Both good questions. On the first one: obviously, if we all die or if labor and capital become perfectly substitutable such that the economy collapses to y=AK, then there’s no amount of workforce restructuring you can do to preserve a real labor market.
But if, say, robotics remains bottlenecked by a lack of data even after we get a software-only singularity; or if demand persists for purely relational human services that AIs definitionally can’t provide; or we for whatever other reason do not see the returns to labor collapse, then we’ll still have a labor market, and it’ll look very different from the one today. We want to solicit some ideas for how to structure that labor market in the event that one of those scenarios ensues.
In terms of non-Americans — speaking only for myself, my first-best version of a response would include a safety net for people in all countries. Because of where the main labs are based, the country capable of taxing them or taking equity stakes is the United States, and after last year the politics of foreign aid from the US are unbelievably bleak. If there appears to be a path to a system of globally shared AI growth, I will be the first to support it. As it stands I’m very pessimistic.
This is exactly the kind of proposal we’re trying to solicit. I’d love if you submitted!