Thus far, technologists had been giving out aggressive timelines of AI progress, but it seems that economists are now onboard too.
Former US Treasury Secretary and Chief Economist of the World Bank Larry Summers recently suggested that AI could drastically accelerate scientific progress, potentially compressing decades of advancements into a mere seven years. His comments also touch upon a fascinating point — that the rise of AI may well eclipse even the most dominant political narratives of our time when viewed from a future perspective.
“I think it’s possible that artificial intelligence will lead to another discontinuity in the growth process,” Summers stated, “that will lead to very substantial acceleration in the rate of growth.” He elaborated on this acceleration, stating, “It might mean we have 50 years of scientific progress in seven, and ultimately, it’s scientific progress that drives growth.”
Summers continued, emphasizing the potential scale of this transformation: “So, potentially, this is going to change everything about how the economy operates and is going to be an industrial revolution scale event.” He pointed to the rapid advancement of AI models, observing, “Most of the things that a year ago I was told would take three years to happen have already happened in terms of progress with these models.” He concluded this thought with a simple, yet powerful statement: “So this is going to be an immense thing.”
Looking towards the future, Summers offered a thought-provoking prediction: “When your intellectual great-grandchild writes the history of this period in 2225,” he posited, “my guess is that stuff about Donald Trump will be the second or third story and stuff about [geopolitical events] will be the second or third story.” Instead, he argued, “the first story will be that we had this transformative change in the ways in which people lived and the ways in which the things they enjoyed were produced.”
Summers’s prediction paints a vivid picture of a world on the cusp of radical change. His comparison to the Industrial Revolution underscores the potential for AI to reshape not just specific industries, but the very fabric of economic activity. The dramatic compression of scientific progress he envisions, with 50 years of advancement squeezed into seven, suggests a future where breakthroughs in medicine, energy, and materials science occur at an unprecedented pace.
Summers isn’t the only person who’s predicted rapid scientific growth through AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI will lead to a century’s worth of scientific progress in 5-10 years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been even more aggressive, saying that some day, AI will cause a 100 years of scientific progress to happen in a single year. It remains to be seen if these predictions play out, but more and more experts across disciplines seem to be agreeing that AI is poised to turbo-charge scientific growth.