>proper global UBI is *enormously* expensive (h/t @yelizarovanna)
This seems wrong. There will be huge amounts of wealth post-ASI. Even a relatively small UBI (e.g. 1% of AI companies) will be enough to support way better QOL for everyone on earth. Moreover, everything will become way cheaper because of efficiency gains downstream of AI. Even just at AGI, I think it’s plausible that physical labour is something like 10x cheaper and cognitive labour is something like 1000x cheaper.
Sorry! I realise now that this point was a bit unclear. My sense of the expanded claim is something like:
People sometimes talk about AI UBI/UBC as if it were basically a scaled-up version of the UBI people normally talk about, but it’s actually pretty substantially different
Global UBI right now would be incredibly expensive
In between now and a functioning global UBI we’d need some mix of massive taxes and massive economic growth (which could indeed just be the latter!)
But either way, the world in which that happened would not be economics as usual
(And maybe it is also a huge mess trying to get this set up beforehand so that it’s robust to the transition, or afterwards when the people who need it don’t have much leverage)
For my part I found this surprising because I hadn’t reflected on the sheer orders of magnitude involved, and the fact that any version of this basically involves passing through some fragile craziness. Even if it’s small as a proportion of future GDP, it would in absolute terms be tremendously large.
I separately think there was something important to Korinek’s claim (which I can’t fully regenerate) that the relevant thing isn’t really whether stuff is ‘cheaper’, but rather the prices of all of these goods relative to everything else going on.
>proper global UBI is *enormously* expensive (h/t @yelizarovanna)
This seems wrong. There will be huge amounts of wealth post-ASI. Even a relatively small UBI (e.g. 1% of AI companies) will be enough to support way better QOL for everyone on earth. Moreover, everything will become way cheaper because of efficiency gains downstream of AI. Even just at AGI, I think it’s plausible that physical labour is something like 10x cheaper and cognitive labour is something like 1000x cheaper.
Sorry! I realise now that this point was a bit unclear. My sense of the expanded claim is something like:
People sometimes talk about AI UBI/UBC as if it were basically a scaled-up version of the UBI people normally talk about, but it’s actually pretty substantially different
Global UBI right now would be incredibly expensive
In between now and a functioning global UBI we’d need some mix of massive taxes and massive economic growth (which could indeed just be the latter!)
But either way, the world in which that happened would not be economics as usual
(And maybe it is also a huge mess trying to get this set up beforehand so that it’s robust to the transition, or afterwards when the people who need it don’t have much leverage)
For my part I found this surprising because I hadn’t reflected on the sheer orders of magnitude involved, and the fact that any version of this basically involves passing through some fragile craziness. Even if it’s small as a proportion of future GDP, it would in absolute terms be tremendously large.
I separately think there was something important to Korinek’s claim (which I can’t fully regenerate) that the relevant thing isn’t really whether stuff is ‘cheaper’, but rather the prices of all of these goods relative to everything else going on.