2024 ByDefaultCapitalWillMatterMoreT

• (L. Rudolph L., 2024) ⇒ L. Rudolph L.. (2024). “By Default, Capital Will Matter More Than Ever After AGI.”

Subject Headings: Economic Substitution of Labor with AI, Post-Labor, Universal Basic Income, Post-Scarcity.

Notes

• Central Theme: The core claim is that once advanced AI (or “labour-replacing AI”) supplants human mental and/or physical work, capital (both physical capital like data centers and intangible capital such as money, patents, or large equity stakes) will become far more crucial than it is today. Consequently, capital owners may enjoy a permanent structural advantage, while non-owners lose leverage.
• Capital vs. Labor: With labor’s value dropping, the factor of capital (factories, data centers, software, money, etc.) dominates production. Whoever controls physical and financial capital can plug in AI to accomplish tasks once done by humans.
• Even in a future of plenty, resource allocation exists. More advanced AI does not eliminate scarcity entirely; it just reduces labor costs. Capital and resources like GPUs, hardware, energy grids, and real estate will remain finite.

Cited By

• http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%222024%22+By+Default%2C+Capital+Will+Matter+More+Than+Ever+After+AGI

Quotes

1. "I've heard many people say something like 'money won't matter post-AGI'. This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect."
2. "Labour-replacing AI will shift the relative importance of human v non-human factors of production, which reduces the incentives for society to care about humans while making existing powers more effective and entrenched."
3. "The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There's less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour)."
4. "Adam Smith could write that his dinner doesn't depend on the benevolence of the butcher or the brewer or the baker. The classical liberal today can credibly claim that the arc of history really does bend towards freedom and plenty for all ... But after labour-replacing AI, this will no longer be true."
5. "With labour-replacing AI, the incentives of states—in the sense of what actions states should take to maximise their competitiveness against other states and/or their own power—will no longer be aligned with humans in this way."
6. "All this means that the ability to get and wield power in the real world without money will dramatically go down once we have labour-replacing AI."
7. "Enforced equality is unlikely … large reductions in inequality have historically all been driven by one of the 'Four Horsemen of Leveling': total war, violent revolution, state collapse, and pandemics."
8. "By default, the world order might therefore look (even more than today) like a global caste system based on country of birth, with even fewer possibilities for immigration."
9. "In the best case, this is a world like a more unequal, unprecedentedly static, and much richer Norway … The only realistic forms of human ambition are playing local social and political games within your social network and class."
10. "I think it's much healthier for society and its development to be a shifting, dynamic thing where the ability, as an individual, to add to it or change it remains in place. And that means keeping the potential for successful ambition—and the resulting disruption—alive."

References

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2024 ByDefaultCapitalWillMatterMoreT	L. Rudolph L.			By Default, Capital Will Matter More Than Ever After AGI						2024