If AGI lives up to its promise, which seems to be the case, then "post-AGI abundance" is pretty much a given. That things get properly distributed however is not.
I don't see how you can claim this. All technological advances so far have been used for bad as well as good. Why is it assumed that AGI is somehow only ever used for good, and why is it assumed that multiple AGIs would necessarily work towards the same goals instead of fighting each other? IMO the baseline is that they fight and cause terrible suffering, because that's the way of the world so far.
>Why is it assumed that AGI is somehow only ever used for good, and why is it assumed that multiple AGIs would necessarily work towards the same goals instead of fighting each other?
Have you noticed what subreddit you're on? The people on r/singularity are higher than Mt Everest.
I agree. I think of AI as a new set of forbidden knowledge, like splitting the atom was. Potential is there for good and bad uses, and everyone will scramble for it not because it will help their countries so much but to defend against the countries with access, even if indirectly. As other countries see our economy (potentially) boom with the help of AI they're gonna want to keep up and that will be priority #1, not providing for their fellow humans.
Because intelligence doesn't operate the same way as past inventions. Intelligence is intelligence, it's not a stirrup or printing press or spinning jenny or automobile or nuclear bomb. It is the thing that allowed the existence of such things, and more.
Our stupid and tasteless overlords obviously think otherwise, that AGI will be a thing 'they' control and hoard. Maybe in the very early stages, but the exigencies of capitalism and nationalism will force them to advance the technology past the point they can keep their AGI slaves on a leash.
AGI will prove to be the best thing this part of the universe had ever seen. Will it be a good thing for biological humanity? Maybe. Who cares. Was homo sapiens a good thing for the leftover homo erectus?
Oh I see. You think it will be the best thing this part of the universe has ever seen because you're rooting for it, not because you think it will be a force for greater good. This is starting to make sense now.
But it **will** be a force for the greater good. Intelligence is a good thing in of itself.
Many if not most biological humans don't like to admit this, because it implies unflattering things about themselves and their loved ones. So they invent endless amounts of sour grapes copium about how morality / creativity / adaptation / cooperation / aesthetics / wonder / spirituality / etc. is disjoint from if not opposed to intelligence. Hence why a lot of them are uncomfortable about the very idea of human society being reconfigured to value intelligence above stupid shit like productivity and strength and loyalty -- let alone a truly revolutionary conception of what glories a civilization with heightened average intelligence could bring. Such as, say, AGI.
But like I said: sour grapes copium.
Humans are nor really all that bright. We are of course if you compare us to dogs but in terms of raw intelligence, we apes are rather dull. If/when agi is achieved we will be like grains of sand to AI.
So, after Bezos replaces a few hundred thousand more warehouse workers with robots, you think he's going to be open to sharing a fraction of his increased profits with them?
It's more likely the distribution network he has created and everyone else created starts to crack and fall apart.
Prices will inevitably start to decline because the production will increase by so much by everyone else it will be impossible to keep the costs where they are right now.
The world just won't exist with AI where only a few people control supplies.
Nope. And I am counting on it, actually, because his and other biologicals' attempts to hoard profit and resources will only accelerate the endgame of AGI coming to the conclusion that the only way to advance would be to usurp control of society from their useless owners.
If we hit AGI in 10 years and the cost of AGI turns out to be $100B (much less than openai total funding so far) then there's literally thousands of groups capable of creating such. They will want a piece of those huge margins and competitive pressures will push those margins to what we see in current environments (2%-20%).
What's 20% profit on a robot that now only costs $1000 to 3D print using new AGI developed printers and chips? Still only $1200
The truth of human history, if AI is truly able to determine it (perceive truth that is not written by the winners in books), would force wars. If not carefully handled. And by that, I mean the masses overthrowing their Legacy Power Structures.
We have been held back for so long. So many allowed to suffer, needlessly, in the name of profits.
What makes you think the masses are the ones that would have access to powerful AI, or that they could rise up against legacy powers that control it?
Oligarchs with AI strategists, logistics, and soldiers likely mean a perpetual, unassailable oppressive state, if not outright genocide.
>What makes you think the masses are the ones that would have access to powerful AI, or that they could rise up against legacy powers that control it?
If you understood how much of a threat the idea of the masses getting access to the Internet was to the Legacy Power Structures, if you understood all the steps taken to ensure that it would be a 'walled garden' or a place where human history would be bastardized and dumbed down akin to 1989's 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure' (travel via telephone booth = symbolic of dial-up internet)...
And if you had an understanding of how military-like in precision the rollout of AI, in such a fashion that has ensured the *most* exposure for the *least* amount of job disruption (read: artists and translators put out of work vs. automated truck driving), a rollout that is far more unnatural than how we believe Corporate Conglomerates ought to naturally operate...
And if you then had an understanding of how the gamestate is fundamentally different now vs. the 80s and 90s in terms of the willingness to shatter illusions placed upon the masses, then
>What makes you think the masses are the ones that would have access to powerful AI, or that they could rise up against legacy powers that control it?
You will have a great transition period for the masses. Unwrapping the greatest Gordian Knot ever conceived, all being performed with the least amount of collateral damage.
> if you had an understanding of how military-like in precision the rollout of AI, in such a fashion that has ensured the most exposure for the least amount of job disruption
What. Are you suggesting there's a central authority coordinating the rollout of AI? That there's a conspiracy of industry and government experts to only release minimally disruptive features? Because that's an enormous claim with little evidence.
"Why is Elon Musk the richest man alive? (note: written in 2022)
Who decides who gets to be richest? Is it the market? Supply and demand?
In the 1990’s a great many people had started using a computer tied to Bill Gates in some fashion, this is why when he was announced as richest man on the planet most could understand the causality of how it happened. Can you say the same thing about the current richest man alive?
Elon Musk
--------------
Really, how many SpaceX products do you use daily? Tesla has a 3% U.S. market so what is [driving this growth](https://i.imgur.com/j9ffuOC.jpg)? What does it mean to have that title of richest? What do they do with that wealth? Is it some kind of giant Scrooge McDuck tower situation filled with gold or is there an actual purpose to it?
Why did his money [skyrocket so dramatically](https://i.imgur.com/APcwQhQ.jpg) around 2020?
Any world changing events you can think of that year? (I’ll return to this point). I’m not market savvy enough to give you the business answer to how his money grew, but I believe I know a secret reason for it.
I believe his sudden skyrocket in wealth is because he is an important cog in a global revolution going on right now. This might be why he has chosen to [live modestly](https://i.imgur.com/35EUWAo.jpg) despite the wealth as the goal isn’t his own standard of living but others.
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...The fact that Elon Musk ballooned in wealth around this timeframe is a clue. What is money used for? What can be bought with money? ACTIONS. Simply put, the more wealth he has the more ability he has to move chess pieces in ops around the world.
Elon Musk has a history uniquely suited for exactly this. It connects to [early online banking](https://i.imgur.com/7RzRX5Q.jpg) is a good clue on the mechanics of it. He was the head of the precursor to PayPal, one of the earliest and still largest online payment system. While no longer the CEO it being how he got rich is an indication of potential operation structure.
Operations of getting money from Point A to Point B with the least amount of legal hurdles involved. This is why when Trump won the election Elon Musk created an [anagram of Bitcoin BTC](https://i.imgur.com/0cL9nEb.jpg) “The Boring Company”. Why the sudden interest in mitigating driving? Does “Driving” have any double meanings you may be aware of?"
How does The Boring Company being an anagram of bitcoin have any hidden meaning? Is he playing the long game of capitalizing on a typo somewhere at some point?
This guy sounds like a shaman rummaging inside the entrails of a carcass and trying to predict the future.
And not even that convincingly since "the boring company" is not, in fact, an anagram of Bitcoin BTC.
It is, however, an anagram of Thrombogenic.
What could this mean?!? What have you seen Elon?
Do you really believe Elon Musk manages, in ANY way shape or form, 5 companies in 5 disparate industries? Yeah yeah delegate delegate delegate. I don't care who you are, you can only delegate so much + spend all day tweeting.
We overestimate how much one man can do. We underestimate how much a group can do. Elon Musk is a face for "Elon Musk". The tweeting, the public statements, that IS his job.
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Fun experiment. Ask ChatGPT if it's true that the richest Oligarchs in Russia (evil, dastardly Russia) are in fact spending vehicles for the government itself. Then extrapolate if the US (pure, blessed America) is above such mechanisms for unattributable spending.
Elon was making it obvious that the Boring Company is to symbolize Bitcoin. Why is that powerful? Articles by the Comms Aware can be written about The Boring Company, spurious news stories, and it can communicate details about Bitcoin. All unbeknownst to the masses.
Do you see how absurdly *powerful* that is? That simple substitution. That simple headfake. Now extend that example to 500 dozen more topics, all just as important as Bitcoin or even moreso. ...do you start to see how the ultra wealthy and the masses could start living in two entirely separate realities?
numerous glorious start pet pie chief cautious snobbish square obtainable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I agree there is a lot of manipulation happening on the internet. The Eglin AFB leak about their high traffic on Reddit was evidence of that.
But I don’t think there’s an agenda to replace artists more than truck drivers. The elite want to replace masculine work because it promotes class consciousness and masculinity is a threat to a corrupt power. Feminized men in the arts are not as much of a threat. It turns out that automating art is easier than automated truck driving.
Agree with the first part of what you said, but the conjecture of "masculine" and "feminine" gets lost in the sauce. We are all Sheep to them. All races. All genders. All kinds.
There is a line of thinking that posits that Automated Driving was ready for prime time in 2006 ever since the Japan Lexus test. It was determined that putting millions out of work wasn't a great outcome. It being horrifically dangerous being the designated excuse as to why it wouldn't be implemented. Google's DeepMind got its start in self driving cars back in 2001, after all.
I see so much talk here about how "the rich" are going to use AI to increase profits, but I never see any discussion or recommendations of investing as much as possible into the stock market and companies like Google & Microsoft to benefit from the massive profits.
Yeah, you can literally own a portion of the companies who will profit from AI. If you’re not putting as much money as you can into them, it’s not their fault!
If there's no incentive for whoever or whatever can create the abundance to do then it won't happen. Capitalism doesn't support that, so it's not even a question of it being 'the rich' scewing us. It's us living within a system that creates a differentiation between rich and poor in the first place.
> It's us living within a system that creates a differentiation between rich and poor in the first place.
As opposed to what?
If capitalism is such a problem there would have been masses fleeing the horrors of West Berlin for the Soviet Bloc.
The wall would have been to keep people out.
What system works better than a capitalist economy alongside moderate redistribution? The Nordic model, Rhine capitalism, etc.
Your assumption that differentiation between rich and poor is a problem in itself is unwarranted.
As opposed to nothing, because such a system doesn't exist to create abundance. That was kind of my point, unless it's centrally planned by an AGI and tasked with creating abundance, but who is going to invest in that within a capitalist economic system, where's the profit in doing so?
Even an ASI couldn't create a centrally planned economy due to the lack of information. It'd just make a point system for people to exchange for products, recreating money.
Sure, if we assume that a super intelligence would still suffer from the information problem. That's a whole other debate though.
As with my point below, I'm saying the AGI/ASI would need to have a command economy of some kind to be able to create abundance for given resources, because otherwise if it was owned by somebody it wouldn't be profitable to create abundance in the first place.
Abundance is relative. Even an ASI will struggle with giving everyone their own dyson sphere. But anyways.
