🔮 What does it cost to make a worker?
🔮 What does it cost to make a worker?
Azeem is exploring the economic trade-offs between AI and human work through his sketchbook, analyzing the cost of humans completing economic tasks compared to AI, and considering the minimum cost of creating an economically meaningful worker, including expenses such as upbringing, education, and support, while noting that AI, as a manufacturing-based intelligence, has high reproducibility and follows a classic learning curve.
Azeem’s sketchbook is an experimental format we’re trialing for paying members, where we share raw research notes, early frameworks, and unfinished ideas that haven’t been fully polished. They are the earliest indication of what I’m thinking through.
Here is another peek into my sketchbook. I’m trying to understand the economic trade-off between getting work done by an AI or a human. One way of doing this is to look at tasks in the economy and see how much it costs a human to do them compared to a machine.
Another way is to view the worker as an entity the economy needs, and to consider the minimum cost of creating one. (Of course, humans are much more than that, but I’m limiting the frame purely to economics here.) Those costs include the parenting, educating, and feeding from bairn to adult. We can then compare that to the cost of bringing in a machine capable of doing the same types of work using AI.
AI is manufactured intelligence. That is not the same intelligence that we humans have, but it’s clearly something that looks like intelligence.
While it is being manufactured, it’s highly replicable and follows the classic learning curve I described in my first book. And in my forthcoming second book, I extend these ideas.
Economically useful human intelligence is created very differently. It takes much longer than making a chip, and you don’t know the outcome for a long time.
Source: Exponential View · exponentialview.co