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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29327 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Both you and @Gillitrut have cited comparative advantage. I don't think that saves us here. Comparative advantage means you need to be willing to do some job for less than the cost of operating a robot to do that job.

This is a (common!) misunderstanding of comparative advantage. If humans could produce some good or do some job for a lower marginal cost than a robot then the humans don't just have a comparative advantage, they have an absolute advantage. A group (say humans) can have comparative advantage relative to some other group (say robots), even if the second group can produce everything more cheaply than the first group, as long as the second group cannot produce literally everything it needs.

In a high-automation world, that cost will be very cheap -- the robots are building robots. What I mean by "expected economic value of a typical human goes negative" is that the price someone would be willing to pay for a human to do that job is less than the price of the resources it takes to maintain a human life.

Imagine I'm Cyberpunk Genghis Khan. I have robots that produce everything of economic value to me, including art, food, and military might. I'm keeping Mongolia as a nature preserve, and some subsistence farmers are trying to live out in some forest. Why should I let them? They produce some valuable widget, but they need to be allowed to keep at least enough farmland to keep them alive. I could have my robots build that same widget while occupying half the space.

I detect a tension between these two sections. On the one hand, robots are so cheap we can mass manufacture them to do any new labor as the need arises. On the other hand, robots are so rare and expensive that only the rich own and have access to them. If robots are so cheap, why can't the workers making widgets (or farming, or whatever) buy robots to do their own jobs instead and profit thereby? If robots are so expensive, how is it there are enough to fill literally every labor demand?

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