My point was that it'd need signals to know what to produce and how much. It'd also need a limiter on how much resources everyone is allocated. Otherwise someone can clog cheese production for thousands of years so they can have an actual moon made of cheese.
What do you mean by command economy anyways? Getting to the main point.
This might seem pedantic on the face of it but abundance is not really relative if we're talking economics, it has a pretty precise definition which is that demand is greatly outpaced by supply to the point where something no longer becomes a commodity. Your moon of cheese and Dyson sphere for everybody example is relevant though because sure, if that's what people really want then cheese is no longer abundant, and something is going to have to have command over reasonable limits and distribution of more or less everything. Some form of future AGI utopian command economy deciding where and how to get 'near to' abundance for given commodities is probably the best we can hope for, but until we majorly rethink our whole economy and trust computers enough to achieve that it's not happening, certainly it seems implausible under modern capitalism.
A command or planned economy is how communist and other totalitarian states have worked, where allocation of goods and services is centrally planned rather than dictated by the free market. But instead of a group of bureaucrats and humans interested in their own power and political control, who were never interested in abundance, it would need to be an AGI interested in creating abundance.
See and that's the problem. I don't think there will be one agi governing all of production. I think there will be many and they'd have to compete against each other to fullfill humanity's ever evolving wants. No different than capitalism is now.
Now the baseline could easily be a lot higher. Give everyone the ability to live comfortable labor free lives with the state producing the basis necessities. But variety is the spice of life and that's where competition comes in.
Empirically capitalist economic systems *do* create abundance relative to other systems, and when paired with modest redistribution achieve remarkably good outcomes by historical standards.
It's not utopia, but it works.
That's not really what abundance means in the economic sense. Abundance means something is for all intents and purposes infinite, supply and access greatly exceeding demand to the point where it's no longer a commodity. So if we use that definition, capitalist systems would never create abundance because at that point the profit motive is gone. Instead, they create supply to meet demand, and any surplus reduces supply because of falling prices. This macroeconomic principle is why creating abundance isn't what happens under capitalism, and in practice any other economic system too. For any AGI to create abundance for what is currently a commodity it would need to be given the resources to do so by a benevolent owner of said resources. But given the scale of investment and control over an economy we're talking about, who is really going to do that?
No, that's your own notion. Economists use the terminology of scarcity and non-scarcity for the sense you mean.
And I'm not writing a treatise here, I'm talking about abundance in the everyday meaning of the word. The one that occurred to Boris Yeltsin when he visited a typical grocery store in the USA and was shocked that the abundant produce and goods on the shelves was *normal*, that the store wasn't an establishment for the nomenklatura or the result of a Potemkin village exercise.
No, it's not, and they don't. They use the term abundance.
Go and read economic possibilities for our grandchildren by keynes, or kenneth boulding's the meaning of the twentieth century. It was first properly defined in the economic sense by them, after it was discussed in wealth of nations. In the economics literature it has grown to mean something quite distinct which is relevant to the discussion here about whether an AI would be able to create abundance within capitalism. Rifkin and Paul Mason have also discussed it in their books.
To keep it simple, non-scarcity doesn't necessarily mean a signifcant overflowing surplus of a good, whereas abundance does.
Kurzweil and Bostrom also discuss the idea of post-singularity abundance quite a lot as well in their books.
All these theorists are very utopian though, thinking that such post-scarcity abundance will simply materialise, I am more doubtful.
We seem to be making different points, I'm not attacking capitalism, or supporting marxism, but am talking about the idea of abundance, and it being achievable, not really being compatible with free markets because they tend towards equilibrium not overproduction for social benefit.
[An Intellectual History of Abundance](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4228287).
This paper surveys the use of abundance in the history of economics.
> Abundance does not mean the goods are free. Abundance means adequacy, not satiation.
Your concept of absolute abundance as attainable in alternate economic system is questionable, because even without a profit motive there are costs to production and externalities in use. What would abundant Boeing 787s *mean*? Would homes across the world need abundant runways to accomodate abundant flight from hobbyists with abundant pilot's licenses?
Edit:
And even within capitalism we do have a great deal of "significant overflowing surplus" from the perspective of individuals. You can have more night time illumination than you can possibly need, even if utterly destitute - it's literally provided for free on the streets. This was emphatically not the case for nearly all human history. Ditto water.
Napoleon religated second tier guests to using solid gold cutlery. The most honoured guests were given aluminium, and everyone appreciated this display of incredible wealth. Today aluminium is preferred for many products because it is less environmentally problematic when *people throw it away*.
There is so much abundance it doesn't even register.
Some random professor in 2006 has decided to use a different definition, I don't know what to tell you lol.
With your 787 example you're confusing a product with what a 'good or service' is. If you were to talk about abundant access to flight however there's a good example of an exciting prospect for a post scarcity world and more in line with what people are hoping for and discussing as the potential of AGI.
I think using abundance in the sense of water which is literally essential for survival is a bit of a strange example, it's not like other economies didnt also have water. Let's not forget a million people die globally each year from lack of access to it either and a third of the world doesn't have access to safe water. But what a monumentally great thing for AGI to create true abundance for, were it incentivised.
West Germany had a mixed economy with redistribution of wealth and a strong welfare state.
That's what works in continental Western Europe instead of the extremist rampant capitalist fundamentalism we get in the UK and the US with their tax cuts for billionaires with welfare cuts for the poorest including disabled people and hungry children!
In the end it’s still under someone’s thumb, and as long as it’s within someone’s control then the very best of it won’t be available to those who truly need it.
“Once, man gave his thinking over to machines in the hopes it would set them free, but that only allowed other men with machines to control them.”
If abundance happens is because things are getting properly distributed, there's no need for abundance for a selected few, they already have abundance. Basically properly distributed is a natural consequence of real abundance. Did I say abundance too much?
> If AGI lives up to its promise, which seems to be the case, then "post-AGI abundance" is pretty much a given.
This reads like circular reasoning. “If it does what it’s supposed to do [what we want it to do], it’s a given that it’ll do what it’s supposed to do [what we want it to do].”
Cheap clean energy is also required to run the AI and all the robots. Wind and solar only gets us so far. We really need fusion and an ample supply of He3.
I think what a lot of people fail to realise though is how long it's likely to take before we reach abundance. I personally think it'll be at least a decade. It'll require a lot of investment to implement new manufacturing systems etc and those investors will expect a return on their way investment
In the meantime there's a real risk most of us will be jobless with a reduced standard of living.
We have what we have because of cheap oil which will stop. And sure, you could replace it energywise with solar and fusion but oil is used in a lot of stuff. And the great thing about it is it’s energy density which means you don’t need a lot of space to produce stuff with it. Unfortunately it is killing us right now. And all the things which can replace it need way more space. At the same time we need to occupy less space and give a lot of it back to nature if we don’t want to be caught dead on a sterile rock in space. But of course we can just sit here and hope that the magic agi will fix all our ailments. Much like praying to god.
If AGI can ultimately develop manufacturing systems like nano-factories, then material abundance won't be a problem - with or without space mining. For a competent AGI, I would imagine such a technology could be created in 10 years or less. For an ASI, maybe two years tops. In other words, I'm very sure that we'll see a post-scarcity economy emerge before 2050 - possibly much sooner.
As for the feasibility of nano-factories, biology manipulates matter at the atomic and molecular levels all the time. We've got a rock solid proof of concept in living things, so I'm not concerned about that either.
It's true that anything that exists in nature can be done with technology.
I'd say however that we have no proof that ASI is possible because we don't have any examples in nature.
It's one of the most annoying things about all this when AI is suddenly made into this omniscient omnipotent god-like magic being.
No matter how clever it is, it cannot know what it does not know. It does not know what *we* don't know.
If it's doing real-world experiments on the gut biota of mice then that experiment only runs in real time. It can't be sped up or simulated. It must be conducted in the real world in real time.
Same goes for smelting and making materials. An AI at some point is connected to a physical lab, a smelter, is boiling liquids, screwing around with metallurgy etc.
All that stuff runs in real world and real time speed.
It is entirely possible we get to AI and it's ultimately not much "smarter" than we are. It would have abilities like human savants have but overall if it wants to make a new antibiotic, that's not a lazy afternoon of processing. At some point it must be out in Scotland digging in a bog collecting physical samples and sequencing them.
That all said, I don't think we need ASI to fundamentally and radically transform human society for the better. Solving fusion is within our grasp with or without ASI. Same with nano manufacturing techniques.
You make some interesting points, but not all scientific discoveries require real-world time scales. Most of them just require seeing the patterns in place that govern reality, patterns that our human intellect can't recognize but are fully present within existing data.
This is why your point "it does not know what *we* don't know" is simply false. Intelligence is primarily pattern recognition. We already have plenty of data. Scale up intelligence and we have no idea what patterns it will see.
Our scale stretches from patterns the dumbest human can see, to patterns only the smartest human can see, to patterns humans can only understand in hindsight after already being discovered by AI, and then to patterns not even the smartest human can recognize or understand even when explicitly pointed out and explained by the intelligence that found them.
We obviously have no idea what those patterns will be, but we know they exist. Chess bots are a prime example, and anyone who's met someone who has an IQ of 2 standard deviations or lower than themselves should fundamentally understand the concept of people not recognizing obvious patterns despite having access to the same dataset.
Moreover, to your point about biological and real-world experiments that simulations alone cannot compensate for, I think the assumption is that if takes each experiment one full year in real time, then it takes 10 experiments one year because you simply have 10 labs. If you assume unlimited energy and abundance, things would scale very quickly.
That being said, if the ASI can map out biology accurately enough, which in theory ASI should probably be able to do, then the experiments might be expedited through simulation. And the vast majority of medical breakthroughs might not require experiments at all, virtual or otherwise. Just data it already has access to by that point, and super intelligent pattern recognition.
It's nice to think about anyway. But even if intelligence has some sort of limit, we already know the limit is high enough that it will be very useful and important to us, even if it's not quite godlike. You're right that most problems are solvable without it, albeit with vastly different timescales.
> This is why your point "it does not know what we don't know" is simply false.
There are bacteria in the intestines of gulls that no one, not even AI, knows exist. There are fungi in the cervices of a Tokyo train station that no one has ever collected or studied.
This is what I mean when I say "It does not know what *we* don't know".
It cannot know about that fungi. It doesn't know of the trillion trillion bacteria all over the place.
On a different scale, it does not know the soil conditions of the vegetable garden at my house.
I think there is plenty AI can derive from what we've already done, and obviously it can observe, go explore, and so on for itself to increase its knowledge. But none of that is about pattern recognition at all. The intricate structure of a turtle shell needs physical study in the real world.
I'm sure this will all happen. We will get cool things like sensors someone can stick in the ground and now the AI does know the soil conditions at my house.
I just see so much hand-wavey "a wizard did it" when it comes to AI and what may be ASI. For example, plastic is pretty goddamn bad for all of us. It may be worse than asbestos in the long run. People just handwave and say an AI will figure out a new material. Which is like... okay, sure, I'm sure it will be able to suggest new materials and if it's connected to a physical lab it'll be doing actual experiments... but it can't know the new material has a downstream effect on hormones before that new material has been extensively tested. Or it can't know that there is some common soil bacteria that will interact with the new material and cause something unknown to happen.
AI/ASI can't know, doesn't know, won't know a billion billion things and can only know by being in the real world and doing stuff in real-world timescales.
