Why do people think this is any different than other major economic revolutions like electricity or the Industrial Revolution? Society is not going to collapse, things will just get weirder in both unbelievably positive ways and then also unbelievably negative ways, like the internet.
If that undoes the suffering of dozens of millions of human beings killed and maimed in WWI and WWII enabled by the Industrial Revolution, let us have not!
Electricity doesn't remove the need for human labor, it just increases productivity. If we produced AGI that could match top humans across all fields, it would mean no more jobs (knowledge jobs at least; physical labor elimination depends on robotics). That would make the university model obsolete- training researchers would be a waste of money, and the well-paid positions that require a degree and thus justify tuition would vanish. The economy would have to change fundamentally or else people would have to starve en masse.
If we produced ASI, things would become truly unpredictable. There are some obvious things that are on the table- fusion, synthetic meat, actual VR, immortality, ending hunger, global warming, or war, etc. We probably get these if they can be gotten. And then it's into unknown unknowns.
Perfectly reasonable to believe ASI is impossible or that LLMs don't lead to AGI, but there is not much room to question how impactful these would be.
I disagree, you have to take yourself back to when electricity was not widely available. How much labor did electricity eliminate? A LOT I imagine.
AI will make a lot of things obsolete but I think that is just the inherent nature of such a disruptive technology.
It makes labor cost way lower for many things. But how the economy reorganizes itself around it seems unclear but I don’t really share this fear of the world imploding. How could cheap labor be bad?
Robotics for physical labor lag way behind e.g. coding but only because we haven’t mastered how to figure out the data flywheel and/or transfer knowledge sufficiently and efficiently (though people are trying).
>How much labor did electricity eliminate? A LOT I imagine.
90% or even 99.9% are in an entirely separate category from 100%. If a person can do 1000x labor per time and you have a use for the extra 999x labor, they and you can both benefit from the massive productivity gains. If that person can be replaced by as many robots and AIs as you like, you no longer have any use for them.
Our economy runs on the fact that we all have value to contribute and needs to fill; we exchange that value for money and then exchange that money for survival necessities plus extra comforts. If we no longer have any value versus a machine, we no longer have a method to attain food and shelter other than already having capital. Capitalism cannot exist under these conditions. And you can't get the AGI manager or AGI repairman job to account for it- the AGI is a better fit for these jobs too.
The only jobs that can exist under those conditions are government mandated. So we either run a jobs program for everybody or we provide a UBI and nobody works. Electricity didn't change anything so fundamental.
