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Depends how much it costs to lengthen life, and how much more the second added century costs than the first, and what people’s discount rates are… but yes, agreed that allowing for increased lifespan is one way the marginal utility of consumption could really rise!

AGI Cannot Be Predicted From Real Interest Rates

by Nicholas Decker

Jan 281 min read 3

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AI safetyExistential riskForecastingAI alignmentAI forecastingAI governanceResearch

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This is a linkpost for https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/will-transformative-ai-really-raise

This is a reply to Chow, Halperin, and Mazlish’s paper which argued that we can infer that AGI isn’t coming, because real interest rates haven’t risen. Implicit in that paper is an assumption that the marginal utility of a dollar of consumption will fall. We get more and more things, and care less about each additional thing. This need not hold if there are new goods, however. We could develop capabilities which are not available now at any price. This also implies that the right way to hedge your risks with regard to AI depends on precise predictions about AI’s capabilities.

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trammellJan 305

I think this is a good point, predictably enough--I touch on it in my comment on C/H/M's original post--but thanks for elaborating on it!

For what it's worth, I would say that historically, it seems to me that the introduction of new goods has significantly mitigated but not overturned the tendency for consumption increases to lower the marginal utility of consumption. So my central guess is (a) that in the event of a growth acceleration (AI-induced or otherwise), the marginal utility of consumption would in fact fall, and more relevantly (b) that most investors anticipating an AI-induced acceleration to their own consumption growth would expect their marginal utility of consumption to fall. So I think this point identifies a weakness in the argument of the paper/post (as originally written; they now caveat it with this point)--a reason why you can't literally infer investors' beliefs about AGI purely from interest rates--but doesn't in isolation refute the point that a low interest rate is evidence that most investors don't anticipate AGI soon.

Nicholas DeckerJan 313

I feel like a real economist now — I’ve got my first referee report to read the prior literature :)

My gut feeling is that it will increase, because it might lead to an increase in lifespan. That’s so far beyond what we can do now that I think marginal utility goes up.

trammellFeb 14