This question is related to others on the financial market response to advanced AI, including:
- the doubling time of the first company to reach a $10 trillion valuation
- whether Alphabet's share price suggests high-level machine intelligence by 2039
Background
Despite some concrete signs of promise of robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning ushering in a new age of automation, there is limited evidence of investors expecting a widespread technological transformation. With the exception of the brief spike during dotcom bubble around the year 2000, the proportion of valuations contributed by tech companies in the S&P500 has been trending up only slowly (~0.3%-points per year).
Since investment decisions respond to improvements in capital’s current or expected marginal product, some trend-deviating disruption in the extent of productivity enhancing technologies is likely to be preceded by a substantial boom in investor activity.
However, how far in advance investors are able to predict a possible technological leap is a difficult issue itself.
Conditional on human-level AI by 2039 (or earlier), will the average sector weighting of the IT industry of the S&P500 surpass 30% for at least one quarter by the end of 2025?
Resolution
For the purpose of this question human-level AI is taken to mean a system that can pass a generalized intelligence test described by this previous Metaculus question. Moreover, the condition of having human-level AI is met upon definitive positive resolution of that question. For the purpose of this question, we shall refer to the current weightings in SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY).
Data