I think it makes a lot of sense to examine alternate scenarios. Commenting on tool AI:
Nearly every expert interviewed for this project preferred this kind of “Tool AI” future, at least for the near term
This is very interesting, because banning AI agents had little support on my LessWrong survey and there was only one vote for it out of 39 on the EA forum survey I ran. To be fair, this implies banning forever, so if it were temporary, there might be more support.
Capital dividend funds: National and regional funds holding equity in AI infrastructure, robotics fleets, and automated production facilities, distributing dividends to citizens as universal basic capital.
I think this is very important because people often point out that humans will not have influence/income if they don’t have a labor wage, but they could still have influence/income through ownership of capital.
You mention how poverty would still be a problem. However, I think if AI starts to automate knowledge work, the increased demand for physical jobs should lift most people out of poverty (at least until robots fill nearly all those jobs).
Yeah I think my sense was definitely that people saw Tool AI as a great solution, but mostly interim. If we had phrased it as being “locked in forever,” the reactions might have looked very different? I’ve interpreted it more as that people seem to see it as preserving option value: we can still develop AGI later, but ideally after we’ve managed to integrate Tool AI into society, and set up systems to handle AGI better than if it came now when we’re quite poorly prepared.
Really appreciate your points on capital dividend funds and the distributional side as well. If you’re up for it, would love if you shared these thoughts on the Metaculus tournament too, where we’re running a comment prize exactly to surface perspectives like this: https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/foresight-ai-pathways/ :)
I think it makes a lot of sense to examine alternate scenarios. Commenting on tool AI:
This is very interesting, because banning AI agents had little support on my LessWrong survey and there was only one vote for it out of 39 on the EA forum survey I ran. To be fair, this implies banning forever, so if it were temporary, there might be more support.
I think this is very important because people often point out that humans will not have influence/income if they don’t have a labor wage, but they could still have influence/income through ownership of capital.
You mention how poverty would still be a problem. However, I think if AI starts to automate knowledge work, the increased demand for physical jobs should lift most people out of poverty (at least until robots fill nearly all those jobs).
Yeah I think my sense was definitely that people saw Tool AI as a great solution, but mostly interim. If we had phrased it as being “locked in forever,” the reactions might have looked very different? I’ve interpreted it more as that people seem to see it as preserving option value: we can still develop AGI later, but ideally after we’ve managed to integrate Tool AI into society, and set up systems to handle AGI better than if it came now when we’re quite poorly prepared.
Really appreciate your points on capital dividend funds and the distributional side as well. If you’re up for it, would love if you shared these thoughts on the Metaculus tournament too, where we’re running a comment prize exactly to surface perspectives like this: https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/foresight-ai-pathways/ :)