Nice piece! I have a Master’s in Economics and I share your criticisms of the discipline. However, my reaction is that if there is AGI to the point that AIs have personhood/ownership rights (which would be a significant transformation of our legal system), and AIs are adept enough that they can trivially modify human preferences, the answer to the question of “what does the study of economics look like in such a world” is, honestly, “who cares?”
I think the purpose of economics is to allow humans to try to improve well being for humans… in a sufficiently post-AGI world (if such a thing comes to pass) humans would be neither the practitioners nor the subjects of economics or policy making, and as far as I can tell economics therefore might as well not exist. There’s no purpose in trying to economically model such a world, and I think that constrains the range of outcomes that economics papers can be expected to explore.
Nice piece! I have a Master’s in Economics and I share your criticisms of the discipline. However, my reaction is that if there is AGI to the point that AIs have personhood/ownership rights (which would be a significant transformation of our legal system), and AIs are adept enough that they can trivially modify human preferences, the answer to the question of “what does the study of economics look like in such a world” is, honestly, “who cares?”
I think the purpose of economics is to allow humans to try to improve well being for humans… in a sufficiently post-AGI world (if such a thing comes to pass) humans would be neither the practitioners nor the subjects of economics or policy making, and as far as I can tell economics therefore might as well not exist. There’s no purpose in trying to economically model such a world, and I think that constrains the range of outcomes that economics papers can be expected to explore.