Sorry to take a while to respond, it went well, about 28 people or so attended. Some of the most frequently discussed questions included whether or not LLMs are a promising architecture towards AGI, how to mitigate effects of gradual disempowerment, and what the near-term career implications of AGI might be.
I would not say there were any major conclusions drawn, however certainly a lot of ideas were exchanged.
It's that they can't exist without them. The general idea is that no matter what an entity needs people to profit off of, or to have power over. I'm not saying it makes sense
A common argument I hear when I discuss future economic effects of AGI is “consumers must have money or else the economy collapses therefore gradual economic disempowerment is impossible”.
This is something I believe is false, yet I frequently find myself unable to convincingly argue so. I make the argument that capital is useful for producing more capital, and they respond with “that’s circular, someone has to buy it eventually”. I make the argument that when tools of power (like weapons) can be produced without human involvement, power can end up being obscenely concentrated, and they respond with “but there needs to be people to have power over so they will take care of the lower classes”.
I’m not sure what name to give this set of arguments, (though I’d call them misconceptions), but they generally seem to take the form of “humans are needed for the end product to be worth pursuing”. i.e humans are needed to buy any product you make, and humans are needed to be subjects of any power you have.
Am I incorrect? Do these arguments have any basis in fact? (I understand economies have momentum but I am generally talking about long term changes).
If I’m not, are there any eloquent, intuitive, rational counterarguments to these?
I really appreciate this post, it points out something I consider extremely important. It's obviously aligned with gradual disempowerment/intelligence curse type discussion, however I'm not sure if I can say if I've ever seen this specific thing discussed elsewhere.
I would like to mention a 5th type, though perhaps not the type discussed in your post since it likely doesn't apply to those who actually do rigorously study economics, this is more so a roadblock I hit regarding the layman's understanding of Econ. To summarize it in three words, the idea that "consumerism is important".
Examples of this sort of misconception:
I'm sure I've not worded this particularly eloquently but I hope you understand what I mean. I cannot emphasize enough how frequently, when discussing AGI with others, I get pushed back using these arguments. I struggle countering them because people seemingly have this deeply baked in idea of "consumerism is what drives the economy". If I could reach some kind of intuitive explanation as to why these arguments are wrong, it would be extremely useful.