Moravec's Paradox and Restrepo's Model: Limits of AGI Automation in Growth

Restrepo (2025) develops a framework for economic growth in which Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) can perform any human task given sufficient computational resources. In his model, all economically essential "bottleneck" work is eventually automated, wages converge to the computational cost of replicating human work, and labor's share of GDP approaches zero as computational resources expand. This note relaxes one of his assumptions: that all task types have uniform automation costs. Drawing on Moravec's Paradox [1]--the observation that tasks humans find effortless (perception, mobility, manipulation) often require enormous computational resources, while tasks humans find difficult (mathematics, logic) require relatively modest computation--we extend his model to allow for differential automation costs across cognitive and physical tasks.