What if we had an AI Copilot for the economy? Yesterday, Anthropic released what amounts to a beta, and it’s already got amazing capabilities.
Check this video out:
In the demo, Anthropic uses its AI to project the GDP of the US and other major countries into the future. Everything is charted beautifully and based in the latest data.
Imagine how many grad students it would take to pull all this together! Instead, Anthropic’s newest and most powerful model, Claude 3 Opus, performs the analysis in minutes.
AI Prompts Itself
The coolest thing about this demo was the “Dispatch Subagents” tool.
Claude takes the problem “Project GDP for major economies” and breaks it into parts. Then it reprompts itself many times to find data on each country.
Next, it projects the data forward using an econometric model. And finally, it charts the results.
Bring Me Supertyler!
Watching this demo was really exciting! Right before my eyes, I could see the future happen.
I knew of one man who’d appreciate it more than anyone: economist Tyler Cowen.
I tweeted the demo at him, and he retweeted it! As a huge Marginal Revolution fanboy, this might be the moment my life peaked. 🙂
Claude is not going to replace a very skilled economist like Tyler. But it could make Tyler 100x more effective.
Call him Supertyler.
Economy Copilot: The Next Step
Although I can’t wait to meet Supertyler, the future of AI and economics will be even more exciting than that.
Imagine an Economy Copilot. For any policy we’re considering, we can ask Economy Copilot “What will be the effect on our economy?”
Right now, a lot of people are upset about immigration. But the US desperately needs workers to fill our countless open jobs.
So what should we do? Let’s ask Economy Copilot…
Francis: We’re thinking of closing the border. What will happen to the economy if we do?
Economy Copilot: Closing the border is likely to reduce GDP per capita by 10% due to a lack of workers. This will cost the average American about $7,000 per year.
When you put it in those terms, who’s going to be okay with that? And Economy Copilot has no preference of its own…it’s just crunching numbers.
How Economy Copilot Could Change Politics Forever
Politicians might not use Economy Copilot, but voters will. Indeed, lots of people are already using Claude, ChatGPT, and other models that may soon have this capability.
If voters see “$7,000 less for you every year forever,” they’re going to be really mad. And some will tell their Congressman to vote against that new “Seal the Border” bill.
Some users may get results from Economy Copilot and say that it’s “woke”. Others may say it has a right-wing bias.
But I think most people will believe the AI model.
Some research indicates that we view results from AI as more objective than human decisions. From a study of decisions on job applications, published last year:
Upon evaluating a job seeker’s suitability for a position, participants viewed algorithmic decisions as fairer, more competent, more trustworthy, and more useful than those made by humans. Interestingly, when a candidate was deemed unsuitable for hiring, people reacted more negatively to the verdict given by a human than to the same judgment offered by AI.
Wrap-Up
A world with Economy Copilot is a better world. Today, we often can’t agree on basic facts, much less what conclusion to draw from them.
Any tool to better analyze data and come to rational conclusions will help!
What do you think of the Claude demo? Leave a comment and let us know!
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