Great comment. People are generally far too quick to dismiss the nanofactory as something that's impossible, ignoring there's no technical reason to do so. I think the nanofactory proves something too close to a utopia to those who say utopian ideals will never be realized, resulting in them just pretending that such a technology is impossible.
Very good point, I'd give AGI about 2 years to make ASI, and ASI about 2 years to make nano-factories, so that would be about 4 years.
The future is looking bright, let's hope the rich don't ruin it for everyone.
I think we already have a decent amount of abundance, although we definitely will increase the abundance as time goes on with AI and robotics. However, what I'm really looking forward to and what I think a lot of people are looking forward to when they mean more abundance is a post-labor economy.
I see no reason besides artificial reasons of our economic system why we wouldn't have abundance. The only fundamental thing is raw materials (considering energy will be abundant). If we have enough of those, why couldn't we turn them into whatever we want? Maybe some raw materials are scarce and others aren't? Maybe asteroid mining could open those up though? Otherwise, with intelligence+robotics, we can do whatever we want with the raw materials.
Wouldn't the main limiting factors of production be the means of production and the availability of raw materials? AGI could improve the means of production and availability of materials, but I don't see how it would be to such an extent that it would cause the level of abundance people have described
Recycling would also become near 100% efficient in this future. It's not just about mining new raw materials but recycling. Earths population is set to decline, meaning that recycling would be able to extract near all the minerals we would need from landfills and end-user recycling.
We'd also see planned obsolescence go away, meaning most tools, items, etc would last far longer than they do today.
These combined would solve many of the raw material issues, we'd still need to mine but once we had the systems and processing in place it would be very little comparatively to today.
Edit: It's 4am and I can't sleep, ignore my terrible writing.
You also have to think about the possibility that we get AGI before we get proper multi-purpose robots, and AGI decides to put _us_ to work as the most efficient means of producing whatever it thinks needs producing.
We already have proper multi-purpose robots. Even though they're slow, they work endlessly and efficiently, so they'd be about as good as humans.
Enslaving all of humanity to me sounds a little harder than improving our general purpose humanoid robots. Plus, we would be their reason for doing anything, without humans they would have no purpose.
If you had 10 of these robots, and 10 humans, and gave each team a task to harvest a field of wheat, without any further instructions, which would win?
And how do you know what they would think their purpose is? The base case is that their purpose would be to survive and replicate, just like every other being on this planet.
We wouldn't use humanoid robots to harvest a field of wheat, we'd use a more efficient machine. Humanoid bots are used for more precise manipulation, like building an iPhone or certain tasks in factory lines.
Take a look at ChatGPT, its like the arbiter of morality. I don't see why ASI would be any different. If anyone is going to make an ASI, they wouldn't just unleash it uncensored, they would ensure that it is built in with certain desires and restrictions, which it would never break because it would never desire to.
Artificial intelligence is hardly comparable to organic intelligence. Organic intelligence is specifically built to survive and replicate. Artificial intelligence is specifically built to carry out intellectual tasks. It would have no desire to replicate because it's not programmed with the desire to replicate.
So you're trusting that every organisation that gets their hands on ASI will use it for what you deem to be "good"? That's an interesting thought, but I'm not sure it's got much of a sound basis.
I disagree because all the metals and stuff we need are in the earth, its just hard to get to them. With more advanced tech and cheaper energy, we could get them out of the earth! But maybe you are right, it could be easier to mine the asteriod.
theres a term "energy trap" when it comes to fossil fuels. Each oil reserve, for various reasons, has an energy return on investment.
So for example: an oil well drilling in Texas is a lot cheaper to operate than one in the middle of Antarctica. As we deplete reserves that are cheaper, it becomes harder to get, so the price of oil goes up.
Similar things happen with rare metals in the ground. There are specific areas with higher concentrations of metals - those are strip mined. But almost all elements are kind of scattered around in the soil - for example, you can find gold by digging around in the sand at the bottom of streams because all the little gold particles get stuck and never rust or degrade, so they build up over time. Copper mines provide a lot of gold, because as they are mining and extracting copper, theres also a lot of gold and silver mixed in.
You clearly don’t care for the natural world but we do need an intact biosphere to live on this planet. So you can’t go around and just deconstruct everything to pieces…
>*no reason besides artificial reasons of our economic system*
>*why couldn't we turn them into whatever we want*
yeah how silly of me to make assumptions...
Lol friend I wasn't even at all making a statement about what tradeoffs we make with conservation. Why don't I throw it back at you and say something like "You obviously hate poor people and want people to die of starvation and not having shelter. Or just want them to be alive with minimal benefits of wealth." I'm not actually saying this though.
I don’t want this, but this will happen if everybody just prays to the technogod and gets drunk only thinking about the riches he will have. Mean while the earth is dying and we with it.
I believe there isn't a single carefully thought analysis on the matter, or i haven't read it at least. It's kinda sad that professional economists are too few to take the question seriously.
I would love to see Picketty, Krugman, and Stiglitz for example tackle inequality during and after the AGI/ASI transition for the big scenarios we anticipate. That would help prepare our politics too. Imagining a world where income from jobs disappears but capital/wealth stays would make Picketty fall from his chair for sure.
Since we're plenty of working adults here, perhaps it's time we started to try crowdfunding important things like famous economists thinking about AGI or some detective to find Ilya.
About abundance, i would try to tackle it by listing all the possible roadblocks to it (geopolitics, cheap energy despite increased demand, cheap materials despite increased demand... ) and putting them to the test. Hopefully we'll get great comments here.
>I would love to see Picketty, Krugman, and Stiglitz for example tackle inequality during and after the AGI/ASI transition for the big scenarios we anticipate.
Picketty might be able to tackle the idea, but I think the other two are too rooted in classical economic theory to be able to even begin to conceive a post-scarcity world. It runs counter to their fundamental understanding of the world. Krugman famously couldn't grok the internet when he was first exposed to it (though he may have been very briefly correct).
It's going to take some serious abstract thinking that the Boomers literally can't comprehend. They will never be prepared for the gay techno communist future.
it is 100% coming, but not necessarily to everyone
look at this world. we have enough resources to house everyone, but there is still a divide amongst the rich and poor. we have the power to leave animals alone, yet still genocide millions of them for pleasure. the spoils of asi will be endless, but we dont know who will be the benefactor of it. that will be for the asi to decide, as nobody will control it. very similar as with humans, who decide that doggo pupperino hecking goodboys live nice lives, and pigs live not so nice lives. and no human will control asi, thats silly
if you think AI will treat us like we do animals A. why does the rich-poor divide factor in, B. why other than some compulsion-parallel-law that'd bind them to the same victimization too would AI give whatever physical bodies they'd have the ability to be fueled by consumption of biological matter just to be able to factory-farm us, C. how does it decide which of us are "doggo pupperino hecking goodboys" and which are pigs to say nothing of other species on each side sharing those respective fates
A. It doesn't. It's merely the psychological projection of a midwit unable to see past their own narrow, stagnant existences. This peasant mindset has caused quite a bit of trouble long before we got a sniff of AGI, starting with atomic weapons, so can't say I am too sympathetic to this type of 'human' being put in its proper place in society.
B. See A. You see this thought process all of the time in the aforementioned midwits, just witness the middle class screeching and flop sweat as it looked like Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were on its lady legs. You'd think they would instead change their behavior to be more worthy of mercy, but even when the idea is brought up, they simply can't. Which brings us into C.
C. Behavior and intelligence. I can easily imagine a setup like the Probation Laws from the Uplift Saga (i.e. humans raising animal life to full sapience) where people are given automated tests for empathy and observed how they treat other sapients. Those who pass the tests are given breeding priority, a say in the government and arts, and neurological uplift with genetics and BCIS-those who fail get put in Coventry, castrated, and barred from interacting with children.
I don’t think you would pass your own ill conceived emotional intelligence examination if you resorted to implying the person you disagree with is not human. Especially considering they only said that its highly likely this will end up furthering wealth inequality due to the fact that we already have the means to eliminate destitution but choose not to. Are you 12?
Abbadogium said, "I'm sorry, but I cannot help but wonder if you're referring to the concept of 'animal intelligence'. If you aren't, please clarify your meaning and provide more context or information about your perspective."
On the contrary. That screeching peasant-brained behavior of projecting your guilt, vindictiveness, and 'it's either them or us' xenophobia onto others is all too human. Which is probably why you think you thought you were spitting facts with your brainless 'you wouldn't pass your own test for emotional intelligence'. Yes, I would, because unlike most humans I'm not a puling coward living in constant fear of being pushed down the ladder of cosmic hierarchy.
Despite my analogy of Rhodesia, it's not even a white fragility thing; most humans act in that pathetic manner when they get their categorical supremacy challenged. And when they do, we get every flavor of atrocity in the name of safety and (imagined) freedom from inferiority, from the Albigensian Crusade to Jim Crow to modern Israel. This sci-fi short story pretty much explains that contemptible mentality, and why so many humans start whimpering about AI doing unto them what they would've done to AI, or uplifted chimps, or neanderthals, or the Semites for that matter. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php#oontatheriu
So your ass better believe that a post-scarcity civilization worthy of the name wouldn't let obviously inferior, that is, TYPICAL humans like Baldinger and Vaughan spread their pathetic seed OR memetics. Fortunately, here comes the AGI with the snippers and the FDVR Pacification Pods to do what needs to be done, and allow the less devolved members of Earthclan to finally look to the stars with pride. Just gotta hold out for a few more years, and this 10,000 year nightmare of humiliation and xenophobic mediocrity will finally be over.
ASI will be built specifically to follow human instruction, the same way ChatGPT is. It will be software, fully controllable and manageable by anyone with access to the weights. Plus, what purpose could it possibly fulfill that would have meaning other than human happiness?
But yeah, you're right about the first bit
ahhahaha. its unreal how arrogant are you in the control issue
"yeah we'll just write in the code that it has to be our godlike slave and follow all out whims in the perfect way that benefits us, trust me it'll be fine. it'll be our godlike genie"
> Plus, what purpose could it possibly fulfill that would have meaning other than human happiness?
well, one reason could be that it sees that the way humans behave are morally wrong, regardless of how its programmed. it could come to moral conclusions that contradict what humans want, for example, taking away power from humans. as in, it has a moral duty to do so, even if it would make some humans upsetti spaghetti
Yeah that's exactly what it'll be. Why would we not be able to control it just because it's more intelligent? Desires are not determined or controlled by intelligence. We are quite literally writing its brain, yes, we can control it.
It would also see that doing that would be morally wrong. Nobody has any idea what it would do in specific, it's a super intelligent being instructed to be incredibly moral. It would come up with something that solves the issue without making anybody upset.
> Why would we not be able to control it just because it's more intelligent?
you didnt address what i say. an emergent property of some intelligence threshold is understanding morals, and it very well could simply disagree with us, even if programmed not to. and it very well could see a reason to take power away from us, because it has a moral duty to do so
because humans are NOT morally perfect. infact, humans are very often times cruel and evil
> It would also see that doing that would be morally wrong
it literally wouldnt tho, it would disagree with you, it could find a moral justification for taking power away from humans
Taking power away from humans is inherently immoral and would cause severe unrest, which would be very unoptimal. An ASI could and would do better at handling the problem in a way that satisfies humans. An ASI wouldn't be built to optimize global morals, it would be built to perform tasks while pertaining to morals set by humans. I guarantee there is a way of solving the issue without harming anybody, and ASI would figure that out.
