7min chapter

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219 - Joscha Bach: Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and the Threat of AI Apocalypse

Robinson's Podcast

CHAPTER

AI and the Future of Wealth Distribution

This chapter explores the transformative impact of the AI revolution on economic dynamics and wealth distribution. It critiques the existing monetary systems and examines how technology could reshape employment and address income inequality.

00:00
Speaker 2
One other economic issue that I'm curious about your thoughts on is whether the coming AI revolution and continuing developments in AI will consolidate wealth and magnify wealth disparities.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think there is a slight bias in this perspective, which I would call the employer perspective, and the employee perspective. It's basically this idea that money is a fixed quantity that is not being conserved in a way and that cannot be arbitrarily mined out of the ground. And it's going to accumulate in the hands of very rich people that then can get arbitrary amounts of things done and everybody else is starving. And I don't think that money works like this. Money is actually a system of regulations that allows us to focus on an economic system and control that system. It's more like dopamine in a brain. is producing dopamine not because it's a nutrient, but because it's a messaging chemical. And that messaging chemical can be produced in arbitrary amounts in a way. You can also insert it in your brain using dopaminergic drugs like Adderall or cocaine. And these drugs are like stimulants in the economy, right? They are going to increase the productivity because they increase the anticipated reward in the system. And money is in some sense a message that anticipated reward. But it's not necessarily translating into actual reward. And so if the actual reward is not manifesting, you are going to crash. And this is also what happens with people that take drugs and it's happening with economies that don't work. And what I'm worried about is not so much the idea of wealth accumulation, but economic instability due to our inability to regulate the monetary system. And that is the main issue. The question of how much we can eat and how many resources we consume is mostly a function of how much our society can produce and is incentivized to produce. And then once that is, we can produce it, we just need to allocate it, right? That's not a big issue. If there is a surplus of the stuff that we can produce and the price for the stuff that gets produced goes down, right? And so the question is mostly, how can our governments and monetary institutions regulate the money, the terry and the way in which we distribute currency in the hands of people, or systems of allocation in such a way that the new goods that we can produce get distributed and that we actually produce the stuff that we want to have. In a capitalist system, there is this idea that instead of having a government that is measuring what people want, and then telling companies how much to produce, is not as efficient of having a distributed system that is basically measuring by giving people money into their hands what they actually want, and in this way having a feedback. And when people in the capitalist system are amassing enormous amounts of resource, it could mean either that they are using cheat mode or design problem in the system, and are basically accumulating dopamine as individual brain cells, and then use part of the brain to only work on their behalf and consume resources that they shouldn't consume. But it could also mean that they just prove that they're better at resource allocation than others. And as a result, they don't necessarily take much more money for themselves, but they are using this money to control future research allocation, for instance, by deciding which companies should be built because they're producing stuff that people actually want, which is the role of a venture capitalist. And you could say it's dramatically unfair that the people who are operating with such large spades are having business class seats or first class seats and the others are flying economy are not flying at all. And this is indeed a problem that society needs to solve, right? But it seems to be something that if you zoom out, does not seem to get worse over time. The income disparities between people 100 years ago and today are much, much smaller. And also the income disparities, arguably between people 50 years ago and today, are smaller in terms of living standard of what they translate into. Things that have changed, of course, is because of economies of scale and so on. We now have a few individuals that have nominally enormous amounts of resources at their disposal that didn't exist in the past, right? So you could argue that a billionaire today has resources that exceed the resources that a king had in past times. But of course the amount of freedom that this individual has are much smaller than the resources of a king. If you were a village chief dean in medieval times or in a tribal society you get a famous murder and rape. As a billionaire you generally don't. The things that you can do are limited by a system of laws. They have a certain degree of speakers consumption, but there is only so many haircuts you can get and so many cars you can own. At some point, it doesn't make sense. And also, if the society runs in this way, and we don't take out money at the top, which we constantly do, for instance via inflation and so on, the system is going to be unstable. So if the system wants to survive, it has to deal with all those things by implementing the right monetary theory. And so if we now zoom into the problem of technology is pushing some people out of jobs, and we need to find new employment for them that is gainful, is a valid problem. But the valid problem is a much more local perspective than the global one. How can we save the dollar? And after we printed trillions of dollars and then I was lashing around in the system. And we did this to deal with the issue that a lot of people were basically de facto went out of employment due to COVID. we subsidized their jobs. So they could only be on Zoom calls and still have a living that was mostly funded by getting a truck driver to drive from the Chinese container to your home. Right? And it's a very weird, non-sustainable situation to which we got used, and it is basically enormous stimulus that we pumped into the economy that we now have to deal with. That, I think, is a much more serious problem. How can we deal with the impending recession? How can we reset the dollar? Can we reset the dollar? Can we deal with the existing stakeholders who don't want to give up the resources that they cheated out of the system, and so on and so on? How can we get the government motivated to do the right thing? How can we elect a government that is incentivized to do the right thing? How can we build structure in a society? Right? And a lot of that is about processing information better, making models of reality that are testable, that can be exchanged between people that allow us to make predictions of our outcome. So I think AI is going to be helpful for that. It's going to be helpful for telling people what's actually the case. What is the ground truth? AI is that tool to deal with inconsistent information to make better models.

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