Imagine you’re a small but growing firm. You can choose whether to reinvest your profits in:
growth
productivity
There are various factors which might affect which of these is the better buy:
if you’ve already captured a large share of the market, you get diminishing returns from investing in growth
if your business processes are already pretty efficient, you get diminishing returns from investing in productivity
if you’re larger then researching how to improve productivity becomes more attractive. It costs the same to research the next productivity trick, but you can roll it out to a larger firm.
if your business processes are extremely unusual then researching productivity tricks might be more attractive, as there are more likely to be low-hanging fruit that haven’t been discovered by other people
So I imagine for most firms, their ratio of growth to productivity investment lies within a particular range. We expect the UberTool caricature to fail because it is investing far too heavily in productivity instead of growth (and it’s just too small to be able to do the necessary research).
So how might an AGI be different from UberTool?
It might actually be doing a lot of growth too (“take over the internet”)
the extremely unusual business processes thing—in particular not having humans in the loop
Just realised I’ve been blurring the distinction between tools and intangibles. If a firm wants to increase its efficiency, it could either design better chairs for its employees or design a better recruitment process and I’ve been treating these as the same kind of thing. I think the main difference is that intangibles are harder to buy and sell than tools are, and this may be relevant.
Imagine you’re a small but growing firm. You can choose whether to reinvest your profits in:
growth
productivity
There are various factors which might affect which of these is the better buy:
if you’ve already captured a large share of the market, you get diminishing returns from investing in growth
if your business processes are already pretty efficient, you get diminishing returns from investing in productivity
if you’re larger then researching how to improve productivity becomes more attractive. It costs the same to research the next productivity trick, but you can roll it out to a larger firm.
if your business processes are extremely unusual then researching productivity tricks might be more attractive, as there are more likely to be low-hanging fruit that haven’t been discovered by other people
So I imagine for most firms, their ratio of growth to productivity investment lies within a particular range. We expect the UberTool caricature to fail because it is investing far too heavily in productivity instead of growth (and it’s just too small to be able to do the necessary research).
So how might an AGI be different from UberTool?
It might actually be doing a lot of growth too (“take over the internet”)
the extremely unusual business processes thing—in particular not having humans in the loop
What other factors would be relevant?
Just realised I’ve been blurring the distinction between tools and intangibles. If a firm wants to increase its efficiency, it could either design better chairs for its employees or design a better recruitment process and I’ve been treating these as the same kind of thing. I think the main difference is that intangibles are harder to buy and sell than tools are, and this may be relevant.