Jason Abaluck

13.5K posts

Jason Abaluck

@Jabaluck

Professor of Economics at Yale SOM

New Haven, CT Katılım Nisan 2009

493 Takip Edilen16.1K Takipçiler

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·22 Ağu

I thought I'd try to reconstruct Bryan's discussion with a 13-year-old about the minimum wage based on the below tweet: (@bryan_caplan let me know if anything is inaccurate)

Bryan Caplan@bryan_caplan

Took me under 5 minutes to turn a normal, smart 13-year-old against the minimum wage. Contrary to almost everyone, the textbook argument IS intuitive. It's just emotionally unappealing.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·22h

@benconomics Try yolo mode!

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Benjamin Hansen@benconomics·22h

@Jabaluck I just hope I have the time to cook in this AI future. Is it me instructing the robot every 5 seconds yes I want you to cook the next step yes I want you to cook the next step yes I want you to cook the next step yes I give you permission always to cook the next step.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·1d

This is meant as snark, but notice that, when AI puts everyone out of a job, no human being ever cleans a toilet again and cooking will be a habit of people who delight in mimicing rituals of their youth, because robots can make your favorites perfectly.

alz@alz_zyd_

When AI puts everyone out of a job, I guess all the unemployed people will start doing each other favors, like you cook me food, and I fix your toilet in return. I wonder what we should call all these favor exchanges

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·1d

When you enjoy a video game where the foes grow more dire with each level and culminate in a final boss, remember the debt you owe to Dante’s Inferno.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·1d

@erinhengel Yes, and I'm trying to point out that all of human history is a poor guide for what comes next in precisely this respect. Behaviors will continue among the old out of inertia, but they will fade. No one will clean toilets, and "labor" will persist only as leisure (i.e. cooking).

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Erin Hengel@erinhengel·1d

@Jabaluck I think he’s just trying to point out that a bunch of idle adults are probably going to do what they’ve been doing for all of human history—finding things to do that need doing and then trading the resulting output/service/whatever with others for stuff that still needs doing.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

@bruce_lambert I thought my post was clear: only you are an actual person.

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Bruce Lambert@bruce_lambert·2d

@Jabaluck So cute the way you attribute subjective states to the CEOs of the big AI labs, as if they were actual people.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

Now, imagine the epistemic vertigo of people who: 1) Are alive at this pivotal time in history 2) Seem to be pivotal decision-makers (e.g. CEO of leading AI company or world leader)

Henry Shevlin@dioscuri

cmon how can YOU, a person living through the singularity, read this and not draw the obvious conclusion

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

We will see a flurry of new AI proofs, but the next major benchmark is a purely AI proof where mathematicians say, "This is a hard and long-standing problem with a solution that required moving well beyond existing techniques, not (only) more search."

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

You can't tell from the problem statement alone whether this will be the case (although it's more likely for some problems than others), so it's something you need to rely on mathematicians to report ex-post after reviewing the solution.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

Current cutting-edge AI proofs are consistently of the form, "This was a hard and long-standing problem that turned out to be easier than expected if you search persistently."

Thomas Bloom@thomasfbloom

A very nice proof! A thread with a couple of comments:

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

Maybe an underappreciated mechanism historically: Famous people/leaders rationalize their outlier status as "God's plan" -> others look to famous people for guidance -> belief in God's plan memetically flourishes

Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck

Now, imagine the epistemic vertigo of people who: 1) Are alive at this pivotal time in history 2) Seem to be pivotal decision-makers (e.g. CEO of leading AI company or world leader)

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

Everything hinges on whether there are some tasks which humans excel at which prove difficult for AI (such as few-shot learning in certain contexts). I wouldn't bet on it, but the jury is still out.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

This is a somewhat farcical scenario, since the institution of hospitals would likely no longer be relevant if you had generally capable robots to deliver medical care in a more convenient way (were they aligned).

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·2d

Agents with capabilities exceeding humans at most tasks can surmount bottlenecks that otherwise would require enormous amounts of human effort.

Joshua Saxe@joshua_saxe

I'm perplexed at why people who I know are smarter than me, including the authors, buy the epistemic strategy used in the AI 2040 scenario, in which, tl;dr, the famous METR time horizon plot predicts eschatological doom. I don't believe the authors have sufficiently grappled with why the radiologists and programmers still have their jobs, and why baristas haven't been replaced by automatic espresso machines Or even why we haven't seen more small-scale scheming / reward hacking / misalignment damages due to the use of coding agents across Big Tech, in which we've already granted such agents significant autonomy. I think if these gaps were more deeply considered they'd be making a more nuanced and less extreme argument. In the meantime I'm concerned that resources, advocacy and governance are being influenced by their conceptual model.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·5d

The skill to use AI productively is the same as working w/ research assistants or graduate students productively. You develop ways to verify that results are correct (e.g. edge cases where you know the answer, internal consistency checks, etc...).

John Gallagher@MereSophistry

Sincere response: I don't understand how people trust any technical results. I tried (& continue to try) to have Claude Code do technical quantitative analysis. There are basic mistakes everywhere. I look at the results and within 30 seconds, notice numerous errors.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·3 Tem

If robots automate all jobs, they can give you extremely good advice on what to do with your life. Don't work on post-ASI economics. You are much dumber than superintelligences. Work on alignment or the economics of a jagged capability world.

John Horton@johnjhorton

Prominent economist in my DMs on a central but overlooked question raised by AGI:

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·30 Haz

Jumping off a cliff to avoid the slippery slope: "Peter Singer argued we should do much more to help poor people. I reject that argument. Therefore, don't help anyone."

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·25 Haz

@MarysRoommate That's a common view of outsiders but not of professional mathematicians. It seems to stem from the fact that he often recorded results in his notebooks without the accompanying calculation, combined with using analytical techniques unfamiliar to his contemporaries.

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Randy Lazarus@MarysRoommate·25 Haz

@Jabaluck Well except for Ramanujan. He was absolutely summoning solutions fully-formed from the ether with magic.

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Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck·24 Haz

The smartest people often underestimate how rare "non-magical" clear thinking is. Brilliant mathematicians are not summoning solutions fully-formed from the ether, but almost no one can think for long stretches without losing the thread.

Mathematica@mathemetica

"I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy." — Terence Tao

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Keşfet

@benconomics @erinhengel @bruce_lambert @MarysRoommate @elonmusk @BarackObama @taylorswift13 @cristiano