One analogy for AGI adoption I prefer over “tech diffusion a la the computer” is “employee turnover.”
Assume you have an AI system which can do everything any worker could do, including walking around in an office, reading social cues, and doing everything else needed for an excellent human coworker.
Then, barring regulation or strong taste based preferences, any future hiring round will hire such a robot over a human. Then, the question of when most of the company are robots is just the question of when most of the workforce naturally turns over through hiring and firing, because all new incoming employees will be robots.
Of course, in this world, there wouldn’t just be typical hiring rounds, and there would probably be massive layoffs of humans to replace humans with robots. But typical hiring rounds provide an upper bound on how long the process would take. If the only way the company to “adopt” AGI is to hire human-shaped things, then the AGI will be human-shaped.
This is not what automation will actually look like, it’s just an upper bound on how long it’d take. In practice the time between ASI and 90% US unemployment ignoring regulation and x-risk would be more like 0-2 years because a superintelligence could come up with very quick plans to automate the economy, and the incentives will be much stronger than in typical hiring/firing decisions.
One analogy for AGI adoption I prefer over “tech diffusion a la the computer” is “employee turnover.”
Assume you have an AI system which can do everything any worker could do, including walking around in an office, reading social cues, and doing everything else needed for an excellent human coworker.
Then, barring regulation or strong taste based preferences, any future hiring round will hire such a robot over a human. Then, the question of when most of the company are robots is just the question of when most of the workforce naturally turns over through hiring and firing, because all new incoming employees will be robots.
Of course, in this world, there wouldn’t just be typical hiring rounds, and there would probably be massive layoffs of humans to replace humans with robots. But typical hiring rounds provide an upper bound on how long the process would take. If the only way the company to “adopt” AGI is to hire human-shaped things, then the AGI will be human-shaped.
This is not what automation will actually look like, it’s just an upper bound on how long it’d take. In practice the time between ASI and 90% US unemployment ignoring regulation and x-risk would be more like 0-2 years because a superintelligence could come up with very quick plans to automate the economy, and the incentives will be much stronger than in typical hiring/firing decisions.