Three: Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI

About this episode

The human brain does what it does with a shockingly low energy supply: just 20 watts — a fraction of a cent worth of electricity per hour. What would happen if AI technology merely matched what evolution already managed, and could accomplish the work of top human professionals given a 20-watt power supply?

Many people have sort of considered this hypothetical, but perhaps nobody has followed through and considered all the implications as much as Carl Shulman. Behind the scenes, his work has greatly influenced how leaders in artificial general intelligence (AGI) picture the world they’re creating.

Carl simply follows the logic to its natural conclusions, leading to a world where:

• $0.01 of electricity can be turned into medical advice, company management, or scientific research that would cost hundreds of dollars today, resulting in a scramble to manufacture chips and apply them to the most lucrative forms of intellectual labour
• Given their incredible hourly salaries, the supply of outstanding AI researchers quickly goes from 10,000 to 10 million or more, enormously accelerating progress in the field
• Companies operated entirely by AIs are much faster and more cost effective than those that lean on humans for decision making, and the latter are progressively driven out of business
• The technical challenges of controlling robots are rapidly overcome — leading to strong, fast, precise, and tireless robot workers able to accomplish any physical work the economy requires, and a rush to build billions of them and cash in
• Overnight, the number of humans becomes irrelevant to economic growth, which is now driven by how quickly the entire machine economy can replicate its components. Given how quickly complex biological systems can reproduce — some in a matter of days — a doubling every few months may be a conservative estimate
• Any country that delays participating in this economic explosion risks being outpaced and ultimately disempowered by rivals whose economies grow to be 10-fold, 100-fold, and then 1,000-fold larger than its own

As the economy grows, each person could afford the equivalent of a team of hundreds of machine ‘people’ to help them with every aspect of their lives.

And with growth rates this high, it doesn’t take long to run up against Earth’s physical limits — the toughest to engineer around being Earth’s ability to release waste heat. If this machine economy and its insatiable demand for power generates more heat than the Earth radiates into space, the planet will rapidly heat up and become uninhabitable for humans and other animals.

This eventually creates pressure to move economic activity off-planet. There’s little need for computer chips to be on Earth, and solar energy and minerals are more abundant in space. So you could develop populations of billions of scientific researchers operating on computer chips orbiting in space, sending the