It seems to me you don’t get the point. The point of the post is that the equilibrium you’re hypothesizing doesn’t really exist. Individuals can only amp up their own consumption by so much, so you need a ton of people partying like it’s the end of the world to move capital markets. And that’s what you’d be betting on—not if the end is near but if everyone will believe it to the degree that they materially shift their saving behavior.
At least, if you only consider the capital supply side argument in the original post, this would be why it would fail. IIRC they don’t consider the capital demand side (i.e., what companies are willing to pay for capital). If a lot of companies are suddenly willing to pay more for capital—say, because they see a bunch of capital intensive projects suddenly being in-the-money, either because new technology made new projects feasible, or because demand for their products is skyrocketing—then you could still see interest rates rise. I didn’t discuss this factor here, since that wasn’t the focus of the original post, but Carl Schulman has made it elsewhere—at The Lunar Society podcast, I think. Now if near-term TAI were to create those dynamics, then interest rates could indeed predict TAI, and the conclusion of the first post would happen to hold, though it would be for entirely different reasons than they state, and it would be contingent on the capital demand side link actually holding
It seems to me you don’t get the point. The point of the post is that the equilibrium you’re hypothesizing doesn’t really exist. Individuals can only amp up their own consumption by so much, so you need a ton of people partying like it’s the end of the world to move capital markets. And that’s what you’d be betting on—not if the end is near but if everyone will believe it to the degree that they materially shift their saving behavior.
At least, if you only consider the capital supply side argument in the original post, this would be why it would fail. IIRC they don’t consider the capital demand side (i.e., what companies are willing to pay for capital). If a lot of companies are suddenly willing to pay more for capital—say, because they see a bunch of capital intensive projects suddenly being in-the-money, either because new technology made new projects feasible, or because demand for their products is skyrocketing—then you could still see interest rates rise. I didn’t discuss this factor here, since that wasn’t the focus of the original post, but Carl Schulman has made it elsewhere—at The Lunar Society podcast, I think. Now if near-term TAI were to create those dynamics, then interest rates could indeed predict TAI, and the conclusion of the first post would happen to hold, though it would be for entirely different reasons than they state, and it would be contingent on the capital demand side link actually holding