• Many will be pushed into service or manual labor roles that better resist automation, creating oversupply and wage depression in those sectors.
• Extreme wealth inequality: The overwhelming majority of economic gains will begin to flow to capital owners and the small class of specialized workers who design and maintain these systems. The wealth gap between capital owners and everyone else will reach historically unprecedented levels.

I think you would find the posts and comments here and here useful.

I agree that Borlaug was an amazing person and an inspiration. I mentioned him in my second 80,000 Hours podcast.

I think a great project would be food resilience in nuclear scenarios.

That's what ALLFED is trying to do...

But there is still only so much time in the day, and many higher-tech leisure goods like TVs, gaming rigs, bikes, cars, yachts don't rely much on LMIC labour anyway. (Some things like clothing and tents may be more exceptions.)

I do agree with you that some LMICs could see a boon - but I don't expect this effect to be widespread across LMICs in general. 

AI agrees with you on cars and yachts, but says the majority of TVs, gaming rigs, and bikes consumed in HICs are made in LMICs. Overall, I think I agree with you that the new demand created by new wealthy people would initially probably increase demand for manual laborers in HICs more than LMICs. However, if labor is the bottleneck, I think there will be a large incentive to shift production of goods to LMICs. I think this would not just be consumer goods, but even housing in the case of prefabricated panels (it only costs a few cents per kilogram to ship something across an ocean). I think it would also apply for high tech goods because the AI could tell the workers exactly what to do even if they are not very skilled. But I agree that this won't necessarily work out for all LMICs (conflict zones, those that restrict trade, etc).

If governments are able to shift their tax bases towards capital we might see tax revenues remain stable.

I think it's best to discuss this in your other post, but for completeness, here is my comment from there:

Epoch estimates that wages will ~10x in the run up to full automation. Capital would rise much faster. If TAI is anything like this, governments won't have to worry about revenue. 

In the case where wages rise 10x, transfers could rise more than 10x if (1) transfers are linked to wages (which they often are); and/or (2) the share of people receiving transfers rises (because unemployment rises).

Interesting point. I think it's true that current white collar workers in HICs would be unhappy with current levels of government unemployment support. However, I think they would generally be happy with <10x current unemployment benefits. As for rising unemployment, governments would need to tap into capital gains somehow. Foresight Institute has this interesting idea of "Capital dividend funds: National and regional funds holding equity in AI infrastructure, robotics fleets, and automated production facilities, distributing dividends to citizens as universal basic capital."

Yet, because labour income is often taxed at higher effective rates than capital income,^[19] if profits increase at the expense of wages and salaries, overall government revenues would fall.

Epoch estimates that wages will ~10x in the run up to full automation. Capital would rise much faster. If TAI is anything like this, governments won't have to worry about revenue. 

I think it's important to explore the potential impacts of TAI on low and middle income countries (LMICs), and there has been very little done, so thanks for doing this. I agree with most of what you say.

Countries that rely heavily on remittances (e.g. Latin America and the Pacific) will also lose out. In a way, remittances can be seen as payment for “exports” of in-person services like construction or domestic work. Even if these jobs don't get automated away, I expect competition for them will get fiercer as people who don’t hold capital run out of other ways to make money. (This risk may be mitigated if those richer countries manage their domestic inequality pressures well.)

That could be true in the later stages of TAI with robotics, but in the earlier stages, I think that it will be more knowledge worker jobs that will be automated, and the demand for manual labor will increase dramatically, because the people making a lot of money from AI will want bigger houses, more roads, and more physical goods in general. Yes, there will be some unemployed knowledge workers who may want a manual job, but those who had some investments will likely be very rich. Also, in this scenario, government revenue would be large because they would be taxing the high wages of manual workers, and taxing massive corporate/capital gains. Some of the production of goods will be done in the HICs (perhaps increasing remittances), but I think a lot will be done in LMICs, which would a boon for those countries.

However, poor countries can be worse off even if the overall pie is growing if the rich countries’ increased wealth makes it harder for poor countries to compete for a scarce supply of globally traded goods, such as food, energy, raw materials, minerals, etc.

I think prices of those commodities would increase, but I think the worker wages would increase even more.

TAI is likely to make immigration much more restrictive, at least in the near term. While this is already happening for various reasons, I expect TAI will accelerate these trends as the arguments for allowing in workers who are able and willing to do the jobs that locals can’t or won’t will disappear. This will close off an important development pathway.

Again, I agree once you get huge amount of robotics, but in the first part of TAI, I think demand for physical workers in HICs will skyrocket, so they will want more immigration.

I was imagining someone who thinks that, say, there's a 90% risk of unaligned AI takeover, and a 50% loss of EV of the future from other non-alignment issues that we can influence. So EV of the future is 25%.

I'm not understanding - if there's no value in the 90%, and then 50% value in the remaining 10%, wouldn't the EV of the future be 5%?

I wonder if some of the health impacts of being vegan could be mitigated with single cell protein. For methane SCP fed to salmon, just a little compared to fully vegan (soy) diet showed a big improvement in gut health. I'd be most confident that this would port to other obligate carnivores like cats, but I could see it being beneficial for dogs and humans as well. Unfortunately, methane SCP is not yet approved for human food, but hydrogen SCP is in some places. Quorn is also SCP (fungal), so any studies on whether that helps?

This is great work!

Tentative victory condition: Any novel pathogen that could be created in the near future, no matter how stealthy or fast-spreading, is widely recognized at least a month before most of the world’s population would have become infected. Assuming a fast doubling time of 3 days and a very simplistic doubling model, this would mean detecting at ~0.1% cumulative prevalence. Initial programs could probably achieve a robust version of this by the end of 2027 with a concerted effort and less than ~$100M/year.

I'm getting ~50% infection after a month taking into account the slowing growth rate at higher prevalence. But what percent of people globally who hear about something strange growing exponentially in the waste water (with no symptoms) do you think will take drastic actions to protect themselves? And what is your probability that it will immediately become world news if detected?

Great idea! At least net support for glycol was positive. I'm guessing support for upper room UV would be even higher than far UVC because there is very little exposure of people for upper room? And in-room filtration would be high support as long as it's not loud?