These economic concepts such as comparative advantage tend to assume, for ease of analysis, a fixed quantity of workers. When you are talking about human workers in the short term, that is a reasonable simplifying assumption. But it leads you astray when you try to use these concepts to think about AIs (or engines).
I think this is a central simplifying assumption that makes a lot of economists assume away AI potential, because AI directly threatens the model where the quantity of workers is fixed, and this is probably the single biggest difference from me compared to people like Tyler Cowen, though in his case he doesn’t believe population growth matters much, while I consider it to first order be the single most important thing powering our economy as it is today.
Agreed on population. to a first approximation it’s directly proportional to the supply of labor, supply of new ideas, quantity of total societal wealth, and market size for any particular good or service. That last one also means that with a larger population, the economic value of new innovations goes up, meaning we can profitably invest more resources in developing harder-to-invent things.
I really don’t know how that impact (more minds) will compare to the improved capabilities of those minds. We’ve also never had a single individual with as much ‘human capital’ as a single AI can plausibly achieve, even if its each capability is only around human level, and polymaths are very much overrepresented among the people most likely to have impactful new ideas.
I think this is a central simplifying assumption that makes a lot of economists assume away AI potential, because AI directly threatens the model where the quantity of workers is fixed, and this is probably the single biggest difference from me compared to people like Tyler Cowen, though in his case he doesn’t believe population growth matters much, while I consider it to first order be the single most important thing powering our economy as it is today.
Agreed on population. to a first approximation it’s directly proportional to the supply of labor, supply of new ideas, quantity of total societal wealth, and market size for any particular good or service. That last one also means that with a larger population, the economic value of new innovations goes up, meaning we can profitably invest more resources in developing harder-to-invent things.
I really don’t know how that impact (more minds) will compare to the improved capabilities of those minds. We’ve also never had a single individual with as much ‘human capital’ as a single AI can plausibly achieve, even if its each capability is only around human level, and polymaths are very much overrepresented among the people most likely to have impactful new ideas.