Phil Trammell

They just add to the total welfare of the world.

You know, I mean, this idea goes at least as far back as like Bostrom's astronomical waste point that we could like put Dyson spheres around the stars and turn all the energy into really happy simulations and whatnot.

I think the particular greediness of this optimizer doesn't matter what they're greedy for.

Yeah.

I mean, if we're talking about like whether they'll dominate the economy, maybe this is a technicality, but, you know, we only count,

final consumption goods and investment goods is GDP, right?

If there's just this phenomenon.

How does the von Neumann probe show up in GDP?

Well, yeah, exactly, right?

So if it's like, if we recognize it as a person that like owns itself and it's like sort of, you know, optimizing on the margin between like spending a bit more on a baby von Neumann probe that colonizes another star system or like a ballerina or something.

And it's just like, it doesn't value the ballerina very much, but it's, yeah.

Anyways.

Yeah, I think it's possible the labor share is high the way we usually account it.

Yeah.

This seems to me like an extension of the messy middle case, right?

One of the ways in which the messy middle might only be bad in a narrow range of scenarios isn't just that it would be easy to redistribute because the pie would be bigger, but because

the interest rate would be way higher and or sort of equivalently, the price of everything except the human intrinsic goods would be falling really rapidly, sort of two sides of the same point.

A little bit of savings would turn into a lot of consumption next year, right?

So things have to go really wrong for us to just get over the threshold of capital being productive enough to...

automate lots of work, but not be productive enough that the interest rate is high and or the price of capital produced goods is falling a lot, okay?