How about this—in most non-disaster scenarios, AI would make the abundance a lot easier to achieve. And conservative or liberal, it’s basic human nature to go for abundance in such situations.
I don’t think this is true in the important sense; yes, we’ll plausibly get material abundance, but we will still have just as much conflict because humans want scarcity, and they want conflict. So which resources are “important” will shift. (I should note that Eliezer made something like this point in a tweet, where he said “And yet somehow there is a Poverty Equilibrium which beat a 100-fold increase in productivity plus everything else that went right over the last thousand years”—but his version assumes that once all the necessities are available, poverty would be gone. I think that we view clearly impossible past luxuries, like internet connectivity and access to laundry machines as minimal requirements, showing that the hedonic treadmill is stronger than wealth generation!)
How about this—in most non-disaster scenarios, AI would make the abundance a lot easier to achieve. And conservative or liberal, it’s basic human nature to go for abundance in such situations.
I don’t think this is true in the important sense; yes, we’ll plausibly get material abundance, but we will still have just as much conflict because humans want scarcity, and they want conflict. So which resources are “important” will shift. (I should note that Eliezer made something like this point in a tweet, where he said “And yet somehow there is a Poverty Equilibrium which beat a 100-fold increase in productivity plus everything else that went right over the last thousand years”—but his version assumes that once all the necessities are available, poverty would be gone. I think that we view clearly impossible past luxuries, like internet connectivity and access to laundry machines as minimal requirements, showing that the hedonic treadmill is stronger than wealth generation!)