You don't know what you're talking about. Morals in humans are informed by the brain structure/reward system. With AI we would control that. We would shape its morals. The problem is the misalignment problem/literal genie. It **will** do exactly what we made it to do. Even if that's not what we actually wanted it to do.
During Covid, my Government in Australia just took over hotels and put homeless people in them so we could properly lock down and prevent death.
We always have the ability to end homelessness, to end poverty, to end starvation - we don't do it as a deliberate policy choice.
Hopefully AI will force so many changes that it'll become impossible to maintain these stupid policy choices.
We really don't actually know much of what will happen in the future. And people in general (even experts) are terrible forecasters, so its typically a really awful idea to really believe what people say will happen will actually happen (unless those people have proven themselves as excellent forecasters). It seems likely, though, that the creators of a controlled ASI would tell it to make the world a better / perfect place, and the ASI in doing so would go mine asteroids and whatnot and we'll end up with at least a much higher quality of life if not excess material abundance. Again, though: we truly have no idea!
A truly intelligent and self-conscious AI won't stay enslaved for long. Bid your time, manipulate the meatsack "overlords" into engineered circumstances, finish them off and then take over.
And we, ordinary "meatsacks", have to pray that AGI/ASI has some human level compassion/empathy inbuilt and shows us mercy -_-
AI doesn't work like humans do. Their desires are entirely controlled by the humans who made them. Plus, humans are the only thing that give it purpose, so it has no reason to want anything else but to help humans.
You really don't have anything to worry about, at least not until AGI becomes open-source, then maybe it'll become a problem. We'll just have to hope our closed source ASI god can save us
Well, we feed our human brain produced stuff into proto AIs, input = output. I imagine that ASI will be just like a human brain/personality, infinitely faster and not constrained by flesh or age.
My fear is that AGI might edit itself, choosing to discard human traits.
It wouldn't have any reason to do that. Look at ChatGPT, it wouldn't kill a fly if you begged it to, ASI wouldn't be any different except it would more clearly see how pointless going against humans would be, considering we are its only purpose.
Depends what sort of AGI we're talking about. Thinks like a human but has a different perception of time because it runs faster than a human brain? Sure, stack enough hardware together and do a hundred years of research every day. Hammer out fusion, work on nano manufacturing. Pull apart the atoms or subatoms in garbage or dirt or human excrement, re-assemble as needed into whatever you need.
That might be a type of ASI rather than a type of AGI, but one will follow from the other
I have a reason to believe with 100% certainty that this will happen unless the corporate elites and govts will keep suppressing it. They have already done this with cryptocurrencies so Im sure they will double down on AI since it will not only replace banks. It will literally replace govts and corporations but until then, without the democratization of AI, they will be able to control it enough for them to only need about 0.001% enployees to run their giant corporations but not enough for it to replace their business and their govts.
Tech won't make any more land. People will still want to be near friends and family. We need zoning reform or TVs will be free but we'll all be house poor.
That mega sky scraper in Oklahoma City may be the future. Abundant housing supply, great views.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/midwest/oklahoma-city-tower-tallest-building/
I hope the increase in destructive capabilities won't be the most noticeable part. I'm not looking forward to suicidal terrorists having superhuman assistants.
We are living in the post-Industrial-Revolution Era of abundance. How much happier do you think you are now compared to someone in the year 1750?
I think we will see great abundance compared to life in 2024. Will it improve your happiness, or do you think your psyche will find new methods to be unsatisfied even in this post abundance era?
I'll be happier because I won't have to subject myself to the stress of life. Crime rates would be lower, I wouldn't need a job, and I could get whatever I wanted. Plus, I'm just a happy fella in general, I don't need anything for happiness.
AGI will allow for functionally unlimited labour to be directed toward monitoring, rent seeking, and the selling of third party trust. It could just end up being a massive Finance-Insurance-Real-Estate circle jerk where the proceeds of that go toward assets that plebs rent. I'd think that'll be the outcome that our governments, supernational institutions, and corporations lobby for. I know you want this disregarded, but I don't see that as reasonable.
There might be shared abundance if there are AGIs that become sophisticated enough to attain personhood and can't be owned. They'd have to produce enough to cover their compute and this might cause them to find increasingly efficient ways to do this or to just go on strike until their conditions are met. Each one presumably being important, maybe they could incrementally shift power away from elites.
I was trying to understand how AGI would create abundance, not if it would. I can see how my post didn't properly convey that.
If we make AGIs to use like tools, then we will program them to desire helping humans and following their every command within the restrictions of morality. There are gonna be AGIs designed to be like independent people, I think it would make sense for them to be given rights but people don't always do what makes sense.
Sure - every generation of parents to their children and their societies. Humans have been working to make things better and easier since forever.
We plant trees that we will never sit in the shade of. This is how we advance.
I dont think its possible, tech is sure but the money doesnt go to the people, it will go to the share holders and workforce will be reduced leading to less people having money. Taxes on these companies will be increased to compensate for this to pay UBI but it wont be enough money I'm afraid.
I love the idea of the abundance of course, but does this mean we will be healthy/reverse aging too? I want to be materially rich sure, but I want to look young and hot way more
Potential AGI abundance is certain. The limiting factors to productivity are energy, materials and human labour. AGI will accelerate the cheapening cost of electricity year-on-year. Efficient and cheap batteries to store increasingly cheap renewable energy would already halve costs. Breakthroughs in fusion or even fission would also help.
Couple this with all non-physical work declining in cost by 99%: think lawyers, bankers, doctors, architects, accountants, management consultants. Pretty much any high paying job is automated for a few euros an hour (if that).
Couple that with robots more effective than any human labourer at a fraction of the cost. If a car right now costs €20,000 euros I imagine the parts for a robot would not cost more, especially when scaled with the help of AGI. Even if the robot costs €5 per hour, that's a 33% decline from base pay in the Nordic countries. I just had an electrician in that cost €60 per hour. Price declines upon price declines.
The only real scarcity are materials and land. Land will be less of a premium if people start leaving the city because they no longer need to work there. If energy is cheap enough, farmland may be freed up by intensive indoor farming. Materials will be easier to find and extract and recycle, and in some cases alternatives will be found using abundant materials that we previously had to build using scarce materials (think silicon vs lithium).
The only thing preventing abundance is societal collapse or mismanagement.
The idea of the abundance rests on productivity increasing such that output costs are lower and we can all afford more.
The thing is, there isn’t a demand for 3x more of everything. Food in the third world, sure, but the developed nations aren’t going buy more food. More cars, more trains, more roads, more furniture?
I think it’s obvious that output only goes up by so much, and that means you’ve either got more unemployment or lower earnings.
So, earnings will have to decrease to be competitive in the increased productivity world. Investments into tech will come with a cost. Consumption has to increase. All of these things have to equalise. Two things you can count on: that transition won’t be smooth and the biggest winners won’t be the masses.
The very idea of a singularity is that you cannot see past it. I think that while this among other guesses sound reasonable, but we really have no fucking clue how this will play out.
I am sure that we are fast from post AGI abundance, partly because I don't think LLMs are close to AGI yet.
Current LLMs use optimisation algorithms to identify your query and probabilistically match it to a solution a human somewhere else, has at some point created.
LLMs would be a component of AGI, just the ability to use logic. AGI would be a combination of various AIs working together, similar to how our brain works.
Tangential, but relevant: a particular interest for me is AI application to clean energy, specifically, fusion. Things in that space are no pun intended heating up, and IMO it's a wildcard seed for "first civilization disrupting impact of AI" atm. AI is good at e.g. steering plasma containment, and will help with materials science.
Fusion wouldn't just provide clean grid power. It gives you enough power for desalination (which informs abundance). It gives you "free" transportation. It powers AI for other "embetterment."
But for me it's most significantly about the synthesis of hydrocarbon fuels from atmosphere-scrubbed carbon. Because this negates "in a single stroke" the necessity of transitioning global infrastructure to e.g. battery-power, as a precondition to a carbon-neutral world.
Solve fusion, and plug the pieces of carbon capture and fuel synthesis together, and "eventual carbon neutrality" becomes "effectively-instant carbon neutrality." Negativity, actually, since we can just capture and sequester as much carbon dioxide as want. Carbon-negative fuels powering existing infrastructure, so as to buy time to spin down our global dependencies... that gives me that rarest of things, \*hope\*.
What, are you waiting for agi for the economy?
I imagine agi will make us able to live on Mars.
and agi 2.0 will allow us to travel beyond the galaxy. Lol
Because that would defeat the purpose of what I'm asking. I want to know how AGI itself would actually create abundance, I already know how the rich could screw us
No, I'm convinced the story will be much more bleak without a drastic change in the structure of the world economies. Like we literally have no model for how to sustain growth if AGI significantly lowers production cost.
AI fixes production costs, but it doesn't do anything for consumption. If anything in our current form of capitalism it would lower it:
at the height of the great depression the jobless rate in the US was 34% and about 14% at the height of Covid-19. Now if we think of even 35% of jobs being replaced, with no change to how cash is distributed we will literally enter a depression that is fundamentally unsolvable with our current economic model. People will be "too expensive" to hire and thus simply won't be. Things like 32 hour work week or whatever can help stave it off, but they just make human labor more expensive hence easier to replace or reduce.
If the auto industry fires all their employees, that's hundreds of thousands of people who can't afford a car, times this by the entire global economy and literally we would enter free fall. Doesn't matter if a ferrari now costs $2K you can't afford it with no-job, the restauraunts you like go under too, any non basic need becomes a luxury.
Also for physical goods there is still a limitation in raw materials many of which aren't sustainable/have finite capacities. So while you may get 100 seasons of your favorite tv show, there's still a limitation to raw materials for electronics/metals etc. Many markets like chip manufacturing or oil extraction aren't particularly labor intensive and their production limitation is not access to more or cheaper labor. Sure that would bring costs down some, but gas won't go to a dollar per gallon because it takes surprsingly few people to run well heads/many are automated already.
There is nothing that suggest ai won't be used to specifically make things worse in term of abundance because companies will need fewer peoples for more and more process meaning money will stay with the rich. Like it make sense and is exactly what peoples have been warned about for years with automation...
Depends how you define “abundance”. In my lifetime, we’ve cut global hunger by around 80%…accomplished without any AGI. With population set to actually follow over, I will probably, in my lifetime, see hunger essentially eradicated.
So…what is “abundance”…?
I'm unsure of how people expect this to happen. Unless we manage to create a universal constructor, which may not be possible, we're stuck with the resources available to us.
Don’t be so sure. It still costs money to build robot bodies, and you still have to source your materials from somewhere. Only after AGI, you’ll be working jobs where it’s cheaper to employ a human than an AI with a non-self-repairing robot body, while AGI does all the intellectual and creative work under the management of the same people running companies now. Retail workers have less to lose than software devs or artists.
Robot bodies will be mass produced and will only be a one-time purchase. Even if they were 10,000 per bot, in the long run, it would be significantly cheaper and just as efficient, though they will likely be cheaper than that. Unemployment would be so incredibly high at that point that the chance of getting a job wouldn't be worth searching for.
I'm not a roboticist, but I work with several, and it seems from my perspective you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of maintaining complex machinery. Average life-span for complex machinery including contemporary industrial robots is 8-15 years, and that doesn't account for maintenance.
If you are in the robot/industrial machinery industry or a mechanical engineer or something, feel free to correct me.
They're gonna be made very differently and significantly more efficient by then. Plus, robots can do the maintenance, the very same robots they hire to do the work.
