Economic Post-ASI Transition

Here is my metastrategy for transitioning to post-ASI economy:

If we have an aligned ASI (which you've granted), we can just ask it what's the best way for humanity to transition to post-ASI economy. Given that ASI will be vastly smarter than any of the alive humans at the time it could probably come up with a solution that's better than anything we currently have.

I cannot say I've thought about it deep enough, but I've thought and written a bit about UBI, taxation/tax competition and so on. My imagination so far is:

A. Taxation & UBI would really be natural and workable, if we were choosing the right policies (though I have limited hope our policy making and modern democracy is up to the task, especially also with the international coordination required). Few subtleties that come to mind:

1. Simply tax high revenues or profits.
   1. No need to tax "AI (developers?)"/"bots" specifically.
   2. In fact, if AIs remain rather replicable/if we have many competing instances: Scarcity rents will be in raw factors (e.g. ores and/or land) rather than the algorithms used to processing them
2. UBI to the people.
3. International tax (and migration) coordination as essential.
   1. Else, especially if it's perfectly mobile AIs that earn the scarcity rents, we end up with one or a few tax havens that amass & keep the wealth to them
   2. If you have good international coordination, and can track revenues well, you may use very high tax rates, and correspondingly spread a very high share of global value added with the population.
4. If specifically world economy will be dominated by platform economies, make sure we deal properly with it, ensuring there's competition instead of lock-in monopoly
   1. I.e. if, say, we'd all want to live in metaverses, avoid everyone being forced to live in Meta's instead of choosing freely among competing metaverses.

Risks include:

1. Expect geographic revenue distribution to be foreign to us today, and potentially more unequal with entire lands with zero net contribution in terms of revenue-earning value added
   1. Maybe ores (and/or some types of land) will capture the dominant share of value added, not anymore the educated populations
   2. Maybe instead it's a monopoly or oligopoly, say with huge shares in Silicon Valley and/or its Chinese counterpart or what have you
   3. Inequality might exceed today's: Today poor people can become more attractive by offering cheap labor. Tomorrow, people deprived of valuable (i) ores or so, or (ii) specific, scarcity-rent earning AI capabilities, may be able to contribute zero, so have zero raw earnings
2. Our rent-seeking economic lobbies who successfully put their agents at top policy-makers in charge, and who lead us to voting for antisocial things, will have ever stronger incentive to keep rents for themselves. Stylized example: We'll elect the supposedly-anti-immigration populist, but whose main deed is to make sure firms don't pay high enough taxes
3. You can more easily land-grab than people-grab by force, so may expect military land conquest to become more a thing than in the post-war decades where minds seemed the most valuable thing
4. Human psychology. Dunno what happens with societies with no work (though I guess we're more malleable, able to evolve into a society that can cope with it, than some people think, tbc)
5. Trade unions and alike, trying to keep their jobs somehow, and finding pseudo-justifications for it, so the rest of society lets them do that.

B. Specifically to your following point:

I don't think the math works out if / when AI companies dominate the economy, since they'll capture more and more of the economy unless tax rates are high enough that everyone else receives more through UBI than they're paying the AI companies.

Imagine it's really at AI companies where the scarcity rents i.e. profits, occur (as mentioned, that's not at all clear): Imagine for simplicity all humans still want TVs and cars, maybe plus metaverses, and AI requires Nvidia cards. By scenario definition, AI produces everything, and as in this example we assume it's not the ores that earn the scarcity rents, and the AIs are powerful in producing stuff from raw earth, we don't explicitly track intermediate goods other than Nvidia cards the AIs produce too. Output be thus:

AI output = 100 TVs, 100 cars, 100 Nvidia cards, 100 digital metaverses, say in $bn.

Taxes = Profit tax = 50% (could instead call it income tax for AI owners; in reality would all be bit more complex, but overall doesn't matter much).

AI profit 300 ( = all output minus the Nividia cards)
People thus get $150bn; AI owners get $150bn as distributed AI profit after taxes
People consume 50 TVs, 50 cars, 50 digital metaverses
AI owners also consume 50 TVs, 50 cars, 50 digital metaverses

So you have a 'normal' circular economy that works. Not so normal, e.g. we have simplified for AI to require not only no labor but also no raw resources (or none with scarcity rent captured by somebody else). You can easily extend it to more complex cases.

In reality, of course, output will be adjusted, e.g. with different goods the rich like to consume instead of thousands of TVs per rich person, as happens already today in many forms; what the rich like to do with the wealth remains to be seen. Maybe fly around (real) space. Maybe get better metaverses. Or employ lots of machines to improve their body cells.

C. Btw, the "we'll just find other jobs" imho is indeed overrated, and I think the bias, esp. among economists, can be very easily explained when looking at history (where these economists had been spot on) yet realizing, that in future, machines will not anymore augment brains but replace them instead.

It's not clear to me that the system wouldn't collapse. The number of demand side, supply side, cultural & political changes may be beyond the adaptive capacity of the system.

Some jobs would be maintained b/c of human preference. Human preference has many aspects like customer preference, distrust of AI, networking, regulation etc, so human preference is potentially quite substantial. (Efficiency is maybe also a factor; even if AI is super human intelligent the energy consumption & size of the hardware may still be an issue especially for AI embodied in a robot). But that stills seems like huge job loss.

So as we head in that direction there's going to be job loss plus the fear of job loss -- that's likely to pull down demand leading to even more job loss. But it's not a typical demand driven recession b/c 1) jobs are not expected to return, 2) possible supply side issues from transition to AI, 3) paradoxical disinclination to work b/c jobs are expected to disappear soon or b/c of 'UBI' & 4) cultural shock from AI & ensuing events.

How bad could this be? A vicious cycle of culture, economics & politics can be quite vicious. The number of people who quit critical jobs prior to those jobs being properly automated is an important variable. 'UBI' is not obviously helpful in that regard.

Addendum

The comment concerns transition to a post ASI economy & possible failures along the way. Assuming that ASI already exists, as Satron has done, removes most of the interesting & relevant aspects of the question.

I second this question.

I have looked and found only the partial solution directions mentioned in the question and in Satron's comment on having an ASI solve it. Which also seems unlikely to work for reasons I gave there.

Everything I've found looks disturbingly like copium and vague wishful thinking.