Vitae per person (VPP): a new metric of civilizational resource
an alternative to unemployment figures
A lot of people are preoccupied with unemployment resulting from AI-enabled automation.
I’ve never been so concerned about this. What I’m far more concerned about is this:
Do we have enough resources for every person on the planet?
Each person needs to consume some fixed amount of resources each year — food, energy, water, earth metals, … — to live as well as your average American coastal elite.
So I’d like to propose a new unit:
1 vita = {annual energy, clean water, protein, transport, m² climate-controlled indoor space, compute, communications bandwidth, consumer-durables flow}, each specified at 2025 “coastal-elite” service levels.1
I am very excited about AI increasing the vitae available to us.
If we live in a world with 10 VPP, I’m not at all worried about whether I personally am employed or not, because I can rely on benevolence and altruism to spot me a vita and help me out.2
If we live in a world with 1-2 VPP, I’m a bit more concerned. You can probably buy significant marginal utility in the 1-2 vita range; I don’t think redistribution is automatic in this world.
And if we live in a world with <1 VPP — which it’s my impression we currently do — my top priority is moving us towards a world with at least 8 billion vitae (one for each person alive today).
I measure my civilization not by its unemployment figures but by VPP.
If we have abundant VPP, looking after everyone is just a redistributive question.
Since VPP is determined by the scarcest resource, this is one case where you do want to raise the floor!3
AI deployment and economic policy should be evaluated on:
“What path do they put us on for VPP by 2050 / 2100?”
A policy that keeps VPP at 0.3 while “preserving jobs” is bad.
A policy that risks existential catastrophe to chase VPP 1,000 is also bad.
We want the Pareto frontier: maximize long-run VPP subject to not dying.
Historically, civilization has operated at well under one coastal-elite life per person. VPP is ~0.3 today. The interesting question is not ‘will there be jobs?’ but “can AI + new energy push us to 3–10 VPP without wrecking the world?’”
This is the per-person analog of Kardashev’s civilizational energy parameter. Currently, humanity is measured on the Kardashev scale at K = ~ 0.72: that’s how far we’ve progressed, on a log scale, from a pre-industrial species (K ≈ 0) to a full planetary-energy civilization (K = 1). We’re a factor ~500 too small to be type I.
Today: 0.3 VPP
Type I: 40 VPP
I think this stands for as long as humans are similar enough to each other that our elite can’t conscience hoarding vitae when some people have <1.
I’d happily see there be an EA / international org that:
Estimates the factors that go into a vita
Identifies / hones in on the lowest
Supports initiatives to raise it
Rinse and repeat
I don’t currently see the path towards the world where your altruistic condition on conscience of elite fulfills.
I imagine that trying to figure out how to build a word with all the right *incentives* for altruism for vita hoarders has potentially a very high impact (maybe low efficiency due to the difficulty of the task).
I think we need to be careful with relying on trickle down (vita) economics!
0.3 seems high to me — from your table, I expect GPT is using easier-to-find country-level stats rather than actual coastal elite stats. My guess is the true figure is like 0.1-0.25, depending on what you’re envisioning wrt coastal elite.