I do make the “by default” claim but I also give reasons why advocating for specific regulations can backfire. E.g the environmentalist success with NEPA. Environmentalists had huge success in getting the specific legal powers and constraints on govt that they asked for but those have been repurposed in service of default govt incentives. Also, advocacy for a specific set of regulations has spillovers onto others. When AI safety advocates make the case for fearing AI progress they provide support for a wide range of responses to AI including lots of nonsensical ones.
Maxwell Tabarrok
Karma: 786
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The Best Bits From Build, Baby, Build
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Four Futures For Cognitive Labor
Tax Cuts and Innovation
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A High Decoupling Failure
The 2nd Demographic Transition
Metascience of the Vesuvius Challenge
Thank you for reading and for your well thought out comment!
American Acceleration vs Development
Claude vs GPT
I agree with this and I’m glad you wrote it.
To steelman the other side I would point to 16th century new world encounters between Europeans and Natives. It seems like this was a case where the technological advantage of the Europeans made conquest better than comparative advantage trade.
The high productivity of the Europeans made it easy for them to lawfully accumulate wealth (e.g buying large tracts of land for small quantities of manufactured goods), but they still often chose to take land by conquest rather than trade.
Maybe transaction frictions were higher here than they might be with AIs since we’d share a language and be able to use AI tools to communicate.
Yes that’s fair. I do think that even specific advocacy can have risks though. Most advocacy is motivated by AI fear which can be picked up and used to support lots of other bad policies, e.g how Sam Altaman was received in congress.