Forget the Cynics, AI Will Double GDP, Cure Cancer, Create Jobs, and Even Kill the DMV, Optimists Insist

Warnings from the AI community about the destructive power of their supposedly malevolent prodigy have reached fever pitch. Their dark omens dominate headlines. Often unmentioned are the life-changing benefits that many others in the divided AI community believe their wunderkind will instead deliver.AI researchers tell the Sun that they see a different side of the coin. AI could double GDP growth, cure all major diseases in ten years, make almost everything cheaper, spark a jobs boom, give children their own personal Ivy League tutor and — the Holy Grail — streamline interactions with the government to the point that the DMV will no longer be necessary. The latest round of doom-mongering was sparked by the resignation of OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon who said that many in the industry believe AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” AI leaders quickly chimed in, calling for more regulation. Silicon Valley said it needed saving from itself. Other AI researchers and industry leaders take a different view; they predict mass affluence, rather than an AI apocalypse.AI is “going to drive down the cost of everything: from agricultural goods to products that right now can only be affordably made overseas,” Policy Director at the market-driven public policy think tank the Cicero Institute, Michael Brickman, tells the Sun. AI models, he explained, will be trained to build things faster and more efficiently. “You’re going to start seeing a lot more made here because AI can make that more efficiently and that’s just going to need more jobs and cheaper goods for Americans. It is going to create many, many, many more jobs than it will ever replace.”Mr. Brickman, who has worked on the White House Domestic Policy Council, foresees AI allowing people to access benefits, permits, and licensing much more quickly.“Imagine AI could prefill an application or just get you the information or the approval that you need so you don’t have to spend time with DMV,” Mr. Brickman said. “Or you don’t have to spend six months waiting for a permit so you can build a home.”AI could revolutionize education, Mr. Brickman added, allowing every student regardless of economic background or school district to have an individualized, one-to-one AI tutor.“If you can put these tools in the hands of parents and students you’ve given them a personalized tutor and the ability to learn anything they want in any way they want,” he said.“It makes it a lot easier to create new schooling models that I think can actually accelerate kids’ learning, deepen it in many ways, engage them far more in problem solving,” said Michael B. Horn, a faculty member at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute.Mr. Horn cautions against extreme reactions on the potential of AI technology. “I think there’s like sort of the extreme rosy view, which I don’t really buy into and then there’s like the extreme pessimistic view, which I don’t buy into either,” he said.Stanford professor of economics, Charles Jones, highlighted the advancements in medical research that numerous AI agents — all of them more intelligent than the smartest human being — could bring to bear.“An economy of AI geniuses could design new pharmaceuticals and predict which drugs are likely to do best in clinical trials with minimal side effects,” he wrote in a recent paper.“It’s unethical to not develop it, to not give access to care that can improve outcomes that can improve access,” Adam Meier, who served as Director of Montana’s Department of Public Health, told The Sun. But only if “we do it in a way that’s thoughtful, and we think about accountability, and we have the right constraints in place.”Certain medical procedures could be done under the supervision of a human “autonomously or even semi-autonomously,” Mr. Meier added. “But even further than that down the future you might be able to go into surgery where there’s no human present.”The theory that AI could “cure cancer” stems from AIs ability to rapidly conduct research, Mr. Meier said, speeding up time to diagnose a cancer patient or even devise a new treatment.“One of the strengths of AI is that it can take really complex data, like rare disease data for example, and they can process it very quickly,” Mr. Meier said. “And it can identify things that humans may miss.”Accelerated medical benefits from AI may already be occurring. Last month, Anthropic announced its model Claude had fully mapped a system of enzymes that copy RNA into DNA, including non-coding DNA sequences and “an additional accessory protein of unknown function.” Claude undertook the work autonomously.In his essay calling for a slowdown in AI development to “pace the frontier” and reduce the threats from rogue AI, Anthropic founder Dario Amodei nonetheless listed benefits to the technology. He said AI could cure “most major diseases” within ten years, accelerate economic growth, and “usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom.”“My own father died of a disease that was cured just a few years after his death, and I myself survived an early-stage cancer that would not have been treatable even fifty years ago,” Mr. Amodei wrote. “Carefully wielded, AI can be the latest in a long line of technological miracles that have uplifted and ennobled humanity.”Mr. Jones’ study predicted US gross domestic product could grow from around 2 percent annually, where it has rested for the last several years, to 5 percent. That would put the US growth rate on par with India’s, which was number one in the world with a 7.57 percent increase in 2025.The founder and CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has been one of the most prominent tech executive voices against AI doomsaying. “2030 is not going to be the end of the world,” Mr. Huang said. “There is zero percent chance that’s going to be the end of the world.”A new Gallup poll shows the United States is in the bottom five of 37 countries in optimism that AI will mostly help their nation. In the US, only 36% believed AI would help the majority of people in their country. That places the United States on the level with nations like Afghanistan.“I think it’s interesting that the people who are trying to scare Americans for profit and for greater control over this technology have been saying this since the beginning,” Mr. Brickman said. “When these models, GPT-2 could barely produce a coherent sentence, they were saying the same thing: ‘This is too dangerous.’ There’s an industry of nonprofits that really is just looking for the latest thing to scare people about… I think it’s deeply cynical and really creates horrible incentives.”“I think there are some people who don’t want America to win on AI because they know how important it is that we do win for national security, for our economic strength and many other reasons.”“And then I think there are also a group of people that frankly need something to be scared of, with many of the same groups and people who were trying to scare us about nuclear weapons and then climate and now AI – it’s the same story.”Mr. Horn is optimistic that AI will “increase the value of human connectivity.” Human interactions “will feel relatively scarcer and more in demand for people: performance, sports, community gatherings, things of that nature. My hope is that it could be a real revitalization of a lot of our community institutions.”

Forget the Cynics, AI Will Double GDP, Cure Cancer, Create Jobs, and Even Kill the DMV, Optimists Insist

Forget the Cynics, AI Will Double GDP, Cure Cancer, Create Jobs, and Even Kill the DMV, Optimists Insist

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