AI direction could make most workers much closer in productivity to the best workers. The difference between the productivity of the average and the best manual workers is perhaps around 2-6X
Based on the derivation, it seems you mean the difference in productivity of workers doing similar tasks in the same industry, which seems important to specify. Otherwise as written, I would say the “difference between the productivity of the average and the best manual workers” is >1000x between e.g. surgeons in rich countries and e.g. farm hands/construction workers/salespeople, etc in poor countries.
But it’s not clear to me the relevant multiplier is the one you pick within one country and industry. E.g. if we have abundant cheap AI cognitive labour, couldn’t I set up a company producing widgets in e.g. India, employ heaps of low-skill workers for cheap but make them very productive with AI training and direction, and make a killing?
Maybe the bottleneck here is more on political economy and insitution quality, such that even with AGI not all poor countries suddenly become rich because they have productive AI-led firms.
Overall I feel a bit confused how big I think the one-time boost would be, but if we are counting across countries I would suspect >10x. Perhaps in practice the US (or whoever has the intelligence explosion) would limit access to cognitive abundance to itself and maybe a few allies.
Based on the derivation, it seems you mean the difference in productivity of workers doing similar tasks in the same industry, which seems important to specify.
Yes exactly right—thanks for flagging!
But it’s not clear to me the relevant multiplier is the one you pick within one country and industry. E.g. if we have abundant cheap AI cognitive labour, couldn’t I set up a company producing widgets in e.g. India, employ heaps of low-skill workers for cheap but make them very productive with AI training and direction, and make a killing?
Yep this is a way we might be too conservative. Our analysis makes more sense for the US but might be too conservative for other countries. OTOH, as you say maybe there are limits for other countries’ output that isn’t about worker ability.
It’s also a bit unclear whether you’ll really be able to ratchet up worker productivity to the level of top workers just via AI instruction
Things like primary metals and chemical manufacturing typically already run 24⁄7, so I don’t think that AI instructed workers would increase output very much. Mining is also mostly 24⁄7, but there may be more room to increase output with better workers. o3 estimates light (finished goods) manufacturing runs about 100 hours per week, so there is room for more shifts and faster assembly lines, but you would need to redesign the products to be much less material consumptive in order to get a big increase in good production with the ~same amount of material going in, and this would require changing the equipment. But I do think that switching from making vehicles to making robots would be a large increase in the value produced. And you could argue with the massive increase in wealth that the price of goods will go way up. But I don’t think that’s what you are getting at with your Y-axis label of physical capabilities. I think there is a lot more room for productivity speedups on the repair and maintenance side. And this is important because when we switch to producing high value products like robots, that would mean we be producing many fewer new cars and appliances. I think we would produce robots to drive existing cars, rather than producing new self driving cars, because robots require so much less material. We may even produce domestic robots that wash dishes and clothes by “hand” for multiple houses given the shortage in clothes washers and dishwashers. This is because if wages for manual workers went up a lot worldwide, there would be tremendous demand for appliances. But one way of doing this for clothes is most people using a laundromat. There would also be a lot of demand for new buildings, but buildings are resource intensive, so we probably could not build that much more in just a few years. The steel would probably be diverted towards robot production, but we still could use wood and (unreinforced) concrete for buildings. Road building would probably also be reduced as steel reinforcement is needed for concrete roads. So overall, if we just try to produce more of the same things, at current prices, I think the 10x speedup just from AI-directed workers is not feasible. However, with the substitution with much higher value products like robots, I think it would be feasible.
By the way, it looks like your curve of growth is most similar to Hanson’s here (though presumably you think it will happen a lot sooner).
Based on the derivation, it seems you mean the difference in productivity of workers doing similar tasks in the same industry, which seems important to specify. Otherwise as written, I would say the “difference between the productivity of the average and the best manual workers” is >1000x between e.g. surgeons in rich countries and e.g. farm hands/construction workers/salespeople, etc in poor countries.
But it’s not clear to me the relevant multiplier is the one you pick within one country and industry. E.g. if we have abundant cheap AI cognitive labour, couldn’t I set up a company producing widgets in e.g. India, employ heaps of low-skill workers for cheap but make them very productive with AI training and direction, and make a killing?
Maybe the bottleneck here is more on political economy and insitution quality, such that even with AGI not all poor countries suddenly become rich because they have productive AI-led firms.
Overall I feel a bit confused how big I think the one-time boost would be, but if we are counting across countries I would suspect >10x. Perhaps in practice the US (or whoever has the intelligence explosion) would limit access to cognitive abundance to itself and maybe a few allies.
Yes exactly right—thanks for flagging!
Yep this is a way we might be too conservative. Our analysis makes more sense for the US but might be too conservative for other countries. OTOH, as you say maybe there are limits for other countries’ output that isn’t about worker ability.
It’s also a bit unclear whether you’ll really be able to ratchet up worker productivity to the level of top workers just via AI instruction
Things like primary metals and chemical manufacturing typically already run 24⁄7, so I don’t think that AI instructed workers would increase output very much. Mining is also mostly 24⁄7, but there may be more room to increase output with better workers. o3 estimates light (finished goods) manufacturing runs about 100 hours per week, so there is room for more shifts and faster assembly lines, but you would need to redesign the products to be much less material consumptive in order to get a big increase in good production with the ~same amount of material going in, and this would require changing the equipment. But I do think that switching from making vehicles to making robots would be a large increase in the value produced. And you could argue with the massive increase in wealth that the price of goods will go way up. But I don’t think that’s what you are getting at with your Y-axis label of physical capabilities. I think there is a lot more room for productivity speedups on the repair and maintenance side. And this is important because when we switch to producing high value products like robots, that would mean we be producing many fewer new cars and appliances. I think we would produce robots to drive existing cars, rather than producing new self driving cars, because robots require so much less material. We may even produce domestic robots that wash dishes and clothes by “hand” for multiple houses given the shortage in clothes washers and dishwashers. This is because if wages for manual workers went up a lot worldwide, there would be tremendous demand for appliances. But one way of doing this for clothes is most people using a laundromat. There would also be a lot of demand for new buildings, but buildings are resource intensive, so we probably could not build that much more in just a few years. The steel would probably be diverted towards robot production, but we still could use wood and (unreinforced) concrete for buildings. Road building would probably also be reduced as steel reinforcement is needed for concrete roads.
So overall, if we just try to produce more of the same things, at current prices, I think the 10x speedup just from AI-directed workers is not feasible. However, with the substitution with much higher value products like robots, I think it would be feasible.
By the way, it looks like your curve of growth is most similar to Hanson’s here (though presumably you think it will happen a lot sooner).
Thanks!