Pausing AI vs Degrowth in rich countries

By Miquel Banchs-Piqué (prev. mikbp) @ 2023-09-23T07:09 (–2)

I'm sure this is a very unpopular take but I feel obliged to share it: I find the "pausing AI development is impossible" arguments extremely parallel to the "economic degrowth in rich countries is impossible" arguments; and the worse consequences for humanity (and its probabilities) of not doing doing them not too dissimilar. I find it baffling (and epistemically bad) how differently these debates are treated within EA. 

Although parallel arguments can be given for and against both issues, EA have disregarded the possibility to degrowth the economy in rich countries without engaging the arguments. Note that degrowthers have good reasons to believe that continued economic growth would lead to ecological collapse --which could be considered an existential risk as, although it would clearly not lead to the extinction of humanity, it may very well permanently and drastically curtail its potential. The EA community has not addressed these reasons, just argued that economic growth is good and that degrowth in rich countries is anyway impossible. Sounds familiar? "AI development is good and stopping it is anyway impossible".

 

I have this impression since long and I'd have liked to elaborate it it in a decent post, but I don't have the time. Probably I'm not the only one having this impression so I would ask readers to argue and debate below. Especially if you disagree, explain why or upvote a comment that roughly reflects your view rather than downvoting. Downvoting controversial views only hides them rather than confronting them.

 

[Additions:

I want to make clear that I find the term degrowth misleading and that many people in that movement use terms like a-growth, post-growth, growth agnostics.

I want to thank the users who have engaged and will engage in the discussion! This was the main objective of the post, thanks.]

[Addition 2:

I think this tweet (and Holly's repost) makes the comparison ever more clear.]

Ben Millwood @ 2023-09-23T12:21 (+20)

While I agree there are similarities in the form of argument between degrowth and AI pause, I don't think those similarities are evidence that the two issues should have the same conclusion. There's simply nothing at all inconsistent about believing all of these at the same time:

Almost the entire question, for resolving either of these issues, is working out whether these premises are really true or not. And that's where the similarities end, IMO: there's not much analogy between the relevant considerations for feasibility of AI pause and feasibility of degrowth, or desirability of either outcome, that would lead us to think it's surprising for them to have different answers.

alexherwix @ 2023-09-23T19:38 (+4)

I think one point of this post is to challenge the community to engage more openly with the question of degrowth and to engage in argument rather than dismiss it outright. I have not followed this debate in detail but I sympathize with the take that issues which are controversial with EAs are often disregarded without due engagement by the community.

harfe @ 2023-09-24T14:30 (+3)

If a point of the article was to get the community to engage with the arguments for degrowth, the author should have engaged with the things that EA has written about degrowth. For example, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22408556/save-planet-shrink-economy-degrowth or https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XQRoDuBBt98wSnrYw/the-case-against-degrowth

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T11:08 (+1)

I explicitly said that I do not have the time to write a good post and that I rather post this so that people discuss.

Incidentally, I read the Vox article long ago when it came out but I did not know that the writer is EA. I don't remember much of it now, but maybe the answers from Kallis and Hickel (I'm not a fan of his) suffice to show that the article may not be as good as you think.

I will try to read the forum post soon -maybe I have done it in the past and I just don't remember.

Actually, thanks to this commentary I have found an inteesting  post The case for Green Growth skepticism and GDP agnosticism, which seems to go very much into the kind of analysis I would like to see more often here. I have only read the summary and skimmed the comments and it looks very promissing, I will try to read it as well. And a series of incredible posts about The geat energy descent with a shorter version which go to the heard of the issue and won the price for the "Most Underrated EA Forum Post in 2022".

BTW, try to search for "degrowth" and for "AI" in the forum, 22 and 5287 results respectively. I guess this proves the point I am trying to make.

Davidmanheim @ 2023-09-24T06:52 (+3)

Current gross world income is enough to provide everyone on earth with $10,000 per year. (And that overstates a lot of things because much of that wealth is in forms that aren't distributable.) 

But $10,000/year is under the US federal poverty level. It seems a lot like degrowth is embracing a world where everyone lives under the level that a poor person in the developed world lives, which seems in pretty stark contrast to the goals of making the world prosper.

The claim of degrowth is that there's no way to have more than this consistent with long-term flourishing of humanity. That seems to fly in the face of every theoretical and observed claim about resource constraints and growth - climate is a real problem, but degrowth doesn't come anywhere close to solving it.

