Steve Newman on Second Thoughts

As things turned out, I did connect with Noah, he was gracious enough to have a discussion with me, and we came to a meeting of the minds. I've been on vacation for the last couple of weeks, but will be writing a blog post about this shortly. > "Lower quality work": Yes, humans will be do lower quality work, but will also be much cheaper. Sure, if you want AIs that are better, you can pay for them, but the lost opportunity cost makes them prohibitively expensive, as I will expand. The problem with this model is that if there is some finite resource needed by both humans and AIs, then quickly humans become unable to pay for that resource. And it seems inevitable to me that such resources will exist: for instance, energy, raw materials, land. So, absent policy interventions, the salary that a human could command won't be sufficient to keep them fed, housed, etc. > So the likely scenario seems to be that an energy and compute budget is mandated by law for humans at a level just below super-intelligence Now we're not talking about comparative advantage, we're talking about policy interventions to maintain human welfare in a world where comparative advantage is insufficient for people to support themselves. > But the more important counter to adaption problems is that the AI world is fabulously wealthy with cheap energy and compute and there is no need to work, the basics of life are free and people who don't want to work won't need to. Yes, assuming various things go well, in principle there are policy choices we could make that would lead to this outcome – but, again, this is no longer an argument about comparative advantage, which is all I was addressing in this post.