Most likely the countries who will have unconstrained AGIs will get to advance technologically by leaps and bounds. And those who constrain it will remain in the "stone age" when it comes to it.
What would AGI lead to? Most knowledge work would be replaced in the same way as manufacturing work has been, and AGI is in control of the existing elite. It would be used to suppress any revolt for eternity, because surveillance could be perfectly automated and omnipresent.
Really not something to aspire to.
Or, my favorite outcome, the AI to iterate over itself and develop its own hardware and so on.
If the rich need less and less educated, healthy and well fed workers, then more and more people will get treated like shit. We are currently going into that direction with full speed. The rich aren't even bothering to hide this anymore from the public because they think they have won the game and can't be overruled anymore. Let's hope there will be still elections in four years and MAGA doesn't rig it like Fidesz in Hungary and so many other countries who have fallen into the hands of the internationalist oligarchy.
Maybe. I think it's a matter of culture.
Very few people mistreat their dogs and cats in wealthy countries. Why shouldn't people in power treat regular people at least as well as regular folks treat their pets?
I'm no history buff but my hunch is that mistreatment of people largely came from a fear that if I don't engage in cruelty to maximize power, my opponents will and given that they're cruel, they'll be cruel to me when they come to take over.
So we end up with this zero sum game of squeezing people, animals, resources and the planet in an arms race because everyone's afraid to lose.
In the past - you couldn't be sure if someone else was building up an army, so you had to build up an army. But now that we have satellites and we can largely track everything - we can actually agree to not engage in this zero sum dynamic.
There will be a shift from treating people as means to an end of power accumulation and containment, to treating people as something you just inherently like and would like to see prosper.
It'll be a shift away from this deeply corrosive idea of never ending competition and growth. When people's basic needs are met and no one is grouping up to take other people's goodies - why should regular people compete with one another?
They shouldn't and they won't. People who want to do good work will do so and improving the lives of people worldwide will be its own reward. Private islands, bunkers and yachts will become incomprehensible because there'll be no serf class to service any of it. We'll go back to if you want to be well liked and respected - you have to be a good person. I look forward to it :)
Because very few regular people will be their pets. These are the people who do everything in their power to pay their employees less. They treat their non-pets horribly... see feed lots and amazon warehouses. They actively campaign against programs which treat anyone well, particularly those who they aren't extracting wealth from. They whine and moan and cry about rules that protect people from getting sick and injured because helping those people would prevent them from earning a bit more profit.
They may spend a pile of money on surgery for their bunny, but if you want them to behave nicely to someone else's pet, or even someone else... well that's where they draw the line.
I guess you are hoping to be one of those pets... but what makes you think you're qualified for that, and why would you be willing to sacrifice all of your friends and family to the fate of feral dogs for the chance to be a pet?
I'm not suggesting that a few people become rich people's pets.
I'm saying it isn't inherent in human nature to mistreat other conscious beings.
If people were normally cruel to their pets, then I'd say yeah, this species just seems to enjoy cruelty and it is what it is. But we aren't cruel to pets, so the cruelty to workers does not stem from human nature, but other factors.
I gave one theory as to what causes the cruelty and that I'm somewhat optimistic that it'll run its course in due time.
Anyhoo :)
Killer ape theory
I suspect (but not sure) it may be more inherent than is generally believed. Then again simple physical pain is easy to gauge and relate to, but passing some law is an academic process where one can distance oneself from the ill effects on the adherents of the law. Then there are more variations - people will be tribalistic, they will be kind to their own kind/family even sacrificing, but murderous to some one of another tribe. All in all the average human is bundle of contradictions if you were to analyze simplistically, though it will make good sense when viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology.
"Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature" (Georgia Guidestones, a monument describing someone's ideal future that is surrounded by conspiracy)
Will you be one of the 500 million pets? Or one of the 7.5 billion leftovers? Sure would be a shame if billions become unnecessary and then a pandemic 100X worse than covid got lableaked.
Also, I would rather die than be someone's pet. Why should I have to rely on the charity and good humor of a ruler? Pardon my language but Fuck that entirely.
You can’t seriosly claim they are upending people’s jobs when those jobs were BS in the first place.
For example US is probably the most resource rich country in the world, but people don't consider it for the resource curse because the rest of its economy is so huge.
Sociology: The Oil Curse
Could it exist some day? Certainly. But currently 'AI' will never become an AGI, there's no path forward.
What indicators are these?
Here we are, a couple of years later, truly musing about sectors of the world embracing AI and others not.
That sort of piecemeal adoption was predictable but not that we are here to have this debate this soon!
These are all silicon valley "neck thoughts." They're entirely uninformed by the current state of the world and any travels through it. It's fantasies brought about by people with purely monetary desires.
It'd be funny if there wasn't billions of dollars being burnt to market this crap.
With every technological advancement it can always be good or bad. I believe it is going to be good to have a true AI available at our fingertips.
Because I can think of a large number of historical scenarios where malicious people get access to certain capabilities and it absolutely does not go well and you do have to somehow account for the fact that this is a real thing that is going to happen.
For example, several governments are actively engaged in a live streamed genocide and nothing akin to the 1789 revolt in Paris seems to be underway.
The 1789 was one of many revolutions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts) and it was not fought because of genocide of other people, it was due to internal problems.
Sure. The ancien régime was considered illegitimate so they got rid of it, and if a state is involved in genocide it is since the Holocaust considered illegitimate and it should lose its sovereignty.