AI’s Singularity Might Start in the Shopping Cart | American Enterprise Institute

Demis Hassabis—the outgoing head of Google DeepMind and incoming chief scientist of Alphabet, Google’s parent—might be correct. Last month, he wrote that artificial general intelligence “a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away.” And that humanity is thus standing in the “foothills of the singularity.”

Foothills are a geographic middle ground between lowlands and mountains. The terrain has begun to slowly rise, but you’ve not yet reached the steep slopes. Foothills are a transition phase, and in the case of AI, Hassabis and many other Silicon Valley technologists and executives think that phase will be a short one—at least compared with past technological shocks. They also think AI will be the Olympus Mons of general-purpose technologies.

Just in case the AI-optimistic San Francisco Consensus has the right story, it seems prudent to start thinking hard right now about the socioeconomic and geopolitical issues such a technological leap would generate.

A good example of how such thinking is already happening: a superinteresting National Bureau of Economic Research conference last September, “The Economics of Transformative AI,” which generated a bunch of papers examining the implications of having a “country of geniuses in a data center,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has put it. Among the topics explored: AI’s potential to speed up research, how well American workers could adapt to AI-driven job change, and how much society should spend to avoid the existential risks from advanced AI.

Along the same lines, I would point to recent papers such as “Some Simple Economics of AGI” (“autonomy is fundamentally outpacing oversight”) and “AI Feedback Loops and the Conditions for Explosive Growth” (“the question of an intelligence explosion can no longer be dismissed as science fiction”).

So, yes, a considerable degree of expert cognitive bandwidth is being devoted to the topic. That said, it’s good to remember where things stand right now in the emerging Age of AI. Anything like “transformative” impacts has yet to happen, despite all that AI infrastructure investment and considerable corporate spending. Where some effects can be found, they seem minimal to modest. 

For instance: an updated analysis from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab fails to find “widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI” although “young workers in AI-exposed occupations are increasingly falling behind their less-exposed peers.”

Also: This from The Information doesn’t look particularly science fictional:

Then there’s Shopify, whose software powers online storefronts for merchants. The company last week reported 34% revenue growth for the quarter, in line with the first quarter—but an improvement on last year’s growth rate, which in turn was faster than 2024’s. Shopify is benefiting from AI chatbots that are giving shoppers recommendations on what to buy, pulling in many cases from its catalog of merchant products.  Shopify says it has structured data in the catalog so AI services can access it easily and show detailed product information when a consumer asks a question. The company is incorporating that with other software to help merchants take advantage of AI-powered shopping research. Shopify executives say AI is helping smaller merchants—the type that are typically on Shopify—get attention for their products.

Then again, the kind of benefits Shopify is seeing from AI is probably what we should expect as companies across the economy slowly integrate a powerful new technology into their operations. Maybe the technological singularity begins a journey across the foothills of chatbot-driven shopper recommendations.