Who's done high quality work / can tell a convincing story about managing the economic transition to a world where machines can do every job better than humans?
Some common tropes and why I don't think they're good enough:
- "We've always managed in the past. Take the industrial revolution for example. People stop doing the work that's been automated and find new, usually better-compensated work to do." This is true, and I think it will probably be an important component of the transition. But it's clearly not sufficient if machines are better than humans at everything.
- "Tax AI (developers?) to pay for UBI." Again, something in this vein will probably be part of the solution. But:
- (a) UBI hasn't been well-tested.
- (b) I don't think the math works out if / when AI companies dominate the economy, since they'll capture more and more of the economy unless tax rates are high enough that everyone else receives more through UBI than they're paying the AI companies.
- (c) It doesn't have enough detail.
- Worldcoin. I think the idea is similar to the UBI story, but again it needs more detail.
Who has thought about this really deeply / well?
Note that for the purpose of this question, assume a world where alignment basically works (we can debate that question elsewhere).
It's not clear to me that the system wouldn't collapse. The number of demand side, supply side, cultural & political changes may be beyond the adaptive capacity of the system.
Some jobs would be maintained b/c of human preference. Human preference has many aspects like customer preference, distrust of AI, networking, regulation etc, so human preference is potentially quite substantial. (Efficiency is maybe also a factor; even if AI is super human intelligent the energy consumption & size of the hardware may still be an issue especially for AI embodied in a robot). But that stills seems like huge job loss.
So as we head in that direction there's going to be job loss plus the fear of job loss -- that's likely to pull down demand leading to even more job loss. But it's not a typical demand driven recession b/c 1) jobs are not expected to return, 2) possible supply side issues from transition to AI, 3) paradoxical disinclination to work b/c jobs are expected to disappear soon or b/c of 'UBI' & 4) cultural shock from AI & ensuing events.
How bad could this be? A vicious cycle of culture, economics & politics can be quite vicious. The number of people who quit critical jobs prior to those jobs being properly automated is an important variable. 'UBI' is not obviously helpful in that regard.
Addendum
The comment concerns transition to a post ASI economy & possible failures along the way. Assuming that ASI already exists, as Satron has done, removes most of the interesting & relevant aspects of the question.
A career or job that looks like it's soon going to be eliminated becomes less desirable for that very reason. What cousin_it said is also true, but that's an additional/different problem.