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Notes -
There is a certain investment thesis that I see increasingly on LW / AI Twitter / adjacent spaces online. Let me summarize it:
If AI destroys the world, or someone uses it to, money doesn’t matter and probably even the most hardcore preppers are toast. There is no use preparing for this scenario other than maybe bringing forward some bucket list items if you’re a Yud level doomer.
If AI leads to some incredible abundant utopia with a FOOM / hard takeoff scenario, money won’t matter and we’ll all be trillionaire emperors of our respective limitlessly abundant space kingdoms and/or VR wirehead heavens. Maybe Elon Musk will become some overlord, but the average equity investor won’t know or care.
If things don’t change, and/or AI gets retrofitted onto the existing economy in a fake scenario to preserve social and economic status stratification and/or private ownership of property / means of production, people who own big tech / AI companies will be best off. Everyone else will either be a UBI peasant at best or Elysium / Manna underclass at worst.
If the realistic possibility space consists of solely these scenarios, the only logical investment strategy unless you’re retired or retiring in under 5 years is to YOLO everything on AI/tech/etc stocks. But that is a big if. This thesis is especially enjoyed by tech industry workers who argue that either AI will replace them, in which case this must make money, or it won’t, in which case at least they still have a high paying jobs.
I don’t think it takes a genius to see why this is more than a little flawed.
Point 1 is directionally correct, points 2 and three are completely off.
There is a big risk of ai making individual preparation essentially worthless for everyone or at least everyone aside from a few oligarchs. That covers a variety of apocalyptic and dictatoria scenarios, but as reasoned isn't worth worrying about.
If that turns out to not be the case, then it's going to be because:
Under those conditions, you have to understand that the market not only allocated but reflects how scarce labor and human resources have already been allocated. Even if a company builds GAI, if they ask that GAI something like, "what's the best way to cure mortality and profit?" The answer will likely start with, "well we need infrastructure and testing data, so first buy these existing pharmaceutical companies." That in the end distributes wealth through the broader market. Since in advance it's hard to predict exactly how the wealth will flow, you wnd up back at the time-tested advice to just buy index funds and sit on them instead of trying to pick winners.
AI will change how wealth is distributed. Some classes of people will rise, and others fall. But in general I predict that your social and economic status after ai will remain very correlated with your pre-ai standing.
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