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gregvp's avatar

I'm afraid your argument from theory is not borne out by history. Horses and engines were not perfect substitutes for a very long time, but horses were still eventually replaced. The same is likely to be true of humans and AI/robots.

Horses and steam engines coexisted for over a century before horses were replaced by a combination of internal combustion engines and electric motors.

Edit: to make this point explicit, the AIs we have today and can foresee are the primitive forerunners of the AIs we can expect in future--steam engines to tomorrow's electric motors. Your argument has fallen into the "static world" fallacy again.

It is not true that horses could not benefit from technology advance or capital investments.

The curved-moldboard plough replacing the old heavy plow reduced plow teams from six or eight to two horses or a single horse: at least a threefold productivity improvement. The horsedrawn combine harvester further improved productivity by at least threefold. Investments in canal networks massively increased the productivity of horses used for bulk transport, and iron roads (railways), leaf-sprung waggons, and macadamised roads increased the productivity of horses in "last mile" transport.

Edit: to make this point explicit, the argument that humans can benefit from technological advances or increased capital stocks but horses could not, is historically false.

More horses were used in World War II than in World War I, despite IC engines and electric motors having been around for sixty years by that time.

Edit: to make this point explict, things can appear to improve for quite a while (for horses or humans) before the underlying trend is revealed.

Re-read David Edgerton's "The Shock of the Old" to get a more rounded view of how things actually go in technologically-driven economic paradigm shifts. It may or may not be faster this time - if AI is real, and not just a lossy information summarizer, like the JPEG format for pictures.

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Daniel Kokotajlo's avatar

I feel like you still aren't grappling with the implications of AGI. Human beings have a biologically-imposed minimum wage of (say) 100 watts; what happens when AI systems can be cheaply produced and maintained for 10 watts that are better than the best humans at everything? Even if they are (say) only twice as good as the best economists but 1000 times as good as the best programmers?

"When humans and AIs are imperfect substitutes, this means that an increase in the supply of AI labor unambiguously raises the physical marginal product of human labor, i.e humans produce more stuff when there are more AIs around. This is due to specialization. Because there are differing relative productivities, an increase in the supply of AI labor means that an extra human in some tasks can free up more AIs to specialize in what they’re best at."

No, an extra human will only get in the way, because there isn't a limited number of AIs. For the price of paying the human's minimum wage (e.g. providing their brain with 100 watts) you could produce & maintain an new AI systems that would do the job much better, and you'd have lots of money left over.

"Technological Growth and Capital Accumulation Will Raise Human Labor Productivity; Horses Can’t Use Technology or Capital"

It won't raise human labor productivity fast enough to keep up, at least not in the long term.

Maybe a thought experiment would be helpful. Suppose that OpenAI succeeds in building superintelligence, as they say they are trying to do, and the resulting intelligence explosion goes on for surprisingly longer than you expect and ends up with crazy sci-fi-sounding technologies like self-replicating nanobot swarms. So, OpenAI now has self-replicating nanobot swarms which can reform into arbitrary shapes, including humanoid shapes. So in particular they can form up into humanoid robots that look & feel exactly like humans, but are smarter and more competent in every way, and also more energy-efficient let's say as well so that they can survive on less than 100W. What then? Seems to me like your first two arguments would just immediately fall apart. Your third, about humans still owning capital and using the proceeds to buy things that require a human touch + regulation to ban AIs from certain professions, still stands.

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