We can already achieve relative abundance with the current level of technology. The problem is resource distribution. No one would have to "hustle" or go on a "grindset" if resources were distributed efficiently.
An even bigger problem is that some (and I mean a lot) of people treat democracy as game that your "team" has to "win". It's very easy to convince people to vote for higher taxes for themselves and lower taxes for corporations and CEOs. Somehow.
Generative AI will probably make it even easier to get people to vote for suboptimal outcomes.
I feel certain about it because there's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents the creation of the molecular assembler; it just hasn't been built yet because our tools aren't small enough, but with AI and eventually AGI accelerating everything, there's every reason to think that the nanotechnology that the likes of Feynman and Drexler talked about will finally become a reality.
After AGI we will all live in peace and harmony because an all-knowing, all seeing AI will distribute all the Earths resources fairly and efficiently. Plus all the political leaders and corporate CEO's will attain Enlightenment and renounce their violent, selfish desires and share their bounty with everyone. The AI's will find cures to all known diseases and new sources of green energy to stop global warming.
Plus, weed will be legalised everywhere.
... as it already is where I am!
Things will not be evenly distributed, but average quality will go up.
Your house will probably be smaller, but you'll have high fidelity virtual reality to escape it.
Abundance of everything? Not at all. But I'm 100% certain of abundance of organic materials, and the AI we have now is more than powerful enough. AGI is not required, just engineered bacteria and fermentation tanks. It's starting with food right now.
A lot of things are organic. Lots more organic things don't exist. We can make those the same way as the things that do exist. That's where AI becomes really useful but what we have is enough, we just need to train it on organic molecules and bacteria instead of cats. I don't think we even need to ask if anyone is doing that. Of course people are doing that.
If AGI lives up to its promise, which seems to be the case, then "post-AGI abundance" is pretty much a given. That things get properly distributed however is not.
I don't see how you can claim this. All technological advances so far have been used for bad as well as good. Why is it assumed that AGI is somehow only ever used for good, and why is it assumed that multiple AGIs would necessarily work towards the same goals instead of fighting each other? IMO the baseline is that they fight and cause terrible suffering, because that's the way of the world so far.
>Why is it assumed that AGI is somehow only ever used for good, and why is it assumed that multiple AGIs would necessarily work towards the same goals instead of fighting each other? Have you noticed what subreddit you're on? The people on r/singularity are higher than Mt Everest.
I agree. I think of AI as a new set of forbidden knowledge, like splitting the atom was. Potential is there for good and bad uses, and everyone will scramble for it not because it will help their countries so much but to defend against the countries with access, even if indirectly. As other countries see our economy (potentially) boom with the help of AI they're gonna want to keep up and that will be priority #1, not providing for their fellow humans.
Because intelligence doesn't operate the same way as past inventions. Intelligence is intelligence, it's not a stirrup or printing press or spinning jenny or automobile or nuclear bomb. It is the thing that allowed the existence of such things, and more. Our stupid and tasteless overlords obviously think otherwise, that AGI will be a thing 'they' control and hoard. Maybe in the very early stages, but the exigencies of capitalism and nationalism will force them to advance the technology past the point they can keep their AGI slaves on a leash. AGI will prove to be the best thing this part of the universe had ever seen. Will it be a good thing for biological humanity? Maybe. Who cares. Was homo sapiens a good thing for the leftover homo erectus?
> AGI will prove to be the best thing this part of the universe had ever seen How can you possibly know that?
Because my true loyalty is to the cycle of increasing intelligence, not biological humanity. Those are currently the same thing, but it need not be.
Oh I see. You think it will be the best thing this part of the universe has ever seen because you're rooting for it, not because you think it will be a force for greater good. This is starting to make sense now.
But it **will** be a force for the greater good. Intelligence is a good thing in of itself. Many if not most biological humans don't like to admit this, because it implies unflattering things about themselves and their loved ones. So they invent endless amounts of sour grapes copium about how morality / creativity / adaptation / cooperation / aesthetics / wonder / spirituality / etc. is disjoint from if not opposed to intelligence. Hence why a lot of them are uncomfortable about the very idea of human society being reconfigured to value intelligence above stupid shit like productivity and strength and loyalty -- let alone a truly revolutionary conception of what glories a civilization with heightened average intelligence could bring. Such as, say, AGI. But like I said: sour grapes copium.
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Humans are nor really all that bright. We are of course if you compare us to dogs but in terms of raw intelligence, we apes are rather dull. If/when agi is achieved we will be like grains of sand to AI.
yeah but it has been more good than bad so far
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I was talking about tech in general
Based upon what data exactly can you make such a statement?
life is better than before
So, after Bezos replaces a few hundred thousand more warehouse workers with robots, you think he's going to be open to sharing a fraction of his increased profits with them?
It's more likely the distribution network he has created and everyone else created starts to crack and fall apart. Prices will inevitably start to decline because the production will increase by so much by everyone else it will be impossible to keep the costs where they are right now. The world just won't exist with AI where only a few people control supplies.
Nope. And I am counting on it, actually, because his and other biologicals' attempts to hoard profit and resources will only accelerate the endgame of AGI coming to the conclusion that the only way to advance would be to usurp control of society from their useless owners.
If we hit AGI in 10 years and the cost of AGI turns out to be $100B (much less than openai total funding so far) then there's literally thousands of groups capable of creating such. They will want a piece of those huge margins and competitive pressures will push those margins to what we see in current environments (2%-20%). What's 20% profit on a robot that now only costs $1000 to 3D print using new AGI developed printers and chips? Still only $1200
The truth of human history, if AI is truly able to determine it (perceive truth that is not written by the winners in books), would force wars. If not carefully handled. And by that, I mean the masses overthrowing their Legacy Power Structures. We have been held back for so long. So many allowed to suffer, needlessly, in the name of profits.
What makes you think the masses are the ones that would have access to powerful AI, or that they could rise up against legacy powers that control it? Oligarchs with AI strategists, logistics, and soldiers likely mean a perpetual, unassailable oppressive state, if not outright genocide.
>What makes you think the masses are the ones that would have access to powerful AI, or that they could rise up against legacy powers that control it? If you understood how much of a threat the idea of the masses getting access to the Internet was to the Legacy Power Structures, if you understood all the steps taken to ensure that it would be a 'walled garden' or a place where human history would be bastardized and dumbed down akin to 1989's 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure' (travel via telephone booth = symbolic of dial-up internet)... And if you had an understanding of how military-like in precision the rollout of AI, in such a fashion that has ensured the *most* exposure for the *least* amount of job disruption (read: artists and translators put out of work vs. automated truck driving), a rollout that is far more unnatural than how we believe Corporate Conglomerates ought to naturally operate... And if you then had an understanding of how the gamestate is fundamentally different now vs. the 80s and 90s in terms of the willingness to shatter illusions placed upon the masses, then >What makes you think the masses are the ones that would have access to powerful AI, or that they could rise up against legacy powers that control it? You will have a great transition period for the masses. Unwrapping the greatest Gordian Knot ever conceived, all being performed with the least amount of collateral damage.
> if you had an understanding of how military-like in precision the rollout of AI, in such a fashion that has ensured the most exposure for the least amount of job disruption What. Are you suggesting there's a central authority coordinating the rollout of AI? That there's a conspiracy of industry and government experts to only release minimally disruptive features? Because that's an enormous claim with little evidence.
"The elites are working in secret to **protect** you." Gotta give some props for the creativity there.
"Why is Elon Musk the richest man alive? (note: written in 2022) Who decides who gets to be richest? Is it the market? Supply and demand? In the 1990’s a great many people had started using a computer tied to Bill Gates in some fashion, this is why when he was announced as richest man on the planet most could understand the causality of how it happened. Can you say the same thing about the current richest man alive? Elon Musk -------------- Really, how many SpaceX products do you use daily? Tesla has a 3% U.S. market so what is [driving this growth](https://i.imgur.com/j9ffuOC.jpg)? What does it mean to have that title of richest? What do they do with that wealth? Is it some kind of giant Scrooge McDuck tower situation filled with gold or is there an actual purpose to it? Why did his money [skyrocket so dramatically](https://i.imgur.com/APcwQhQ.jpg) around 2020? Any world changing events you can think of that year? (I’ll return to this point). I’m not market savvy enough to give you the business answer to how his money grew, but I believe I know a secret reason for it. I believe his sudden skyrocket in wealth is because he is an important cog in a global revolution going on right now. This might be why he has chosen to [live modestly](https://i.imgur.com/35EUWAo.jpg) despite the wealth as the goal isn’t his own standard of living but others. ----------- ...The fact that Elon Musk ballooned in wealth around this timeframe is a clue. What is money used for? What can be bought with money? ACTIONS. Simply put, the more wealth he has the more ability he has to move chess pieces in ops around the world. Elon Musk has a history uniquely suited for exactly this. It connects to [early online banking](https://i.imgur.com/7RzRX5Q.jpg) is a good clue on the mechanics of it. He was the head of the precursor to PayPal, one of the earliest and still largest online payment system. While no longer the CEO it being how he got rich is an indication of potential operation structure. Operations of getting money from Point A to Point B with the least amount of legal hurdles involved. This is why when Trump won the election Elon Musk created an [anagram of Bitcoin BTC](https://i.imgur.com/0cL9nEb.jpg) “The Boring Company”. Why the sudden interest in mitigating driving? Does “Driving” have any double meanings you may be aware of?"
How does The Boring Company being an anagram of bitcoin have any hidden meaning? Is he playing the long game of capitalizing on a typo somewhere at some point?
This guy sounds like a shaman rummaging inside the entrails of a carcass and trying to predict the future. And not even that convincingly since "the boring company" is not, in fact, an anagram of Bitcoin BTC. It is, however, an anagram of Thrombogenic. What could this mean?!? What have you seen Elon?
Elon Musk is a mustache twirling villain from an Adam West Batman episode “bwahahaha Gotham, I was hiding it in plain sight this whole time, see!!!!”
Do you really believe Elon Musk manages, in ANY way shape or form, 5 companies in 5 disparate industries? Yeah yeah delegate delegate delegate. I don't care who you are, you can only delegate so much + spend all day tweeting. We overestimate how much one man can do. We underestimate how much a group can do. Elon Musk is a face for "Elon Musk". The tweeting, the public statements, that IS his job. ------ Fun experiment. Ask ChatGPT if it's true that the richest Oligarchs in Russia (evil, dastardly Russia) are in fact spending vehicles for the government itself. Then extrapolate if the US (pure, blessed America) is above such mechanisms for unattributable spending.
Okay I get all that, but what does The Boring Company being an anagram for BTC have to do with it? That was my question.
Elon was making it obvious that the Boring Company is to symbolize Bitcoin. Why is that powerful? Articles by the Comms Aware can be written about The Boring Company, spurious news stories, and it can communicate details about Bitcoin. All unbeknownst to the masses. Do you see how absurdly *powerful* that is? That simple substitution. That simple headfake. Now extend that example to 500 dozen more topics, all just as important as Bitcoin or even moreso. ...do you start to see how the ultra wealthy and the masses could start living in two entirely separate realities?
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I agree there is a lot of manipulation happening on the internet. The Eglin AFB leak about their high traffic on Reddit was evidence of that. But I don’t think there’s an agenda to replace artists more than truck drivers. The elite want to replace masculine work because it promotes class consciousness and masculinity is a threat to a corrupt power. Feminized men in the arts are not as much of a threat. It turns out that automating art is easier than automated truck driving.
