Context & Overview of the Conference

Threshold 2030 was a two-day conference hosted October 30-31st, 2024, in Boston, Massachusetts. It brought together 30 leading economists, AI policy experts, and professional forecasters to rapidly evaluate the economic impacts of frontier AI technologies by 2030. This event was hosted jointly by Convergence Analysis and Metaculus, with financial support from the Future of Life Institute.

The conference heavily leveraged scenario modeling to produce concrete, detailed outputs about potential AI futures. We asked attendees to consider a set of three plausible scenarios regarding the trajectory of AI development and consequent economic outcomes in the year 2030.

Based on these scenarios, attendees conducted three forms of exercises:

• Worldbuilding: Attendees created and discussed detailed, realistic descriptions of global societies and economies in 2030, focusing on their domains of expertise.

• Economic Causal Modeling: Attendees created economic diagrams describing variables (e.g. labor automation, productivity) and observables that impact top-level measures of economic health (e.g. growth, inequality, quality of life).

• Forecasting: Attendees applied Tetlockian forecasting techniques to key economic questions and generated useful forecasting questions to track.

In the following report, we’ll discuss attendee responses to the three scenarios, and share a deep-dive into the results from attendees on each of the three topics mentioned above.