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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Comparative advantage relies either on high demand or limited means of production. In the classic Portugal & England example by Ricardo both countries have a fixed amount of labor, so although Portugal is better at producing both cloth and wine it makes sense that it focuses on wine and England on cloth, because England has a comparative advantage in cloth. But if either the demanded quantities are small enough that Portugal can cover them on its own or the amount of Portuguese labor grows to that point, there's less or even no need for trade with England anymore and the Portuguese economy can take full advantage of being more efficient at producing both goods.

Accordingly, in order for human comparative advantage to hold against automation it would have to be the case that demand growth outpaces the speed at which automated productive capacity can be expanded. Given that ChatGPT can already talk to thousands of people at the same time while robots outside of heavily constrained environments still struggle to perform basic tasks that are very simple for most humans, I'd say that competitive advantage for humans will break down first in the areas where LLMs are best at.

competitive advantage

What do you mean by this phrase?

Nothing, I'm just too absent-minded apparently.

Ah, makes sense.

I'd say that competitive advantage for humans will break down first in the areas where LLMs are best at.

That's not comparative advantage breaking down, that's comparative advantage working as advertised.

Yes, in the context of the overall economy you're completely right and maybe this was a dumb way to put it. However, I meant for this to be more of an example regarding the point of the speed of expansion. In a toy economy like Ricardo's with only various forms of text work as goods in demand and an advanced LLM and office workers as the only productive forces, the comparative advantage that office workers might have is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the AI model is practically infinitely scalable, that's what this was supposed to illustrate.

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