Mmm, so if I understand correctly your first point is a hope that power concentrates in a multipolar way, and this multipolar world is stable.
What is a historical example of a “mechanism that redirects power from rivals to the public”? Also what is a present-day example? The closest I can think of is UHNW individuals lobbying the USG to preferentially tax their rivals.
Separately: “Capital in the 21st Century” has statistics which are like “in the past 100 years the fraction of wealth owned by the top 1% has increased rapidly”, this seems to be evidence that competitive dynamics between elites aren’t a very strong check on concentration of wealth (which is a form of power).
I agree that the current state of alignment isn’t sufficient for us to have “sovereign AI”. Maybe this is a good reason for continuing to do alignment work. I’ll have to think about it more.
Separately: “Capital in the 21st Century” has statistics which are like “in the past 100 years the fraction of wealth owned by the top 1% has increased rapidly”, this seems to be evidence that competitive dynamics between elites aren’t a very strong check on concentration of wealth (which is a form of power).
I agree that something like the book’s scenario could play out once we have AIs that make people’s work irrelevant, but I want to note that Piketty’s book is just basically wrong about today or the past, and is almost akin to a crank writing about a subject that they don’t know.
This is more of a local validity concern than anything.
The specific reasons are below, and the link to the general post is here.
It implies that it is only by coincidence that the capital share has been roughly constant for centuries. When labor and capital are both necessary for production, it is no coincidence that expenditures on each have grown in tandem (and thus the capital share has been about fixed): expenditures on left shoes and right shoes have stayed proportional too.
It is contradicted by essentially every other way of estimating the substitutability of capital for labor. At the micro level, it is contradicted by direct estimates at the firm- or industry-level that the marginal product of capital tends to fall quickly when more capital becomes available (e.g. Oberfield and Raval, 2021). At the macro level, it is contradicted by the observation that across countries all at the technological frontier at a given time, the countries with more capital per worker tend to have smaller capital shares (e.g. Bentolila and Saint-Paul, 2003). A literature review of 2,419 estimates from 77 studies from 1961 to 2017 finds that, at least for the US economy, the result that capital is not highly substitutable for labor is very robust (Knoblach et al., 2019).
Innovations are predominantly designed to save labor rather than capital.6 This strongly suggests that labor really is a bottleneck (Acemoglu, 2003). If labor were not a bottleneck, it would be more valuable to free up capital, since it is more abundant, or can quickly become so. If you have a hundred workers and a thousand equivalent robots, increasing the efficiency of the robots by 1% is ten times more valuable than increasing the efficiency of the workers by the same proportion.
To take the point above to its conclusion: in the Jevons world, technological development would not merely sustain economic growth. Rather, each technological advance could permanently raise the growth rate.7 This is because, if labor were already not a bottleneck to production, then capital accumulation could sustain growth on its own: we would already be, more or less, in a world of self-replicating robot factories (even if the supply chains involved to build each factory part were long enough that no single factory could literally replicate itself on site). Better technology could then speed growth simply by raising the rate at which capital self-replicates.8 But frontier economies have seen roughly steady growth for centuries, not rapid acceleration.
Mmm, so if I understand correctly your first point is a hope that power concentrates in a multipolar way, and this multipolar world is stable.
What is a historical example of a “mechanism that redirects power from rivals to the public”? Also what is a present-day example? The closest I can think of is UHNW individuals lobbying the USG to preferentially tax their rivals.
Separately: “Capital in the 21st Century” has statistics which are like “in the past 100 years the fraction of wealth owned by the top 1% has increased rapidly”, this seems to be evidence that competitive dynamics between elites aren’t a very strong check on concentration of wealth (which is a form of power).
I agree that the current state of alignment isn’t sufficient for us to have “sovereign AI”. Maybe this is a good reason for continuing to do alignment work. I’ll have to think about it more.
I agree that something like the book’s scenario could play out once we have AIs that make people’s work irrelevant, but I want to note that Piketty’s book is just basically wrong about today or the past, and is almost akin to a crank writing about a subject that they don’t know.
This is more of a local validity concern than anything.
The specific reasons are below, and the link to the general post is here.