Every industrial revolution bypasses a bottleneck

From the conversation

So that's what AGI can do. Even if you curtail it to just white-collar work, that's still tens of trillions of dollars of value. So once we have models which are actually human-level, they will be worth at least that, pending the fact that you can build them or you can run them. I don’t think we should constrain ourselves to being like, "Oh, well, maybe it'll be some fraction of current payroll," because that's very contingent on humans being humans. That's a lower bound, to be clear. Oh yeah, lower bound for sure. But if you think about someone trying to estimate the upper bound for the market cap of Caterpillar based on, "Well, it takes this many men and wheelbarrows to dig a trench. So it couldn't be more than that." One way to think about the industrial revolutions is every time you figure out the industrial revolution, what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck. The bottleneck prior to what we call the Industrial Revolution was metabolism. How much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for their peasant overlord or whatever? Nowadays we would giggle to think that the amount of food we produce is meaningful in the context of the economic power of a particular country.…