Open Thread 415
...
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
1: New subscriber-only post, Learn Phrygian In Zero Days, about toddlers’ linguistic quirks.
2: ACX grantee Jacob Arbeid is looking for a cofounder for his AI safety lab. He writes:
I’m looking for a strong software or ML engineer to cofound the world’s first ‘automation-first’ AI safety lab. As a founding member of the UK’s AI Safety Institute, I saw firsthand how organisational, engineering and research bottlenecks limit humanity’s ability to build the safety tooling we need. To keep pace with AI’s rapid capability advances, we’ll need to go all-in on augmenting safety research and engineering with AI. I’m betting that a different kind of organisation - lean, flexible, relentlessly focused on automation with AI agents - can capture these gains to build at scales that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. I’ve received a generous grant from ACX to build this full-time, starting with AI evaluations. If this is something you feel should exist (no AI safety background required), reach out here or via LinkedIn.
3: Astronomer/engineer/writer Clifford Stoll (mentioned on last month’s links post for his book Silicon Snake Oil, but also famous for cybersecurity adventures and Klein bottle making) will be doing a Q&A at Mox in SF on January 13, see here for details/signup.
4: Many good responses to Highlights On The Comments On Vibecession, but I most appreciated the ones pushing back against my claim that, since China’s economy had dectupled in 25 years, Chinese economic nostalgia had to be baseless. One reader wrote (I haven’t confirmed):
[China has] estimated 50% youth unemployment, general unemployment now illegal to publish (but you can still approximate by falling commuter numbers), some government workers haven’t been paid in more than a year (living entirely off extortion/bribery; includes police, teachers, and all healthcare), common experience in private sector to have your paycheck delayed by “2 weeks” that turns out to be 16 weeks. Starting salary offer for software engineer in Shanghai is <1/3rd legal minimum wage. You cannot partake of public services without home “ownership” (hukou system, and technically its a land lease). Private health insurance is overwhelmingly likely to be a scam and rarely used. Public coverage primarily covers TCM; most western medicine is out of pocket. If you cannot afford to pay - even in a trauma situation - you will be escorted off the property so your death doesn’t lower hospital mortality statistics.
I apologize for telling the Chinese their complaints were invalid, and this is an interesting look at how massively increasing wealth can coexist with people’s lives getting bad (worse?), maybe relevant to last week’s other post…
5: Thanks to everyone who commented on the Permanent Moon Ownership post. I was trying to inspire people to think bigger than B2B SAAS employment in the New Year, but I think I got the tone wrong, and also said things that required more explanation than the literary form could offer. I might talk about them at more length, but here’s a brief summary of what I would have said in more declarative form:
This post was intended to counter a specific meme going around in Silicon Valley, and addressed primarily to the people spreading it. Poor people continue to have a hard time and a natural interest in becoming less poor, as always. The post, and everything below, is aimed at neurotic well-off people.
If we don’t get a crazy AI future, then human labor won’t be obsolete, and you won’t be in a permanent underclass (at least for that reason)
If we do get a crazy AI future, and the economy grows 100x (Industrial Revolution scale) or 1000000x (solar system colonization scale) in your lifetime, then you only need a little capital to remain as absolutely well-off as you are today. For example, after 100x growth, anyone with $25,000 in the stock market now would have $2.5 million.
If you don’t put away $25,000, then in order to stay equally well-off you only need for 1% (industrial scale) to 0.0001% (solar scale) of wealth to be redistributed through some combination of private charity and government welfare. Currently about 2% of income is redistributed via charity, and 25% via government (in the US). I glossed this as “you can get a moon in one of Dario Amodei’s galaxies”, and people had strong opinions on that exact example, but many people getting rich in AI have expressed interest in post-singularity charity, and I expect the 0.0001% - 1% target to be reached.
If you’re in one of the early industries to be affected by AI, you may have a very bad time before the economy can grow 100x or 1000000x. I wouldn’t describe this as a “permanent underclass” - it’s a subset of people, and their suffering is temporary - but it might be a very large subset, and it might continue longer than you can remain solvent. I agree it’s worth having savings ready to prepare against this scenario.
Some people have argued that you have to find a way to join an AI company, because AI company employees will form the new ruling class, with everyone else as serfs. I disagree. The main thing an AI company employee has that you don’t is AI company stock. But you can buy stock in Google, you may soon be able to buy stock in OpenAI and Anthropic, and even if not, you can get indirect exposure to these companies via stock in Amazon and Microsoft. I don’t recommend putting all your money in these stocks. But there’s no fundamental difference between a Google employee having 75% of their money in Google stock because they didn’t cash out their equity vs. you having 75% of your money in Google stock because you’re crazy and fail at diversification. So either put 75% of your money in Google stock or don’t (I recommend don’t), and don’t worry about how you need to join an AI company or be left out of the future oligarchy.
Gradual disempowerment (by humans or AI), coups by AI company executives, and techno-oligarchy by a tiny number of people are serious concerns. But you won’t join the oligarch class by starting a B2B SAAS company, and these concerns are more about democracy, freedom, inequality, and the meaning of life than about you personally being poor. The proper response to these scenarios (as the original post tried to argue) is to fight heroically against them and live forever in the pantheon of the benefactors of humanity - not to start a B2B SAAS company.
One way to think about all of this is that it’s important not to be very poor (you want enough capital to last through the transition period, aided by ballooning stock markets), and it might be extra good to be very rich (if you can be a literal oligarch, you have some new options available), but I don’t think going from 6-digit to 8-digit pre-singularity net worth gets you much more than pride.
Pride might matter - there could be permanent monetary inequality in a post-AGI world, and even if everyone is richer than today, your neighbor could be permanently richer than you (”a 20% bigger moon”), and this might grate for some people. But wealth is only one kind of potentially-permanent-inequality: Jeff Bezos, Bernie Sanders, Malala Yousafzai, Tyler Cowen, Dolly Parton, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chesley Sullenberger all have different types of status. Even if you’re thinking in terms of how you’ll be better than the Joneses in the distant changeless future, I encourage you to think bigger.