Dear @JonCefalu, thanks for this very honest, insightful and thought-provoking article! You do seem very anxious and you do touch on quite a number of topics. I would like to engage with you on the topic of joblessness, which I find really interesting and neglected (i think) by at least the EA literature that I have seen.
To me, a future where most people no longer have to work (because AI and general robots or whatever take care of food-production, production of entertainment programs, work in the technoscientific sector) could go both ways, in the sense that: a) it can indeed be an s-risk dystopia where we spend our time consuming questionable culture at home or at malls (and generally suffer from ill-health and associated risks) (though with no job to give us money, I don’t know how these transactions would be made, and I’d like to hear some thoughts about this) or b) it can be a utopia and a virtuous circle where we produce new ways of entertaining ourselves or producing quality time (family, new forms of art or philosphy, etc.) or keeping ourselves busy, the AI-AGI saturates the market, we react (in a virtuous way, nothing sinister), the AGI catches up, and so on.
So to sum up, the substance of the above all-too likely thought-experiment would be, in the event of AGI taking off, what will happen to (free) time, and what would happen to money? Regarding the latter, given that the most advanced technology lies with companies whose motive is money-making, I would be a bit pessimistic.
As for the other thoughts about nuclear weapons and Skynet, I’d really love to learn more as it sounds fascinating and like stuff which mere mortals rarely get to know about :)
Dear @JonCefalu, thanks for this very honest, insightful and thought-provoking article!
You do seem very anxious and you do touch on quite a number of topics. I would like to engage with you on the topic of joblessness, which I find really interesting and neglected (i think) by at least the EA literature that I have seen.
To me, a future where most people no longer have to work (because AI and general robots or whatever take care of food-production, production of entertainment programs, work in the technoscientific sector) could go both ways, in the sense that: a) it can indeed be an s-risk dystopia where we spend our time consuming questionable culture at home or at malls (and generally suffer from ill-health and associated risks) (though with no job to give us money, I don’t know how these transactions would be made, and I’d like to hear some thoughts about this) or b) it can be a utopia and a virtuous circle where we produce new ways of entertaining ourselves or producing quality time (family, new forms of art or philosphy, etc.) or keeping ourselves busy, the AI-AGI saturates the market, we react (in a virtuous way, nothing sinister), the AGI catches up, and so on.
So to sum up, the substance of the above all-too likely thought-experiment would be, in the event of AGI taking off, what will happen to (free) time, and what would happen to money? Regarding the latter, given that the most advanced technology lies with companies whose motive is money-making, I would be a bit pessimistic.
As for the other thoughts about nuclear weapons and Skynet, I’d really love to learn more as it sounds fascinating and like stuff which mere mortals rarely get to know about :)