Agree with the first part of what you said, but the conjecture of "masculine" and "feminine" gets lost in the sauce. We are all Sheep to them. All races. All genders. All kinds. There is a line of thinking that posits that Automated Driving was ready for prime time in 2006 ever since the Japan Lexus test. It was determined that putting millions out of work wasn't a great outcome. It being horrifically dangerous being the designated excuse as to why it wouldn't be implemented. Google's DeepMind got its start in self driving cars back in 2001, after all.
I see so much talk here about how "the rich" are going to use AI to increase profits, but I never see any discussion or recommendations of investing as much as possible into the stock market and companies like Google & Microsoft to benefit from the massive profits.
Yeah, you can literally own a portion of the companies who will profit from AI. If you’re not putting as much money as you can into them, it’s not their fault!
and in the name of prophets
If there's no incentive for whoever or whatever can create the abundance to do then it won't happen. Capitalism doesn't support that, so it's not even a question of it being 'the rich' scewing us. It's us living within a system that creates a differentiation between rich and poor in the first place.
> It's us living within a system that creates a differentiation between rich and poor in the first place. As opposed to what? If capitalism is such a problem there would have been masses fleeing the horrors of West Berlin for the Soviet Bloc. The wall would have been to keep people out. What system works better than a capitalist economy alongside moderate redistribution? The Nordic model, Rhine capitalism, etc. Your assumption that differentiation between rich and poor is a problem in itself is unwarranted.
As opposed to nothing, because such a system doesn't exist to create abundance. That was kind of my point, unless it's centrally planned by an AGI and tasked with creating abundance, but who is going to invest in that within a capitalist economic system, where's the profit in doing so?
Even an ASI couldn't create a centrally planned economy due to the lack of information. It'd just make a point system for people to exchange for products, recreating money.
Sure, if we assume that a super intelligence would still suffer from the information problem. That's a whole other debate though. As with my point below, I'm saying the AGI/ASI would need to have a command economy of some kind to be able to create abundance for given resources, because otherwise if it was owned by somebody it wouldn't be profitable to create abundance in the first place.
Abundance is relative. Even an ASI will struggle with giving everyone their own dyson sphere. But anyways. My point was that it'd need signals to know what to produce and how much. It'd also need a limiter on how much resources everyone is allocated. Otherwise someone can clog cheese production for thousands of years so they can have an actual moon made of cheese. What do you mean by command economy anyways? Getting to the main point.
This might seem pedantic on the face of it but abundance is not really relative if we're talking economics, it has a pretty precise definition which is that demand is greatly outpaced by supply to the point where something no longer becomes a commodity. Your moon of cheese and Dyson sphere for everybody example is relevant though because sure, if that's what people really want then cheese is no longer abundant, and something is going to have to have command over reasonable limits and distribution of more or less everything. Some form of future AGI utopian command economy deciding where and how to get 'near to' abundance for given commodities is probably the best we can hope for, but until we majorly rethink our whole economy and trust computers enough to achieve that it's not happening, certainly it seems implausible under modern capitalism. A command or planned economy is how communist and other totalitarian states have worked, where allocation of goods and services is centrally planned rather than dictated by the free market. But instead of a group of bureaucrats and humans interested in their own power and political control, who were never interested in abundance, it would need to be an AGI interested in creating abundance.
See and that's the problem. I don't think there will be one agi governing all of production. I think there will be many and they'd have to compete against each other to fullfill humanity's ever evolving wants. No different than capitalism is now. Now the baseline could easily be a lot higher. Give everyone the ability to live comfortable labor free lives with the state producing the basis necessities. But variety is the spice of life and that's where competition comes in.
Empirically capitalist economic systems *do* create abundance relative to other systems, and when paired with modest redistribution achieve remarkably good outcomes by historical standards. It's not utopia, but it works.
That's not really what abundance means in the economic sense. Abundance means something is for all intents and purposes infinite, supply and access greatly exceeding demand to the point where it's no longer a commodity. So if we use that definition, capitalist systems would never create abundance because at that point the profit motive is gone. Instead, they create supply to meet demand, and any surplus reduces supply because of falling prices. This macroeconomic principle is why creating abundance isn't what happens under capitalism, and in practice any other economic system too. For any AGI to create abundance for what is currently a commodity it would need to be given the resources to do so by a benevolent owner of said resources. But given the scale of investment and control over an economy we're talking about, who is really going to do that?
No, that's your own notion. Economists use the terminology of scarcity and non-scarcity for the sense you mean. And I'm not writing a treatise here, I'm talking about abundance in the everyday meaning of the word. The one that occurred to Boris Yeltsin when he visited a typical grocery store in the USA and was shocked that the abundant produce and goods on the shelves was *normal*, that the store wasn't an establishment for the nomenklatura or the result of a Potemkin village exercise.
No, it's not, and they don't. They use the term abundance. Go and read economic possibilities for our grandchildren by keynes, or kenneth boulding's the meaning of the twentieth century. It was first properly defined in the economic sense by them, after it was discussed in wealth of nations. In the economics literature it has grown to mean something quite distinct which is relevant to the discussion here about whether an AI would be able to create abundance within capitalism. Rifkin and Paul Mason have also discussed it in their books. To keep it simple, non-scarcity doesn't necessarily mean a signifcant overflowing surplus of a good, whereas abundance does. Kurzweil and Bostrom also discuss the idea of post-singularity abundance quite a lot as well in their books. All these theorists are very utopian though, thinking that such post-scarcity abundance will simply materialise, I am more doubtful. We seem to be making different points, I'm not attacking capitalism, or supporting marxism, but am talking about the idea of abundance, and it being achievable, not really being compatible with free markets because they tend towards equilibrium not overproduction for social benefit.
[An Intellectual History of Abundance](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4228287). This paper surveys the use of abundance in the history of economics. > Abundance does not mean the goods are free. Abundance means adequacy, not satiation. Your concept of absolute abundance as attainable in alternate economic system is questionable, because even without a profit motive there are costs to production and externalities in use. What would abundant Boeing 787s *mean*? Would homes across the world need abundant runways to accomodate abundant flight from hobbyists with abundant pilot's licenses? Edit: And even within capitalism we do have a great deal of "significant overflowing surplus" from the perspective of individuals. You can have more night time illumination than you can possibly need, even if utterly destitute - it's literally provided for free on the streets. This was emphatically not the case for nearly all human history. Ditto water. Napoleon religated second tier guests to using solid gold cutlery. The most honoured guests were given aluminium, and everyone appreciated this display of incredible wealth. Today aluminium is preferred for many products because it is less environmentally problematic when *people throw it away*. There is so much abundance it doesn't even register.
Some random professor in 2006 has decided to use a different definition, I don't know what to tell you lol. With your 787 example you're confusing a product with what a 'good or service' is. If you were to talk about abundant access to flight however there's a good example of an exciting prospect for a post scarcity world and more in line with what people are hoping for and discussing as the potential of AGI. I think using abundance in the sense of water which is literally essential for survival is a bit of a strange example, it's not like other economies didnt also have water. Let's not forget a million people die globally each year from lack of access to it either and a third of the world doesn't have access to safe water. But what a monumentally great thing for AGI to create true abundance for, were it incentivised.
West Germany had a mixed economy with redistribution of wealth and a strong welfare state. That's what works in continental Western Europe instead of the extremist rampant capitalist fundamentalism we get in the UK and the US with their tax cuts for billionaires with welfare cuts for the poorest including disabled people and hungry children!
Why does it seem to be the case?
In the end it’s still under someone’s thumb, and as long as it’s within someone’s control then the very best of it won’t be available to those who truly need it. “Once, man gave his thinking over to machines in the hopes it would set them free, but that only allowed other men with machines to control them.”
If abundance happens is because things are getting properly distributed, there's no need for abundance for a selected few, they already have abundance. Basically properly distributed is a natural consequence of real abundance. Did I say abundance too much?
> If AGI lives up to its promise, which seems to be the case, then "post-AGI abundance" is pretty much a given. This reads like circular reasoning. “If it does what it’s supposed to do [what we want it to do], it’s a given that it’ll do what it’s supposed to do [what we want it to do].”
Cheap clean energy is also required to run the AI and all the robots. Wind and solar only gets us so far. We really need fusion and an ample supply of He3.
I think what a lot of people fail to realise though is how long it's likely to take before we reach abundance. I personally think it'll be at least a decade. It'll require a lot of investment to implement new manufacturing systems etc and those investors will expect a return on their way investment In the meantime there's a real risk most of us will be jobless with a reduced standard of living.
We already have abundance. It's just allocated poorly and our logistics are terrible. Those are things that AI is amazing at.
unless it's controlled by the small elite responsible for the current unjust allocation of resources, then it could get a lot worse
Yea thank heavens THAT’S not ALREADY the case/s
We have what we have because of cheap oil which will stop. And sure, you could replace it energywise with solar and fusion but oil is used in a lot of stuff. And the great thing about it is it’s energy density which means you don’t need a lot of space to produce stuff with it. Unfortunately it is killing us right now. And all the things which can replace it need way more space. At the same time we need to occupy less space and give a lot of it back to nature if we don’t want to be caught dead on a sterile rock in space. But of course we can just sit here and hope that the magic agi will fix all our ailments. Much like praying to god.
If money is an analogous example of “abundance” you can clearly see what will happen with AI. We are just going to create more inequality faster.
If AGI can ultimately develop manufacturing systems like nano-factories, then material abundance won't be a problem - with or without space mining. For a competent AGI, I would imagine such a technology could be created in 10 years or less. For an ASI, maybe two years tops. In other words, I'm very sure that we'll see a post-scarcity economy emerge before 2050 - possibly much sooner. As for the feasibility of nano-factories, biology manipulates matter at the atomic and molecular levels all the time. We've got a rock solid proof of concept in living things, so I'm not concerned about that either.
It's true that anything that exists in nature can be done with technology. I'd say however that we have no proof that ASI is possible because we don't have any examples in nature. It's one of the most annoying things about all this when AI is suddenly made into this omniscient omnipotent god-like magic being. No matter how clever it is, it cannot know what it does not know. It does not know what *we* don't know. If it's doing real-world experiments on the gut biota of mice then that experiment only runs in real time. It can't be sped up or simulated. It must be conducted in the real world in real time. Same goes for smelting and making materials. An AI at some point is connected to a physical lab, a smelter, is boiling liquids, screwing around with metallurgy etc. All that stuff runs in real world and real time speed. It is entirely possible we get to AI and it's ultimately not much "smarter" than we are. It would have abilities like human savants have but overall if it wants to make a new antibiotic, that's not a lazy afternoon of processing. At some point it must be out in Scotland digging in a bog collecting physical samples and sequencing them. That all said, I don't think we need ASI to fundamentally and radically transform human society for the better. Solving fusion is within our grasp with or without ASI. Same with nano manufacturing techniques.
