I second the general point that GDP growth is a funny metric … it seems possible (as far as I know) for a society to invent every possible technology, transform the world into a wild sci-fi land beyond recognition or comprehension each month, etc., without quote-unquote “GDP growth” actually being all that high — cf. What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean? and follow-up Some Unorthodox Ways To Achieve High GDP Growth with (conversely) a toy example of sustained quote-unquote “GDP growth” in a static economy.
This is annoying to me, because, there’s a massive substantive worldview difference between people who expect, y’know, the thing where the world transforms into a wild sci-fi land beyond recognition or comprehension each month, or whatever, versus the people who are expecting something akin to past technologies like railroads or e-commerce. I really want to talk about that huge worldview difference, in a way that people won’t misunderstand. Saying “>100%/year GDP growth” is a nice way to do that … so it’s annoying that this might be technically incorrect (as far as I know). I don’t have an equally catchy and clear alternative.
(Hmm, I once saw someone (maybe Paul Christiano?) saying “1% of Earth’s land area will be covered with solar cells in X number of years”, or something like that. But that failed to communicate in an interesting way: the person he was talking to treated the claim as so absurd that he must have messed up by misplacing a decimal point :-P ) (Will MacAskill has been trying “century in a decade”, which I think works in some ways but gives the wrong impression in other ways.)
What I would really like to see is cost of living plummet to 0. Then cost of thriving plummet to 0. Which would also cause GDP to plummet. However, this is only a problem in practical terms if the forces of automation require money to keep running, rather than, say, a benevolent ASI taking care of humanity as a personal hobby.
One way or another, though, AGI is going to have an impact on this world of a magnitude equivalent to something like a 30% growth in GWP per year at least. This includes all life getting wiped out, of course.
Maybe we need a standard metric for the rate of unrecognizability/incomprehensibility of the world and talk about how AGI will accelerate this. Like how much a person accustomed to life in 1500 would have to adjust to fit in to the world of 2000. A standard shock level (SSL), if you will.
The shock level of 2000 relative to 1500 may end up describing the shock level of 2040 relative to 2020, assuming AGI has saturated the global economy by then. The time it takes for the world to become unrecognizable (again and again) will shrink over time as intelligence grows, whether manifested as GDP growth, GDP collapse, or paperclipping. If ordinary people understood that at least, you might get more push for investment into alignment research or for stricter regulations.
I second the general point that GDP growth is a funny metric … it seems possible (as far as I know) for a society to invent every possible technology, transform the world into a wild sci-fi land beyond recognition or comprehension each month, etc., without quote-unquote “GDP growth” actually being all that high — cf. What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean? and follow-up Some Unorthodox Ways To Achieve High GDP Growth with (conversely) a toy example of sustained quote-unquote “GDP growth” in a static economy.
This is annoying to me, because, there’s a massive substantive worldview difference between people who expect, y’know, the thing where the world transforms into a wild sci-fi land beyond recognition or comprehension each month, or whatever, versus the people who are expecting something akin to past technologies like railroads or e-commerce. I really want to talk about that huge worldview difference, in a way that people won’t misunderstand. Saying “>100%/year GDP growth” is a nice way to do that … so it’s annoying that this might be technically incorrect (as far as I know). I don’t have an equally catchy and clear alternative.
(Hmm, I once saw someone (maybe Paul Christiano?) saying “1% of Earth’s land area will be covered with solar cells in X number of years”, or something like that. But that failed to communicate in an interesting way: the person he was talking to treated the claim as so absurd that he must have messed up by misplacing a decimal point :-P ) (Will MacAskill has been trying “century in a decade”, which I think works in some ways but gives the wrong impression in other ways.)
What I would really like to see is cost of living plummet to 0. Then cost of thriving plummet to 0. Which would also cause GDP to plummet. However, this is only a problem in practical terms if the forces of automation require money to keep running, rather than, say, a benevolent ASI taking care of humanity as a personal hobby.
One way or another, though, AGI is going to have an impact on this world of a magnitude equivalent to something like a 30% growth in GWP per year at least. This includes all life getting wiped out, of course.
Maybe we need a standard metric for the rate of unrecognizability/incomprehensibility of the world and talk about how AGI will accelerate this. Like how much a person accustomed to life in 1500 would have to adjust to fit in to the world of 2000. A standard shock level (SSL), if you will.
The shock level of 2000 relative to 1500 may end up describing the shock level of 2040 relative to 2020, assuming AGI has saturated the global economy by then. The time it takes for the world to become unrecognizable (again and again) will shrink over time as intelligence grows, whether manifested as GDP growth, GDP collapse, or paperclipping. If ordinary people understood that at least, you might get more push for investment into alignment research or for stricter regulations.
Yeah! GDP is possibly almost pathologically conservative.
Some relevant pieces for sheer transformation might be:
raw material extraction
energy capture and consumption
Importantly, there’s a crux here I think whether any autonomous self-replicating sub-economies go boom or whether demand remains (Baumol-style) determined by human consumption.
On the more ‘impact on life’ side, we could also ask about:
cost of living (nice one Jon)
(other things like cost of raising a child, cost of travel, …)
(perhaps relativised to median income or something)