Economist Alex Tabarrok, co-creator of Marginal Revolution, states that AI replacing all jobs would produce widespread wealth through redistribution rather than economic ruin.
The remarks appeared in a 109-second clip posted by TBPN.
#438Balaji@BALAJISI’m very sympathetic to Prof Tabarrok’s point of view. And of course he’s right that AI hyperdeflates costs in many areas, from code to math to biomedicine to robotics.
However…AI is also breaking as many markets as it creates. It’s flooding sales, marketing, recruiting, email, social media, identity verification, education, and countless other verticals with an onslaught of increasingly convincing scams, spam, and slop.
Essentially, just like cryptocurrency and social media, AI accelerates digital tribalism. Within the trusted tribe, you can indeed share code and context to accelerate progress. But outside the trusted tribe, every message will soon be presumed untrusted slop till proven innocent. (Just look at social media these days for a preview!)
That means the result of AI is not universally positive. There is a first order offsetting term where some markets have their verification costs radically increased by AI (eg email). And there is a second order cost in terms of boosting digital tribalism, and consequent distrust between groups. These are largely separate from the third question of whether AI actually takes jobs or not.
China currently has an advantage in the AI era because it’s the largest scaled digital tribe on the planet. With its centrally controlled network, it’ll have an easier time dampening the bad aspects of AI (like digital fraud) while amplifying the good parts (like physical robotics).
For the free Internet, however, we’ll need to evolve different tools to deal with the AI environment. Likely a web3 of trust, to deter fraud while promoting commerce.
But anyway…I just wanted to sound a note of caution. AI, like every technology, has both costs and benefits. It’s going to create a lot of wealth (already has), but it’s also going to create a lot of costs. And we should enumerate those costs in order to mitigate them.
TBPN@tbpnMarginal Revolution co-creator @atabarrok says that AI replacing all jobs (which he doesn't think will happen) is a rich man's problem. "People are worried AI is going to do all the jobs. But this means we are going to be fabulously wealthy." "Even without any jobs, just being fabulously wealthy — we'll figure things out. This is the sort of problem you want to have." "This is not like a natural disaster, which destroys wealth. This is a tsunami which creates wealth." "Yes, it could be a tsunami in the sense that it's going to be very dramatic. But it's going to be very dramatic in the sense of like, Santa Claus coming and leaving us stuff under the Christmas tree. That's drama we can handle." "It won't be without problems. But problems where the pie gets bigger are problems we can solve." "It's problems when the pie gets smaller, when we are forced into a zero-sum society of one person versus another, that's when society breaks down." "But not when the pie is getting bigger. We'll figure out ways to make sure everyone gets a decent slice. We can solve the problem of dividing it up with everybody being happy. I'm much less worried about that."