Tom Davidson comments on The Industrial Explosion

[Tom Davidson]

Adding my reply tweet:

Interesting, thanks. I wouldn’t have thought that consistency and quality were still capable of massive improvement for manual workers already in the top 10%. Also, not sure it’s realistic to assume that people that today are unproductive would rise to the very top 0.1% even with ideal AI coaching. But I do think the spread could be much bigger if AI is allowed to redesign factories from scratch. There’s a lot of uncertainty here, even more than I’d realized

Would be interested in any evidence you have of fat tails for manual workers

And David’s reply:

I don’t have any evidence like that, but I also think that it wouldn’t show up in numbers that get collected. (I would argue that workers who have output that passes QA at linearly better rates must have exponentially better “quality” in a sense, but it’s not obviously true.)