Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

Hard to be sure, but that's a reasonable guess.

We think that AIs probably initially won't be kind of independently owning property and pursuing their own goals, but that's probably unstable long-term.

You know, decade after decade, century after century, is that really going to hold?

Seems kind of unlikely.

How do you think this AI-driven economy sort of evolves over the medium to longer term?

Okay, so what happens is the economy continues to grow.

Humans, possibly even those who are receiving a small share of the income, because their productivity has risen so much, because the economy has grown so much, their absolute level of income might still have risen.

They might be much richer or able to consume much more than they can today.

But then the next challenge for them would be that as the AI and robot economy kind of basically expands across the entire earth and is doing all of the productive stuff that it can, humans to some extent get edged out in terms of, I guess, literally surface area of the earth.

And you need energy, you need space to grow food and to have a comfortable environment for humans.

And the opportunity cost of setting aside that space

for human beings to live and have a good time and grow their food and so on is going up because technology is advancing.

We're figuring out more, like how to squeeze more and more, you know, AI, more and more productivity, more whatever we value out of kind of each square kilometer of surface on the earth.

And so it's becoming potentially more expensive to keep humans alive than it was before, at least in terms of what we're giving up.

And then possibly some humans won't actually be able to afford that increasing price because their income won't be going up as fast as that.

I'm just guessing that like by this point, surely there has been some kind of agreement that humans are going to have like some fraction of the earth.

We're going to be sort of grandfathered in, like either we've been killed or there's going to be some sort of agreement that we're going to be allowed to have some section of the earth in perpetuity in order to support ourselves while the robots go off.

And like the earth is very small in the scheme of the entire universe.

And it's a lot easier for AIs and robots to go and use all of the resources in space.

While the opportunity cost in an absolute sense of setting aside, you know, half of the Earth's surface for human beings to do their thing on would be very big.