Scott Alexander: evaluation

Transcript context

…After AGI, right? Yeah. Then there’s this question of presumably we will have a lot of wealth somewhere. The economy will be growing at double or triple digits per year. What do we do about that? The thoughtful answer that I’ve heard is some kind of UBI. I don’t know how that would work, but presumably somebody controls these AIs, controls what they’re producing, some way of distributing this in a broad based way. So we wrote this scenario, there are a couple of other people with great scenarios. One of them goes by L Rudolph L online, I don’t know his real name. And his scenario, which, when I read it I was just, “oh yeah, obviously this is the way our society would do this”, is that there is no UBI. There’s just a constant reactive attempt to protect jobs in the most venial possible way. So things like the longshoremen union we have now where they’re making way more money than they should be, even though they could all easily be automated away, because they’re a political bloc and they’ve gotten somebody in power to say, “yes, we guarantee you’ll have this job almost as a feudal fief forever”. And just doing this for more and more jobs. I’m sure the AMA will protect doctors jobs no matter how good the AI is at curing diseases, things like that. When I think about what we can do to prevent this, part of what makes this so hard for me to imagine or to model is that we do have the superintelligent AI over here answering all of our questions, doing whatever we want. You would think that people could just ask, “hey, superintelligent AI, where does this lead?” Or “what happens?” Or “how is this going to affect human flourishing?” And then it says, “oh yeah, this is terrible for human flourishing, you should do this other thing instead”. And this gets back to this question of mistake theory versus conflict theory in politics. If we know with certainty, because the AI tells us, that this is just a stupid way to do everything, is less efficient, makes people miserable, is that enough to get the political will to actually do the UBI or not? It seems from right now the President could go to Larry Summers or Jason Furman or something and ask, “hey, are tariffs a good idea? Is even my goal with tariffs best achieved by the way I’m doing tariffs?” and they’d get a pretty good answer.…

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