Will US national income explode and developing nations plummet in the AI era?
The reason the US can exceed a GDP per capita of $90,000 despite having a weak manufacturing sector is that it produces "the world's highest value-added intangible services and advanced technologies" as if it holds a monopoly.
Approximately 76–80% of the US economy is comprised of the service sector, and these services are not simple self-employment, but high-value-added industries such as finance, software, and biotech that dominate the global ecosystem.
The US is not a country that runs factories to make things. Because it produces its own "technology (IT)," "capital (finance)," "energy (oil/gas)," and "food (grains)"—which form the backbone of the global economy—and controls the global standards,
it maintains a miraculous productivity of $90,000 per capita despite having a large population of over 340 million.
And when the AI era arrives, an era of post-scarcity will open in the US. As the President of the European Central Bank has mentioned, AGI will result in an extreme winner-take-all structure. A nation that preempts AGI will benefit from recursive improvement, where AI improves AI itself and even resolves supply chain and hardware bottlenecks; ultimately, there is a high possibility that the AGI-possessing nation will take over even the supply chain sectors.
The dominant probability is that the nation monopolizing AGI will be the US, not China. What will happen if this occurs? Of course, at the current economic scale, AI is not yet having a significant impact on the US. The current AI industry is merely in the infrastructure construction stage (servers, data centers, power), not the stage of harvesting full-scale value-added.
Nevertheless, because the US effectively monopolizes the source IP (Intellectual Property) and core design technologies of AI, the scenario of "explosive US GDP growth" from the late 2020s onward is being seriously discussed in academia and markets with very high probability.
Currently, the US potential growth rate is conservatively estimated at around 2% per year. However, the economic ripple effect brought by the monopoly on AI IP will completely shatter this.
Infinite scalability converging toward "zero cost": The reproduction cost of AI software IP is close to zero. If every company and individual in the world subscribes to the AI APIs of US companies, the US will be structured to absorb the world's wealth while sitting still.
As the monopoly on AI IP strengthens, global investment capital and top-tier talent will flock solely to the US. This becomes the driving force that levels up the US's potential growth rate itself. Because of this, some observers suggest that once AI spreads in earnest, the US GDP growth rate could leap from the current 2% range to tens of percent or more.
"AI IP Monopoly" will allow the US economy to accumulate wealth at an unprecedented speed in human history. If artificial intelligence reaches AGI and begins to generate full-scale value-added, there is a very high probability that from the 2030s, US GDP will record an "ultra-high-speed upward trend" that far exceeds the linear growth seen until now.
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They say global polarization is already at its highest level in human history, but it looks like we are heading toward true hyper-polarization..
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