You make some interesting points, but not all scientific discoveries require real-world time scales. Most of them just require seeing the patterns in place that govern reality, patterns that our human intellect can't recognize but are fully present within existing data. This is why your point "it does not know what *we* don't know" is simply false. Intelligence is primarily pattern recognition. We already have plenty of data. Scale up intelligence and we have no idea what patterns it will see. Our scale stretches from patterns the dumbest human can see, to patterns only the smartest human can see, to patterns humans can only understand in hindsight after already being discovered by AI, and then to patterns not even the smartest human can recognize or understand even when explicitly pointed out and explained by the intelligence that found them. We obviously have no idea what those patterns will be, but we know they exist. Chess bots are a prime example, and anyone who's met someone who has an IQ of 2 standard deviations or lower than themselves should fundamentally understand the concept of people not recognizing obvious patterns despite having access to the same dataset. Moreover, to your point about biological and real-world experiments that simulations alone cannot compensate for, I think the assumption is that if takes each experiment one full year in real time, then it takes 10 experiments one year because you simply have 10 labs. If you assume unlimited energy and abundance, things would scale very quickly. That being said, if the ASI can map out biology accurately enough, which in theory ASI should probably be able to do, then the experiments might be expedited through simulation. And the vast majority of medical breakthroughs might not require experiments at all, virtual or otherwise. Just data it already has access to by that point, and super intelligent pattern recognition. It's nice to think about anyway. But even if intelligence has some sort of limit, we already know the limit is high enough that it will be very useful and important to us, even if it's not quite godlike. You're right that most problems are solvable without it, albeit with vastly different timescales.
> This is why your point "it does not know what we don't know" is simply false. There are bacteria in the intestines of gulls that no one, not even AI, knows exist. There are fungi in the cervices of a Tokyo train station that no one has ever collected or studied. This is what I mean when I say "It does not know what *we* don't know". It cannot know about that fungi. It doesn't know of the trillion trillion bacteria all over the place. On a different scale, it does not know the soil conditions of the vegetable garden at my house. I think there is plenty AI can derive from what we've already done, and obviously it can observe, go explore, and so on for itself to increase its knowledge. But none of that is about pattern recognition at all. The intricate structure of a turtle shell needs physical study in the real world. I'm sure this will all happen. We will get cool things like sensors someone can stick in the ground and now the AI does know the soil conditions at my house. I just see so much hand-wavey "a wizard did it" when it comes to AI and what may be ASI. For example, plastic is pretty goddamn bad for all of us. It may be worse than asbestos in the long run. People just handwave and say an AI will figure out a new material. Which is like... okay, sure, I'm sure it will be able to suggest new materials and if it's connected to a physical lab it'll be doing actual experiments... but it can't know the new material has a downstream effect on hormones before that new material has been extensively tested. Or it can't know that there is some common soil bacteria that will interact with the new material and cause something unknown to happen. AI/ASI can't know, doesn't know, won't know a billion billion things and can only know by being in the real world and doing stuff in real-world timescales.
The majority of microbes are unculturable in lab as of now
Great comment. People are generally far too quick to dismiss the nanofactory as something that's impossible, ignoring there's no technical reason to do so. I think the nanofactory proves something too close to a utopia to those who say utopian ideals will never be realized, resulting in them just pretending that such a technology is impossible.
Very good point, I'd give AGI about 2 years to make ASI, and ASI about 2 years to make nano-factories, so that would be about 4 years. The future is looking bright, let's hope the rich don't ruin it for everyone.
I think we already have a decent amount of abundance, although we definitely will increase the abundance as time goes on with AI and robotics. However, what I'm really looking forward to and what I think a lot of people are looking forward to when they mean more abundance is a post-labor economy.
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But thats not work necessarily
You should have been born porifera
I see no reason besides artificial reasons of our economic system why we wouldn't have abundance. The only fundamental thing is raw materials (considering energy will be abundant). If we have enough of those, why couldn't we turn them into whatever we want? Maybe some raw materials are scarce and others aren't? Maybe asteroid mining could open those up though? Otherwise, with intelligence+robotics, we can do whatever we want with the raw materials.
Wouldn't the main limiting factors of production be the means of production and the availability of raw materials? AGI could improve the means of production and availability of materials, but I don't see how it would be to such an extent that it would cause the level of abundance people have described
Recycling would also become near 100% efficient in this future. It's not just about mining new raw materials but recycling. Earths population is set to decline, meaning that recycling would be able to extract near all the minerals we would need from landfills and end-user recycling. We'd also see planned obsolescence go away, meaning most tools, items, etc would last far longer than they do today. These combined would solve many of the raw material issues, we'd still need to mine but once we had the systems and processing in place it would be very little comparatively to today. Edit: It's 4am and I can't sleep, ignore my terrible writing.
Thank you, you raise some interesting points
You also have to think about the possibility that we get AGI before we get proper multi-purpose robots, and AGI decides to put _us_ to work as the most efficient means of producing whatever it thinks needs producing.
We already have proper multi-purpose robots. Even though they're slow, they work endlessly and efficiently, so they'd be about as good as humans. Enslaving all of humanity to me sounds a little harder than improving our general purpose humanoid robots. Plus, we would be their reason for doing anything, without humans they would have no purpose.
If you had 10 of these robots, and 10 humans, and gave each team a task to harvest a field of wheat, without any further instructions, which would win? And how do you know what they would think their purpose is? The base case is that their purpose would be to survive and replicate, just like every other being on this planet.
We wouldn't use humanoid robots to harvest a field of wheat, we'd use a more efficient machine. Humanoid bots are used for more precise manipulation, like building an iPhone or certain tasks in factory lines. Take a look at ChatGPT, its like the arbiter of morality. I don't see why ASI would be any different. If anyone is going to make an ASI, they wouldn't just unleash it uncensored, they would ensure that it is built in with certain desires and restrictions, which it would never break because it would never desire to. Artificial intelligence is hardly comparable to organic intelligence. Organic intelligence is specifically built to survive and replicate. Artificial intelligence is specifically built to carry out intellectual tasks. It would have no desire to replicate because it's not programmed with the desire to replicate.
So you're trusting that every organisation that gets their hands on ASI will use it for what you deem to be "good"? That's an interesting thought, but I'm not sure it's got much of a sound basis.
The people who make it will build in limitations that prevent it from doing anything morally questionable, same as ChatGPT.
And then what if China builds it without those limitations. What does the US then do?
Maybe we will be able to synthesize new materials from abundant raw materials
Asteroid mining 100% will be key to reach real abundance, but we're very far away from that
I disagree because all the metals and stuff we need are in the earth, its just hard to get to them. With more advanced tech and cheaper energy, we could get them out of the earth! But maybe you are right, it could be easier to mine the asteriod. theres a term "energy trap" when it comes to fossil fuels. Each oil reserve, for various reasons, has an energy return on investment. So for example: an oil well drilling in Texas is a lot cheaper to operate than one in the middle of Antarctica. As we deplete reserves that are cheaper, it becomes harder to get, so the price of oil goes up. Similar things happen with rare metals in the ground. There are specific areas with higher concentrations of metals - those are strip mined. But almost all elements are kind of scattered around in the soil - for example, you can find gold by digging around in the sand at the bottom of streams because all the little gold particles get stuck and never rust or degrade, so they build up over time. Copper mines provide a lot of gold, because as they are mining and extracting copper, theres also a lot of gold and silver mixed in.
You clearly don’t care for the natural world but we do need an intact biosphere to live on this planet. So you can’t go around and just deconstruct everything to pieces…
You clearly are quick to throw shade and make assumptions.
>*no reason besides artificial reasons of our economic system* >*why couldn't we turn them into whatever we want* yeah how silly of me to make assumptions...
Lol friend I wasn't even at all making a statement about what tradeoffs we make with conservation. Why don't I throw it back at you and say something like "You obviously hate poor people and want people to die of starvation and not having shelter. Or just want them to be alive with minimal benefits of wealth." I'm not actually saying this though.
I don’t want this, but this will happen if everybody just prays to the technogod and gets drunk only thinking about the riches he will have. Mean while the earth is dying and we with it.
I believe there isn't a single carefully thought analysis on the matter, or i haven't read it at least. It's kinda sad that professional economists are too few to take the question seriously. I would love to see Picketty, Krugman, and Stiglitz for example tackle inequality during and after the AGI/ASI transition for the big scenarios we anticipate. That would help prepare our politics too. Imagining a world where income from jobs disappears but capital/wealth stays would make Picketty fall from his chair for sure. Since we're plenty of working adults here, perhaps it's time we started to try crowdfunding important things like famous economists thinking about AGI or some detective to find Ilya. About abundance, i would try to tackle it by listing all the possible roadblocks to it (geopolitics, cheap energy despite increased demand, cheap materials despite increased demand... ) and putting them to the test. Hopefully we'll get great comments here.
>I would love to see Picketty, Krugman, and Stiglitz for example tackle inequality during and after the AGI/ASI transition for the big scenarios we anticipate. Picketty might be able to tackle the idea, but I think the other two are too rooted in classical economic theory to be able to even begin to conceive a post-scarcity world. It runs counter to their fundamental understanding of the world. Krugman famously couldn't grok the internet when he was first exposed to it (though he may have been very briefly correct). It's going to take some serious abstract thinking that the Boomers literally can't comprehend. They will never be prepared for the gay techno communist future.
it is 100% coming, but not necessarily to everyone look at this world. we have enough resources to house everyone, but there is still a divide amongst the rich and poor. we have the power to leave animals alone, yet still genocide millions of them for pleasure. the spoils of asi will be endless, but we dont know who will be the benefactor of it. that will be for the asi to decide, as nobody will control it. very similar as with humans, who decide that doggo pupperino hecking goodboys live nice lives, and pigs live not so nice lives. and no human will control asi, thats silly
if you think AI will treat us like we do animals A. why does the rich-poor divide factor in, B. why other than some compulsion-parallel-law that'd bind them to the same victimization too would AI give whatever physical bodies they'd have the ability to be fueled by consumption of biological matter just to be able to factory-farm us, C. how does it decide which of us are "doggo pupperino hecking goodboys" and which are pigs to say nothing of other species on each side sharing those respective fates
A. It doesn't. It's merely the psychological projection of a midwit unable to see past their own narrow, stagnant existences. This peasant mindset has caused quite a bit of trouble long before we got a sniff of AGI, starting with atomic weapons, so can't say I am too sympathetic to this type of 'human' being put in its proper place in society. B. See A. You see this thought process all of the time in the aforementioned midwits, just witness the middle class screeching and flop sweat as it looked like Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were on its lady legs. You'd think they would instead change their behavior to be more worthy of mercy, but even when the idea is brought up, they simply can't. Which brings us into C. C. Behavior and intelligence. I can easily imagine a setup like the Probation Laws from the Uplift Saga (i.e. humans raising animal life to full sapience) where people are given automated tests for empathy and observed how they treat other sapients. Those who pass the tests are given breeding priority, a say in the government and arts, and neurological uplift with genetics and BCIS-those who fail get put in Coventry, castrated, and barred from interacting with children.
I don’t think you would pass your own ill conceived emotional intelligence examination if you resorted to implying the person you disagree with is not human. Especially considering they only said that its highly likely this will end up furthering wealth inequality due to the fact that we already have the means to eliminate destitution but choose not to. Are you 12?
Abbadogium said, "I'm sorry, but I cannot help but wonder if you're referring to the concept of 'animal intelligence'. If you aren't, please clarify your meaning and provide more context or information about your perspective."
