I wish we were in the Star Trek universe, so this was "AI will free humanity to pursue science and art without economic concerns" instead of "AI will make everyone poor and subjugate."
Back in 1968 people were concerned about losing jobs to computers, just like they are today.
MCCOY: Jim, we've all seen the advances of mechanisation. After all, Daystrom did design the computers that run this ship.
KIRK: Under human control.
MCCOY: We're all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine. When it comes to your job, that's different. And it always will be different.
KIRK: Am I afraid of losing command to a computer? Daystrom's right. I can do a lot of other things. Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain? Is that why I'm fighting it? Am I that petty?
MCCOY: Jim, if you have the awareness to ask yourself that question, you don't need me to answer it for you. Why don't you ask James T. Kirk? He's a pretty honest guy.If you consider the notorious productivity vs wage graph, it makes sense.
People didn't lose their jobs, but the productivity gains from computers and automation didn't go to them either.
That kind of argument is getting really old. It's not a given that there is always something else for people to do when a job is automated, and when there is it's generally not something of equal or higher value (hint, they would have already been doing it).
Those jobs didn't really exist yet, because everyone was too busy trying to get enough to eat.
~50% of the people on the planet live in pretty miserable conditions. We do not live in the age of abundance. Contrary to popular opinion, if we just split up Bill Gates's money, it would not be enough for everyone to have a nice life. On net, we will benefit massively from freeing up labor to do other things - beside mundane things that could be automated but currently cost too much to automate with current methods for it to make sense to automate them.
We could do with fewer "marketing, law, finance, etc" jobs.
We can say this about almost any job category. For those perceived as useless, good riddance. For those seen as essential, they’re essential—wouldn’t it be nice if doctors could spend as much time as they wanted with every patient because a machine was doing the boring bits?
Human Beings have been forced to survive most of our existence - I believe when we lift ourselves out of the necessity of work, that we finally actually be human for the first time.
We are supposed to exist above it all as we are the only life that we are aware that could ever do that.
We're not talking about working class poor people.
Even short of abolishing capitalism (or at least UBI, or a decent social safety net) though, the most likely answer is that people will find work doing stuff that capital wants, and which AI can't yet do (sex work? meaningful art?), or that capital for some reason doesn't want AI to do (intelligence work? domestic servants?). I don't know what those professions will be, but it's likely some of them don't even exist yet.
But now the machines are after our brains too.
We'd have more community, be more grounded, respect the land more, and have less bullshit jobs and products, if a much larger percentage of people still worked in agriculture.
Working the land had tons of downtime - even back at medieval and ancient times. In fact, even hunter gatherers have been observe by ethnographers to just need 2-3 hours to get the food for the day.
> I wish AI would do my laundry and dishes so I could do my art and writing.
> Instead, AI is doing my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes
We can't multiply a million numbers together in a second which is hard for us. But doing the tasks for laundry is easy for us but hard for computers.
Which makes sense if you think about evolutionary pressures of what we are optimized to do well.
It also makes it possible that a few can effectively rule over many without risking a revolution. But there’s a solid argument we are morally obligated to take that risk due to the state of today’s society.
Analogy: if a lot of people are held hostage in a building, do you attempt to breach the building, risking more casualties, or do you give up and let those people die? You do option c, evacuate the surroundings, form a plan to minimize risk, and then breach the building.
Translating into AI, it means we need to minimize the risk of a few taking control and then move forward. Obviously if we achieved AGI today, the risk of a few taking control is still very present
However, you also move fast, because waiting costs lives. If the risk of a few taking control isn’t going away, then we need to move forward. It’s only worth waiting if there’s a good chance that society will fundamentally change in a way that reduces this risk, but if we move forward now, AGI would precede that shift.
Oddly, I feel society is becoming a lot more liberal and anti-capitalist. Maybe it’s just the echo-chamber from the people I surround myself with and online places like HN. So the above could be true.
But lastly, we’re nowhere near AGI, and I’m certain the steps we need to take will cause massive societal shifts before AGI is reached, revealing more about how great the risk of a few taking control really is.