AI could raise living standards and deepen inequality

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 39:08

   three futures of the world. I can see one where, as Greg was saying, the floor comes way up. You know, everybody gets subjectively like 10 times richer, just those sort of material abundance. The prosperity is crazy huge. People are like, man, relative to my life a decade ago, I'm doing great. But also in that world, these people who really learn how to use agents and get a lot of compute together and whatever, we have some trillionaires, you know, maybe 10 trillionaires, whatever. So the floor comes way up, dramatically up, but because this is a lever that people can really use, the most capable, most ambitious, the people who already started rich and have access to a lot of compute, inequality gets worse. So that's one world I can see. I can see another world where we Through many different kinds of things that could happen, the floor doesn't come up as much. We don't generate as much total prosperity, but also there's like less inequality. So maybe people in a decade feel like twice as rich, but inequality has come down. And actually, I'll just like stop and talk to those two because I think this is like the real crux of the issue.

2. 40:25

   Was the third much scarier? No, but it's like a distraction from the point I want to make. I think a lot of people in the world, like we think it's obvious, Greg, and I think it's obvious that people should prefer the first. I assume you also agree with that. But emotionally, it's not where a lot of people are. Well, I was going to say, I don't want to claim what is obvious or not. But I think for me personally, I just see so much potential in this technology.

3. 40:53

   And I think it's just so important from a societal level, just thinking about even American competitiveness. Like you look at robotics. Like I don't think that we are ahead in robotics at all. We are not. But with the software side, we do have this opportunity. And I think that is something all of these factors together in my mind are worth considering at once. Yeah. I mean, clearly. Actually, people who disagree on a lot of other things, I think, do agree that America needs to be competitive on chips and robots and AI and everything else.

4. 41:23

   But there's going to be this huge question about how we organize society and the economy. And do we push for maximum prosperity and accept the inequality that will come with that? Or do we say, like, actually, we're going to constrain it because we're going to be more focused on the relative nature and the fear that, well, if we don't do something, yeah maybe the world will get more prosperous but the people who are really good at using this are going to have all this power and you know emotionally i think intellectually it's kind of seems clear to me emotionally i really get why it's not clear and i really get the the fear that if we let inequality run here the compounding nature of this tool is something that we don't yet understand now the last thing i'll say on this is kind of no matter what i think everyone

5. 42:16

   should want much more compute much more infrastructure uh and the cheapest possible access to ai because otherwise i think you really exacerbate inequality if there's a limited amount of this and the price goes up because of supply and demand only the rich people have it yeah i wanted to to just build on that because i think that to some extent and some of this also plays back to earlier just how sam and i work together how we think right because i think that laying out those two options i think that's actually a really good point where it's like well are those the only two options right is there something that we're not seeing in the space and i think that the last thing sam said to me is an unlock in terms of thinking about so ai is really opportunity ai is opportunity for everyone if you have access right if you have compute if you don't have compute

6. 43:00

   you can't right no matter how good you are with agents if you don't have the compute to run them you're not gonna be able to do much and so i think a world where if everyone does have access to compute and you know i think for for my generation growing up we were much better at using computers than our parents right we grew up with it we were you know native and i think that the generation growing up now are going to be as good as i am at using agents i think are going to be 10 times better it's wild to watch that it is crazy i mean i wrote this is like the first massive story on core memory was that dude who built the nuclear fuser with with claude i just remember it was the fuser didn't even sort of matter as much as like what i saw him doing with his computer i'm like you just use this thing different you know he's like 22 and he has eight ai applications up

7. 43:44

   and yeah and if you get compute to that kid if you can get compute to every kid then it is really going to be the most extreme version of the american dream right where it's really anyone who has the desire, the willpower to really play with this. technology to really lean in to build with it to get the most out of it i think you're going to see this outperformance and i think you're going to see people have all sorts of mobility and so i think that to some extent the right way of answering this question of option one versus option two is to say exactly yeah it's something else and i think it's possible i feel like we're doing some broad stuff and we have a bunch of specific questions that i'm gonna i'm gonna be