Very simple idea, but I thought it'd be worth making a post on this.
Some people are saying AI will make all goods cheaper, so you'll be able to afford a nicer life by working. Without any redistribution, just by market mechanisms. These people are wrong.
AI will lower the price of goods you need to survive, and also the price of your labor. The question is which will get cheaper faster. Let's use energy cost as a proxy. A day's worth of labor equivalent to yours can be done by AI for just a few cents in electricity on tokens. But feeding you with e.g. apples for a day will cost more energy than that, because growing apples can only be energy-optimized so far. So selling your labor at market price will leave you unable to afford apples.
This means a future with economic AI might look like "poverty in the midst of abundance": all goods are cheap, but somehow you can't find a job paying even that much. In economic terms, many previous inventions were complements to human labor, while AI is a general substitute for human labor, lowering its exchange rate vs other goods.
Maybe the problem can be solved by redistribution, or by everyone having investments, or something else - that's a bigger discussion. In this post I just want to make the basic point above.
I wonder how similar the point is to The Intelligence Curse. As for the problem being solved, I doubt that I can think of a solution beyond redistributing the most basic resources and letting people give them to the robotic economy in exchange for directly usable goods...
It'd need to be a lasting solution though. What if robots "buy out" a generation of humans, giving them +100 fun, and there are no more generations of humans.
That's why I prefer solutions like "everyone gets +50 intelligence". Slowing down AI enough that we can get IA. I think more and more people now are realizing that it's better, the only question is can we slow down AI enough.
Very simple idea, but I thought it'd be worth making a post on this.
Some people are saying AI will make all goods cheaper, so you'll be able to afford a nicer life by working. Without any redistribution, just by market mechanisms. These people are wrong.
AI will lower the price of goods you need to survive, and also the price of your labor. The question is which will get cheaper faster. Let's use energy cost as a proxy. A day's worth of labor equivalent to yours can be done by AI for just a few cents in electricity on tokens. But feeding you with e.g. apples for a day will cost more energy than that, because growing apples can only be energy-optimized so far. So selling your labor at market price will leave you unable to afford apples.
This means a future with economic AI might look like "poverty in the midst of abundance": all goods are cheap, but somehow you can't find a job paying even that much. In economic terms, many previous inventions were complements to human labor, while AI is a general substitute for human labor, lowering its exchange rate vs other goods.
Maybe the problem can be solved by redistribution, or by everyone having investments, or something else - that's a bigger discussion. In this post I just want to make the basic point above.