[ExI] Economics of singularity

[The Avantguardian]

--- Aleksei Riikonen <aleksei at iki.fi> wrote:
> Anyway, I wouldn't think too much about the economics of a situation
> where the workforce consists of immortal humans. I doubt that will
> happen sooner, or last for long before we have AIs that do all jobs
> better than baseline-humans.

But if the AIs do the jobs better than base-line humans, they will be in higher
demand. If the AIs are in higher demand, they will cost more than base-line
humans. This will lead to a market where humans will still be able to do many
jobs more cheaply than an AI. This is similar to why it is more economical in
some situations to pay humans to wave signs around on street corners than to
buy a mechanical or electric sign. This will in turn lead to a situation where
you have relatively poor humans serving one another and relatively wealthy AIs
serving one another and the increasingly rare wealthy humans until such wealthy
humans get edged out in the competition. Then you will have two separate
economies, one of AI and another of humans, each in bordering but
non-overlapping ecological and market niches. Industrial centers in the desert
versus farms in the tropics for example. By that point, niche-partitioning will
have occured and a Nash Equilibrium between humans and AI will evolve. At least
this is one of the more likely of the nine possible outcomes of the singularity
that I have calculated.


Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"In ancient times they had no statistics so that they had to fall back on lies."- Stephen Leacock