I feel like one important question here is whether your scenario depends on the assumption that the preferences/demand curves of a consumer are a given to the AI and not changeable to arbitrary preferences.
I think standard economic theories usually don’t allow you to do this, but it seems like an important question because if your scenario rests on this, this may be a huge crux.
I don’t think my scenario depends on the assumption that the preferences of a consumer are a given to the AI. Why would it?
Do you mean that I am assuming AIs cannot have their preferences modified, i.e., that we cannot solve AI alignment? I am not assuming that; at least, I’m not trying to assume that. I think AI alignment might be easy, and it is at least theoretically possible to modify an AI’s preferences to be whatever one chooses.
If AI alignment is hard, then creating AIs is more comparable to creating children than creating a tool, in the sense that we have some control over their environment, but we have little control over what they end up ultimately preferring. Biology fixes a lot of innate preferences, such as preferences over thermal regulation of the body, preferences against pain, and preferences for human interaction. AI could be like that too, at least in an abstract sense. Standard economic models seem perfectly able to cope with this state of affairs, as it is the default state of affairs that we already live with.
On the other hand, if AI preferences can be modified into whatever shape we’d like, then these preferences will presumably take on the preferences of AI designers or AI owners (if AIs are owned by other agents). In that case, I think economic models can handle AI agents fine: you can essentially model them as extensions of other agents, whose preferences are more-or-less fixed themselves.
So I was basically asking what assumptions are holding up your scenario of humans living rich lives like pensioners off of the economy, and I think this comment helped explain your assumptions well:
Right now, I think the biggest disagreements I have right now is that I don’t believe assumption 9 is likely to hold by default, primarily because AI is likely already cheaper than workers today, and the only reasons humans still have jobs today is because current AIs are bad at doing stuff, and I think one of the effects of AI on the world is to switch us from a labor constrained economy to a capital constrained economy, because AIs are really cheap to duplicate, meaning you have a ridiculous amount of workers.
Your arguments against it come down to laws preventing the creation of new AIs without proper permission, the AIs themselves coordinating to prevent the Malthusian growth outcome, and AI alignment being difficult.
For AI alignment, a key difference from most LWers is I believe alignment is reasonably easy to do even for humans without extreme race conditions, and that there are plausible techniques which let you bootstrap from a reasonably good alignment solution to a near-perfect solution (up to random noise), so I don’t think this is much of a blocker in my view.
I agree that completely unconstrained AI creation is unlikely, but I do think that in the set of futures which don’t see a major discontinuity to capitalism, I don’t think that the restrictions on AI creation will include copying an already approved AI by a company to fill in their necessary jobs.
Finally, I agree that AIs could coordinate well enough to prevent a Malthusian growth outcome, but note that this undermines your other points where you rely on the difficulty of coordination, because preventing that outcome basically means regulating natural selection quite severely.
I feel like one important question here is whether your scenario depends on the assumption that the preferences/demand curves of a consumer are a given to the AI and not changeable to arbitrary preferences.
I think standard economic theories usually don’t allow you to do this, but it seems like an important question because if your scenario rests on this, this may be a huge crux.
I don’t think my scenario depends on the assumption that the preferences of a consumer are a given to the AI. Why would it?
Do you mean that I am assuming AIs cannot have their preferences modified, i.e., that we cannot solve AI alignment? I am not assuming that; at least, I’m not trying to assume that. I think AI alignment might be easy, and it is at least theoretically possible to modify an AI’s preferences to be whatever one chooses.
If AI alignment is hard, then creating AIs is more comparable to creating children than creating a tool, in the sense that we have some control over their environment, but we have little control over what they end up ultimately preferring. Biology fixes a lot of innate preferences, such as preferences over thermal regulation of the body, preferences against pain, and preferences for human interaction. AI could be like that too, at least in an abstract sense. Standard economic models seem perfectly able to cope with this state of affairs, as it is the default state of affairs that we already live with.
On the other hand, if AI preferences can be modified into whatever shape we’d like, then these preferences will presumably take on the preferences of AI designers or AI owners (if AIs are owned by other agents). In that case, I think economic models can handle AI agents fine: you can essentially model them as extensions of other agents, whose preferences are more-or-less fixed themselves.
I didn’t ask about whether AI alignment was solvable.
I might not have read it more completely, if so apologies.
Can you be more clear about what you were asking in your initial comment?
So I was basically asking what assumptions are holding up your scenario of humans living rich lives like pensioners off of the economy, and I think this comment helped explain your assumptions well:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F8sfrbPjCQj4KwJqn/the-sun-is-big-but-superintelligences-will-not-spare-earth-a#3ksBtduPyzREjKrbu
Right now, I think the biggest disagreements I have right now is that I don’t believe assumption 9 is likely to hold by default, primarily because AI is likely already cheaper than workers today, and the only reasons humans still have jobs today is because current AIs are bad at doing stuff, and I think one of the effects of AI on the world is to switch us from a labor constrained economy to a capital constrained economy, because AIs are really cheap to duplicate, meaning you have a ridiculous amount of workers.
Your arguments against it come down to laws preventing the creation of new AIs without proper permission, the AIs themselves coordinating to prevent the Malthusian growth outcome, and AI alignment being difficult.
For AI alignment, a key difference from most LWers is I believe alignment is reasonably easy to do even for humans without extreme race conditions, and that there are plausible techniques which let you bootstrap from a reasonably good alignment solution to a near-perfect solution (up to random noise), so I don’t think this is much of a blocker in my view.
I agree that completely unconstrained AI creation is unlikely, but I do think that in the set of futures which don’t see a major discontinuity to capitalism, I don’t think that the restrictions on AI creation will include copying an already approved AI by a company to fill in their necessary jobs.
Finally, I agree that AIs could coordinate well enough to prevent a Malthusian growth outcome, but note that this undermines your other points where you rely on the difficulty of coordination, because preventing that outcome basically means regulating natural selection quite severely.