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Among people working at frontier AI labs (or otherwise contributing to progress towards AGI), how many (A) both view it as a good thing to “free people from work” and (seemingly inconsistently) continue working themselves despite adequate personal wealth? Otherwise, is it mostly that (B) such folks need/value the additional earnings, or do they (C) consider their contribution towards the loss of meaningful paid work to be outweighed by other considerations? Or do they/you think (D) plentiful decent jobs will continue persist, or is there something else I'm missing?
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@Eli Tyre To clarify what I see as inconsistent, it is to simultaneously:
1. Support ASI displacing all paid human work because it would enable everyone to spend their time doing unpaid activities of their choice.
2. Currently have net worth sufficient to retire early and spend all your time doing unpaid activities of your choice.
3. Currently be doing paid work (that would be done instead by ASI, were it available) nonetheless---and enjoying it more than you would enjoy being retired currently.[1]
Working at a frontier lab or otherwise contributing towards the arrival of ASI is not essential to this scenario. I just imagine that many such people currently meet these three criteria.
[1] With regard to the meaning of "enjoying" here, the idea is that this criterion of human wellbeing in #3 correspond to the criterion implicit in #1's notion of people being better off when freed from paid labor.
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Right this isn't inconsistent, because just because one is doing paid work doesn't mean that the fact that it's paid is decisive or even relevant at all to your decision to do that rather than something else.
It could be that you would do that work even if it were unpaid, but it happens to be highly paid, and so that's a nice bonus.
I think this probably does describe at least some folks that the AGI labs?
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Thank you. Right, it's not about being paid per se. What I actually have in mind (but didn't write) is more about impact, contribution, working together with others, etc. Work with all those characteristics will also be made scarce by ASI, I fear. So maybe what I want to say is: what characteristics of the work make them enjoy it, what features are decisive? And how does that set of decisive features compare with the types of work that will be made obsolete by ASI? I'll have to keep working on clarifying this (and maybe I'll eventually see I'm mistaken).
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