I was recently saddened to see that Seb Krier – who's a lead on the Google DeepMind governance team – created a simple website apparently endorsing the idea that Ricardian comparative advantage will provide humans with jobs in the time of ASI. The argument that comparative advantage means advanced AI is automatically safe is pretty old and has been addressed multiple times. For the record, I think this is a bad argument, and it's not useful to think about AI risk through comparative advantage.

The Argument

The law of comparative advantage says that two sides of a trade can both profit from each other. Both can be better off in the end, even if one side is less productive at everything compared to the other side. The naive idea some people have is: humans are going to be less productive than AI, but because of thie law humans will remain important, will keep their jobs and get paid. Things will be fine, and this is a key reason why we shouldn't worry so much about AI risk. Even if you're less productive [...]

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