Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…I hadn’t thought about that at all. That is a very interesting observation. It is funny. Comparative advantage is something that people love to invoke and it’s a very beautiful idea obviously. There are limits to it. It’s a special limited model. Chimpanzees can do interesting things, but we don’t trade with them. I think it’s interesting to think about the reasons why. Part of it is just power, I think. Once there’s a sufficiently large power imbalance, very often—not always, but very often—groups of people seem to shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate. Maybe there’s something special about human beings, but maybe it’s also a more general thing. You need all these special things to be true before groups will trade. It’s not necessarily obvious. I think the big thing going on here is one, transaction costs. Two, comparative advantage does not tell you that the terms on which the trade happens are above subsistence for any given producer. People often bring this up in the context of, “Well, humans will be employed even in a post-AGI world because of comparative advantage.” There are five different ways that argument breaks down, but the easiest way to understand it is: why don’t we have horses all around on the roads? Because there’s some comparative advantage between cars and horses. One, there are huge transaction costs to building roads that are compatible with horses and cars at the same time. In a similar way, AI thinking at 1,000 times the speed that can shoot their latent states at each other is going to find it way more costly than the benefit, in terms of interacting with a human being in the supply chain. Second, just because horses have a comparative advantage mathematically does not mean that it is worth paying $100,000 a year, or whatever it costs to sustain a horse in San Francisco. That subsistence isn’t going to be worth the benefit you get out of the horse. I do think it’s interesting, the sheer fact… My expectation and my intuition obviously differs a great deal from yours on this. Most parts of the tech tree are never going to be explored. There are just too many interesting ways of combining things. There are too many deep ideas waiting to be discovered, and not only we, but nobody ever is going to discover most of them. So choices about how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit. It’s something I really dislike about technological determinist arguments. I’m willing to buy it low enough down when progress is relatively simple. But higher up, you start to get to shape the way in which you do the exploration. And it’s interesting, we are starting to shape it in interesting ways. There are various technologies that have been essentially banned. You think about DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, restrictions on the use of nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Those kinds of things weren’t done before the fact, but they’re starting to get pretty close in some cases, where we just preemptively decide, “Oh, we’re not going to go down that path.” So that starts to look like a set of institutions where we are actually influencing how we explore the tech tree.…

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