Economist Noah Smith has made a similar argument, that comparative advantage will still preserve human jobs, with the caveat that it only holds if the AIs aren’t competing with humans for the same scarce resources. He does admit that if, say, humans have to outbid AIs for things like electricity to run farm equipment and for land to grow crops on, we might very well end up with a problem.
Yeah, getting outbid or otherwise deprived of resources we need to survive is one of the main concerns to me as well. It can happen completely legally and within market rules, and if you add AI-enhanced manipulation and lobbying to the mix, it’s almost assured to happen.
One thing I’ve been wondering about is, how fixed is the “human minimum wage” really? I mean, in the limit it’s the cost of running an upload, which could be really low. And even if we stay biological, I can imagine lots of technologies that would allow us to live more cheaply: food-producing nanotech, biotech that makes us smaller and so on.
The scary thing though is that when such technologies appear, that’ll create a pressure to use them. Everyone would have to choose between staying human or converting themselves to a bee in beehive #12345, living much cheaper but with a similar quality of life because the hive is internet-enabled.
Economist Noah Smith has made a similar argument, that comparative advantage will still preserve human jobs, with the caveat that it only holds if the AIs aren’t competing with humans for the same scarce resources. He does admit that if, say, humans have to outbid AIs for things like electricity to run farm equipment and for land to grow crops on, we might very well end up with a problem.
Yeah, getting outbid or otherwise deprived of resources we need to survive is one of the main concerns to me as well. It can happen completely legally and within market rules, and if you add AI-enhanced manipulation and lobbying to the mix, it’s almost assured to happen.
One thing I’ve been wondering about is, how fixed is the “human minimum wage” really? I mean, in the limit it’s the cost of running an upload, which could be really low. And even if we stay biological, I can imagine lots of technologies that would allow us to live more cheaply: food-producing nanotech, biotech that makes us smaller and so on.
The scary thing though is that when such technologies appear, that’ll create a pressure to use them. Everyone would have to choose between staying human or converting themselves to a bee in beehive #12345, living much cheaper but with a similar quality of life because the hive is internet-enabled.