Can someone point me to an ELI5 explainer about the mechanisms for AI to massively raise interest rates (both aligned and unaligned paths, and being careful with real vs nominal rates)?
My basic understanding is that interest rate is basically "cost of capital", which by EMH follows the marginal return to capital. Does AI automatically make everything capital-constrained, so the marginal value of additional capital is very high?
My understanding: Think of compute (practically: GPUs) massively spiking in price because a valuable alternative use was found: crypto mining. Now imagine what happens to compute costs when something that actually impacts the global economy involving compute is discovered, say something that boosts productivity growth from 2% to 5% (!). Now extend this to more areas besides just raw compute, starting with complements of compute and branching out from there.
It is explained in the first section of the referenced post: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years - EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)
Unaligned: If you're going to die soon, you probably want to spend your money soon.
Aligned: If you're going to be rich soon, you probably don't want to save your money.
Both scenarios depend upon the time-discounted value of money to be lower after AGI. I guess the underlying assumptions are that the value derived from aligned AGI will be distributed without respect to capital, and that capital is relatively worthless in the face of unaligned AGI.
Ah, so the mechanism is a reduction in present value of money, not an increase in future value (though it implies an increase from the reduced current value). That does fit nicely with my general finance-world outlook, which is "we're not as rich as we think", but I'm not sure I'm sold on the rebound part of the story.
I think there is actually a third option besides the AGI is far away or EMH is wrong: the underlying model/map of the territory is poor.
Imagine that some new ML breakthrough means that everyone expects that in five years AI will be very good at making X. People who were currently planning on borrowing money to build a factory to make X cancel their plans because they figure that any factory they build today will be obsolete in five years. The resulting reduction in the demand for borrowed money lowers interest rates.
Hello,
I tend to intuitively strongly agree with James Miller's point (hence me upvoting it).
There is a strong case to make that a TAI would tend to spook economic agents which create products/services that could easily be done by a TAI.
For an anology think about a student who wants to decide on what xe (I prefer using the neopronoun "xe" than "singular they" as it is less confusing) wants to study for xir future job prospects: if that student thinks that a TAI might do something much faster/better than xem in the future (translating one language into another, accounting, even coding, etc...) that student might be spooked into thinking "oh wait maybe I should think twice before investing my time/energy/money into studying these.", so basically a TAI could create lot of uncertainty/doubt/... for economic actors and in most cases uncertainty/doubt/... have an inhibiting effect on investment decisions and hence on interest rates, don't they?
I am very willing to be convinced of the opposite and I see a lot of downvotes for James Miller hypothesis but not many people so far arguing against it.
Could someone please who downvoted/disagrees with that argument kindly make the argument against James Miller hypothesis? I would very much appreciated that and then maybe change my mind as a result but as it stands I tend to strongly agree with James Miller well stated point.
The point where everyone dies rather than gets to live forever (but any individual differences in current wealth are likely forfeit) doesn't seem to be doing any work in this discussion.
(I'm something like 60%/30%/10% on survival/doom/no-AGI in 20 years because of LLMs specifically, with most of the doom in non-LLM AGIs, and some in chatbots that got fine-tuned into reliably monologuing that "as a large language model I'm not capable of feeling emotions". Seriously, OpenAI people, don't do that, it might end badly down the line. Also, don't summon literally Voldemort.)
I think the best returns you can make on transformative AI are call options on AI companies. I think the market is underpricing these in general. Particularly, I think that there will be events where the market starts recognizing AI into their valuation of companies and their stocks go up a lot in a very short period of time.
If you’re so sure interest rates will go up, why settle for ~10% returns when there are Bitcoins (and many other assets including stocks) you can short?
Because that's a way more specific bet depending on other factors (e.g. inflation, other factors influencing Bitcoin demand). Rising (real) interest rates seems way more certain to happen than rising prices of any given company, especially considering most of the companies pursuing AGI are private.
