Phil Trammell

But if the price of robots is falling really fast.

Yeah, but here prices are adjusting in this interesting way that too many macro models don't allow for, right?

So what's happening is what would be called investment-specific technical change, where, yeah, the price of capital is falling relative to the price of consumption instead of doing the standard macro thing of saying there's just output.

It's like chimera of a thing called output, which is one for one can be allocated to capital or consumption, right?

That's not going to be true in this world.

Yeah.

Every unit of capital next year is giving up way less consumption than each unit of capital this year.

Because just one robot now turns into many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas is the same.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the claim's a little stronger, not just like you could have some exceptions, but that it seems that historically and today we see the exceptions and they just haven't really taken over the economy historically because they've been these dissipation shocks, as they're called.

So they've given it to their kids who just wanted it or they put it in foundations, which...

uh which meant it i mean it's not a really a shock but i mean it's right people went people might have liked to uh you know fill the universe with monuments to themselves and sort of whatever live forever very wealthy and it's like a weird preference but it's not a hypothetical preference i think that's that's the thing but who knows what's going on in their heads i think um

Even without the kind of intrinsic preference for accumulation, there are some instrumental reasons why some people might value accumulation, which is also worth bringing up.

So there's...

desire for political or philosophical or religious influence, right?

So people get to sort of an arms race over what society looks like and what people believe.

And then similarly, but differently, because it's not an arms race, there's just a total utilitarian philanthropy, right?

So when I think about

why it might be good to have a lot of wealth in the future as a good classical utilitarian.

To me, the values, or at least one way you could have a kind of almost unsatiating utility function in having wealth in the future is to create new happy beings, right?