are more radiologists than ever. Their salaries have risen, not fallen. What happened? Jones explains it simply: Jobs are bundles of tasks. submitted by /u/chunmunsingh
Originally posted by u/chunmunsingh on r/ArtificialInteligence