Luke Drago: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got it, got it. If we move back to the intelligence curse for a bit here, we talked about, or you mentioned social mobility as an indicator, kind of decreasing social mobility of an indicator, as an indicator of the intelligence curse happening. Perhaps you could sketch out what what a bad scenario looks like here. What does it look like if we have a more static society with lower social mobility, where capital is the main driver of progress, but that progress is not made by a set of diverse actors, it's made by companies that are larger and larger. And yeah, what does that kind of society look like? So I think there are a couple of examples here, but I'll just kind of tell the story to the perspective of 1 guy. Let's say I'm like a college graduate. Let's in the year 2020 or the year 2030. I've graduated from college. I'm struggling to get a job. I for some reason studied CS. I'm not sure why I did that in 2020, but you know, in 2026, it wasn't obvious what was going to happen. So I've woken up in 2030 and I cannot find an entry level job. I also couldn't find internships. Maybe like one or two companies here and there, but on the whole, it's just way cheaper not to get me involved. Okay, so I can't get a job. I'm relying on unemployment, which is increasingly strained because I'm not the only undergraduate who can't get a job. A whole lot of undergraduates can't get a job. Meanwhile, Microsoft has published record earnings because they've been able to halve their expenditure on employees and double their output. This is exciting for a lot of reasons, but remember that in the US, Corporate taxes are a very small amount of the federal budget. 50% of federal budget taxes, tax revenue comes from income tax. So we have a smaller and shrinking income tax base because less people are making that income while companies are posting record profits. And of course, they have the kind of money to work to evade those taxes as well. So our social safety nets are increasingly strained. Unrest is increasingly popular. People are very upset. They don't have a lot of time on their, or they have a lot of time on their hands. The thing they do is they protest or they get very upset. And the result of this is our social safety nets just stop working. They're not able to keep up with the strain. We aren't, we have to reduce payments. We have to make fiscal cuts. It's in the name of tightening our belts and not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. And in 2040, a whole lot of people just aren't employed. And there was a battle. There was a political debate of what we would do, and we've passed some sort of UBI for a while, but that UBI wasn't sufficient for the kind of standard of life that you would expect. And it's increasingly unstable. And of course, now we have a couple of companies who are really, really powerful. And those couple of companies are increasingly realizing that they'd be better off if governments weren't getting in the way all the time asking for things. And so if you look at the Tom Davidson Koo paper about how an AI or an individual armed with AIs could take power, you've got increasing social unrest, instability in institutions. This is a ripe environment for someone to come in and disrupt an existing order. Maybe that happens democratically, maybe it happens non-democratically. But the result is that suddenly, not only are you less economically safe, but you're also in a situation where the rights you took for granted to return your economic stability are now out of grasp. They're harder for you to get. That doesn't sound so great. Isn't it the case that companies, say Microsoft and Google and Nvidia and perhaps OpenAI and so on, that there will be fierce competition in providing products for consumers at the very top? So even if you have the main drivers of the economy being capital deployed by massive companies, you would see innovation, you would see from competition, and you would see better products and services.…

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