David Duvenaud

But our basic thesis is that this is much more fragile than it seems like it'll be intuitive.

And again, maybe one example to keep coming back to is think of the monarchy, the English monarchy, and how they hold all the cards.

In fact, maybe a better example is the English aristocracy before the Industrial Revolution.

You're thinking, okay, they own all the land.

They have all the political connections.

They can see what's happening.

They mostly know these entrepreneurs.

But somehow they end up being this giant new source of wealth created that they mostly don't participate in.

And as far as I understand, they ended up a little bit poorer in absolute terms, although the civilization ended up much richer overall.

And also, similarly with the monarchy, it's like, well...

The king owns everything, has absolute power.

How is it that kings end up in this figurehead role where they have very little room to maneuver and they end up capturing a very, very small surplus?

But the big picture is that there's going to be this small rump of legacy humans, maybe who have de facto ownership of this giant machine economy that's going to be maybe hundreds of thousands or more times as big as the current one.

they're not going to be producing value.

They're not going to be deciding what's going on.

And so at this point, it's not clear that they end up having de facto property rights respected.

And there's lots of reasons to think maybe we still will respect property rights.

It'll be very cheap to keep humans alive.

This is definitely not a foregone conclusion.

And this is kind of one of the fuzzier parts of this whole story.