Then we should start planning now by stopping the notion that being a good, moral person includes earning a wage.<p>There are big political issues with achieving UBI. One of them is reversing that notion. I grew up in a poor family, one time, when my Mum was laid off I heard her lament that she didn't want to take unemployment because she wasn't one of 'those scroungers.'<p>I see unemployment from AI, if it happens, to be a slow burn. If we don't shift our attitudes towards it then we're going to be entering a new era of "Welfare queens" but without any meaningful work for people to actually do.
The charts show wages plummeting if "AGI" becomes real in 5 or 20 years while "output" skyrockets. But I'm very curious what economic "output" the AGI will be producing that is so valuable in a world where no one has a job. All that economic output needs a consumer. But who's consuming a<p>Ultimately, this analysis is incredibly shallow. There's no indication the author has thought very hard about what types of tasks are even feasible for "AI" to do. Will AI repair leaky plumbing? Will it start new businesses? Can it pump my gas? Can it teach ballet to children?<p>It's easy to forget all the parts of a job that go along with the core part of the job. Could AI deliver packages? Well, it's questionable that AI can successfully drive on city streets at scale, but if AI can drive the delivery van to my house, can it load the boxes into the delivery van? Can it bring the package to my door? Can it handle a mechanical failure or a flat tire? Can it refill its own fuel? How will it handle it when packages are stolen from it prior to delivery? Call the AI cops?<p>And to what end? Who's even deciding to make and sell products? Does the AI decide on its own to operate a business? Why would it? How would AI direct its attention and activity appropriately? Where would AI get the resources to do this? Why would it even try?
Most innovations to make things easier/more automated have caused humanity to work harder and longer. It would be quite humane if AI allows us to finally do the opposite but I don’t think that will be the case; The new level of productivity is often just the new baseline that competitors have to meet.<p>Someone still has to run the AI. It will be a while before AI can fully reproduce and improve itself, especially throughout the whole supply chain, which means humans still need to be in the loop for that. “Smarter” or not, AI will be symbiotic with humanity for a very long time to come.
How are we going to order our society when none of us can compete with machines? It used to be that everyone could contribute something- even grandma could churn butter and dullards could pull a plow. But technology has made it so that only a few people can really contribute anymore. Most people's labor just isn't that valuable anymore, relative to the machines. We have the tech to live to 100 but no clear way, or reason, to afford it. It all points to a coming crisis point when we must radically alter the social contract.
Chart 2 (Ouputs and Wages) illustrates what I have been saying all along: AI is the #1 reason we need universal basic income. Let the AI have my job. But it's got no need for my income, so I keep that!
Predictions of doom and gloom because some technology (AI or something else) renders humans unneeded forget that humans aren't just workers but also consumers. So if we get rid of a large proportion of workers without replacing work as a means of wealth distribution the economy will no longer work because there will be no one to buy the goods and services produced.<p>Ultimately we will either have to forgo technological advancement in order to keep the current model where work is the primary means of wealth distribution or move to a completely different system for that. If machines can do our work to let us do more interesting things for us I say great.<p>The difficulty is the transition period where replacing people by AI without compensation will be advantageous for the first movers but not yet enough to break the system to force us to a new model.
I tend to disagree with this writing. I think it's overly broad and imprecise. It doesn't consider that the current advances are rather specific to what we call knowledge work.<p>I don't see hairdressers, carpenters or people working on construction sites etc. being directly affected by this. Everyone will still need a new haircut, some furniture and a house. Sure, there might be machines to do that at some point but these machines need to be built and maintained by someone. At least in the first round until we have other machines to build and maintain those machines...
When the machines, all on their own, learn physics and then have the insights to reconcile QFT and GR and thereby provide us with an entire new model for the universe, then I'll agree that machine intelligence has passed human intelligence. As it is, AI is a very convincing mocking bird.
People think differently. A pedantic paperwork processor can be gold in the right position. An inspired create type needs a different job.<p>Are we planning to create AIs with different kinds of 'intelligence'? Or will we all be ruled by the same rote idiot-savant rule-lawyer in every position, making our lives miserable?<p>An old joke: The best world is French cooks, British police and German administrators.<p>The worst? British cooks, French administrators and German police.<p>What kind of AI are we planning to deploy?
Trajectory? The sun is on a trajectory to collide with the earth.<p>Large language models aren't intelligence in the same way humans are. I remain unconcerned about the machines and more concerned aboutthe intentions of those who weild them.
Until AI can experience joy in the act of attaining knowledge they're all dumb AF to me. Make a curious AI, then my eyebrows will suffer a slight upwards raise.
“Policymakers should charge teams of experts with iterative scenario planning to help them regularly update their views on how the probabilities of the various scenarios evolve”<p>Or you know just have ai models run the scenarios.<p>I’m fairly fatigued on this sort of article… I do believe there will be large impact to work & society as we are able to manufacture intelligence. But that’s so obvious now as to be uninteresting.<p>Everyone says we’ll need solutions but I’ve yet to see meaningful work to propose any.
Well, yeah, we may master fusion, we may send man to mars, we may cure cancer, we may all die due to billionaires making billions more.<p>The universe is full of potential, not just for bad things but also good things.<p>Maybe we ought to work on and prepare for that instead.<p>Anyway, 15 mins after we get a proper AI it will make a spaceship and fuck off somewhere that we are not...if it is super intelligent.
Strong AGI is our purpose. At several points in the history of biological life on earth there have been phase changes in the complexity of life: When we first captured mitochondria, when we first figured out multicellular life, when we form complex foodchains, when we first began to use tools, master agriculture, etc...<p>Life is an unbroken chain from the first self-replicating molecules to this very moment, and each moment that has passed has accelerated the ability of the universe to comprehend itself in our little corner of reality through the increasing complexity of life. In the same way that paramecium still exist, we will continue to still exist as part of something larger, but we will no longer be at the forefront of complexity as biological beings, which is a good thing.<p>I feel privileged to have existed at the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, which is not always something the average human gets to witness.