All roads lead to equality when the value of labour becomes 0 due to 100% automation.
Over history, lots of underclasses have been stuck that way for multiple generations, even without the assistance of a robot workforce that can replace them economically.
Some future rich class so empowered would be quite capable of treating the poor like most today treat pets. Fed and housed, but mostly neutered and the rest going through multiple generations of selective inbreeding for traits the owners deem interesting.
On the first, non-human pets rebelling is seen every time an abused animal bites their owner.
On the second, the hypothetical required by the scenario is that AI makes all human labour redundant: that includes all security forces, but it also means the AI moving around the security bots and observing through sensors is at least as competent as every human political campaign strategist, every human propagandist, every human general, every human negotiator, and every human surveillance worker.
This is because if some AI isn't all those things and more, humans can still get employed to work those jobs.
The question is, to what extent would humans still set goals and priorities, and how.
From what I hear about the US and UK governments, even the elected representatives of these governments don't really set goals and priorities, so the answer is surely "humans don't".
Hopefully AI would help us better achieve our goals, but they still need to be our goals. I’m just not sure what that means. I don’t think anybody does.
That’s a major problem here, if we can’t reliably articulate our goals in unambiguous terms, how in earth can we expect AI to help us achieve them? The chances that whatever they end up achieving will match what we will actually like after the fact seems near zero.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
This is the "draw the rest of the owl"* of the alignment problem.
Or possibly the rest-of-owl of AI in general: Consider that there's still no level-5 self driving cars, despite road traffic law existing and the developers knowing about it since before they started trying.
All those "jobs" you describe - and many more - would cease to be a thing, as their purported basis for existence would be no more. Any role that doesn't concretely contribute to our survival and advancement is just "busy work". People could theoretically continue to maintain some simulation of something that keeps them as a retirement, but it'd be meaningless.
Dogs in particular are pack animals, self-organisation amongst them wouldn't be at our level but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> All those "jobs" you describe - and many more - would cease to be a thing, as their purported basis for existence would be no more. Any role that doesn't concretely contribute to our survival and advancement is just "busy work". People could theoretically continue to maintain some simulation of something that keeps them as a retirement, but it'd be meaningless.
Yes?
I think you've missed the point, though.
When your opponent has all those skills to that level and doesn't sleep and simply applies all the surveillance tech that has already been invented like laser microphones and wall-penetrating radar that can monitor your pulse and breathing, how would you manage to rebel?
How would you find a like mind to organise with, when your opponent knows what you said marginally before the slow biological auditory cortex of the person you're talking to passes the words to their consciousness? Silicon is already that fast at this task.
And that's assuming you even want to. Propaganda and standard cult tactics observably prevent most rebellions from starting. LLMs are already weirdly effective at persuading a lot of people to act against their own interests.
No reason, except their (the rich or the AI) own personal desire to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
> They're absolutely useless alive from an economics perspective, and so would probably be better served ground up into fertilizer or some other actually useful form.
Indeed. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."
But while some may care about disassembling this world and all non-rich-human life on it to make a Dyson swarm of data centres, there's also the possibility each will compete for how many billions of sycophants they can get stoking their respective egos.
Or a handful of the poor become the new rich, which is usually what happens in that scenario.
For the latter point, consider that no matter how much the people of North Sentinel Island hate outsiders, they're not going to pose any risk to the rest of us.
Now, an elite whose membership includes those who want equality for the rest of us, that may create conditions for such a rebellion to succeed, but absent such from an insider (which could be encoded into the AI via either a bug or deliberately from whoever created the AI), some elite whose defence is handled by the kind of AI under consideration would not face any more of a threat from the wider population than we here in the west today face from the North Sentinel Islanders.
Note however that I'm not saying what will happen, but what is possible in various conditions. There's no guarantee of anything at this point.