To be clear, I’m most interested in the far future with this question. I can still imagine growth being slow for some time with AGI (although I’m not sure), but it would still lead to a kind of economic transition that isn’t very sensitive to current capital and resource levels and composition, because we’ll have much better ways to acquire capital and resources with AGI, including also the capital and resources most useful to AGI. Almost all of the impact on the far future of economic growth seems like it would be through how it affects AGI or other lock-ins like extinction:
It’s useful to AGI and has ambiguous value (could be risky to give more resources to AGI).
It could be used to prepare us against unaligned AGI or other existential risks.
It doesn’t affect AGI or other risks, and the impact doesn’t go through to the far future, because of the economic transition with AGI (or extinction/collapse).
I agree that the impact would not go far beyond the arrival of AGI. That was part of the reason I chose a 40 year time frame, to make the argument less controversial for people who think the arrival of AGI is very probable this century.
However, I think the arrival of AGI this century is just too extreme of an outcome relative to all of our history to have more than a 30% confidence in. So I still think over 70% of the long-term value of growth (positive or negative) would be realized in expectation.
In response to your three scenarios for the impacts of growth on AGI, I think growth in the United States or China is most likely to lead to (1). However, the kind of growth I would advocate for, in low income countries, would be more (3). Although there is a good chance that the benefits of AGI will be captured by developed nations, and low income countries will benefit from any growth they can get now even in a world of AGI.
Do you expect a marginal increase in growth now to affect things much past the arrival of AGI? I would guess it wouldn’t.
To be clear, I’m most interested in the far future with this question. I can still imagine growth being slow for some time with AGI (although I’m not sure), but it would still lead to a kind of economic transition that isn’t very sensitive to current capital and resource levels and composition, because we’ll have much better ways to acquire capital and resources with AGI, including also the capital and resources most useful to AGI. Almost all of the impact on the far future of economic growth seems like it would be through how it affects AGI or other lock-ins like extinction:
It’s useful to AGI and has ambiguous value (could be risky to give more resources to AGI).
It could be used to prepare us against unaligned AGI or other existential risks.
It doesn’t affect AGI or other risks, and the impact doesn’t go through to the far future, because of the economic transition with AGI (or extinction/collapse).
I agree that the impact would not go far beyond the arrival of AGI. That was part of the reason I chose a 40 year time frame, to make the argument less controversial for people who think the arrival of AGI is very probable this century.
However, I think the arrival of AGI this century is just too extreme of an outcome relative to all of our history to have more than a 30% confidence in. So I still think over 70% of the long-term value of growth (positive or negative) would be realized in expectation.
In response to your three scenarios for the impacts of growth on AGI, I think growth in the United States or China is most likely to lead to (1). However, the kind of growth I would advocate for, in low income countries, would be more (3). Although there is a good chance that the benefits of AGI will be captured by developed nations, and low income countries will benefit from any growth they can get now even in a world of AGI.