Equity total returns are influenced by many factors, including: interest rates, valuation metrics, economic sensitivity, inflation, the tax regime...and on and on.
Sure, but so is your insurance fund. Worse, actually, since if you structure your investments wrong you may go flat bankrupt, which would be pretty much impossible if I'm holding indices.
Moreover, tons of research has shown that major equity indexes incorporate relevant information into their prices very quickly, so it is unlikely that you know something the market does not (see Efficient Market Hypothesis).
Yes, but that's irrelevant. In this scenario, I'm insuring, not investing. I don't care about average or risk-adjusted returns or stuff like that, I care only that in those states of the world where there is severe technological unemployment likely affecting me, I have assets of value. So the question is, in technological unemployment scenarios (whatever their probability, howsoever they are priced into the efficient market) would my equities be worth more? I think they would.
I'll expect your call 10 years from now.
I dunno, so far I'm not impressed by your prospectus. :)
I haven't given much thought to the concept of automation and computer induced unemployment. Others at the FHI have been looking into it in more details - see Carl Frey's "The Future of Employment", which did estimates for 70 chosen professions as to their degree of automatability, and extended the results of this using O∗NET, an online service developed for the US Department of Labor, which gave the key features of an occupation as a standardised and measurable set of variables.
The reasons that I haven't been looking at it too much is that AI-unemployment has considerably less impact that AI-superintelligence, and thus is a less important use of time. However, if automation does cause mass unemployment, then advocating for AI safety will happen in a very different context to currently. Much will depend on how that mass unemployment problem is dealt with, what lessons are learnt, and the views of whoever is the most powerful in society. Just off the top of my head, I could think of four scenarios on whether risk goes up or down, depending on whether the unemployment problem was satisfactorily "solved" or not:
with AI problems, people and
organisations are willing and
able to address the big issues.
misery that unrestricted AI
research can cause, and very
wary of future disruptions. Those
at the top want to hang on to
their gains, and they are the one
with the most control over AIs
and automation research.
automation problems in a
particular way (eg taxation),
people underestimate the risk
and expect the same
solutions to work.
conflict between those benefiting
from automation and those
losing out, and superintelligence
is seen through the same prism.
Those who profited from
automation are the most
powerful, and decide to push
ahead.
But of course the situation is far more complicated, with many different possible permutations, and no guarantee that the same approach will be used across the planet. And let the division into four boxes not fool us into thinking that any is of comparable probability to the others - more research is (really) needed.