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RW Robert Wright Robert Wright Author and podcaster who writes about evolution, psychology, religion and the prospects for global cooperation, now with a focus on AI and how to avert catastro...

“As of a year ago, I had this theory when people were saying, where's the productivity growth? … But I had this theory that what was actually happening was that the workers who had figured out how to use AI weren't telling their bosses. They were just spending their day at the beach, right? And so they're still getting as much money as they were to do the same amount of work they were doing. So the productivity growth doesn't show up unless you count beach time.”

Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

“As of a year ago, I had this theory when people were saying, where's the productivity growth? … But I had this theory that what was actually happening was that the workers who had figured out how to use AI weren't telling their bosses. They were just spending their day at the beach, right? And so they're still getting as much money as they were to do the same amount of work they were doing. So the productivity growth doesn't show up unless you count beach time.” — Robert Wright, Doom Debates!

Context

Robert Wright is wrapping up the conversation with one last question for Liron, about why AI's effect on the economy was not yet visible in productivity statistics. He offers this as a theory he held a year earlier and then asks whether it still applies. Liron answers by pointing to fast revenue growth at early-stage startups.

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Transcript

Doom Debates! Around 1:13:01 into the episode
Robert Wright

good. Yeah, even there. Anyway, how many human hours of work two years ago would it have taken to do that $1,000 worth of work, roughly?

Liron Shapira

…like shoot off a little thought, switch context, switch back context, see the answer. And these are just questions that normally we just, we just wouldn't have the answer. We wouldn't iterate, right? So there's this, there's all this iteration happen happening rapidly that just didn't used to be a

Robert Wright

thing. Okay. I've got what we call in the business a hard out at the half hour mark, but I have one more question for you. So I had this, like as of a year ago, I had this theory when people were saying, where's the productivity growth? Well, first of all, that always takes time. I mean, it took a long time, you know, with the original kind of PC revolution, then the online PC revolution and so on. That was kind of slow to accumulate. But I had this theory that what was actually happening was that the workers who had figured out how to use AI weren't telling their bosses. They were just spending their day at the beach, right? And so they're still getting as much money as they were to do the same amount of work they were doing. So the productivity growth doesn't show up unless you count beach time. Do you think that is still happening to some extent? Or I've got to think the companies are wising up. But what is your sense for that?

Liron Shapira

Yeah, it's an interesting question. You know, what's going on with AI productivity growth? So for one thing, I actually think the best place to see the proof of AI productivity growth is in the early stage startup market. If you listen to Y Combinator, see what they're saying. And if you listen to…

Robert Wright

I agree. Yeah, I don't know. Edzitron, I'm not sure. There was a very

Liron Shapira

interesting stat, although circling back to the Anthropic IPO discussion, right? The S1, and you mentioned Edzitron. I think the number one takeaway here is that this is the final nail in the coffin of the Edzitron camp, right? This idea that, like, look, sure, Anthropic is making tokens, but…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Doom Debates!

“I think the number one takeaway here is that this is the final nail in the coffin of the Ed Zitron camp, right? This idea that, like, look, sure, Anthropic is making tokens, but they're just borrowing from NVIDIA, right? And all these companies are just like in a circle, like throwing money at each other, and there's no value being generated. There were so many data points from the Anthropic S1 that put the nail in the coffin of that kind of speculation. So, number one is just like the cash flow. It was very clear that when Anthropic is serving a model, the margins on serving the model are huge. They were talking like 50, 60, 70, 80%, like depending on how you account for it. But like, yeah, they serve a model. They're printing money. Like, serving the model is printing money.” — Liron Shapira, Doom Debates! “It's always been my experience throughout most of my life where I'm like, yeah, this is like the peak of my brain. I'm understanding this with so much nuance. Like computers are so far from being able to do this. And then literally in a period of months, I still remember it was March this year, right? … my entire career entered a completely new phase where now I don't write code at all. I just tell AI to write code. Like I've become a product manager. And of course, the AI is on my heels being its own product manager.” — Liron Shapira, Doom Debates!