Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Economy 100 times bigger in ten years
The doubling-time argument
The reason is doubling times. Once AIs can substitute for humans across the board, robot doubling times work out to something like once a year, and shorter as the technology improves. The population of humanoid robots today is doubling about twice a year, even though they are not yet useful, because people are investing in the hope that they will be and are scaling up factories.
A robot-built economy
If robots became useful enough to substitute for a human worker at nearly everything, that doubling time would shrink. They would keep growing until they were the majority of the economy, and the whole economy would then grow with them: giant strip mines in the deserts, automated diggers, automated factories staffed by robots that build more robots.
The citizen's dividend
Material abundance stops being the problem. The open one is what happens to people when jobs disappear. The answer in AI 2040 Plan A is a citizen's dividend: tax the AI and robot companies and give everyone a share, so people already own a slice of the economy and stay fine without work.
How did past revolutions change growth rates?
Economist Robin Hanson's 2000 paper on long-term growth described the world economy moving through modes with very different doubling times. His estimates put the farming era at roughly 900 years per doubling and the industrial era at roughly 15 years. He argued that another shift could shorten doubling times again.
How has a citizen's dividend worked in practice?
Alaska has paid residents a yearly dividend from the Alaska Permanent Fund, an investment fund built from oil revenue, since 1982. Every eligible resident gets the same amount regardless of income. The size varies from year to year with the fund's returns.
Why would robots double faster than people?
Machines can be built and shipped on a production schedule, and software can be copied instantly to every unit. What one robot learns can be shared with all the others at once. Humans take roughly eighteen years to grow to working age.
More from The Joe Rogan Experience