There are other claims that degrowth makes that seem unobjectionable, and worthy of debate - global poverty is being perpetuated by debt burden in the developing world, so the developed world needs to forgive that debt, foreign aid doesn't accomplish its stated aims is is a force for neo-colonialism, austerity overwhelmingly harms the poor and should be unacceptable, the enforcement of global intellectual property laws harms the developing world, and similar. But the central claim, that we need to have fewer goods, fewer people, and less prosperity, isn't really worth debate.

alexherwix @ 2023-09-24T08:20 (+5)

I have to disclaim that I am NOT an expert on degrowth but from everything I know about the topic you are building up a huge strawman and misrepresenting their position in a way that really proves the point I was trying to make. 

Just searching on google scholar for the term "degrowth" and looking at the first result, I come to an open access article "Research on Degrowth" in a reputable outlet with a reviewing discussion of the actual positions held and research being done on the topic. I have not read the entire article but from engaging with it for less than five minutes it's clear that your simplified summary is inadequate. 

Degrowth is a new term that signifies radical political and economic reorganization leading to drastically reduced resource and energy throughput. Related scholarship critiques the ideology behind the dogma of economic growth; contributes to documentation of negative material, social, and ecological effects of growth; and assesses alternatives to growth-based development (1). Put simply, the degrowth hypothesis is that it is possible to organize a transition and live well under a different political-economic system that has a radically smaller resource throughput. 

Thus, the point the degrowth movement is concerned with is reducing resource and energy throughput and not stopping all forms of (technological) development. On the opposite, it is about being more mindful of what technologies we develop and how we put them into practice with the goal of needing a smaller resource throughput as a result. Or do you expect degrowth proponents to advocate against investing more into R&D of better solar panels and wind turbines? No, the whole point of degrowth is not to be against development but to change our conception of development so as to lead to an overall reduction (or at least stabilization) of resource and energy throughput. Lofty goals but same can be said for the whole AGI and existential risk shebang. 

And I mean their point seems to be worthy of discussion as there are limits to growth as you acknowledge, and it seems not outlandish and to many people probably very reasonable to argue that we are approaching these limits as we have a created an economic system that has pushed us into the dangerous territory of our planetary boundaries. 

Maybe you disagree about the degree to which we are in state of emergency or you are a techno-optimist who believes AGI will easily solve all "resource flow hiccups" we may be experiencing right now but this does NOT absolve you from doing a minimum of critical engagement with a case being made if you are to actively advocate against it. If the topic is not for you, fine. Stay out of it. But do not misrepresent the claims and case of people just because they have a different opinion from you.

P.S. sorry if this is a little bit harsh but this situation really captures a lot of what I am worried about with the EA forum. Stuff sometimes gets downvoted for specious reasons that are not grounded in any significant engagement with the topic but simply a "hot-take" that's formed based on a different (often uninformed) starting point. This creates potentially specious filter bubbles similar to other social media. Shouldn't this forum strive to do better than this?

Davidmanheim @ 2023-09-24T10:36 (+4)

The last sentence in that quote gives away the game. The hypothesis - the one I'm saying is not supported by any evidence, and which has been falsified in the past - is that you can do degrowth without the downsides. The concrete proposals are to stop doing the things that increase economic growth. For example, they are opposed to mining more minerals, regardless of environmental damage, because they want less resource usage. Less isn't more.

You say their point is worthy of discussion. Which point? That there are finite limits? No, it's not worth discussing. Yes, there are limits to growth, but they aren't relevant. They are busy telling people energy is finite, so we should use less - ignoring the fact that energy can be plentiful with solar and other renewable sources. 

These are the same people - literally the same, in some cases - as the "limits to growth" folks from decades ago, and the fact that they were wrong hasn't deterred them in the least. They are STILL telling people that we will run out of minerals, ignoring the fact that discoverable reserves are orders of magnitude larger than we need in the foreseeable future, and in most cases reserves have been getting larger over time.

But sure, you can tell me I haven't engaged with this, and that it needs more thought. I'm even happy to give it more thought - I just need you, or someone else, to point to what you think we should consider that isn't either philosophy about finitude ungrounded in any facts, or that is flat out wrong, instead of saying "consider this general area," one which I'm broadly familiar with already.

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T10:08 (+1)

the central claim, that we need to have fewer goods, fewer people, and less prosperity, isn't really worth debate.

