ryan_greenblatt's Shortform

ryan_greenblatt

This is a special post for quick takes by ryan_greenblatt. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

An economist and a futurist walk into a bar.

The economist takes a sip of his drink. "Ugh, if only people understood basic economics. High-skilled immigration alone would do wonders for US growth."

Futurist: "Oh yeah? Say 100 million immigrants moved to the US, each matching the best human experts in every economically relevant field. Big deal?"

Economist: "Massive. Transformative."

Futurist: "What if they also worked longer hours and faster than any American?"

Economist: "Even better."

Futurist: "What if they were extremely frugal — consuming only the bare minimum needed to keep working?"

Economist: "A near-100% savings rate? Better still!"

Futurist: "What if they were very clumsy and physically weak, so they could only do some kinds of work?"

Economist: "They could still do all cognitive labor — that's over half all wages! Somewhat less good, sure. Still transformative."

Futurist: "What if their skin was grey, almost metallic, from some kind of accident?"

Economist: "Who cares?!"

Futurist: "What if they were AIs?"

Economist: "3% growth per year, tops. There'd be bottlenecks. Honestly, the people predicting explosive growth from AI should learn some economics."

It seems to me that:

If you had a sudden influx of 100m high-skilled immigrants (for simplicity, just assuming this is ordinary very high-skilled immigrants, and let’s say they don’t have above-replacement fertility), the long-run growth rate wouldn’t actually change much. Besides the “declining research productivity” issue common to semi-endogenous models, I’d guess this would also be pretty bottlenecked by energy, housing/zoning laws, etc. A population level effect, which doesn’t substantially change the population growth rate, seems really unlikely to m... (read more)

2jmh3mo

You might look at Hal Varian's takes. They do seem similar to what the exchange between Patel and Cowen were touching on. There was also some discussion here, or at least linked here, that I don't have a ready reference for (sorry) about rate of adoption of the existing (as of maybe 9 months to a year back) models in corporations. The bottle necks were not really model ability or powers but fitting them into the existing production and supply chains. If we see some rouge model that goes out and takes over the production at some of the big, highly automated factories, and probably down stream for the needed inputs (much less likely I suspect as a lot of those are relatively small, non-automated production processes but human dependent) that starts making everything faster and cheaper (or making things it wants and causes some type or retooling and different output) I don't think the rapid transformation by AI will occur. When does that happen? I'm sure others are better suited to estimate but my guess is more like 30 years than 5 years.

12Viliam3mo

We have extrapolated the number of human-level AGIs based on the number of human-level AGIs in previous decades.

ryan_greenblatt's Shortform

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ryan_greenblatt's Shortform

19

Ω 5