I like this idea of a baseline scenario. If we grow gdp by 2% a year forever, that does end up with some pretty crazy results. But in some sense that is also “business as usual”.
Good post! I hadn’t thought about that second bit. I’m curious though, how likely do you think really high rates of growth are during the next decades? My impression from reading, e.g. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/could-advanced-ai-drive-explosive-economic-growth/, is that a naive extrapolation leads to very extreme results, and given that we have had constant rates of growth for the last century in developed countries, saying it’s very likely strike me as perhaps unreasonable. What are your thoughts?
That's what tech tycoon bunkers are for. Temporary wellbeing for a few, but an excellent experience of wealth, which is mostly a comparison.
If everyone has a million dollars, no one is wealthy, but if one person has $1000 and everyone else has nothing, at least one person is wealthy, so the second condition is psychologically better if the experience of wealth is what you're after.
Which is the dynamic portrayed here, and through much of history:
This is an important point that isn't made very often. Humans remarkably quickly go from treating new technology as "scifi, never going to happen" to "eh, whatever". We actually have driverless cars now, but most people haven't noticed
I like this idea of a baseline scenario. If we grow gdp by 2% a year forever, that does end up with some pretty crazy results. But in some sense that is also “business as usual”.
Good post! I hadn’t thought about that second bit. I’m curious though, how likely do you think really high rates of growth are during the next decades? My impression from reading, e.g. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/could-advanced-ai-drive-explosive-economic-growth/, is that a naive extrapolation leads to very extreme results, and given that we have had constant rates of growth for the last century in developed countries, saying it’s very likely strike me as perhaps unreasonable. What are your thoughts?
If you focus on GDP, you are a paperclip maximizer. What matters is the wellbeing of people and families.
It is not obvious that this can continue to improve by many orders of magnitude. Not obvious at all.
That's what tech tycoon bunkers are for. Temporary wellbeing for a few, but an excellent experience of wealth, which is mostly a comparison.
If everyone has a million dollars, no one is wealthy, but if one person has $1000 and everyone else has nothing, at least one person is wealthy, so the second condition is psychologically better if the experience of wealth is what you're after.
Which is the dynamic portrayed here, and through much of history:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615
However, sketching out visions of this rapid change and asking, rhetorically, “how could society ever hope to deal with this?” also falls short.
That is a strawman.
People aren't worried just because they think the rate of change is high, but because of the particular changes they expect to happen.
If the change is rapid enough, say less than the 10ms human neuron firing speeds, then baseline humans can't possibly keep up.
We could have AI managing change on our behalf, or uploaded humans managing the change.
But if you think uploading won't arrive soon enough, and the "on our behalf" bit is rather tricky, then we are in a bad position.
Meanwhile:
https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions
This is an important point that isn't made very often. Humans remarkably quickly go from treating new technology as "scifi, never going to happen" to "eh, whatever". We actually have driverless cars now, but most people haven't noticed