As far as I understand it this is not what they claim. Particularly "fewer people", I am sure they do not claim this. And prosperity either. Prosperity without growth is a classic book.

There may be some people who claim this, they may use the term degrowth, but they are not the "serious" degrowthers. And I find the term Degrowth really misleading. Some use the terms a-growth, post-growth, growth agnostics. I should probably have been more explicit in my post [I added a comment at the end of the post].

And the claim of these people is that rich countries have to consume less, and in general wealth has to be much more distributed. They base it in the fact that past a certain point, the relationship between GDP and social outcomes breaks down or becomes irrelevant. And this is, AFAIK, well known and uncontroversial.

Davidmanheim @ 2023-09-25T18:34 (+2)

I agree with most of your modified claims - but claiming the serious degrowthers are the ones on your side, that the term is misleading, and the popular movement is wrong, seems to be conceding everything?

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T19:56 (+1)

I really have not come across academic "degrowthers" that claim that we need to have fewer people or less prosperity (Kallis, Hickel, Raworth, Jackson, Van den bergh). In any case, in the post I deliberately spoke about to "degrowth the economy in rich countries", not about degrowth in general or (any group of) degrowthers to try avoid these kinds of misunderstandings.

mikbp @ 2023-09-30T10:45 (+1)

I forgot to ask you who are those "degrowthers" that you refer to. I never came across them. Could you please give me a couple of names?

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T09:57 (+1)

Almost the entire question, for resolving either of these issues, is working out whether these premises are really true or not

Exactly. What I try to point to is that EA as movement has not engaged in working out whether degrowth is desirable or not. I don't say anything about the conclusions --in part because I myself am not clear. I actually believe it is extremely difficult to get a clear answer so I would expect a lot of nuance.

Ben Millwood @ 2023-09-25T11:15 (+3)

OK, but this post is about drawing an analogy between the degrowth debate and the AI pause debate, and I don't see the analogy. Do you disagree with my argument for why they aren't analogous?

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T11:28 (+1)

If I understood you well, yes, I disagree. EAs at large basically do not enter the degrowth debate. They act a bit like LeCuns of the degrowth debate, sort to say.

Maybe what I mean is more meta than what you are referring to?

EAs complain that many people just disregard the dangers of AI by saying something in the lines of "AI development is good and stopping it is anyway impossible", or "we will manage the issues", etc. And what I mean is that EAs do/have done the same kind of things with growth.

Ben Millwood @ 2023-09-23T12:35 (+19)

Especially if you disagree, explain why or upvote a comment that roughly reflects your view rather than downvoting. Downvoting controversial views only hides them rather than confronting them.

As a meta-comment, please don't assume that anyone who downvotes does so because they disagree, or only because they disagree. A post being controversial doesn't mean it must be useful to read, any more than it means it must not be useful to read. I vote on posts like this based on whether they said something that I think deserves more attention or helped me understand something better, regardless of whether I think it's right or wrong.

alexherwix @ 2023-09-23T19:48 (+5)

One caution I want to add here is that downvoting when a post is fresh / not popular can have strong filter effects and lead to premature muting of discussion. If the first handful of readers simply dislike a post and downvote it, this makes it much less likely for a more diverse crowd of people to find it and express their take on it. We should consider that there are many different viewpoints out there and that this is important for epistemic health. Thus, I encourage anyone to be mindful when considering to further downvote posts that are already unpopular.

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T13:13 (+1)

I am curious about the arguments from the person who voted disagree to alexherwix's comment.

Daniel_Eth @ 2023-09-23T09:39 (+11)

In my mind there are 2 main differences:

  1. Economic degrowth is undesirable, vs pausing AI is at least arguably desirable – climate change is very unlikely to lead to a literal existential catastrophe, "business as usual" tech improvements and policy changes (i.e., without overthrowing capitalism) will likely lead to a clean energy transition as is, economic degrowth would probably kill many more people than it would save, etc. Meanwhile, AI presents large existential risk in my mind, and I think a pause would probably lower this risk by a non-negligible amount.
  2. Economic degrowth is much less politically feasible than an AI pause – first, because people are loss averse, so degrowth would be taking something away from them vs a pause would just be asking them to forgo future progress; second, because the fear of actual existential risk (from AI) may motivate more extreme policies.

I will say, if I thought p(doom | climate) > 10%, with climate timelines of 12 years, then I would be in favor of degrowth policies that seemed likely to reduce this risk. I just think that in reality, the situation is very different than this.

