U.S. Annualized Real GDP Growth

The most frequently cited reason for why even strong AI capabilities are unlikely to translate quickly into meaningful GDP growth is that institutional, societal, and regulatory frictions will slow diffusion: "Even if AI capabilities move quickly, the economy doesn't just flip a switch. Companies have to reorganize. Capital has to cycle through. Workers have to move into new roles."; "Software progress can move quickly, but GDP responds to capital replacement cycles, regulatory approval, and human trust, all of which move much more slowly."

Lower-growth respondents cite an aging population, a declining labor force participation rate, declining immigration, and a high U.S. debt load as drags on GDP that AI cannot easily offset. "Given slower population growth, an aging workforce, and moderate productivity gains, a reasonable central estimate for annual real GDP growth would be between 1.7% and 1.9%," writes one, and another that "without immigration, the U.S. population would start to shrink in 2033." Higher-growth respondents tend to emphasize the potential of AI to decouple GDP growth from population growth: "In 'Rapid,' Al substitutes for labor (robotics) and accelerates innovation (R&D), removing traditional bottlenecks."

Lower-growth respondents anchor heavily on the stability of U.S. real GDP growth at roughly 2–2.5% annualized over recent decades. One points to the fact that "numerous technological breakouts have occurred over the past 100 years…(electrification, mass customer product manufacturing, global supply chains, radio and television rollouts, digitization, computer technology, an infinite set of advances based on the internet…)" as a reason to be skeptical that the emergence of AI will result in GDP growth "significantly different than [what] the historical record indicates." Another notes that "The Federal Reserve's FOMC published dot plot still projects the long term US GDP growth rate at slightly less than 2%," and another that the CBO is projecting 1.6% growth over the next 30 years. Higher-growth respondents often argue AI's potential to automate cognitive labor and accelerate R&D make it different; that if it "becomes a strong collaborator across sectors, automates large portions of knowledge work, and improves R&D productivity, leading to sustained productivity gains," that this will "eventually put GDP growth above the base rate."

A significant subset of lower-growth respondents worry that rapid AI progress could paradoxically reduce GDP by destroying jobs and consumer purchasing power. One writes, "If managers can replace large fractions of employees with Al, with no obvious alternative employment opportunities, there will be less wealth to be spent among the general populace, which will reduce demand for goods/services and hurt GDP," and another that "if large swaths of the population are out of [a] job, consumption will suffer." Higher-growth respondents tend to assume displaced workers will be reabsorbed or view automation as a solution to labor scarcity: "The integration of autonomous systems in factories and homes overcomes traditional labor shortages and operational bottlenecks."

Many lower-growth respondents emphasize that GDP over these horizons will be shaped more by tariffs, trade wars, kinetic wars, political instability, debt crises, and climate change than by AI progress: "Will there be a significant recession during the two dates or a major military conflict or another pandemic?"; "Tariffs and the U.S.-China rift…will reduce the overall number of buyers for any good or service produced in the United States."; "For 2050 I am also accounting for possible climate change shocks that reduce GDP growth." Higher-growth respondents tend to either not address these factors or to cite one or some of them as a reason to widen their lower confidence interval.

A number of respondents argue that even if AI delivers a meaningful GDP boost, it may manifest as a temporary bump that doesn't align neatly with the 2025–2030 or 2045–2050 measurement periods. "My 2045–2050 growth predictions are lower than my predictions for peak five year growth by 2050, because I think it is possible that there will be a temporary period of highly transformational effects and peak growth will have already passed by 2050," writes one forecaster. Another adds that "moderate progress might lead to elevated growth for a decade or so, before returning to the long-term average."

A minority of respondents—mostly those forecasting extreme variance rather than simply high or low growth—flag the possibility that human economic activity ceases entirely. One writes: "I think there's a >10% chance that 'human economic activity ceases' for all 2050 10th percentiles," and another that "I expect the rapid progress scenario to very likely lead to societal collapse hence the negative GDP forecast." Relatedly, a few respondents raise the concern that GDP may become a meaningless metric under rapid progress: "Does GDP mean anything for Moderate and Rapid scenarios by the year 2045? It seems similar to trying to measure the current Human GDP in terms of the Crow economy."