Intelligence Curse notes AI and employment
What will remains scarce once intelligence is too cheap to meter, and what does this imply about which things to invest in (in a broad sense) now? The industrial revolution let you turn hydrocarbons into horsepower. The cognitive revolution will let you turn some kind of fuel into actions. What are the hydrocarbons of the cognitive revolution. You can say data in linkedinese or you can say context as a cowenism. Lay down your thoughts or personal context, or weird connections, or desires and they will power and guide these agents (in a good world) Capital → labor is the obvious one
Tim Hwang twitter: advanced artificial intelligence makes the return of secret guild society likely, because the only way of preventing models from learning a skill and automating labor will be a meticulous effort to keep know-how undocumented, closely held, and obscure
- more generally look for tweets to belatedly qt?
There’s a bunch of marxistish ideas about the reproduction of labour, e.g. via motherhood. Now we’ll just have capital to compute to labour, can these analyses say anything useful about that?
- Status
- Land
- Positional goods more generally (though you need to keep track of which positional goods AIs and humans will compete over)
- one of the above is status, if status comes from having human followers, which seems true, being a patron/feudal lord may persist.
- Context
- Taste
- Various knowledges/skills?
- Math
- Writing
- Art
- Various relationships
- Having children
- Meditation/headspace
- Memetic immunity
- Mental models
- Personal immortality (literally or through writing, at least temporarily)
- Share of memespace for some group (assuming human attention isn’t radically augmented)
- see Traits That May Cease to Be Valuable - Quarter Mile https://quarter—mile.com/Traits-That-May-Cease-to-Be-Valuable
- a sense of what’s possible and what will soon be possible/feeling the AGI
- gwernfollowing twitter accounts will be the currency of the future
Bostrom has a model of income sources under AGI in deep utopia
Also assuming AI agents will be massively productive imperfect substitutes for human labour shouldn’t you expect most demand for human labour to come from AI firms/agents (at least eventually)? On this model you might think more general questions about human empowerment (e.g. the bargaining power/pricing power of AI agents/firms vs. humans) would be more important than questions about how to make UBI work, since high aggregate demand for human labour would persist for longer than if AIs were more perfect substitutes for human labour.
AI agents lowering transaction costs will massively increase the amount of stuff it’s worth buying and selling (e.g. your individual data)