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I'm, if anything, more of a doomer than you are in that I think the chance of catastrophic changes from ai are much more concerning than job displacement. But I don't quite understand this particular angle of doom. AI's introduction to economies, assuming it's in the mundane form of doing our jobs better than us, will almost certainly be positive sum. At the same time you're losing your competitive advantage so will the rest of us doing non-physical labor. Any part of your spending that goes to these nonphysical labor will also drop precariously. And that's a lot of your spending. If you are correct and your fate is to become a medical conduit for gpt and be paid half as much while servicing four times as many people it seems like quite an assumption that your cost of living won't also fall by at least half. Perhaps that sounds absurd but you pay being cut in half should sound at least as absurd. What an economy where large swathes of thinking are automated is a very difficult question and any simple "This is world ending for people who primarily make their income via their cognitive ability" is not dealing with nuance. I think it's more likely that we'd all move to physical labor and live better than we do now than we're all out on the streets. At a macro economic level I would be willing to wager, if the friction of doing so is not too annoying, that AI will be seen to have had a positive impact overall on the lives of Indians in India in a decade if its primary impact is on jobs. All bets are off if it triggers some non-economic catastrophe.
I'm a knowledge worker who may see their competitive value halve (and I Live in the UK so am paid not that much to begin with), and my cost of living is almost entirely housing, food, energy.
The things that AI will make cheaper are an insignificant slither of my budget. But AI will vastly reduce my market value while vastly increasing the minimum productivity I will have to hit in order to retain that much reduced market value.
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Just because automation is good for the overall economy doesn't mean that the benefits will reach those displaced, or that the period of displacement won't be extremely disruptive or dangerous.
As it stands, it encourages monopoly and scale, you no longer have a lot of the coordination bottlenecks that prevent any single successful company from swallowing the majority of GDP, especially when it's even modestly superhuman AGI in charge.
I have more to lose than most Mottizens, because I am not a citizen of a wealthy Western country. India can't afford UBI, nor is it in a good position to ramp up its manufacturing to make good use of it. Countries like America or Australia can probably manage the former, and China the latter. My stay in the West is contingent on me being a value add, and that will almost certainly be weakened. After all, you're not going to be deported because your visa expired and you couldn't get a job anymore.
As for why I focus on AIU instead of AI simply killing all of us, I can do much better when it comes to preparing for the former, and I'm as helpless as anyone else if it's the latter. My marginal effort and concern is far better suited for the worlds where it makes a difference.
Is it possible that the gains of automation are taxed to subsidize UBI, or that decreased costs of goods helps soften some of the shock? Certainly. I'm not banking on it though, not before a lot of suffering.
India is already much more volatile than the West, and I have reason to suspect that the risk of things going sharply south for at least a while as all the sectors of the economy reliant on producing goods and services for international consumption become obsolete is unacceptably high.
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