đź Exponential View #578: Fable & time to pause AI; iPhone vs babies; gene therapy, bad CEOs & Chinese Gen Z++
Your Sunday briefing
Hi all,
I sent a note on Thomas Pikettyâs blueprint for global justice to members of Exponential View yesterday. I call its recommendations a âblueprint for managed declineâ. The commentary touches on the future of modernity, scientific dynamism and democratic legitimacy. Read it here.
In todayâs Sunday briefing, we look at:
The iPhone reduced fertility; what will AI do?
Whatâs driving the consensus behind pausing AI development?
The largest solar factory, gene therapy for rejuvenation & Chinese Gen Z finds inspiration in Western memes++
But, firstâŠ
How will we distribute AI wealth?
Bernie Sanders, Sam Altman, Donald Trump and Vinod Khosla all agree that the public should own a slice of AI. Bernie proposes transferring 50% of ownership of leading AI companies into a sovereign wealth fund; Trump is supportive; Sam agrees in principle but pushed back on the 50%; and Vinod wrote an op-ed in the FT advocating for a new tax code on wealth AI creates and eventually pooling it into a sovereign wealth fund:
A sovereign fund with ownership of AI companies makes every American a capital owner, not a bystander to the AI economy.
The same day the Senate held a hearing on AI, Anthropic published a framework that has sovereign wealth funds as one of the mechanisms to deploy in case of the worst-case scenario, when â[t]he search for work stretches past a year, then past two, and for some, eventually stopsâ.
The core assumption here is that AI will tilt the economyâs income from labor to capital. We donât have evidence that this is happening yet and we may not know for a long time.
Vinod believes that AI will be capable of doing 80% of jobs by 2030 and that $15 trillion of US GDP, which is labor compensation, will mostly disappear. Economist Chad Jones, in contrast, thinks the transition will take closer to thirty years because of weak links â even if we automate most tasks, the ones that donât get automated will slow everything down (this aligns with what we see happening with AI diffusion into organizations right now). Slow doesnât mean painless, though. And for a long time, we may not know which scenario weâre in.
My view is that there will be human jobs around for much longer than the prevailing narratives might suggest. Virtually all of these jobpocalypse scenarios of recent years have been mooted theoretically but not in the messy world of life. Weâll create more roles and that last mile (what Chad calls âthe weak linkâ) will command decent wages. That doesnât mean we wonât see increasing returns to capital over labor. So, societies might decide to change how they tax and redistribute. The different experiences between the UK and Norway over North Sea oil suggest that endowments seem to work better than transfers.
See also: I was on Paul Krugmanâs podcast this week. We covered the AI bubble question, the productivity paradox and why Chinese AI engineers are Claude-pilled. Watch or listen here.
Time to pause
Washington has issued an export control order that prevents Anthropic from offering its Fable and Mythos models to non-US citizens, including Anthropicâs own employees. Apparently, researchers at Amazon discovered a jailbreak and it seems like Amazonâs boss, Andy Jassy, passed concerns on to the Commerce Department. (Amazon recently invested $5 billion into Anthropic and indicated it would invest a further $20 billion, having already put $8 billion into the firm and acting as its major distributor.)
The reaction seems a little over the top, given the minor trigger. Iâd half expect it to be diluted in the next few days. Or it might just be the next stage in the feud between the Defense apparatchiks and Anthropic.
But it comes at a time when Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind are signaling theyâre in favor of slowing down frontier AI development. Erik Brynjolfsson rightly asks, what did they see? Is it the fear of the growing backlash or a genuine capability explosion?
My brief thoughts on whatâs behind this.
The most charitable reading is that the labs feel they are reaching a point at which their AI models challenge the security assumptions that underpin modern life. This isnât unreasonable: they have consistently worried that this point might arise. That actual point may still be years away, but Demis and Dario do think in long arcs â and we might need years to prepare.
There is a less charitable reading that is also plausible.