LessWrongclaudefrontier ai13h agoenergy 108

What are the concrete arguments for "AI pause would significantly hurt the economy."

I've seen a bunch of people claiming "well, we need to make sure whatever our AI policy is doesn't hurt the economy because people will feel that in their wallets and hate it (and hurting the economy is bad." This might hypothetically be true, but I've never seen anyone argue for it in any detail. Meanwhile, I'd naively expect if shut down AI anytime soon, it'd dampen growth, and maybe it'd be a minor economic dip, but I wouldn't expect it to be a major recession. (It makes sense that it'd become a bigger deal as AI takes over more of the economy. But it feels like the people saying "it'd hurt the economy" are often the people implying that means we should do less of a pause and do it later). I don't know much about economic recessions. But, like, for reference, here's the 2007-2009 recession and the Covid blip. GDP Unemployment I asked Claude If the frontier AI industry and datacenter build out completely halted, what do you predict would happen to US unemployment and GDP? Claude said: My central estimate: a sudden, complete halt would likely cause a US recession. Unemployment would probably peak around 5.5–6.5%, up from roughly 4.2–4.4% today. Real GDP would end up about 2–4% bel

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