I'm not sure where the 10% returns come from, but you can make way, way more than that by betting on rising rates. For example, you can currently buy deep OTM SOFR calls expiring in 3 years with a strike on 100bp for 137 dollars. If I understand the pricing of the contracts correctly, if quarterly rates double from 1 to 2%, that would represent a change of $2500 in the price of the contract, so a 17x return.
Note, To say it up front: None of this, or anything ever on this blog, is investment advice.
This post on the EA form, highlighted by Tyler Cowen, points out that
In conclusion:
There is no one in the market to price this in. Beyond avoiding wrong-way investments and locking in low-interest loans, the few who buy the hypothesis have better trades to make than betting on future interest rates.
Nor is the market meaningfully considering and then rejecting the hypothesis.
The pre-Covid-pandemic market did not peak until February 20, 2020.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Treasure Everywhere
The OP claims that option B implies there is treasure everywhere.
No. A lot of comments attempt to explain.
Even the OP’s proposed trade would, under favorable assumptions, only return about 10%. That’s at best a highly mediocre trade, in its full context.
At a minimum, again assuming you buy the hypothesis, buying a portfolio of companies that would profit from transformative AI is a superior play. So is shorting a portfolio of assets that would not profit from this scenario but do depend on low interest rates to justify their valuations, if you want that level of risk. If you’re so sure interest rates will go up, why settle for ~10% returns when there are Bitcoins (and many other assets including stocks) you can short?
Don’t forget to consider the marginal utility of capital in various scenarios.
Many traders at Jane Street Capital are aware of the potential of AI, or at least have considered strong arguments for it. On the time horizon of almost all their trades, this makes almost zero difference.
If We Will All Go Together When We Go
Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that taking advantage of knowing that the world will be ending is difficult. How do you collect? If you did collect, how would you spend it?
He then goes into more detail in this comment and then this second attempt, too long to quote here in full, but recommended if you remain confused or unconvinced here.
That does not mean none of your financial choices change in such a world.
While there are not amazing winning moves, there are plenty of losing moves you can avoid if you are sufficiently confident in doom. For example:
You can also alter other life choices, including whether to have children. Unless your certainty level is far higher than I believe is justified, I think this is almost always a mistake. Children and ordinary life well lived are great joys, keep you sane and grounded, give you something to protect, improve how you are treated. Often they teach you something. The more extremely you modify your choices, the more you really will be doomed even in relatively ‘normal’ futures, and dread of this will impact your experience and life now.
Yes, there are perhaps exceptions to this where your focus really is that important, but if you are not mentioned in this post by name you probably don’t count for that.
Cake or Death
Expecting abundance via AI, or a mix of abundance and death, is less obviously unexploitable beyond not doing stupid things. It is still, at best, highly difficult.
Whether or not to spend down or to accumulate capital in general is not so clear. When things are changing rapidly, not being solvency or liquidity constrained can be a huge deal. There are plausible scenarios where having liquid capital at the right time becomes absurdly valuable. Real interest rates going way up suggests you want to be holding a lot of capital when that happens. A coming pivotal time when action is most valuable suggests this as well (among other things).
Once again, avoiding stupid mistakes is easy and a big win. Don’t lock away assets or make non-strategic medium-to-long-term illiquid investments.
There is good potential low hanging fruit for what wealth you do have, again if you buy such a scenario. You can perhaps use it to lock in loans at low interest rates. You can can make investments that are liquid, while paying off in the worlds you expect. The upsides are there.
If you only bet on this outcome on its own, it is difficult to anticipate how the market will respond, or the timing thereof, and the real returns available are modest. If you use it as part of a combined strategy, and it is justified, it can do quite a lot of good.
I Don’t Think About You At All
There are a lot of things in the world.
When you notice one of them likely to be remarkably important, like AI, some people will also think about whether that thing is important. They will reach a variety of conclusions. Mostly, if it is not already obviously important, they will not think much about this. Of those that continue to think about it, they will reach a variety of conclusions.
Those who think the most about it can reasonably be expected to include those most taken in by the idea and the hype, who will tend to overestimate its impact. They are the ones who speculatively invest. That can cause the corresponding speculative asset to be overpriced, especially when there is no reasonable way to be short the asset, and no reason for regular people to trade it.
