What does 50% economic growth look like?

An exploration of what might be

The world averages between 3%-4% real growth per year. Call it 3.5%.

Tyler Cowen, in a recent podcast, assumes AI will add 0.5% growth over the next 20 years. Call it 4 over a sustained period of time. This would roughly feel like the post World War II boom of the 1950s, televisions and cars and homes for the wealthy countries, peace and food for the emerging markets.

This is the fairly conventional, standard economic textbook view. It presumes new technology is introduced, it is an incremental improvement over existing tech, and it takes time to diffuse to the larger population.

But, this blog/newsletter has never been about the conventional. It remains an attempt to peer beyond discontinuities.

What happens next?

2025 Dec to 2026 Dec → somewhere in this timeline, a superhuman AI mathematician and coder will be built. We will have 10 million Alec Radfords, Ilya Sutskevers in a data center somewhere in Texas.

The first and immediate thing this country of geniuses will be set to,…