Good interview. On why there is such vast disagreement about AI's potential economic impacts - I do think Ajeya's hypothesis about different base rates has merit, and I also agree that many economists are simply not entertaining the premise where AI actually can beat the top humans at all cognitive tasks. 

But I think one grossly underrated reason why economists and AI futurists talk past each other on this point is that most futurists don't understand what "economic growth" and "GDP" actually measure. Presumably, when futurists talk about "economic growth", they use it as a shorthand to refer to real output rather than nominal output, since the latter can be increased by simply printing money. However, we don't have ways to directly measure real economic growth — rather, all our measures are based on market transactions at nominal prices, and then we apply some "deflator" to account for inflation. Some adjustments are also attempted to account for changes in quality and consumer tastes (i.e. the consumption basket today is vastly different from the consumption basket 100 years ago), but this is a very messy and imperfect process. 

One of the reasons why GDP is so bad at capturing technological changes is that productivity improvements are, all else equal, deflationary. Consider AI-generated video and art - there is ~infinitely more of this today than there was 10 years ago, but because most of that is generated at such low costs, the amount that that video and art contribute to GDP is trivial. 

At the same time, AI will not eliminate positional and status goods. So even if AI eliminates all physical scarcity, positional goods are likely to then take up more and more of the overall "economy". This suggests that the correlation between GDP and the well-being metrics that people actually care about will weaken, if not decouple entirely. 

I suspect much of the gap between mainstream economists and AI futurists would shrink (though not entirely vanish) if futurists just stopped referring to "economic growth" and instead referred to how they expect physical output or energy usage to change over time. Both the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions can be explained just as well, if not better, with energy usage as with GDP. I think the same will be true of TAI. Most economists would readily concede that AI could increase energy usage by 1000x or more if AI managed to solve nuclear fusion (for example) - they'd just be (rightly) sceptical of any suggestion that that translates to a 1000x increase in measured GDP. 

Thanks for the post. I generally agree with your arguments but thought I should respond as someone currently doing research on a non-alignment problem. While I want a global pause, I have no idea what I personally can do to help achieve that. Whereas I at least have some idea of actions I can take that might help reduce the "massive increase in inequality/power concentration" problem. 

"Solve philosophy" is not the same thing as "implement the correct philosophy", and we need the AI to bridge that gap. There is a near-consensus among moral philosophers that factory farming is wrong, yet it persists.

This is a great point and I just wanted to call it out. I do think research is most likely to make a difference when it is produced with some thought about implementation - i.e. who the relevant audience is, how to get it to them, whether the actions you are recommending they take are actually within their power, etc. 

Thank you! Appreciate the feedback :)

I sort of see where both criticisms are coming from. The lowest-common-denominator, community-related posts get the highest engagement (including from people like the OP) because they require little context. The high context technical stuff is much harder to parse, and necessarily has a smaller audience, so gets less engagement (perhaps with the exception for AI Safety, which is currently experiencing a "boom"). 

There will naturally be fewer technical posts in the areas I'm interested in and, like Michael_PJ, I have no desire to read long technical posts in areas I'm not interested in, so I end up engaging disproportionately with community-related posts. 

Fiddling with the forum filters helps - I personally have downweighted posts tagged "Community" and "Building effective altruism" - but I suspect few people do this.

Hi Dushan. I cover this at a high level under "But impacts will be uneven" heading. I agree with you that countries in the supply chain will benefit and others less so.

Thank you! Yes, totally fair point. I am not trained in development economics so was very uncertain about this post, and expected there to be large differences between countries that I wouldn't pick up. It's disappointing to hear that the development econ mainstream has not been engaging with this topic.  

I had in mind the lower-income countries (mostly in Africa) when writing most of this. Your point about how, without TAI, these countries might be able to develop export industries and climb the development ladder is an interesting one. I had thought of that briefly, but was unsure how likely that was to happen, given we haven't seen any African country do it yet (to my knowledge). But perhaps it's just something that takes time and can only really happen after the middle-income countries become rich. 

AI agrees with you on cars and yachts, but says the majority of TVs, gaming rigs, and bikes consumed in HICs are made in LMICs. 

Fair enough. I think most of these are made in Asia and I do expect Asia (particularly China) to fare better than most other LMICs or developing countries. 

I should note that "transfers" is not limited to unemployment benefits. For OECD governments, the biggest class of transfer by far is currently public pensions. 

There are all sorts of good reasons why the elderly should be happy with lower public pensions (elderly poverty rates tend to be lower than for children or working-age adults, life expectancy has increased far more than retirement ages have). But that still doesn't happen for political economy reasons. Perhaps that will change with TAI - the elderly tend to own more capital so they should see massive returns in general. Maybe they'll be happy with <10x pension increases even as wages increase 10x. I just wouldn't take that for granted.

Agree 100% that governments would need to tap into capital gains somehow, or capital more broadly. I also like that Capital dividend fund idea - thanks for sharing. 

Thanks for the post! I share much of the concerns you raise, particularly your conclusion that benefits of AI will not be distributed equitably through natural market mechanisms. 

There will still exist a sizable gap between the development of these systems and their diffusion into the broader economy, but this gap will be on the order of years, not decades. 

I am curious about why you think this. And by "the broader economy" are you talking about the global economy or only the US? I don't have any firm views on speed of diffusion but I find decades plausible, at least when it comes to the global economy. Especially if diffusion involves widespread deployment of robotics.