Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

almost all of the income is flowing through to human beings at this initial point.

What do you think would happen that would kind of gradually perhaps whittle away the fraction of wealth and the fraction of sort of economic production that is owned by humans or is flowing through to human beings?

So I thought that your objection here might be that initially it might be that AIs don't have any sort of legal personhood or any ability to own property.

But we've got a picture that they're becoming more and more capable all the time.

Eventually they're going to radically surpass human capabilities, both in terms of economic production, in terms of persuasiveness, in terms of charisma.

And there's going to be potentially a whole lot of diversity in what they're like and the kinds of different AIs that people train and release onto the world.

And some of them, you might imagine, would want to go out and advocate and would be permitted to advocate for AI personhood, for AI rights, for AI well-being and so on.

And

Basically, this is just not a sustainable situation that the great majority of beings who are also the far most productive and the most intelligent and the most charismatic, that they will forever remain without any kind of personhood or ability to independently pursue their goals.

Sooner or later, this will crack somehow.

And that's maybe the point at which will then the AI share of GDP income or the AI share of kind of independent wealth that they can actually deploy according to their own preferences.

That will begin and then it will just like grow over time because, of course, they're able to...

make more money, they potentially can earn higher investment returns because they're just smarter.

Yeah.

Is that like one way that things could go?

So a different dynamic that would be going on here that isn't precisely human disempowerment, but that is related to it and could help to contribute to it, is I think there are a number of forces that would be pushing us more strongly towards oligarchy in this world than they do currently.

What are some of those?

Yeah.

Okay, so we've painted a picture here where I guess initially most of the income is flowing through to human beings.

We think it's probably getting more unequally distributed than it is today, and it's going to become probably more unequally distributed over time.