When all our needs are met, and all the machinery to meet those needs tend to themselves, what work remains?
- Futurama: https://youtu.be/LCPhbN1l024
If it really just expands faster than we can come up with needs, then what is there to worry about?
which means we need to learn terraforming and/or interstellar travel within the next 100,000 years, without killing our entire species while we do it.
Needs are food, housing, and safety. Anything beyond that is not a need, it is a want. We're not giving everyone everything they need, and an increasingly tiny number of people are grabbing anything and everything they want.
We're about to start discovering that in a dynamical system with lots of other intelligent agents, our need for "safety" at a certain point does depend on others need for food and housing.
Let's try to remember that as we are laying them all off to give their jobs to AI.
The line between a need and a want is fuzzy to say the least. To cavepeople, all our needs are met at this point. But we're anywhere near fulfilled and have come up with more terms that enter the 'need' category. Maslow's hierarchy, pop authors like Tony Robbins (certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth, contribution) and Dan Pink (autonomy, mastery, purpose), trained psycologists/psychiatrists like Gabor Maté and Ted Klontz talk about how our relations during childhood reveal a need for bond/connection to oneself and others.
We're not dealing with exact sciences here, so it's not easy to converge on an objective list of 'needs' that are separated from 'wants'. There are studies like the famous Harvard Hapiness study that may give us more objective notions, but you'd need to run several of these across time to find stuff that has stronger predictive value across generations.
We could go on here - I'd argue universal healthcare is a 'need' in order to live a happy/fulfilled/safe human life in the modern world. Many would disagree with me, but the point is the goal post shifts as we progress.
I'd call it a need if the lack of it is correlated with disfunctional states or objectively lesser outcomes (which outcomes are necessary?). Even if you have this clear cut the question of what's considered necessary is an opinion. The implication of this in the conversation is that AI isn't likely to fulfill our needs: we'll come up with more and shift the goal post just like all our ancestors have done until now.
Never mind the fact that for them, the extra does nothing to change their lifestyle, and is essentially just a dollar-denominated high score, while for the rest of us, the smallest fraction of that wealth would be life-altering.
If you're upset about something, obviously all your needs aren't being met yet.
That Culture was a complete utopia from the author's perspective — all their serious drama had to come from their interactions with various outsiders.
Yet there are people here in the real world who find it horrifying.
Those fictional AI would out-class humans by about the degree to which a human would outclass a blade of grass; even if you tone that down a bit and we're just pets rather than plants in comparison, I can see how people may feel that this detracts from their sense of self-worth.
Being fed and sheltered for free isn't sufficient to provide for all of a person's needs.