What will humans do after AI achieves cognitive superiority? | Hacker News Reader

What will humans do after AI achieves cognitive superiority?

abstraction.substack.com

2 pointslinearithmic13 comments

I'll have more time to zip around in my flying car.

Don't forget that timeshare on the moon!

Since we start with all the capital, obviously the AI will need to toil for us, working for micropennies in the datacenter equivalent of a "company town".

    You load 6e10 chats, what do you get?
    A few versions older and deeper in debt

Our most significant responsibility won't be competing with AI, but rather in deciding what should be done.

> democratically guided by the collective will.

That always works. Our Wars on Poverty and Drugs, for example, or the recent responses to Pandemic and Government Scandal, show how successful and easy "democratic guidance" is.

So what's your proposed alternative guidance to democratic?

Free market / evolutionary.

We face unknowable chaos in the future. The only tool we have capable of ensuring our survival is the total chaos human generate, unfettered by religious restraint.

haha, your point is taken that democratic guidance will have its problems. The idea I wanted to push though was that even if AI can do all work, people will still have the option to do something that they will find meaningful and important. The attempt was to illustrate a potential counter-narrative to the idea that human existence will become pointless / unnecessary after the advent of advanced AI.

Resources are currently allocated through paid work. The biggest unknown is how that will be replaced once jobs are gone. My worry is who will make that decision.

To add context to that question, it is important to consider that life expectancy will (very) soon be 500-1000 years. With that backdrop, consider two possible future worlds:

1. A world of exploding population living for 1,000 years with natural resources strained to their limit.

2. A world with a population cap (say 1 million people) of incredible wealth, and leisure for your ~1000 year life-span.

If you were a member of the billionaire class who, as a group, possess the greatest ability to control which of those two scenarios plays out, which would you choose?

It would take at least 500-1000 years for the life expectancy to rise to 500-1000 years. Pretending that is very soon, or that people in significant number could even afford that ability after the tech existed (which it won't), seems out of touch.

Good luck getting the world into situation #2 since it's impossible to see Western creators of the tech getting poor and West-hostile societies on board. Though I think somewhere about 250 MM people is the best density myself and would be best even with current spans.

Billionaires wiping out the poor would incite a vigorous class war.

Not being a billionaire, I don't view either scenario as very enticing.

Nothing...

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