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I agree with you from a mathematical point of view. You have this "dead economy theory"[0]. I spent a lot of time trying to model this theory, enhance the theor

by Loic 22d ago

I agree with you from a mathematical point of view. You have this "dead economy theory"[0]. I spent a lot of time trying to model this theory, enhance the theory (lot of good HN comments) and find a "middle ground" path. My saying is that you end-up on an optimization saddle point where it is really hard to not fall into concentration of power. I was able to get radical abundance only at the cost of pretty hard regulations. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712

pbronez 22d ago
Did you publish your results anywhere? I’d be interested to read about them in detail.
agileAlligator 22d ago
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/shrinking-hierarchy https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/shrinking-hierarchy This is almost a direct counter to your essay, albeit written before you
theptip 21d ago
I agree there are some extremely bad outcomes from fast labor replacement. I don’t think it’s inevitable that the economy collapses though. The problem is that this model assumes that capital needs labor, but soon it may not. The easiest model is - assume we get robot laborers in the next few years. The AI firms that are displacing humans still need services, most of these will be purchased from other AI/robot firms, and so while prices will swing around dramatically, there is no reason the engine has to stop. (Depending on what the AIs want; you can assume that more compute and robots will be part of it.) I do agree that unbridled capitalism is mostly incompatible with human flourishing in this world and in any event you’ll see a lot more regulation; made feasible by how good AIs are at navigating huge Byzantine rulebooks. I view the techno-feudalist capitalist endgame as fairly unstable due to consolidation pressures, though I guess once we have nuclear-armed megacorps they might use MAD to prevent further mergers.

by Loic 22d ago

pbronez 22d ago

Did you publish your results anywhere? I’d be interested to read about them in detail.

agileAlligator 22d ago

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/shrinking-hierarchy https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/shrinking-hierarchy This is almost a direct counter to your essay, albeit written before you

theptip 21d ago

I agree there are some extremely bad outcomes from fast labor replacement. I don’t think it’s inevitable that the economy collapses though. The problem is that this model assumes that capital needs labor, but soon it may not. The easiest model is - assume we get robot laborers in the next few years. The AI firms that are displacing humans still need services, most of these will be purchased from other AI/robot firms, and so while prices will swing around dramatically, there is no reason the engine has to stop. (Depending on what the AIs want; you can assume that more compute and robots will be part of it.) I do agree that unbridled capitalism is mostly incompatible with human flourishing in this world and in any event you’ll see a lot more regulation; made feasible by how good AIs are at navigating huge Byzantine rulebooks. I view the techno-feudalist capitalist endgame as fairly unstable due to consolidation pressures, though I guess once we have nuclear-armed megacorps they might use MAD to prevent further mergers.