Dwarkesh Patel: preference

Transcript context

…Fair. But if we’re in the world where reproduction is still happening the way that it’s happening, I think… And this is a big question, I’m not making a prediction. You had David Reich on the show. His point on the last podcast was that we’re buzzing with natural selection. So even if you get some sort of indifference now, you might get selection to point into an even stronger preference for other humans. Here’s one way to think about it. How is the wealth of the richest people in the world instantiated? We were having a call earlier, and you made the point that their consumption is more geared towards relational goods. Like Mark Zuckerberg is hiring MMA instructors and dancers for his wife’s birthday, and so forth. But most of his wealth is just stock in Meta. As a controlling shareholder, he could say, “Meta, turn all this wealth into dividend income, and I will just spend that on consumption.” Instead, he would rather have his wealth compound and have Meta build more data centers. So you don’t even have to change humans for this to be the case. The humans who are wealthiest—and growing wealthier because their wealth is compounding—just have this almost Nick Landian preference for accelerating capital. That does seem to suggest that this is an important determinant of what kinds of things are produced in the future. There are two ways you could get the two kinds of people, one of whom prefers a human therapist and one of whom is fine interacting with the AI. If they both satiate equally quickly in capital but the one who likes the human therapist also just likes having some human-intrinsic services, then the marginal value of capital in the future, compared to the marginal value of capital today, for each of them if they start out equally rich, should be basically the same. There could be interactions and whatnot, but basically, that should be the same. If what’s driving the difference is that one person just doesn’t satiate in capital because they’re engaged by the prospect of exploring the universe and turning their head into a galaxy brain or whatever, and the other one satiates, then the person who doesn’t satiate in capital is going to, if they’re being rational, have a higher savings rate. So in the long run, they’re going to have most of the wealth, and the overall capital share will basically be the capital share of that person’s spending, which is going to be one.…

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