What happens to a society in which 40% of people find their jobs no longer exist 10 years from now or five years from now? And a lot of people don't realize how quickly it happens. So before we started Trigonometry 8 years ago, I used to do standup, but before that and alongside that, I had my own translation business. I still have friends on Facebook from my translation days. They're all retiring now because there is still some small market for human translation. 99% of it, like if you need to know what Vladimir Putin said in his last speech and you don't speak Russian, are you going to pay somebody £1,000, $1,000 to have a... No, you just stick it in AI and it tells you, right? Or Google Translate or whatever it is. So there are whole industries that are already disappearing. If we project that in the way you described earlier, which is basically anything that can be done on a computer eventually can be done, plus robotics improves over time, which of course it will, and we know just how critical, particularly in this country, in the United States, driving is in terms of jobs for people, particularly for men. You put all that together, the societal implications of that are very, very significant and I would argue scary, right? Is that fair?
Yeah. I think it's even scarier than that. So now we're just talking about the small fraction of jobs that AI is already approaching. But remember the promise of this technology is all jobs. We're trying to do anything a human being can do. And so there will be certain kinds of things where for a small fraction of things people just really intrinsically prefer a human. I think people are really overrating the amount of things for which this will be the case. I think people might have had the sense that I really want an Uber driver to be a human and then people use Waymo for the first time and like, this is... it's a better... I would pay more for this experience because the machine just... I can get in and things work. But putting that aside. So the reason it's a worse problem than this, if you look through the last couple centuries of history, there's been this remarkable economic fact that two-thirds of national income, two-thirds of GDP basically gets paid out to wages and one-third gets paid out to capital. So get paid out to capital means like rent on land or if you own factories, you know, getting the profits from those factories basically, and the rest is getting paid out. Most of income that is earned in a country is going... getting paid out to people doing work. And the reason this has been the case is that in the economy labor and capital are complements. So if you just accumulated a bunch of capital, if you had a bunch of factories but there's just nobody working on it, then that would increase the demand for labor and you'd want to pay laborers a bunch of money to fill those factories. This goes away when capital can do labor, when a data center which is capital can also do labor or a robot factory can also build labor. And so all the income goes to the capital holders. And in fact it doesn't just go to capital per se. It doesn't just go to... I mean it goes to capital holders but it disproportionately goes to the parts of capital that are most exposed to AI. So, you know, the purchase that most Americans have to capital is through their homes. A house is maybe the... if you're trying to design an instrument that is going to be the least implicated in the AI takeoff, it would be a random plot of land near other humans because humans won't matter in this future economy. That is not connected to the infrastructure for AI, to electricity, to in a big way, etc. And so but really what the capital that will matter is you have equity in these AI companies, you have equity in companies that build more compute, build more data centers, build more factories. And so a very small fraction of capital holders are in fact the ones that are going to get the rents from our economy. Now I'm a very libertarian person by inclination. But if I just look at this dynamic, I'm forced to say look, this justifies a huge amount of redistribution because the logic for free markets is there's many different reasons. A big one is signal, right? So if you let prices be determined by the market, it tells people what is the most acute valuable need for scarce resources. That will still continue being the case. And so there should still be elements of markets in the future. But another big part of it is incentives, is to incentivize people to work hard to make productive things. And if all the work is being done by AIs that will work hard and do valuable things regardless of whether they get a $10 million payment or... or more precisely whether the person who owns the AIs gets paid a billion dollars or hundred billion dollars or whatever, I think that the logic of extreme libertarianism is really much weaker, right? It does justify a lot more redistribution. Well, even if you are such a hardcore libertarian that you think, you know, come hell or high water, we've got to go down this route, I would advise people who have capital to think through the consequences of that in their own lives. Because if you live on a planet with 8 billion people in which 3,000 people have all the wealth and all the income, that is not going to end well for those 3,000 people unless they want to build a giant robot army to protect them against the hordes of starving people outside their gates, which again I don't think would go well for them either. You see what I'm saying?
I mean, I think it might. Um, I also... that's a problem.
That's reassuring. No, it might. Sure, you can build an army and kill all the rest of humanity who don't have money and you do, right? I mean, especially because historically you have a revolution because most of the people in your military, you have to win over your military. You have to win over the government. You have to just... like your government runs on the people you need to command. And so revolutions are possible because... it would be easy for the robots to do revolution because they're running the society in the future. For the humans who are not, it's sort of equivalent to like the animals in your zoo doing a revolution. It's not really going to like make the government not work anymore. Um, so yeah, that's... I mean another thing which is sort of tougher to think about is the future in general will be so much richer whether humans are in control over it or not or how many humans are in control of it. And so it will just make sense just from very small amounts of philanthropy as a fraction of the wealth that some people or some AI will have in the future, would take a very small fraction of it to make everybody much better off than they are today. We're giving people millions... every single person millions of dollars would be a small fraction of like, you know, Elon Musk wants to build a mass driver on the moon and colonize the solar system. And it takes a small fraction of that to just make everybody incredibly rich, but it's still skyrocketing inequality. And so there, yeah, you could have a world where the gap is way, way, way wider, but everybody's still better off. And I think even in that world I would say well okay but still it's not like if the AI are building the mass driver of the moon I think that entitles all humans to much more of the products of that productivity explosion.
Because everything is understood in context. So even the poorest person is wealthy compared to somebody from 300 years ago, but they don't feel that way because they go on Instagram and they see somebody else, you know, on a yacht smoking a cigar having a great time or they go, I can't buy this property, I can't buy this or I can't do that. And that creates resentment. And where you have resentment, that's where things start to get a little bit funky.
Yeah. So there's an inequality problem. Maybe to another. Um, I think the AIs have the potential to make authoritarian societies much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past.
Um, so we talked about the fact that, you know, the robot arms are running everything in the future. Here's another angle. Mass surveillance.
