Hey Eugene, interesting stuff! 

1) Long-term AI is very likely a complement; short-term, it may be a substitute”

I wonder why you think this?

2) "Good evidence suggests AI benefits the already skilled"

I feel like the evidence here is quite mixed: e.g., see this article from the economist: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/13/how-ai-will-divide-the-best-from-the-rest

If we treat digital minds like current animal livestock, the expected value of the future could be really bad. 

Great analogy Alistair

Hi Aaron, 

I'm sorry it's taken me a little while to get back to you.

In hindsight, the way I worded this was overly strong. Cultural explanations are possible, yes. 

I guess I see this evidence as a weak update on a fairly strong prior that the burden of knowledge (BOK) is increasing – given the range of other variables (e.g., age of innovation, levels of specialisation), and similar trends within patent data. For example, you couldn't attribute increasing collaboration on patents to norms within academia.

I'd be interested to compare # researchers with # papers. The ratio of these two growth rates is key, for the returns to research parameter from Bloom et al. Do send me this, if you have remembered in the intervening time.

Charlie

Thanks for writing this Gideon. 

I think the risks around securitisation are real/underappreicated, so I'm grateful you've written about them. As I've written about, I think the securitisation of the internet after 9/11 impeded proper privacy regulation in the US, and prompted Google towards an explicitly pro-profit business model. (Although, this was not a case of macrosecuritization failure). 

Some smaller points: 

Secondly, its clear that epistemic expert communities, which the AI Safety community could clearly be considered

This is argued for at greater length here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4641526

but ultimately the social construction of the issue as one of security is what is decisive, and this is done by the securitising speech act.

I feel like this point was not fully justified. It seems likely to me that whilst rhetoric around AGI could contribute to securitisation, other military/economic incentives could be as (or more) influential.

 What do you think?

Hi, thanks for this! Any idea how this compares to total costs?

thanks, Charlie! Seems like a reasonable concern. I feel like a natural response is that hedonic wellbeing is only one factor within life satisfaction. Though, I had a quick look online, and one study suggests they're pretty strongly correlated (r between 0.8 and 0.9) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167487018305087

Thanks, glad you enjoyed 👍

At least, from one of showing the plot. I'm more skeptical of the line, the further out it goes, especially to a region with only a few points.

Fair. 

This data is the part I was nervous about. I don't see a great indication of "leveling off" in the blue lines. Many have a higher slope than the red lines, and the slope=0 item seems like an anomaly. 

To be clear – there are 2 version of levelling off. 

1. Absolute levelling off: slopes indistinguishable from 0
2. Relative levelling off: slopes which decrease after the income threshold.

And for both 1) and 2), I am referring to the bottom percentiles. This is the unhappy minority which Kahneman and Killingsworth are referring to. So: the fact that slopes are indistinguishable after the income threshold for p=35, 50, 70 is consistent with the KK findings. The fact the slope increased for the 85th percentile is also consistent with the KK findings. Please look at Figure 1 if you want to double check.

I think there is stronger evidence for 2) than for 1).At percentiles p=5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 there was a significant decrease in the slope (2): see below. I agree that occurrences of 1) (i.e. insignificant slopes above £50k) may be because of a lack of data. 

I also agree with you that the 0 slope is strange. I found this at the 10th and 30th percentiles. I think the problem might be that there wasnt many unhappy rich people in the sample. 

Thank you! I haven’t used GitHub much before ... Next time 🫡