“I have hopes for a utopian future where AI does everything better than humans, which allows us to spend our time poorly doing the things we are most excited about.”

This thought is quite common and widespread, I’ve heard it multiple times, and it always baffles me. The very idea that human beings would stop exploiting each other and just live a peaceful, content life with their AI helpers is so hopelessly distant from the way I understand the world. I wish I was wrong, but human beings don’t exploit each other because we need to, as if it was an unfortunate thing; we exploit each other because we want and because we can. Even if AI robots solved most of our problems, we will never simply accept that and let others live in peace. Some human beings will always look for opportunities to rise above others, as long as they somehow can. I’d go even further as to say that, in case a future like that became actually feasible and predictable, lots of people currently in positions of power would fight very hard to keep that from happening.