✨ Thinking machines won't need us. And that's OK

If artificial general intelligence can perform every productive task, GDP will scale with compute, not people. The question isn’t whether we’ll work — but why, and for what rewards

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

First, a few recent headlines for context:

• “How an AI job apocalypse unfolds” - Axios

• “AI Really is Coming For the Jobs” - WSJ

• “Which Workers Will A.I. Hurt Most: The Young or the Experienced?” - NYT

• “‘Godfather of AI’ says the technology will create massive unemployment” - Fortune

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Let’s take these job worries a step further: Imagine an economy that no longer depends on human effort to grow. Like, at all.

That would be a civilizational inflection point. For most of history, labor has been a binding constraint on progress. Farms, factories, and offices have all required lots of sweaty, carbon-based life forms — with all their well-known upsides and limitations.

You know, you and me.

But supersmart artificial intelligence would conceivably change the historical necessity of human workers. And I totally get it: The prospect probably sounds terrifying:

Mass unemployment.

Collapsing wages.

Social decay from a purposeless citizenry.

The Hollywood version, as seen in films such as Blade Runner or Elysium: The owners of the intelligent machines live in impossibly high skyscrapers or even off-planet, while the rest of us toil below on a polluted, slum of a planet.

Los Angeles of 2154 in Elysium

The growth engine flips

Yet if Silicon Valley should actually achieve its stated goal of developing human-level AI — and, granted, maybe that’s not possible this century or ever — the reality of such a world might be a surprisingly bright one. Consider an intriguing new paper by Pascual Restrepo of Yale University, “We Won’t be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World.” The economist, a frequent collaborator with 2024 Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, offers an alternative and seemingly more Up Wing future — though, sorry, not a utopian one.

From the paper:

Historically, work provided not only income but also recognition that one’s efforts improved society’s well-being. Work gave people the sense that they would be missed. In an AGI world, that connection is severed. Human skill is no longer needed to improve living standards in an appreciable way. Today, if half of us stopped working, the economy would collapse. In the AGI world, we would not be missed.

But stick with me, this is basically a good news story of AI abundance, not AI apocalypse.