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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.
I think Point 1 really obscures a lot of bad AI outcomes by cloaking them in the most dramatic one. It is much, much more likely that AI does (or is used to do) something "mundane" like a superengineered virus or destroying the internet. (The latter may already be happening - it won't be a one-time event, just a slow but steady string of incidents that make the internet as we know it insecure and see the migration of core functions away from it.)
Lumping all other bad AI outcomes under "AI destroys the world" is a terrible idea, particularly when considering investing. Destroying the world is very hard to do, it's much more likely that any damage done by AI is far short of "destroying the world" and there is a considerable overlap between "world not destroyed" and "very bad outcomes for human flourishing, civilization and society." If you accept what should be very obvious - that it's much more likely that AI ends up creating the conditions for a catastrophic scenario that does not instantly kill you than one that destroys the world or at least you personally - then there are pretty decent investment strategies at your fingertips.
Interesting. I think AI makes a lot of ‘traditional’ prepper collapse scenarios much less likely in an all-or-nothing way. The prepper fantasy of the rural homestead where you’ve packed enough food to be self sufficient after the apocalypse in some isolated corner of Montana or Wyoming isn’t going to be much use against truly hostile AI. It’s a 20th century vision of the apocalypse.
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