The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario.
We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc.
The humans all running around on their Wall-E carts doesn't feel like utopia to me.
Edit: to head off the "rich people worried about striving for their job while people in poor countries are starving" arguments, I encourage you to visit a dying rust belt town in the US. These folks are by and large not starving (indeed, overabundance of calories is the bigger problem), they have adequate shelter, and plenty of outdoor space. Their material needs are met. But these places are despair central. People see little opportunity for advancement or the ability to change their circumstances, and the opioid epidemic is a direct consequence of a sense of hopelessness that there is no place for motivation to go or to effect change.
>A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia.
I understand where you're coming from on that, but there are a ton of people living in slavery, or in unsafe working conditions, or with food insecurity, or dying of preventable disease.
There will always be something to strive for, even if it's made up. You think that the best football players in the world are doing something real? No, it's a made up game. We'll make up more games.
I agree with your points. My problem is that I don't see any way to "stop" AI development at a level just below human capability where you get most of the benefits but still have humans firmly in control.
Regarding entertainment jobs like sports star, musician, artist, actor, etc., the problem is those are professions where, for the most part, only the very best can make a living. Nobody is that interested in seeing the matches of the 324th best tennis player in the world, despite that person being in the top .01% of tennis players globally. Similarly, only a tiny percentage of actors "make it", everyone else does it for a few years and then leaves because they enjoy eating, or they accept poverty wages for a long time.
I get pretty scared when I hear the AI utopianists rattle off all the benefits that are coming (and when they play down the risks) because it feels clear to me that they really haven't wargamed out what society would look like with very powerful AI.
The game is made up, but the effort, and process to be one of the most skilled sports players is still real. And sports players would probably feel something missing life if AI could replace them too
Computers surpassed humans at chess nearly 30 years ago. Yet human chess is more popular than ever, and people still dedicate their life to improving at chess.
As a more silly comparison, forklifts didn't stop people from weightlifting.
Chess is inherently a leisure activity. The incentive for playing chess is just to be better at chess. But things like woodworking, typesetting, and welding, while all possible to do recreationally, are not leisure activities. They are effort used to produce something. The desire is always there to engage with the thing or idea, but if the resource cost is far too high or the knowledge required is more than one person can reasonably learn the effort will not be expended. A leisure activity will always persist so long as someone knows how to do it because it exists for itself. But many other activities exist in service to something else, and if that something else ceases to exist then the activity will as well. You lose entire domains of useful cross-disciplinary knowledge that way.
Presumably, a truly superintelligent AI in a utopia scenario could figure out a way to enable people to continue working, even if the work doesn’t actually contribute anything, if it is really the case that work is essential to human wellbeing.
Now you might say “but those would be fake jobs.” If so, I have bad news about how many present-day jobs are fake jobs.
I agree with this. I thought the AI 2027 paper put it well:
> There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.
I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's an enviable/desirable future.
I don’t even see why they have to be bioengineered. We have all-natural human beings doing this right now, except they are rubber-stamping human rather than artificial directives.
They don't, it's just at that point in the AI 2027 story the AI has already wiped out the humans due to resource contention (similar to how humans largely wiped out the wolves).
> A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc.
I somewhat get the point, but I think stuff like this is very often said by very privileged people. I don't think it's a serious threat to humanity as a whole. Perhaps to some humans, but there will always be ambitious people, even in a world where most things are provided by benevolent AIs for free. There is simply so much more harm caused to actual humans today by resource insufficiency than by them having too much, that I don't think we should worry about this scenario today.
There's the mice utopia experiment too. I often hear that in space your bones dégradé, your biology needs weight as input.
Also I believe our socialness was crafted out of the need for survival. If removed it's all gonna run wild since nobody needs anybody, and it might end up as doom scrolling but for human relationship. Short bursts from time to time and that's it
Really glad you brought up the mice utopia experiments. I encourage people to read about them and think how they apply to humans.
In many ways they don't apply to humans, and I think a lot of the modern critiques are valid, and the overpopulation concerns in particular don't map well to the modern world. Still, I believe it helps to think deeply about what happens to societies when innate drives and motivations have "nowhere to go".
It's the inverse. We created a world for introverts only in the last ~50 years, where people can spend all their time in an office desk not actually talking to anyone. This was never the case in any of human evolution before.
It's only going back. Raw urban human connections will be the only thing left to exercise.
I disagree. I think the best-case outcomes for AI are actually quite positive. AI might actually fix many of the problems with the tech world that we have right now, like monoculture and consolidation.
I think this line of thinking is a huge disservice to people in third world countries and poverty. People everywhere want to find goals and motivations that move them forward.
Just look at the legions of people that have moved from Chinese rural areas to big cities. For many, many people, life in the cities is worse and kind of dystopian - much more overcrowding, "drone-like" jobs indoors, horrible pollution, and especially for men an often abysmal sex ratio if you want to find a mate. But people do it because it offers the dream of advancement and a better life - and of course some people do achieve that dream, even if the majority do not. That's versus life in rural areas which is guaranteed to be static, no chance for advancement and often crushing boredom.
People everywhere want to strive, work hard and get ahead. This is not just a privileged rich people issue.
In these three videos she sets up a tripod and tells her toddler to walk away from her. She is behind the camera. He toddles away, occasionally looking back at her or checking out something on the ground or falling on his butt. At some point he is too far away and she runs after him, entering the frame from behind the camera. The video stops and shows the distance he was able to be away before she had to chase after him.
The videos are sweet and funny but also engrossing and powerful. The tension builds as you watch it. Is this the moment where he is too far away? What if that were my son? Would I have run after him at this point? He sure is getting close to those trees.
But most importantly it expresses parenthood. The video only works because a real human experienced that very particular feeling of worry as her child was just a bit too uncomfortably far away. Because an AI can never have this feeling it can never create this art.
I do not believe that a labor-less world is around the corner. But if it was, we can just make things like this. And the world would be beautiful.
its annoying that robots are going to take intellectual jobs before physical ones. it feels way more likely for my project manager to become an agent before the lady that makes me a burrito at chipotle.
I think this is very true, but robots are definitely coming for the burrito makers, too.
Bill Gates talks about this in his recent missive, but as robotic technology improves (and, perhaps more importantly, as the cost comes down) there will be huge competitive pressures for companies to replace workers with robots wherever they can.
Even their utopian views feel dystopian. Take solace in the fact, that it looks like it’ll take trillions to achieve, probably one of the most expensive technological buildouts of all time?
We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc.
The humans all running around on their Wall-E carts doesn't feel like utopia to me.
Edit: to head off the "rich people worried about striving for their job while people in poor countries are starving" arguments, I encourage you to visit a dying rust belt town in the US. These folks are by and large not starving (indeed, overabundance of calories is the bigger problem), they have adequate shelter, and plenty of outdoor space. Their material needs are met. But these places are despair central. People see little opportunity for advancement or the ability to change their circumstances, and the opioid epidemic is a direct consequence of a sense of hopelessness that there is no place for motivation to go or to effect change.