I also enjoyed the discussion of how cost disease type effects can prevent extremely explosive growth even if one good cannot be automated. I’m pretty skeptical that there will exist such a good. I don’t have data to back this up, but I have a vague sense that historically when people have claimed that X cannot be automated away for fundamental reasons, they’ve been mostly wrong.
(That should be “if even one good”, right?)
What do you think of the idea that “consumption by a human” could be considered a task? People may value products / services being consumed by humans because it confers status (e.g. having your artwork be well-received), or because they want humans to have good experiences (aka altruism), or for other reasons.
As long as anyone has a reason to value human consumption of goods / services, it seems like that could play the role of task-that-can’t-be-automated-away.
Yeah that seems like a reasonable example of a good that can’t be automated.
I think I’m mostly interested in whether these sorts of goods that seem difficult to automate will be a pragmatic constraint on economic growth. It seems clear that they’ll eventually be ultimate binding constraints as long as we don’t get massive population growth, but it’s a separate question about whether or not they’ll start being constraints early enough to prevent rapid AI-driven economic growth.
(That should be “if even one good”, right?)
What do you think of the idea that “consumption by a human” could be considered a task? People may value products / services being consumed by humans because it confers status (e.g. having your artwork be well-received), or because they want humans to have good experiences (aka altruism), or for other reasons.
As long as anyone has a reason to value human consumption of goods / services, it seems like that could play the role of task-that-can’t-be-automated-away.
Yeah that seems like a reasonable example of a good that can’t be automated.
I think I’m mostly interested in whether these sorts of goods that seem difficult to automate will be a pragmatic constraint on economic growth. It seems clear that they’ll eventually be ultimate binding constraints as long as we don’t get massive population growth, but it’s a separate question about whether or not they’ll start being constraints early enough to prevent rapid AI-driven economic growth.