It’s important to be precise about the specific claim we’re discussing here.
The claim that R&D is less valuable than broad automation is not equivalent to the claim that technological progress itself is less important than other forms of value. This is because technological progress is sustained not just by explicit R&D but by large-scale economic forces that complement the R&D process, such as general infrastructure, tools, and complementary labor used to support the invention, implementation, and deployment of various technologies. These complementary factors make it possible to both run experiments that enable the development of technologies and diffuse these technologies widely after they are developed in a laboratory environment—providing straightforwardly large value.
To provide a specific operationalization of our thesis, we can examine the elasticity of economic output with respect to different inputs—that is, how much economic value increases when a particular input to economic output is scaled. The thesis here is that automating R&D alone would, by itself, raise output by significantly less than automating labor broadly (separately from R&D). This is effectively what we mean when we say R&D has “less value” than broad automation.
It’s important to be precise about the specific claim we’re discussing here.
The claim that R&D is less valuable than broad automation is not equivalent to the claim that technological progress itself is less important than other forms of value. This is because technological progress is sustained not just by explicit R&D but by large-scale economic forces that complement the R&D process, such as general infrastructure, tools, and complementary labor used to support the invention, implementation, and deployment of various technologies. These complementary factors make it possible to both run experiments that enable the development of technologies and diffuse these technologies widely after they are developed in a laboratory environment—providing straightforwardly large value.
To provide a specific operationalization of our thesis, we can examine the elasticity of economic output with respect to different inputs—that is, how much economic value increases when a particular input to economic output is scaled. The thesis here is that automating R&D alone would, by itself, raise output by significantly less than automating labor broadly (separately from R&D). This is effectively what we mean when we say R&D has “less value” than broad automation.