Here’s an argument against this view—yes, there is some cost associated with helping the citizens of a country and the benefit becomes less great as you become a rentier state. However, while the benefits do go down and economic prosperity becomes greater and greater for the very few due to AGI, the costs of quality life become significantly cheaper to help others in the society. It is not clear that the rate at which the benefits diminish actually outpaces the reduction in costs of helping people.
In response to this, one might be able to say something like regular people become totally obsolete wrt efficiency and the costs, while reduced stay positive. However, this really depends on how you think human psychology works—while some people would turn on humans the second they can, there are likely some people who will just keep being empathetic (perhaps this is merely a vestigial trait from the past, but it irrelevant—the value exists now, and some people might be willing to pay some cost to avoid shaping this value even beyond their own lives). We have a similar situation in our world: namely, animals—while people aren’t motivated to care about animals for power reasons (they could do all the factory farming they want, and it would be better), some still do (I take it that this is a vestigial trait of generalizing empathy to the abstract, but as stated, the description for why this comes to be seems largely irrelevant).
Because of how cheap it is to actually help someone in this world, you may just need one or a few people to care just a little bit about helping people and that could make everyone better off. Given that we have a bunch of vegans now (the equivalent to empathetic but powerful people post AGI), depending on how low the costs are to make lives happy (presumably there is a negative correlation between the costs to make lives better and the inequality of power, money, etc), it might be the case that regular citizens end up pretty alright on the other side.
Curious what people think about this!
Also, many of the links at beginning (YouTube, World Bank, Rentier states, etc) don’t work.
Here’s an argument against this view—yes, there is some cost associated with helping the citizens of a country and the benefit becomes less great as you become a rentier state. However, while the benefits do go down and economic prosperity becomes greater and greater for the very few due to AGI, the costs of quality life become significantly cheaper to help others in the society. It is not clear that the rate at which the benefits diminish actually outpaces the reduction in costs of helping people.
In response to this, one might be able to say something like regular people become totally obsolete wrt efficiency and the costs, while reduced stay positive. However, this really depends on how you think human psychology works—while some people would turn on humans the second they can, there are likely some people who will just keep being empathetic (perhaps this is merely a vestigial trait from the past, but it irrelevant—the value exists now, and some people might be willing to pay some cost to avoid shaping this value even beyond their own lives). We have a similar situation in our world: namely, animals—while people aren’t motivated to care about animals for power reasons (they could do all the factory farming they want, and it would be better), some still do (I take it that this is a vestigial trait of generalizing empathy to the abstract, but as stated, the description for why this comes to be seems largely irrelevant).
Because of how cheap it is to actually help someone in this world, you may just need one or a few people to care just a little bit about helping people and that could make everyone better off. Given that we have a bunch of vegans now (the equivalent to empathetic but powerful people post AGI), depending on how low the costs are to make lives happy (presumably there is a negative correlation between the costs to make lives better and the inequality of power, money, etc), it might be the case that regular citizens end up pretty alright on the other side.
Curious what people think about this!
Also, many of the links at beginning (YouTube, World Bank, Rentier states, etc) don’t work.