Yes, unfortunately, Noah's argument rests on at least two assumptions that do not hold:
1) That constraints on compute will mean that humans will have jobs to do that AIs are too busy to do, because they're fully maxed out on capacity doing more important jobs.
This doesn't hold up when the marginal cost of creating and running a new AI instance falls below the marginal cost of raising and feeding a human. Noah believes it will not because he assumes:
2) that the resources that AIs need (compute) are not in competition with the resources that humans need (food).
However, they are. We can repurpose farmland and irrigation water to datacenters, fabs, and cooling towers. Maybe that wouldn't matter if all the AI-created wealth meant that you didn't need to do valuable labor to feed yourself, but:
3) If vast wealth is created by AI, there will be enough for everybody, so there's no need to be rushing to accumulate capital now.
In his article, dismisses the people who are worried that the AI's owners will accumulate all the wealth and be the only ones who can afford food or housing. Comparative advantage provides no reassurance here; there's nothing in economics that prevents productivity gains from being outpaced by a growing wealth disparity that provides all the productivity gains to the top and then some. And it's exactly the outcome you'd expect without government redistribution.
1) That constraints on compute will mean that humans will have jobs to do that AIs are too busy to do, because they're fully maxed out on capacity doing more important jobs.
This doesn't hold up when the marginal cost of creating and running a new AI instance falls below the marginal cost of raising and feeding a human. Noah believes it will not because he assumes:
2) that the resources that AIs need (compute) are not in competition with the resources that humans need (food).
However, they are. We can repurpose farmland and irrigation water to datacenters, fabs, and cooling towers. Maybe that wouldn't matter if all the AI-created wealth meant that you didn't need to do valuable labor to feed yourself, but:
3) If vast wealth is created by AI, there will be enough for everybody, so there's no need to be rushing to accumulate capital now.
In his article, dismisses the people who are worried that the AI's owners will accumulate all the wealth and be the only ones who can afford food or housing. Comparative advantage provides no reassurance here; there's nothing in economics that prevents productivity gains from being outpaced by a growing wealth disparity that provides all the productivity gains to the top and then some. And it's exactly the outcome you'd expect without government redistribution.