Scott Alexander: belief

Transcript context

…But just to riff on proscriptive ideas, there’s one thing where we try to protect jobs instead of just spreading the wealth that automation creates. Another is to spread the wealth using existing social programs or creating new bespoke social programs, where Medicaid is some double digit percent of GDP right now and you just say, “well Medicaid should continue to stay 20% of GDP” or something. And the worry there, selfishly from a human perspective, is you get locked into the kinds of goods and services that Medicaid procures rather than the crazy technology that will be around, the crazy goods and services that will be around after AI world. And another reason why UBI seems like a better approach than making some bespoke social program where you make the same dialysis machine in the year 2050 even though you’ve got ASI or something. I am also worried about UBI from a different perspective. I think again, in this world where everything goes perfectly and we have limitless prosperity, I think that just the default of limitless prosperity is that people do mindless consumerism. I think there’s going to be some incredible video games after superintelligent AI and I think that there’s going to need to be some way to push back against that. Again, we’re classical liberals. My dream way of pushing back against that is kind of giving people the tools to push back against it themselves, seeing what they come up with. I mean, maybe some people will become like the Amish, try to only live with a certain subset of these super technologies. I do think that somebody who is less invested in that than I am could say, “okay fine, 1% of people are really agentic, try to do that. The other 99% do fall into mindless consumerist slop. What are we going to do as a society to prevent that?” And there my answer is just, “I don’t know. Let’s ask the super intelligent AI oracle. Maybe it has good ideas”. Okay, we’ve been talking about what we’re going to do about people. The thing worth noting about the future is that most of the people who will ever exist are going to be digital. And look, I think factory farming is incredibly bad. And it wasn’t the result of one person- I mean, I hope it wasn’t the result of one person being like, “I want to do this evil thing”- it was a result of mechanization and certain economies of scale.…

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