Compute would also be reduced within a couple of years, though, as workers at TSMC, NVIDIA, ASML and their suppliers all became much slower and less effective. (Ege does in fact think that explosive growth is likely once AIs are broadly automating human work! So he does think that more, smarter, faster labor can eventually speed up tech progress; and presumably would also expect slower humans to slow down tech progress.)
So I think the counterfactual you want to consider is one where only people doing AI R&D in particular are slowed down & made dumber. That gets at the disagreement about the importance of AI R&D, specifically, and how much labor vs. compute is contributing there.
For that question, I’m less confident about what Ege and the other mechanize people would think.
(They might say something like: “We’re only asserting that labor and compute are complementary. That means it’s totally possible that slowing down humans would slow progress a lot, but that speeding up humans wouldn’t increase the speed by a lot.” But that just raises the question of why we should think our current labor<>compute ratio is so close to the edge of where further labor speed-ups stop helping. Maybe the answer there is that they think parallel work is really good, so in the world where people were 50x slower, the AI companies would just hire 100x more people and not be too much worse off. Though I think that would massively blow up their spending on labor relative to capital, and so maybe it’d make it a weird coincidence that their current spending on labor and capital is so close to 50⁄50.)
Re your response to “Ege doesn’t expect AIs to be much smarter or faster than humans”: I’m mostly sympathetic. I see various places where I could speculate about what Ege’s objections might be. But I’m not sure how productive it is for me to try to speculate about his exact views when I don’t really buy them myself. I guess I just think that the argument you presented in this comment is somewhat complex, and I’d predict higher probability that people object (or haven’t thought about) some part of this argument then that they bite the crazy “universal human slow-down wouldn’t matter” bullet.
Yeah, I agree with this and doesn’t seem that productive to speculate about people’s views when I don’t fully understand them.
They might say something like: “We’re only asserting that labor and compute are complementary. That means it’s totally possible that slowing down humans would slow progress a lot, but that speeding up humans wouldn’t increase the speed by a lot.” But that just raises the question of why we should think our current labor<>compute ratio is so close to the edge of where further labor speed-ups stop helping.
I discuss this sort of thing in this comment and in a draft post I’ve DM’d you.
Compute would also be reduced within a couple of years, though, as workers at TSMC, NVIDIA, ASML and their suppliers all became much slower and less effective. (Ege does in fact think that explosive growth is likely once AIs are broadly automating human work! So he does think that more, smarter, faster labor can eventually speed up tech progress; and presumably would also expect slower humans to slow down tech progress.)
So I think the counterfactual you want to consider is one where only people doing AI R&D in particular are slowed down & made dumber. That gets at the disagreement about the importance of AI R&D, specifically, and how much labor vs. compute is contributing there.
For that question, I’m less confident about what Ege and the other mechanize people would think.
(They might say something like: “We’re only asserting that labor and compute are complementary. That means it’s totally possible that slowing down humans would slow progress a lot, but that speeding up humans wouldn’t increase the speed by a lot.” But that just raises the question of why we should think our current labor<>compute ratio is so close to the edge of where further labor speed-ups stop helping. Maybe the answer there is that they think parallel work is really good, so in the world where people were 50x slower, the AI companies would just hire 100x more people and not be too much worse off. Though I think that would massively blow up their spending on labor relative to capital, and so maybe it’d make it a weird coincidence that their current spending on labor and capital is so close to 50⁄50.)
Re your response to “Ege doesn’t expect AIs to be much smarter or faster than humans”: I’m mostly sympathetic. I see various places where I could speculate about what Ege’s objections might be. But I’m not sure how productive it is for me to try to speculate about his exact views when I don’t really buy them myself. I guess I just think that the argument you presented in this comment is somewhat complex, and I’d predict higher probability that people object (or haven’t thought about) some part of this argument then that they bite the crazy “universal human slow-down wouldn’t matter” bullet.
Yeah, I agree with this and doesn’t seem that productive to speculate about people’s views when I don’t fully understand them.
I discuss this sort of thing in this comment and in a draft post I’ve DM’d you.