it doesn’t matter whether you’re fully replacing one job, or partially replacing multiple jobs. my model still implies that the market value of human labor diminishes more than the amount of money needed to keep everyone at the same level of consumption as they did before
leogao
Karma: 9,727
food production still consumes resources that the robots do care about. fuel, machinery, logistics capacity etc.
I don’t understand your objection. right now, the cost of replacing a given human with AI is greater than the cost of the human (because the compute is very expensive, the AIs are not very good, etc). over time, the AI gets cheaper and cheaper, until at some point it is precisely as expensive as the human. one day thereafter, AI will be very slightly cheaper than the human. you would prefer to pay for the AI compute instead of the human salary. at this moment in time, it will be economically incentivized to fire all the humans and replace them with AIs. because the AIs still cost almost exactly as much as humans at this moment, it won’t be economical to have substantially more AIs than you had humans the day before, because if it were, then we would have hired more humans in the first place; there must be diminishing returns to quantity of humans employed, and the previous equilibrium is still very close to the new equilibrium. but the amount of new value created for the world due to this switch is very small: only the delta between what the humans used to cost and what the AIs now cost.
one problem with UBI as a solution for AI economic disruption: at the moment when AI can first replace a human job, it will probably cost only epsilon less than the human. the cost will be mostly capital (datacenters, chips, electric plants, etc), rather than labor. so we can only afford to give the human epsilon UBI. as time goes on, eventually the AI gets cheap enough that humans can get substantial UBI, possibly exceeding their original income, as the AIs become more productive than the humans were. but there’s a big gap in the middle that we need to bridge somehow. the best case scenario is that different industries get automated at different times so that the gaps don’t line up, and we can redistribute the surplus from the first industries to be automated to fill the gap for later industries. the worst case is that all the gaps happen at once and we all starve to death because the surplus is not enough to keep people alive.
very cool! always exciting to see new stuff in cryonics. i’m curious to hear takes from people who know more about the details of the technology what they think of these new techniques.
idk about other labs, but openai employees are not permitted to take out loans against openai equity.
I don’t want to have to make every shortform a self contained article. it makes sense that full posts should explain the context, but I would find it very exhausting to have to e.g explain that I work at openai every single time I shortform post about anything openai related. if lesswrong shortform is the wrong place to do this, I’m happy to post elsewhere.
you could also move to some country like Paraguay with relatively lax immigration laws and a US timezone, and work remotely from there. this is probably a better option than nocturnal living for a lot of people.
raw potatoes cost about $2/kg in the US, $0.50/kg in china, and $0.25/kg in india. so it’s clearly not just the cost of preparation.
food and rent are two big ones. they’re both vastly cheaper elsewhere
to be clear, i’ve worked remotely, and i know exactly how the social dynamics can suck. maybe this would be a reasonable argument for why you wouldn’t do it for a 30% pay raise. but the disparity is so enormous (anywhere between a 2x and 100x, depending on where you are in the world and how good you are) that there must surely be a lot of people who would take the money and deal with it.
I’ve worked completely nocturnally before. it wasn’t the best experience in the world, and probably wouldn’t have been sustainable in the long run, but there are a lot of jobs out there that are way more demanding (submarine, space, oil rig).
I’m very confused why purchasing power varies so dramatically internationally. like why are there countries where everyone has very low wages but everything is also really cheap so it balances out? prima facie, huge disparities like this should get evened out by arbitrage.
the simple explanation is that some labor can only be performed locally, labor mobility is limited (immigration laws, people don’t like moving, etc), and transportation costs for goods exist (shipping and tariffs).
however, global shipping is ridiculously cheap. and the economy increasingly consists of white collar jobs which could in theory be done remotely. for example, it seems it mind boggling to me that a top tier SWE/RS in the bay area is worth 10-100x more than one in India or Vietnam. like sure, someone being in the same timezone is great, and Zoom sucks, and so on. but for that price delta surely you could pay people to live nocturnally, construct apartments with bright lights synced to Pacific Time, invest in much better video call technology like that Google Beam thingy, etc?
maybe one possibility is that labor mobility is not actually that low for the very toppest tier people, and so if someone is actually worth that much then getting them good immigration lawyers is a trivial cost relative to their value/cost. so the market for the best people is very efficient and they all brain drain to the bay area the first chance they have. and so the lower salary of outsourcing is partly illusory at the highest levels, because the distribution of talent is very different across different localities, due to agglomeration effects.
it feels rude to talk about specifics about other people. at a broad level, there are some people I’ve gained a lot of respect for. it’s easy for people to say they care about safety, so I don’t weigh that very heavily. but now I know who’s willing to step up and take actions in a crisis. and conversely too.
it’s obviously about the department of war situation. it wasn’t intended to be vague, it just didn’t occur to me that it wouldn’t be obvious what it was about.
I think this comment aged very poorly
I’ve learned a lot about various people around me, and myself, over the past few days.
I claim that even if the openai contract is not meaningfully weaker safety wise, it is still bad for openai to publicly signal solidarity with ant but then sign with DoW.
suppose hypothetically the only difference between the openai and anthropic contracts is that the DoW wanted a snicker bar, and anthropic didn’t want to give DoW the snickers bar. even then, it would be a huge dick move for openai to publicly signal solidarity, and then sign with DoW to give them the snickers bar.
the concept of a spontaneous unscheduled phone call is so strange and alien to me. you’re telling me there are people out there who want to be interrupted at random points in their day, and a large fraction of the time they are able to just pick up and talk? rather than constantly getting voicemails, and then leaving voicemails back because by the time you get around to replying, the caller is busy? do these people spend most of their days doing neither deep work nor being in social situations that would be rude to suddenly step away from?
if you want to know whether a given crypto project is a scam, there’s a very reliable heuristic, which is to assume the answer is yes. but suppose you want to actually not discard the one occasional good idea.
there is one very simple rule to determine if a crypto idea makes any sense whatsoever. crypto makes sense as a solution if you can’t trust anyone. not the government, not some institution that is bound by laws, not a majority vote of some set of reasonable people. (but also you think civilization won’t completely collapse, e.g the internet will keep working). removing the need to trust people/institutions is the only advantage of crypto. for this one advantage, we pay dearly in terms of everything else. crypto will always be slower, less efficient, less usable, less scalable than the obvious centralized solution.
this is a completely self consistent threat model. but the set of things you can trust in this world is extremely tiny. you can’t use anything tradfi, because those ultimately rely on visa/Mastercard and banks and such to not fuck you over. you can’t live in a house you own unless you have the arms to defend your house, because your ownership of that house depends on the government having a record somewhere that you own that house, and its willingness to use police to defend your house. you can’t really invest in anything except physical assets you can put in your house, because any stock is just a digital record at the DTCC. you can’t really rely on any food or water from the outside world to be safe unless you are testing it yourself or producing it yourself.
there are people who genuinely live in a world like this. especially in certain politically unstable countries. but this is a very small subset of people, and the vast majority of crypto projects will never ever be used by any of those people. (and there will almost always be a better way to help them.)