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Manual labor jobs are more resistant to GPT-4 than email jobs are, but they're not meaningfully resistant to actual AGI. A lot of the incapacity of our current robotics tech is on the software side, which AGI definitionally fixes. Advanced robots are presently expensive primarily because they're low-volume specialty items, which won't be true if smarter software suddenly allows them to perform far more tasks. A few years later you'll have robots building more robots with no human labor input, an exponential process which leads to hilarious outcomes like economic output doubling every month or two.
This isn't just a matter of tweaking some tax policies. Our reference class for something like AGI should be more like the transition into industrial capitalism, except much faster, and on a much larger absolute scale. Humans may survive; I'm not entirely persuaded by arguments to the contrary. Existing forms of social organization almost certainly won't. Thinking we'll fix this up with UBI or public works employment or even Fully Automated Luxury Communism is like a feudal king thinking he'll deal with industrial capitalism by treating factories like farmland and handing them out to loyal vassals.
Do people not become unemployed because the cost to employ them exceeds the value they generate?
I suppose that I could see some greater section of the economy ejecting their workers and flying off into the aether as its impression of value exits reality, but I don't really see such a disruption as being permanent because people will react and correct their subjective vision of value.
And I suppose that is my objection to this pathway of thinking, how does it displace the subjective theory of value?
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I absolutely agree! This is why I am pushing for having a plan now rather than just letting it rip as we did during the Industrial Revolution. There was an incredible amount of unnecessary pain and suffering during that transition which we could’ve prevented with the correct amount of foresight.
What have we learned from that revolution? Hopefully we at least won’t force parents and children to work 12 hours a day six days a week in horrific conditions. Does an early UBI help?
Perhaps a slower rollout would be desirable? What lessons have we learned from history, now that we know the general direction of a technological revolution?
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Since probably most Westerners nowadays are at least partly descended from feudal lords, I assume that when you say "descendants of feudal lords" you mean people who can reasonably lay claim to titles. Now, such people might be highly disproportionately over-represented among today's elites, but that by itself does not necessarily mean as much as it might initially seem. Black people are highly over-represented among NBA players, yet only a tiny fraction of black people are NBA players. Likewise, it is possible that although modern claimants to feudal titles might be highly over-represented among today's elites, they nonetheless only make up some trivial fraction of modern elites, maybe 1% or 2% or 5% or something along those lines. Whereas several hundred years ago, their noble ancestors made up a huge fraction of all of the elites in Europe, something more like 70% or 80% or 90% depending on how you count it.
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