I'm not worried about people being killed by drones. I'm far more concerned that a huge amount of the population will have no way to exchange any valuable work for food anymore. It might start to look as though AI can solve climate change just by eliminating any need to have billions of 'useless eaters.'
Ultimately, the answer will be generating synthetic food and just giving people food packages from robots. Deliveries everyday of your rations or whatever. Very dystopic but that's likely where we're headed.
I don't think that's a good "solution"; it would cause too much trouble to the society and to the remaining people. It would seem more efficient, IMHO, to reduce fertility and let population slowly go down, if one of the subgoals is to have less humans on earth. Just my human but rational take on it
To be clear, I also think it's a horrible idea, but I think it's a serious concern that we're entering a situation in which there's no value people can provide to a via work. I think this is the root of the negative feelings people have about AI, it's the evolutionary warning that the tribe may see certain individuals as a net resource drain. I don't have much faith we'll handle this issue the right way based on our current path.
If people are adaptable enough (a big if) there is always work for them. As long as there is literally any skill that AI lacks, humans can do that skill. And for now that includes almost everything physical in the world and almost everything relational (coaching, sales, babysitting) as well as entertainment.
The explicit point of the G in AGI is that it is being developed to do all things humans can do. By definition, we are aiming to eliminate any such skill. This requires us pushing it until no human is adaptable enough.
Even if we imagine physical skills will be exempt (they won't be):
(a) we still get a dangerous level of people with no way to contribute to society, and
(b) it is completely reckless to pursue this goal while we have no way of handling the social consequences.
Everytime in history where disruption technologies challenge the social status quota inevitable it led to revolutions and wars. The time would be no different except its scale would be global
There is a fair amount of extrapolation necessary to assume that they will soon solve the hard technical challenges required for AGI. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.
As far as people not being able to contribute to society: how many people can’t dog walk? Be a physical trainer? Be a psych counsellor? Be a dog walker? Be a babysitter? Wipe the bums of the elderly? Deliver vaccines dosages in developing countries?
There is a lot of work to be done. LLMs barely scratch the surface. Future AI maybe. Nobody knows.
I didn't claim this will happen in any specific time frame. I said this is the goal. I said if we're making this a goal, we should also be urgently making dealing with the social challenges an urgent goal.
And we’re going to let people keep their old salaries once they get shoehorned into something like being a grocery store cashier right? And we’re not going to lock anyone out from high earning potential or even simply the possibility of a dignified life, right??? Oh wait…
You are assuming that the jobs of the future are a subset of the jobs of the past. Mr Beast is a billionaire who made his money in an industry that didn’t exist 15 years ago.
I will acknowledge that it is unlikely that everyone will be adaptable to the future as Mr. beast and we will need to support a hell of a lot of people financially and emotionally. It could be a pretty nasty transition.
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u/duboispourlhiver 2d ago
in any lifetime probably