Edward Castronova

III. The Specific Structure of the AGI Unemployment Argument and Where It Goes Wrong The AGI catastrophist argument typically runs like this: 1.AGI will be capable of performing any cognitive task a human can perform. 2.Cognitive tasks constitute the majority of employment in advanced economies. 3.Therefore, AGI will be able to replace the majority of workers. 4.Therefore, mass permanent unemployment follows. Step 3 to Step 4 is where the lump of labor fallacy smuggles itself in. The argument assumes that the quantity of cognitive work to be done is fixed, such that when AGI does it, humans are left with nothing. But this is precisely what is not true, for all four channels described above. Let me be more specific about how each gap in the argument fails: Gap A: “AGI can do the task” ≠ “There is no more task to do” When spreadsheets replaced bookkeepers in the 1980s, they did not reduce the total amount of financial analysis done in the American economy. They increased it, massively, because the cost of analysis fell, which meant more analysis got demanded, which meant more analysts got hired — to do more complex, higher-value analysis that the spreadsheets enabled. Automation of the low end of a cognitive spectrum does not eliminate work in that domain; it shifts the frontier of what human effort gets applied to upward. AGI will do the same thing. If AGI can draft a competent first-pass legal brief in 30 seconds, law firms won’t employ zero lawyers. They’ll employ lawyers who review, refine, strategize, negotiate, argue in court, build client relationships, exercise judgment in novel situations — and they’ll take on far more cases per lawyer because the cost per case has fallen. Total legal work done in the economy will increase, not decrease, because more people will be able to afford it. Gap B: The Argument Ignores Price Effects on Demand The catastrophist framing treats the displacement of workers as a pure subtraction problem. But displaced workers who find new jobs (as they historically do) are also consumers. The productivity gains from AGI don’t disappear into a void — they show up as lower prices, higher real wages, or both. Higher real purchasing power means more consumption of more goods and services, which means more demand for labor to produce them. Furthermore, the catastrophist argument generally ignores what happens to the profits generated by AGI-driven productivity. Those profits go to shareholders, who spend and invest them, creating demand elsewhere. Or they get competed away in product markets, lowering prices and raising real consumer purchasing power. Either pathway generates demand for labor. The only scenario where this mechanism fails is one where the gains from AGI are so concentrated and the distribution so pathologically skewed that effective aggregate demand collapses — which is a political economy problem (a distributional problem solvable through tax policy and redistribution) rather than a fundamental unemployment problem caused by the technology itself.

Top AI company Anthropic just exposed info about their own internal AI on an unsecured web server. What we’ve learned is deeply concerning. They describe it as representing a “step-change”, significantly better at hacking. In fact, so much better that they’re giving early access to cyberdefense companies to secure against what happens when it’s eventually released. Anthropic’s Claude AI was already used just a few weeks ago to hack the Mexican government, with hackers getting access to data on nearly 200 million people. Claude planned and executed much of the attack itself. Anthropic and other AI companies aim to develop artificial superintelligence, AI vastly smarter than humans. They hope that they’ll be able to secure it against causing human extinction, which countless AI scientists and even Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei have warned is a real threat. But how can we expect them to secure superintelligence when they can’t even secure a web server? It was just left wide open. That doesn't seem realistic. They’re making rapid progress towards superintelligent AI, but at least they have a plan to make sure it’s safe, right? Not really. The AI companies’ plan is essentially to get AIs to figure out how to do this and hope for the best. The race to artificial superintelligence needs to end.

The problem is that yes, in fact, you can. And that experience, unless artificially constrained, will only get better from here. Current models have their limits, but they are excellent at teaching you how to do things, they can handle conversations surprisingly well (within certain limits) and people are literally out there believing they have relationships with them already. You can choose NOT to do these things, you can find flaws in the ways they are done, but you can't say these things aren't possible.

The thing is you can say it's good all day long but over my dead body will I sign on to this future. I don't care what sort of remnant of a remnant I have to belong to....

No.

its time for congress to start talking about Universal Basic Income

Future historians will consider this important if they exist

Machine superintelligence would extinguish Democrats, Republicans, British, Chinese, scientists, cab drivers, and polar bears. It is a sign of hope that all of those now seem to be saying they'd prefer otherwise (except the polar bears).

"THIS IS INSANE." Even ***Neal DeGrasse Tyson*** (the most pro-science guy ever) is calling for an international treaty to ban superintelligence before everyone dies "Treaties are not perfect, but they are the best we have as humans." "You know what ended the Cold War? The realization that in a nuclear war ... everybody dies. MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction. That's what brought people to the table and say 'This is insane. We have to regulate it. We have to reduce the stockpiling because preserving our species is what matters here.'" "As those dangers become more and more real, people will come to the table and say keep the rest of AI going ... but that branch of AI is lethal. We gotta do something about that. Nobody should build it. And everyone needs to agree to that by treaty."