All of Deric Cheng's Comments + Replies

I'd definitely agree with the perspective you're sharing!

Even in a fast-takeoff / total nationalization scenario, I don't think politicians will be so blindsided that the political discussion will go from "regulation as usual" to "total nationalization" in a couple of months. It's possible, but unlikely. 

I think it's equally / more likely that the amount of government involvement will scale over 2 - 5 years, and during that time a lot of these policy levers will be attempted. The success / failure of some of these policy levers to achieve US goals will probably determine if involvement proceeds all the way to "total nationalization". 

Thanks for the feedback, Akash!

Re: whether total nationalization will happen, I think one of our early takeaways here is that ownership of frontier AI is not the same as control of frontier AI, and also that the US government is likely interested in only certain types of control. 

That is, it seems like there's a number of plausible scenarios where the US government has significant control over AI applications that involve national security (cybersecurity, weapons development, denial of technology to China), but also little-to-no "ownership" of frontie... (read more)

That's a very good point! Technically he's retired, but I wonder how much his appointment is related to preparing for potential futures where OpenAI needs to coordinate with the US government on cybersecurity issues...

Totally agree on the UBI being equivalent to a negative income tax in many ways! My main argument here is that UBI is a non-realistic policy when you actually practically implementing it, whereas NIT is the same general outcome but significantly more realistic. If you use the phrase UBI as the "high-level vision" and actually mean "implement it as a NIT" in terms of policy, I can get behind that.

Re: the simplicity idea, repeating what I left in a comment above: 

Personally, I really don't get the "easy to maintain" argument for UBI, esp. given my analy... (read more)

5clone of saturn
You're equivocating between real economic costs and nominal amounts of money transferred. Most of that $4 trillion is essentially fictional, taxed back again as soon as it's paid.

Re: "UBI in the context of automation", that's a great point and I can definitely see what you're getting at! The answer is that this is part 1 of a 2-part series - Part 1 is how to implement UBI realistically and Part 2 is how to pay for it. Paying for it is an equally or even more interesting problem. 

Re: penalizing productivity, it's pretty unclear from the research whether NIT actually reduces employment (the main side effect of penalizing productivity). Of course theoretically it should, but the data isn't really conclusive in either direction. B... (read more)

1Ape in the coat
Looking forward to the next part then. I think as a general rule, when something theoretically is supposed to happen and we do not have conclusive practical data, its reasonable to assume that it indeed will happen. Depends on the maintenance cost, obviously. But again the problem here is that our best theories strongly predict that impact will not be similar. NIT creates perversive incentives that UBI doesn't. And incentives matter - economy isn't a zero sum game. So a more appropriate question is: Would you rather invest 4 trillions in a company which evaluation will go up or 650 billions in a company which evaluation will go down? I predict that implementation of general NIT will face much more pushback than implementation of UBI. No matter how minor are the required tweaks to EITC they are politically unfeasible in US. Meanwhile, UBI has support all around the political spectrum, from leftists to libertarians.