Comparative advantage is not at all load bearing here. The only thing that is load bearing is skepticism that AI capabilities will advance sufficiently and be sufficiently cheap.
Comparative advantage alone doesn’t mean you get to eat This is Arthur B’s point above, and mine when I pointed out that there are fewer horses these days than in the past.
It is simply a claim that the market clearing price of labour does not have to be sufficient for people to get as much resources as they want. Comparative advantage tells you which actor should do which task in order to maximise output, not what anyone gets paid.
We can see this even today, without needing to imagine a future very different from our present. Around 20% of people in Africa are undernourished, with 78% (!), or one billion people, unable to afford a healthy diet. In Western countries, there is strong empirical evidence and a clear intuitive case for why e.g. some cognitively disabled individuals have market clearing wages substantially below minimum wage thresholds.
If we take sufficiently capable AI as given, we are all cognitively and physically disabled individuals for the purpose of this conversation. If AI labour is sufficiently cheap, and additional workers are sufficiently easy to spin up, the market clearing price of human labour should theoretically approach 0.
Comparative advantage is not at all load bearing here. The only thing that is load bearing is skepticism that AI capabilities will advance sufficiently and be sufficiently cheap.
From a post on my substack @Nathan Young linked below (now on the EA forum)