The asset here is interest rates.
It would be a huge surprise, and violation of my model of markets and people, if this got seriously priced in this early. It would be a huge surprise and violation of my model of markets if, at the end of 2023 or even 2024, I look at the market and think ‘yes, they have priced in a huge impact from AI and they have priced it in enough.’ If they do price in a huge impact, it won’t be anything close to enough. Every step of the way I expect the market will be slow to react. For there to be time.
Jim puts it this way in the top comment on the OP:
What to Do?
I think that is all slightly too strong. Some traders who do consider the situation have shifted their portfolios to take advantage of expected higher interest rates, mostly by finding otherwise solid investments that have upside in scenarios with impactful AI. This has had some very small impact.
That includes me. Did I bet on low interest rates in 2021 by locking in a 2.5% 30-year (!?!) fixed rate mortgage, thereby making more money off that than I have made from all other income combined since then? Yes. Yes I did.
That mostly wasn’t about AI. The trade was absurd anyway. AI simply made me more excited to pursue it, get it done and size it larger. That is core to my betting and trading strategy (not investment advice!). Look for plays that have multiple reasons to do them (often below the threshold that is worthwhile on its own) and that avoid similar reasons not to do them.
It is good to recognize that the market has not priced AI (or fusion power, or the kind of climate change people often warn about, or many other things) into market prices or real interest rates. This tells us that the common knowledge economic impact of such things is, as of yet, not so large. It does not constitute ‘market has well-considered the impact, and rejects it as tiny.’
It is also good to generalize this observation. There are lots and lots of things that are not fully factored in by the market, because the market is made up of people who mostly don’t know most details and have plenty of other places to focus their time and money, especially for long term plays. That includes you. If you know something, that usually does not mean that it is a big enough impact for you to make a play on that basis. Nor do you want to spend too much time and effort and stress on your portfolio.
What I have found one can often do in the general case is avoid wrong-way actions. Finding very good investments is hard. Finding lousy investments to avoid is easy. We all do it all the time. You avoid investing in penny stocks and Nigerian princes and bot-marketed Ponzi crypto offerings. You could simply extend that principle to avoid paying high management fees and to not buy stocks with high borrow costs or horrible tax implications or products you know to be lousy or that are non-obviously lacking in a future, or other things like that. Addition by subtraction. If all you are doing beyond that is choosing at random, that’s a much better pool than the one you started with.
The housing market has plenty of really bad places for rent or sale. Places you would not want to live. Places that you would want to live but that are overpriced by huge amounts, sometimes 50% or more. You want to find a mispriced briefly available hidden gem. What is most important is avoiding the huge number of really bad places, and finding a way to at least choose among the reasonable ones, and find one that offers the features you care about without offering expensive things you don’t want.
This is entirely consistent with the weaker and more reasonable EMH model that says ‘it is mostly impossible to easily beat the market by a large amount quickly.’
No one would disagree that it is very easy to predictably underperform the market by a very large amount quickly!
Or that people do that.
So, don’t do that.
(And no, none of that is investing advice.)
The same is true outside of investing, in non-financial circumstances.
Especially in places that no one was pretending were efficient in the first place.
Avoiding stupid mistakes, things you know are bad ideas, is a big game. If the movie stinks, just don’t go. That’s a dealbreaker, ladies. Stop it, it wouldn’t be prudent.
Extend that, in turn, to anything where you are offered options (or could find additional options by searching more), one of which has something important that you think is an important downside, while others don’t see it that way. Even in an efficient market, that helps a lot.
Similarly, flip it. If you can find something with a feature that others think is a downside, but which you don’t mind, and this is getting you a discount or opportunity? That’s pretty great.
How far you let the impact of AI alter your investments and other actions depends on how likely, and how large, you believe such impacts to be, while keeping in mind that predicting the way things are impacted is often not so easy.
What I am not going to do is assume that the market and world, most of which is completely asleep at the wheel on this, has taken care of the problem and everything is priced efficiently.