Takeaways from some reading about economic effects of human-level AI
I spent some time reading things that you might categorise as “EA articles on the impact of human-level AI on economic growth”. Here are some takeaways from reading these (apologies for not always providing a lot of context / for not defining terms; hopefully clicking the links will provide decent context).
Tom Davidson thinks that “explosive growth would require AI that substantially accelerates the automation of a very wide range of tasks in production, R&D, and the implementation of new technologies.”
This from Paul Christiano in 2014 is also very relevant (part of it makes similar points to a lot of the recent stuff from Open Philanthropy, but the arguments are very brief; it’s interesting to see how things have evolved over the years): Three impacts of machine intelligence
Takeaways from some reading about economic effects of human-level AI
I spent some time reading things that you might categorise as “EA articles on the impact of human-level AI on economic growth”. Here are some takeaways from reading these (apologies for not always providing a lot of context / for not defining terms; hopefully clicking the links will provide decent context).
Economic growth models that (essentially) take growth to be driven by population seem to fit / explain historic growth data fairly well.
(in at least most cases, I think) these predict that “AI robots” will lead to explosive growth (30%+ GWP growth for 10 years).
Things other than AI robots that could cause (effective) population to dramatically increase include: whole brain emulation, artificial wombs, genetic engineering, cultural evolution (naturally favouring cultures that tend to have lots of children), behavioural changes driven by something other than cultural evolution.
Ben Garfinkel cast some doubt on some of the data (I think especially pre-1500 CE) that is used to fit e.g. the Roodman model, but Tom Davidson doesn’t think this is a decisive blow for these kinds of models.
Tom Davidson thinks that “explosive growth would require AI that substantially accelerates the automation of a very wide range of tasks in production, R&D, and the implementation of new technologies.”
Tom Davidson gives ~60% as his probability of explosive growth this century given early enough “virtual AI” (though he says this is extremely rough!).
He thinks the main ways virtual AI doesn’t lead to explosive growth are bottlenecks like getting raw materials or conducting physical experiments, or that the economic models that imply explosive growth from AI robots are wrong
Tom Davidson’s (toy) mechanism for AI replacing human labour is
AI becomes good enough to do any task a top quality human worker could do working remotely
This allows us to quickly develop the level of robotics for AI robots capable of explosive growth by replacing human workers at ~almost all tasks
Energy payback times for solar panels are currently ~1 year at best (financial payback times are longer). If historic experience curves continue to hold, this could fall to months if solar panels supply a large fraction of current demand.
Terrestrial solar power could provide up to 1000x current civilizational energy usage, so there’s room for a new “AI economy” to grow its energy usage significantly (depending on future pre-AI-economy energy usage, of course).
Combining experience curves, evidence regarding feasibility of technological capabilities from nature, and availability of solar energy suggests that leaving earth will be feasible, which will in turn make settling other stars in the galaxy feasible, which will in turn (maybe) make settling other galaxies feasible.
Roodman’s model is arguably not useful for forecasting the arrival of AI, because it basically assumes powerful AI (it assumes that population is output bottlenecked).
If you’re interested in more on this topic, I’d highlight Holden Karnofsky’s recent blog series and Tom Davidson’s recent Open Phil report as good places to start.
In case it’s useful for other people, here’s the main stuff I (at least partially) read / listened to:
Experience curves, large populations, and the long run (from Carl Shulman’s blog)
Terrestrial solar energy could eventually support extremely large economies and populations (from Carl Shulman’s blog)
Roadmap for the “most important century” series (Holden Karnofsky’s Cold Takes blog post series)
Phil Trammell on Economic Growth under Transformative AI (Hear This Idea podcast)
Does Economic History Point Toward a Singularity? (Ben Garfinkel EA Forum post)
Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth? (report by Tom Davidson of Open Phil; see also accompanying blog post)
This from Paul Christiano in 2014 is also very relevant (part of it makes similar points to a lot of the recent stuff from Open Philanthropy, but the arguments are very brief; it’s interesting to see how things have evolved over the years): Three impacts of machine intelligence