Non-crime law deals mostly with accidents and mild sloppy selfishness among parties who are close to each other in a network of productive relations. In such cases, law can usually require losers to pay winners cash, and rely on those who were harmed to detect and prosecute violations. This approach, however, can fail when “criminals” make elaborate plans to grab gains from others in ways that make they, their assets, and evidence of their guilt hard to find.
Ancient societies dealt with crime via torture, slavery, and clan-based liability and reputation. Today, however, we have less stomach for such things, and also weaker clans and stronger governments. So a modern society instead assigns government employees to investigate and prosecute crimes, and gives them special legal powers. But as we don’t entirely trust these employees, we limit them in many ways, including via juries, rules of evidence, standards of proof, and anti-profiling rules. We also prefer to punish via prison, as we fear government agencies eager to collect fines. Yet we still suffer from a great deal of police corruption and mistreatment, because government employees can coordinate well to create a blue wall of silence.
I propose to instead privatize the detection, prosecution, and punishment of crime. […] The key idea is to use competition to break the blue wall of silence, via allowing many parties to participate as bounty hunter enforcers and offering them all large cash bounties to show us violations by anyone, including by other enforcers. With sufficient competition and rewards, few could feel confident of getting away with criminal violations; only court judges could retain substantial discretionary powers.
A lot of smart people, including myself, find the argument convincing, and have tried all manner of approaches to avoid this outcome. My own small contribution to this literature is an essay I wrote in 2022, which uses privately paid bounties to induce a chilling effect around this technology. I sometimes describe this kind of market-first policy as "capitalism's judo throw". Unfortunately it hasn't gotten much attention even though we've seen this class of mechanisms work in fields as different as dog littering and catching international terrorists. I keep it up mostly as a curiosity these days. [1]
That future is boring; our current models basically stagnate at their current ability, we learn to use them as best we can, and life goes on. If we assume the answer to "Non-aligned ASI kills us all" to be "No", and the answer to "We keep developing AI, S or non-S" to be "Yes", then I guess you could assume it would all work out in the end for the better one way or another and stop worrying about it. But we'd do well to remember Keynes: In the long run, we're all dead. What about the short term?
Knowledge workers will likely specialize much harder, until they cross a threshold beyond which they are the only person in the world who can even properly vet whether a given LLM is spewing bullshit or not. But I'm not convinced that means knowledge work will actually go away, or even recede. There's an awful lot of profitable knowledge in the world, especially if we take the local knowledge problem seriously. You might well make a career out of being the best informed person on some niche topic that only affects your own neighborhood.
How about physical labor? Probably a long, slow decline as robotics supplants most trades, but even then you'll probably see a human in the loop for a long time. Old knob-and-tube wiring is very hard to find expertise around to distill into a model, for example, and the kinds of people who currently excel at that work probably won't be handing over the keys too quickly. Heck, half of them don't run their businesses on computers at all (much easier to get paid under the table that way).
Businesses which are already big have enormous economic advantages to scaling up AI, and we should probably expect them to continue to grow market share. So my current answer, which is a little boring, is simply: Work hard now, pile money into index funds, and wait for the day when we start to see the S&P500 start to double every week or so. Even if it never gets to that point this has been pretty solid advice for the last 50 years or so. You could call this the a16z approach - assume there is no crisis, things will just keep getting more profitable faster, and ride the wave. And the good news is if you have any disposable capital at all it's easy to get a first personal toehold on this by buying e.g. Vanguard ETFs. Your retirement accounts likely already hold a lot of this anyway. Congrats! You're already a very small part of the investor class.
[1]: [url-redacted]