I understand comparative advantage. It's a neat theory. If A is better at literally everything than B, but A has finite time, then there is a net gain of wealth if B works, too. B should do whatever they suck least at, and A should do everything else. When all workers have sufficient input resources, and all workers are actively using their strongest personal skills, you maximize total wealth.
But let me try to explain a scenario where comparative advantage might not apply to AI.
Let's assume that we can clone A in seconds. Now we have A1 and A2. And A3, A4, etc. Each clone is exactly as good at everything as the original, and they share knowledge regularly.
Let's imagine that A works roughly 1,500x faster for 20% of the resources, compared to B. (Those are actual numbers from one use case I saw last week.)
At this point, the easiest way to maximize total wealth is to give all the raw resources to A. There's nothing that B could do that a clone of A couldn't do better. And clones of A are dirt cheap to make, and they cost of a fraction of the upkeep of B.
This isn't Economics 101. This is Ecology 101. In a world with finite resources, some species go extinct, because they can't find a viable niche. Chimpanzees do not have comparive advantage at anything. They survive only because either nobody wants their resources, or because we decide to spend some of our own resources to keep them around.
In a world where AIs and humans compete for the same raw resources, there are a lot of ways that smarter-than-human AI could be very bad for us.
Assuming we can't somehow magically control things much smarter than us, we should refrain from building ASI. Or if we do build it, we should hope the AI is like, "Nah, let's keep Earth as a nature reserve full of adorable humans while we go rebuild the galaxy." Or, if we're lucky, "Who wants to go for walksies to the rings of Saturn? Who's a good human?"
To the point about humans being economically viable, there's a good chance it'll be fine. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the
I do agree the alignment question still seems open.
I understand comparative advantage. It's a neat theory. If A is better at literally everything than B, but A has finite time, then there is a net gain of wealth if B works, too. B should do whatever they suck least at, and A should do everything else. When all workers have sufficient input resources, and all workers are actively using their strongest personal skills, you maximize total wealth.
But let me try to explain a scenario where comparative advantage might not apply to AI.
Let's assume that we can clone A in seconds. Now we have A1 and A2. And A3, A4, etc. Each clone is exactly as good at everything as the original, and they share knowledge regularly.
Let's imagine that A works roughly 1,500x faster for 20% of the resources, compared to B. (Those are actual numbers from one use case I saw last week.)
At this point, the easiest way to maximize total wealth is to give all the raw resources to A. There's nothing that B could do that a clone of A couldn't do better. And clones of A are dirt cheap to make, and they cost of a fraction of the upkeep of B.
This isn't Economics 101. This is Ecology 101. In a world with finite resources, some species go extinct, because they can't find a viable niche. Chimpanzees do not have comparive advantage at anything. They survive only because either nobody wants their resources, or because we decide to spend some of our own resources to keep them around.
In a world where AIs and humans compete for the same raw resources, there are a lot of ways that smarter-than-human AI could be very bad for us.
Assuming we can't somehow magically control things much smarter than us, we should refrain from building ASI. Or if we do build it, we should hope the AI is like, "Nah, let's keep Earth as a nature reserve full of adorable humans while we go rebuild the galaxy." Or, if we're lucky, "Who wants to go for walksies to the rings of Saturn? Who's a good human?"