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T11:38 (+1)

The issue is not only climate change, here. We are in dangerous territory for most of the planetary boundaries.

AI presents large existential risk in my mind

One of the points is that EAs do not seem to engage with large close-to-existential risks in the minds of degrowthers and the like. It is true that they do not have fleshed out to what extent their fears are existential, but this is because they are large enough for worrying them. See "Is this risk actually existential?" may be less important than we think.

I like your second point. But still, even if it is less politically feasible, as you say, if the risk is large enough EA should be in favour of degrowth. My point is that very little effort has been done to address this if.

JWS @ 2023-09-23T10:42 (+7)

Thanks for sharing your take :)

EA have disregarded the possibility to degrowth the economy in rich countries without engaging the arguments

Do you have some references for this? Is the claim more that EA hasn't seen the degrowth arguments at all, or that it has and has dismissed them unjustifiably (in your opinion)?

The EA community has not addressed these reasons, just argued that economic growth is good and that degrowth in rich countries is anyway impossible.

Again, has the EA community made these arguments as opposed to a few individuals? I'm not sure I can think of a canonical source here.

The best example I can think of here is Growth and the case against randomista development - but the argument here is not that growth is good as an end in itself, but that it is the best route to increasing human welfare, and indeed that post explicitly says that "economic growth is not all that matters. GDP misses many crucial determinants of human welfare"

***

Nevertheless, I do you think your intuition is right that the 'degrowth' movement and the 'EA' movement are not friends, and in fact often in opposition. But I think that's because both movements have a set of auxiliary ideological claims which are often in conflict. For example, Jason Hickel is one of the world's most prominent degrowthers, and he often argues that the charts showing that global poverty are biased and incorrect (I think he's wrong), which are often core parts of EAs argument for problems of global health being tractable. But often this argument actually rests on an even more foundational argument of "is the world getting better or not" and so on, so what actually seems like an argument about 'is the current rate of GDP growth sustainable' actually turn out to be deep arguments about 'how should humanity live morally'

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T12:59 (+1)

Do you have some references for this? Is the claim more that EA hasn't seen the degrowth arguments at all, or that it has and has dismissed them unjustifiably (in your opinion)?

I don't have references but, for example searching for the term Degrowth in the forum only returns 22 results. The claim is a bit of both, but more that EA has dismissed them unjustifiably. And I partly understand it because the term degrowth is very misleading.

That the world is getting better in some senses and worse in some others I think it is nothing anyone in either side disputes, no? Their argument rests in the fact that past a certain point, the relationship between GDP and social outcomes breaks down *or becomes irrelevant* (see linear plots of Child mortality vs GDP, for example -below). And it is not about how to live morally, it is about what the carrying capacity of Earth can sustain. This carrying capacity depends on our technology, and the "stocks" are very large, so it is not a problem to follow a trajectory that goes outside the carrying capacity for a while as long as it comes back sufficiently inside on time. But this is nothing that can be lightly disregarded. 

jackva @ 2023-09-25T18:34 (+2)

Today in Nature Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42782-y

"On the other hand, a global negative growth scenario will significantly reduce future cumulative carbon emissions (45%) but also dramatically undermines the pursuit of global development goals, like the elimination of poverty. Even with global policies that significantly increase cash transfers to the poor and retired, dramatically improve income inequality, and eliminate military spending, the Global Negative Growth Big Push scenario leads to an increase of 15 percentage points in global extreme poverty by 2100."

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T19:44 (+1)

From the post: "economic degrowth in rich countries". From your quote: "global negative growth".

But in any case this is irrelevant if the ecological collapse that some argue about has worse global effects.

jackva @ 2023-09-25T20:04 (+2)

Yes, but degrowth only in rich countries doesn't really do much:

"Using the International Futures model, this article shows that negative growth and societal transformations in the Global North are possible without dramatically damaging long-term global socioeconomic development, though these interventions do not solve the global climate crisis, reducing future cumulative carbon emissions by 10.5% through 2100. "

jackva @ 2023-09-25T20:06 (+4)

You either need to bite the bullet on supporting global degrowth or you need to acknowledge that degrowth in rich countries doesn't do very much.

mikbp @ 2023-09-25T20:56 (+1)

Thanks. I'll try to take a look at the paper (at some point). The issue of comparing bads (effects of ecological collapse vs effects of full degrowth) still stands, though.