Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, my expectation is that it stays in the same pattern. Just to throw the opposite argument against you, my expectation is that it blows up because I think true AGI—and I’m not talking about LLM coding bots, I’m talking about actual replacement of a human in a server—is qualitatively different from these other productivity-improving technologies because it’s labor itself. I think we live in a very labor-constrained world. If you talk to any startup founder or any person, you can be like, what do you need more of? You need really talented people. And if you have billions of extra people who are inventing stuff, integrating themselves, making companies bottom start to finish, that feels qualitatively different from a single technology. It’s as if you get 10 billion extra people on the planet. Maybe a counterpoint. I’m pretty willing to be convinced one way or another on this point. But I will say, for example, computing is labor. Computing was labor. Computers, a lot of jobs disappeared because computers are automating a bunch of digital information processing that you now don’t need a human for. So computers are labor, and that has played out. Self-driving as an example is also computers doing labor. That’s already been playing out. It’s still business as usual.…

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