“Transformative AI has revolutionary potential,” wrote Stanford University postdoctoral fellow Gabriel Unger in “Economic Possibilities for Artificial Intelligence,” one of the 21 essays in Volume 2 of The Digitalist Papers — a roadmap of the relentlessly advancing capabilities of the AI revolution.
Unger adds that the AI revolution has arrived at a particularly significant moment. “America has spent most of the past 50 years in a period of stagnant productivity growth.” Income inequality has risen while trust in institutions — and in each other — has declined. “There is both the economic fact of objectively diminished prospects, and the social fact of rising pessimism in opinion polls about our present and our future.” Our real opportunity, he writes, “is about how we might be able to use a profoundly transformative technology to help rescue ourselves from our decades of increasing dissatisfaction and diminished expectations, in the service of a more promising economic and social life.”
Unger argues that whether we can fulfill this potential depends critically on answering three broad questions:
- Can we articulate a compelling shared vision of a future with Transformative AI (TAI) that ordinary people will find exciting and compelling?
- Can we settle on a theory of economic growth that helps us realize the full economic potential of AI?
- And can we redesign education and strengthen human connections in the age of Transformative AI?
“There are plenty of AI optimists and AI pessimists,” notes Unger. The pessimists’ fatalism stems from their belief that the future has already been decided, while the optimists believe that the future remains open. The optimists argue that we should turn our attention “to the unresolved questions most important to a better future from AI.”
Let me summarize Unger’s vision for a better AI future.
Why Our Feelings about Technology Have Evolved from Optimism to Pessimism?
“Suppose the AI Revolution is maximally successful along its purely technological dimensions. What kind of broader society and economy do we hope for in this scenario?”
There will always be a balance between optimists and pessimists. But today many people feel pessimistic about the future of the world and, more specifically, about the future of technology. In particular, says Unger, “the same vision of the AI future that the tech industry thinks of as optimistic and utopian inadvertently comes off to many other people as pessimistic and dystopian.” This has helped create a culture in which people increasingly view the future of technology with dread rather than excitement. “Every sci-fi movie is now a horror movie.”
“From the First Industrial Revolution up to as late as the early 1970s, the dominant attitude of the West toward technological progress was passionate optimism.” Let’s remember that “millions of Americans rapturously watched the Apollo missions on their new color televisions.” I personally attended the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, which showcased mid-20th-century American culture and technology with the uplifting message that technological progress would bring abundance and empower ordinary people. Curiously, the height of this optimism coincided with the nuclear arms race, almost certainly the greatest moment of existential risk humanity has ever faced.
Opinion polls now consistently show that relatively few Americans view the future of technology with hope. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 56 percent of Americans believe that AI will do an equal amount of good and harm, 31 percent believe it will do more harm than good, and only 13 percent believe the good will outweigh the harms. Seventy-five percent believe AI will reduce the total number of jobs, while only 6 percent believe it will increase them. And 77 percent say that they do not trust businesses much (44 percent) or at all (33 percent) to use AI responsibly.
Similarly, a 2025 Pew Research Center poll on AI’s impact over the next 20 years found that only 17 percent of U.S. adults believe AI will have a positive impact, while 35 percent believe it will have a negative impact and 33 percent expect a mix of positive and negative effects. Interestingly, AI experts are significantly more optimistic: 56 percent expect AI to have a positive long-term impact, while only 15 percent expect it to be negative.
Why So Many Fear the AI Future?
Such negative views are not surprising given what many people believe is being offered. According to Unger, an unsympathetic critic might describe the Silicon Valley vision for an AI future as not merely pessimistic but outright dystopian:
- You won’t really have a job. You’ll stay home, perhaps living off universal basic income payments.
- Unemployed at home, you’ll interact with your AI companions and AI-powered robots, or put on VR goggles to consume endless streams of AI-generated content.
- Your children, if you have any, will use AI to write their book reports — and then some teacher’s AI will grade them.
“It is not strange to have critics,” Unger writes. “But what is strange is that with some changes of semantics and word choice, something like the above is difficult to distinguish from the same vision that many technologists are openly promoting for the future — even the people who most consider themselves AI optimists. … They do not seem to understand that their utopia is other people’s dystopia.”
John Maynard Keynes — one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century — wrote about such concerns in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”:
“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name… technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”
Almost a century ago, Keynes predicted that by 2030 most people might work only about fifteen hours per week — enough to satisfy the human need to feel useful and productive. Humanity would then face a new challenge: “how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares … to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
Unger argues that we need a better vision. “We need to be able to articulate a future for the AI Revolution in which ordinary people have both exciting jobs and real relationships with each other — not unemployment and solitary lives at home, drugged out on dopamine.”
Articulating a compelling vision for the future of AI is only the first step. Turning that vision into reality requires a convincing account of how AI can generate sustained economic growth and meaningful work for large numbers of people.
The Economic Promise of the AI Revolution
“The economic promise of the AI Revolution is that it can fundamentally change our experience of cognitive labor, in the way that the Industrial Revolution changed our experience of physical labor. Over a sufficiently long horizon, this might prove to be an even more radical change to our individual experiences of work, and to the economy.”
AI is a historically transformative technology. The machines of the industrial economy helped overcome our physical limitations — steam engines enhanced our physical power, railroads and cars helped us move faster, and airplanes gave us the ability to fly. Today, technology is increasingly being applied to activities requiring cognitive capabilities and problem-solving intelligence that not long ago were viewed as the exclusive domain of humans.
“Opinions about artificial intelligence tend to fall on a wide spectrum,” wrote The Economist in a recent article. “At one extreme is the utopian view that AI will cause runaway economic growth, accelerate scientific research, and perhaps make humans immortal. At the other extreme is the dystopian view that AI will cause abrupt, widespread job losses and economic disruption, and perhaps go rogue and wipe out humanity.”
What if AI Is a “Normal” Technology?
But what if artificial intelligence is simply a “normal” technology? What if its rise follows the path of previous technological revolutions? The Economist raised this possibility in discussing “AI as a Normal Technology,” a recent article by Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan and PhD candidate Sashay Kapoor.
“To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact — even transformative general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are ‘normal’ in our conception,” wrote Narayanan and Kapoor. The key question is whether progress will be gradual, allowing people and institutions to adapt, or whether sudden breakthroughs could produce massive disruption or even a technological singularity. Based on past experience, the most profound economic and social impacts are likely to unfold over decades rather than years. Moreover, there is an important distinction between AI methods, AI applications, and AI adoption — each of which evolves on different timescales.
“Part of the price of saying something compelling about AI and economic growth is developing a more serious structural view of the economy, and how AI then enters into it,” explained Unger. “To tell a convincing story about a technology leading to economic growth, you need to have some account of which sectors and firms are going to use the technology, and in which ways.”
Which human tasks might AI substitute for, and which might it complement? Will sectors most affected by AI shrink as a share of GDP if demand is inelastic, with economic activity shifting elsewhere?
Unger also notes that discussions about “the existential risk AI presents to humanity” often overlook a broader set of challenges that are just as significant. The United States and many other advanced economies have experienced relatively weak economic growth for several decades.
“We want a future of high economic growth and a society where ordinary people can enjoy exciting vocations and rich social and family lives,” Unger wrote in conclusion. “We want a path in which AI genuinely sparks sustained economic growth, empowers normal people to have more transformative careers, and makes our social and cognitive experiences deeper and better. This is as existential as anything else.”
Whether the AI revolution ultimately deepens today’s pessimism or opens the door to a new era of prosperity will depend not just on technological advances, but on the choices we make about how to use them.