00:06:02 · Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:06:02] S1: Right. So what do you think are the biggest cruxes then between you and, you know... Like, you just participated in this bet on explosive AI driven growth. It was you, Ben Moll, Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face, Andrew Ho, Robin Hanson, Philippe Lemoine against the fast growth people who are Will MacAskill from Forethought, Dwarkesh, Samuel Albanie, Jan Kulveit. What do you think are the biggest cruxes? Like, what would cause you to change your mind and say, oh, we will actually will get explosive AI growth?
00:06:39 · Alex Imas
[00:06:39] S0: I mean, it would need to have... So I think the the disagreement is not on the capabilities of the models either. So I think I'm extremely bullish on the capabilities of them. It's like a lot of the kind of conversations that I have are like, oh, you're not imagining, you know, millions of agents producing all of this output. And my answer is I absolutely am imagining. Mhmm. But I also see all of that generating kind of reasonable growth numbers because of the... The the idea is that, look, If these agents and all all of this automated production is in a competitive market... Now there's a state of the world where, look, we don't have competitive markets anymore. Something else happens to the economy. We're no longer in a in a competitive capitalist economy, then I don't really know what this... Right? I don't know how to put how to put a number on growth. But if you're... We're in a competitive economy, then prices will decrease. And I think the main kind of crux of the argument is, like, how fast do... Does production increase such that prices remain high still despite all of this output? Demand is able to support all of this new output. People are getting richer from this fact, so they're actually demanding the stuff that's being produced. A lot of the sort of conversations that I have with people on the other side, they don't really think about demand. Like, who is buying the things that is being produced? Do people have money to spend on to spend on whatever is being produced in order to generate double digit growth? So all of these things kinda need to meet, like prices don't collapse, people have enough money to to sustain double digit growth at the high prices, so on and so forth. And and I think not to mention all of this potentially, like, kind of political bottlenecks, political pressure, headwinds, all of these sorts of things. So I think as far as, like, timelines and and technological capabilities, I don't think there's a much of a disagreement with me on the other side. It's more about how does that technological capabilities, how do they translate to growth numbers?
00:08:49 · S2, Ruby Justice Thelot
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00:09:28 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Alex Imas
[00:09:28] S1: What about the subjective feeling of growth? Like, to the people living in this world, will it feel like they are undergoing explosive growth? [00:09:36] S0: That's exactly what I'm trying to say. They... You... May absolutely be feeling like they're experiencing explosive growth. I mean, you can look at what happened, and I don't wanna make this comparison too directly because I think this is gonna be larger than the agricultural revolution or something. That it'll be larger and it'll be faster. So I I don't... I I try not to anchor myself on previous technological technological episodes, but let's take, like, the explosive growth in agriculture, the explosive growth in industry that we have experienced in the past. People must have felt like things were just changing before their eyes. Like, the rug was being pulled under their feet. And yet, if you look at the economic numbers, they were not astronomical because of these... Just the way that the economy works. [00:10:24] S1: Well, with industry, it, like, it kind of did change the regime of growth from, like, having very, very slow economic growth that was essentially negligible on the scale of years or decades to having consistent economic growth of globally... What was it? Like, 3% a year during and after the industrial revolution. So that seems like a a pretty, like, transformative change in the nature of growth. Like, I don't see why that couldn't happen again, like, why we couldn't shift from a regime where we're growing the economy globally 3% per year to, like, 10% per year or a 100%.
00:11:00 · Alex Imas, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:11:00] S0: Yeah. I I I think I think we could... So my my growth forecast, you know, the the bet is about double digits. Right? I'm... I think it's fully within kind of the sphere of possibilities to go for... To, like, four or 5% consistent growth or something like that. And you kinda have to unpack what that number means. If you... Growth is exponential. So you... So so you... If you actually kind of back that number out, it's a... Even one or two purse... Extra percentage points is actually, in reality, you know, in some ways solves our fiscal issues, for exam... You can kinda grow out of all of the sort of fiscal issues that that that developed countries are having right now. Even one or two extra percentages can get you that. So it's... I I think there's also kind of a... The conversation to be had of what an extra two, 3% consistent percent growth on the growth path actually means for the economy, and it's it's actually a lot. Right? So you can get, like, the equivalent of the industrial revolution, the equivalent of the agricultural revolution consistently added to the... To these these economic growth. [00:12:05] S1: Right. On the whole, what do you think are the differences between your view on how automating firms and agent swarms will go versus Robin Hanson's view in Age of Em? [00:12:24] S0: Can you can you remind me of that view? I haven't I haven't read it I for a
00:12:24 · Alex Imas, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:12:24] S0: Can you can you remind me of that view? I haven't I haven't read it I for a [00:12:29] S1: think it's, like, largely similar. Maybe the... How how to characterize Robin Hanson's view of ems. He definitely... He spends a lot of time writing about, like, m culture and how, like, the culture and sociology of these entities will, like, matter a lot. He spends a lot of time talking about explosive growth regimes, like how he thinks that, you know, in just a couple of years or a few years of objective time, the m's may trigger like a singularity where like stuff gets really weird. Yeah. That... I I I guess that's a good thread to pull on. Like, what are the odds you think that for some time in the future, we'll get, like, a regime of, like, moderate growth, you know, like, 5% per year growth, Like, agent swarms are everywhere. The agents are roughly human level, but kind of jagged. And they transform the world, but it's still pretty recognizable. And then after that, a few years of that, you get some kind of, like, for real singularity that gets us, like, for real artificial superintelligence.