Capital, AGI, and human ambition – by L Rudolf L
I’ve heard many people say something like “money won’t matter post-AGI”. This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect.
First: labour means human mental and physical effort that produces something of value. Capital goods are things like factories, data centres, and software things humans have built that are used in the production of goods and services. I’ll use “capital” to refer to both the stock of capital goods and to the money that can pay for them. I’ll say “money” when I want to exclude capital goods.
The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There’s less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).
I will walk through consequences of this, and end up concluding that labour-replacing AI means:
The ability to buy results in the real world will dramatically go up
Human ability to wield power in the real world will dramatically go down (at least without money); including because:
there will be no more incentive for states, companies, or other institutions to care about humans
it will be harder for humans to achieve outlier outcomes relative to their starting resources
Radical equalising measures are unlikely
Overall, this points to a neglected downside of transformative AI: that society might become permanently static, and that current power imbalances might be amplified and then turned immutable.
O Noooooooooo! It’s not that I object to a permanently static society, with “current power imbalances . . . amplified and turned immutable.” Though actually, that does sound pretty bad. What I really object to is our *current* crop of 1 percenters being the group that gets sealed into the permanent upper sliver. I mean c’mon man. Do you really want the current crop of rock stars, Kardashians, dumb dot commers, billionaire pedophile dictators and various other scum dwellers to be that sort that rules over us? Yikes. Mmmm. I guess this how we get people wanting to go to Mars and beyond. It might suck big time, but compared to living on Earth it might seem human.