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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Strictly amateur, but let me take this chance to expand on my intuition:There was no blacksmith who invented industry and used it to take over the world. There were countries that advanced relatively quickly in industry and gained significant relative advantage. The continent of Europe pretty much did invent industry and use it to take over the world.

So, if interactions among firms during the AI transition end up being most like interactions among individuals during the industry transition, we might see some firms get rich but not to the point of hegemony. If firms are more like countries, we might see the top firms as a group come to dominate the world, but with power balanced among many firms. And if firms are more like continents, we might get a foom.

So why did industry have different distributional effects on different scales? It's not an easy question, but it's certainly within the field of economics and subject to economic modeling.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

This seems to suggest that there is much value in collaborations such as the Santa Fe Institute.

[Entertaining-but-instructive aside: I just ran across a fascinating & hilarious interview of SFI cofounder Murray Gell-Mann, who Paul Kauffman once said "...may know more things than any other single human being" but who (we learn in the interview) considers himself a major league slacker: http://www.achievement.org/.... He touches on many topics, including academic silos, practical economics, and his own many neuroses]

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