niplav comments on shortplav

[niplav]

Consider the problem of being automated away in a period of human history with explosive growth, and having to subsist on one’s capital. Property rights are respected, but there is no financial assistance by governments or AGI corporations.

How much wealth does one need to have to survive, ideally indefinitely?

Finding: If you lose your job at the start of the singularity, with monthly spending of $1k, you need ~$71k in total of capital. This number doesn’t look very sensitive to losing one’s job slightly later.

At the moment, the world economy is growing at a pace that leads to doublings in GWP every 20 years, steadily since ~1960. Explosive growth might instead be hyperbolic (continuing the trend we’ve seen seen through human history so far), with the economy first doubling in 20, then in 10, then in 5, then 2.5, then 15 months, and so on. I’ll assume that the smallest time for doublings is 1 year.

    initial_doubling_time=20
    final_doubling_time=1
    initial_growth_rate=2^(1/(initial_doubling_time*12))
    final_growth_rate=2^(1/(final_doubling_time*12))

    function generate_growth_rate_array(months::Int)
        growth_rate_array = zeros(Float64, years)
        growth_rate_step = (final_growth_rate - initial_growth_rate) / (years - 1)

        current_growth_rate = initial_growth_rate

        for i in 1:years
            growth_rate_array[i] = current_growth_rate
            current_growth_rate += growth_rate_step
        end

        return growth_rate_array
    end

We can then define the doubling sequence:

    years=12*ceil(Int, 10+5+2.5+1.25+final_doubling_time)
    economic_growth_rate = generate_growth_rate_array(years)
    economic_growth_rate=cat(economic_growth_rate, repeat([final_growth_rate], 60*12-size(economic_growth_rate)[1]), dims=1)

And we can then write a very simple model of monthly spending to figure out how our capital develops.

    capital=collect(1:250000)
    monthly_spending=1000 # if we really tighten our belts

    for growth_rate in economic_growth_rate
            capital=capital.*growth_rate
            capital=capital.-monthly_spending
    end

capital now contains the capital we end up with after 60 years. To find the minimum amount of capital we need to start out with to not lose out we find the index of the number closest to zero:

    julia> findmin(abs.(capital))
    (1.1776066747029436e13, 70789)

So, under these requirements, starting out with more than $71k should be fine.

But maybe we’ll only lose our job somewhat into the singularity already! We can simulate that as losing a job when initial doubling times are 15 years:

    initial_doubling_time=15
    initial_growth_rate=2^(1/(initial_doubling_time*12))
    years=12*ceil(Int, 10+5+2.5+1.25+final_doubling_time)
    economic_growth_rate = generate_growth_rate_array(years)
    economic_growth_rate=cat(economic_growth_rate, repeat([final_growth_rate], 60*12-size(economic_growth_rate)[1]), dims=1)

    capital=collect(1:250000)
    monthly_spending=1000 # if we really tighten our belts

    for growth_rate in economic_growth_rate
            capital=capital.*growth_rate
            capital=capital.-monthly_spending
    end

The amount of initially required capital doesn’t change by that much:

    julia> findmin(abs.(capital))
    (9.75603002635271e13, 68109)

[Dagon]

Property rights are respected, but there is no financial assistance by governments or AGI corporations.

I have trouble imagining this equilibrium. Property rights are ALREADY eroding, at least in big cities—there’s a whole lot more brazen theft and destruction than ever, almost all without consequence to the perpetrators. Electronic-asset rights are a bit more secure in daily life, but you can’t eat a robinhood screen, and in a LOT of AGI-available worlds, all the electronic records become suspect and useless pretty quickly. At a lower level, stocks lose their value when companies lose their revenue streams. It’s the masses of humans striving and participating in a given economic system that makes it exist at all. If most humans are trading something else than money (time, attention, whatever), then money won’t be used much.

Losing your job to automation is absolutely survivable if it’s rare bad luck, or if new jobs that aren’t instantly (or already) automated can be created. Having a majority (or a large minority, probably) in that situation changes the fundamental assumptions too much to predict any stability of financial assets.

[niplav]

Thanks for the pushback :-)

Property rights are ALREADY eroding, at least in big cities—there’s a whole lot more brazen theft and destruction than ever, almost all without consequence to the perpetrators.

I assume you live in the US? Statista & FBI charts seem to speak against this on a nation-wide level (it could be that there’s less crime but it’s punished even less often).

But, in general, I decided to make this analysis in equilibrium as a simplifying assumption—if I’d tried to make it out of equilibrium I’d simply not been able to calculate anything.

Maybe my number is a soft upper bound: most out-of-equilibrium factors seem to point in the direction of more redistribution rather than less${}_{60\%}$.

If most humans are trading something else than money (time, attention, whatever), then money won’t be used much.

There will presumably be some entity that is producing basic goods that humans need to survive. If property rights are still a thing, this entity will require payments for the basic goods. Humans will additionally then care about non-basic goods, and eventually time, attention and status. The basic-goods-producing-entity will not accept human attention, time or status as payment${}_{30\%}$—so capital is the next best thing that pre-singularity humans own.

[Dagon]

I don’t intend it as strong pushback—this is all speculative enough that it falls well outside my intuitions, and far enough from historical distribution that data is misleading. Anything could happen!

here will presumably be some entity that is producing basic goods that humans need to survive. If property rights are still a thing, this entity will require payments for the basic goods.

Do you mean “if” or “iff”? In the case where a large subset of humans CAN’T make payments for basic goods, does that mean property rights aren’t a thing? I suspect so (or that they’re still a thing, but far different than today).

[Nate Showell]

What’s your model of inflation in an AI takeoff scenario? I don’t know enough about macroeconomics to have a good model of what AI takeoff would do to inflation, but it seems like it would do something.

[niplav]

Oh, yeah, I completely forgot inflation. Oops.

If I make another version I’ll add it.

[niplav]

Next up: Monte-Carlo model with sensitivity analysis.