I think what bothers me here is there’s a baked assumptions:
1. we get AGI or some other technology that is incredibly powerful/disrupts many jobs
2. Humans have to have jobs to deserve to eat (even though the new technology makes food and everything else much cheaper)
3. We can’t think of enough new jobs fast enough due to (1)
4. We have to let all the people who’s jobs we disrupted starve since they don’t deserve anything since they are not working
Conclusion: If you posit that you must maintain capitalism, exactly as it is, changing nothing, and you get powerful disruptive technology, you will have problems.
But is the conclusion “we should impede it” correct? Notice this is not a 1-party game. Other economic systems* can adopt powerful technology right away, and they will have an immense advantage if they have it and others don’t.
Had OpenAI held back GPT-4, long before 2033 other countries would have similar technology and would surge ahead in power.
*I am thinking of state supported capitalism, similar to China today or the USA during it’s heyday.
I think what bothers me here is there’s a baked assumptions:
1. we get AGI or some other technology that is incredibly powerful/disrupts many jobs
2. Humans have to have jobs to deserve to eat (even though the new technology makes food and everything else much cheaper)
3. We can’t think of enough new jobs fast enough due to (1)
4. We have to let all the people who’s jobs we disrupted starve since they don’t deserve anything since they are not working
Conclusion: If you posit that you must maintain capitalism, exactly as it is, changing nothing, and you get powerful disruptive technology, you will have problems.
But is the conclusion “we should impede it” correct? Notice this is not a 1-party game. Other economic systems* can adopt powerful technology right away, and they will have an immense advantage if they have it and others don’t.
Had OpenAI held back GPT-4, long before 2033 other countries would have similar technology and would surge ahead in power.
*I am thinking of state supported capitalism, similar to China today or the USA during it’s heyday.