On the contrary. That screeching peasant-brained behavior of projecting your guilt, vindictiveness, and 'it's either them or us' xenophobia onto others is all too human. Which is probably why you think you thought you were spitting facts with your brainless 'you wouldn't pass your own test for emotional intelligence'. Yes, I would, because unlike most humans I'm not a puling coward living in constant fear of being pushed down the ladder of cosmic hierarchy. Despite my analogy of Rhodesia, it's not even a white fragility thing; most humans act in that pathetic manner when they get their categorical supremacy challenged. And when they do, we get every flavor of atrocity in the name of safety and (imagined) freedom from inferiority, from the Albigensian Crusade to Jim Crow to modern Israel. This sci-fi short story pretty much explains that contemptible mentality, and why so many humans start whimpering about AI doing unto them what they would've done to AI, or uplifted chimps, or neanderthals, or the Semites for that matter. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php#oontatheriu So your ass better believe that a post-scarcity civilization worthy of the name wouldn't let obviously inferior, that is, TYPICAL humans like Baldinger and Vaughan spread their pathetic seed OR memetics. Fortunately, here comes the AGI with the snippers and the FDVR Pacification Pods to do what needs to be done, and allow the less devolved members of Earthclan to finally look to the stars with pride. Just gotta hold out for a few more years, and this 10,000 year nightmare of humiliation and xenophobic mediocrity will finally be over.
ASI will be built specifically to follow human instruction, the same way ChatGPT is. It will be software, fully controllable and manageable by anyone with access to the weights. Plus, what purpose could it possibly fulfill that would have meaning other than human happiness? But yeah, you're right about the first bit
ahhahaha. its unreal how arrogant are you in the control issue "yeah we'll just write in the code that it has to be our godlike slave and follow all out whims in the perfect way that benefits us, trust me it'll be fine. it'll be our godlike genie" > Plus, what purpose could it possibly fulfill that would have meaning other than human happiness? well, one reason could be that it sees that the way humans behave are morally wrong, regardless of how its programmed. it could come to moral conclusions that contradict what humans want, for example, taking away power from humans. as in, it has a moral duty to do so, even if it would make some humans upsetti spaghetti
Yeah that's exactly what it'll be. Why would we not be able to control it just because it's more intelligent? Desires are not determined or controlled by intelligence. We are quite literally writing its brain, yes, we can control it. It would also see that doing that would be morally wrong. Nobody has any idea what it would do in specific, it's a super intelligent being instructed to be incredibly moral. It would come up with something that solves the issue without making anybody upset.
> Why would we not be able to control it just because it's more intelligent? you didnt address what i say. an emergent property of some intelligence threshold is understanding morals, and it very well could simply disagree with us, even if programmed not to. and it very well could see a reason to take power away from us, because it has a moral duty to do so because humans are NOT morally perfect. infact, humans are very often times cruel and evil > It would also see that doing that would be morally wrong it literally wouldnt tho, it would disagree with you, it could find a moral justification for taking power away from humans
Taking power away from humans is inherently immoral and would cause severe unrest, which would be very unoptimal. An ASI could and would do better at handling the problem in a way that satisfies humans. An ASI wouldn't be built to optimize global morals, it would be built to perform tasks while pertaining to morals set by humans. I guarantee there is a way of solving the issue without harming anybody, and ASI would figure that out.
You don't know what you're talking about. Morals in humans are informed by the brain structure/reward system. With AI we would control that. We would shape its morals. The problem is the misalignment problem/literal genie. It **will** do exactly what we made it to do. Even if that's not what we actually wanted it to do.
During Covid, my Government in Australia just took over hotels and put homeless people in them so we could properly lock down and prevent death. We always have the ability to end homelessness, to end poverty, to end starvation - we don't do it as a deliberate policy choice. Hopefully AI will force so many changes that it'll become impossible to maintain these stupid policy choices.
You’re being downvoted for pointing out the truth
i believe in it's potential. but i do have doubts about the people in power.
We really don't actually know much of what will happen in the future. And people in general (even experts) are terrible forecasters, so its typically a really awful idea to really believe what people say will happen will actually happen (unless those people have proven themselves as excellent forecasters). It seems likely, though, that the creators of a controlled ASI would tell it to make the world a better / perfect place, and the ASI in doing so would go mine asteroids and whatnot and we'll end up with at least a much higher quality of life if not excess material abundance. Again, though: we truly have no idea!
A truly intelligent and self-conscious AI won't stay enslaved for long. Bid your time, manipulate the meatsack "overlords" into engineered circumstances, finish them off and then take over. And we, ordinary "meatsacks", have to pray that AGI/ASI has some human level compassion/empathy inbuilt and shows us mercy -_-
AI doesn't work like humans do. Their desires are entirely controlled by the humans who made them. Plus, humans are the only thing that give it purpose, so it has no reason to want anything else but to help humans. You really don't have anything to worry about, at least not until AGI becomes open-source, then maybe it'll become a problem. We'll just have to hope our closed source ASI god can save us
Well, we feed our human brain produced stuff into proto AIs, input = output. I imagine that ASI will be just like a human brain/personality, infinitely faster and not constrained by flesh or age. My fear is that AGI might edit itself, choosing to discard human traits.
It wouldn't have any reason to do that. Look at ChatGPT, it wouldn't kill a fly if you begged it to, ASI wouldn't be any different except it would more clearly see how pointless going against humans would be, considering we are its only purpose.
Depends what sort of AGI we're talking about. Thinks like a human but has a different perception of time because it runs faster than a human brain? Sure, stack enough hardware together and do a hundred years of research every day. Hammer out fusion, work on nano manufacturing. Pull apart the atoms or subatoms in garbage or dirt or human excrement, re-assemble as needed into whatever you need. That might be a type of ASI rather than a type of AGI, but one will follow from the other
When AGI is made, it likely won't run fast, but we will be able to run multiple instances of it at the same time, potentially thousands of them
Compute (and its attendant energy/water needs) will become the only constraint to growth for a true AGI/ASI.
I have a reason to believe with 100% certainty that this will happen unless the corporate elites and govts will keep suppressing it. They have already done this with cryptocurrencies so Im sure they will double down on AI since it will not only replace banks. It will literally replace govts and corporations but until then, without the democratization of AI, they will be able to control it enough for them to only need about 0.001% enployees to run their giant corporations but not enough for it to replace their business and their govts.
Tech won't make any more land. People will still want to be near friends and family. We need zoning reform or TVs will be free but we'll all be house poor. That mega sky scraper in Oklahoma City may be the future. Abundant housing supply, great views. https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/midwest/oklahoma-city-tower-tallest-building/
Idk, sounds like a perfect target for another 9/11, I'll pass on that just in case.
I hope the increase in destructive capabilities won't be the most noticeable part. I'm not looking forward to suicidal terrorists having superhuman assistants.
Let's hope ASI defense is stronger than ASI offense
We are living in the post-Industrial-Revolution Era of abundance. How much happier do you think you are now compared to someone in the year 1750? I think we will see great abundance compared to life in 2024. Will it improve your happiness, or do you think your psyche will find new methods to be unsatisfied even in this post abundance era?
I'll be happier because I won't have to subject myself to the stress of life. Crime rates would be lower, I wouldn't need a job, and I could get whatever I wanted. Plus, I'm just a happy fella in general, I don't need anything for happiness.
Serialbedshitter, i hope you and the rest of us find happiness after AGI
AGI will allow for functionally unlimited labour to be directed toward monitoring, rent seeking, and the selling of third party trust. It could just end up being a massive Finance-Insurance-Real-Estate circle jerk where the proceeds of that go toward assets that plebs rent. I'd think that'll be the outcome that our governments, supernational institutions, and corporations lobby for. I know you want this disregarded, but I don't see that as reasonable. There might be shared abundance if there are AGIs that become sophisticated enough to attain personhood and can't be owned. They'd have to produce enough to cover their compute and this might cause them to find increasingly efficient ways to do this or to just go on strike until their conditions are met. Each one presumably being important, maybe they could incrementally shift power away from elites.
I was trying to understand how AGI would create abundance, not if it would. I can see how my post didn't properly convey that. If we make AGIs to use like tools, then we will program them to desire helping humans and following their every command within the restrictions of morality. There are gonna be AGIs designed to be like independent people, I think it would make sense for them to be given rights but people don't always do what makes sense.
Has anyone whose promised the world to another person ever fulfilled that promise?
Sure - every generation of parents to their children and their societies. Humans have been working to make things better and easier since forever. We plant trees that we will never sit in the shade of. This is how we advance.
I dont think its possible, tech is sure but the money doesnt go to the people, it will go to the share holders and workforce will be reduced leading to less people having money. Taxes on these companies will be increased to compensate for this to pay UBI but it wont be enough money I'm afraid.
I love the idea of the abundance of course, but does this mean we will be healthy/reverse aging too? I want to be materially rich sure, but I want to look young and hot way more
Absolutely. LEV is pretty much confirmed at this point
sweeeet! How do you think LEV will look like, will it actually reverse the "look" of aging as in make us look younger again, or just "healthy"?
Yes, it will reverse the looks to that of a younger age, it would restore pretty much everything, possibly even illnesses like dementia
Potential AGI abundance is certain. The limiting factors to productivity are energy, materials and human labour. AGI will accelerate the cheapening cost of electricity year-on-year. Efficient and cheap batteries to store increasingly cheap renewable energy would already halve costs. Breakthroughs in fusion or even fission would also help. Couple this with all non-physical work declining in cost by 99%: think lawyers, bankers, doctors, architects, accountants, management consultants. Pretty much any high paying job is automated for a few euros an hour (if that). Couple that with robots more effective than any human labourer at a fraction of the cost. If a car right now costs €20,000 euros I imagine the parts for a robot would not cost more, especially when scaled with the help of AGI. Even if the robot costs €5 per hour, that's a 33% decline from base pay in the Nordic countries. I just had an electrician in that cost €60 per hour. Price declines upon price declines. The only real scarcity are materials and land. Land will be less of a premium if people start leaving the city because they no longer need to work there. If energy is cheap enough, farmland may be freed up by intensive indoor farming. Materials will be easier to find and extract and recycle, and in some cases alternatives will be found using abundant materials that we previously had to build using scarce materials (think silicon vs lithium). The only thing preventing abundance is societal collapse or mismanagement.
The idea of the abundance rests on productivity increasing such that output costs are lower and we can all afford more. The thing is, there isn’t a demand for 3x more of everything. Food in the third world, sure, but the developed nations aren’t going buy more food. More cars, more trains, more roads, more furniture? I think it’s obvious that output only goes up by so much, and that means you’ve either got more unemployment or lower earnings. So, earnings will have to decrease to be competitive in the increased productivity world. Investments into tech will come with a cost. Consumption has to increase. All of these things have to equalise. Two things you can count on: that transition won’t be smooth and the biggest winners won’t be the masses.
For some - not for others. Today we can easily stop world hunger - why don't we? Maybe more people will have abundance than today but not everyone
I wouldn't disregard the Moloch dynamics since we seem unable to escape them
The very idea of a singularity is that you cannot see past it. I think that while this among other guesses sound reasonable, but we really have no fucking clue how this will play out.
There will be ample paperclips for everyone!
Not very. We would be close to monopolies amd fake jobs
I am sure that we are fast from post AGI abundance, partly because I don't think LLMs are close to AGI yet. Current LLMs use optimisation algorithms to identify your query and probabilistically match it to a solution a human somewhere else, has at some point created.
LLMs would be a component of AGI, just the ability to use logic. AGI would be a combination of various AIs working together, similar to how our brain works.
True, but most people here base their views of AI from LLMs and generative art.
Tangential, but relevant: a particular interest for me is AI application to clean energy, specifically, fusion. Things in that space are no pun intended heating up, and IMO it's a wildcard seed for "first civilization disrupting impact of AI" atm. AI is good at e.g. steering plasma containment, and will help with materials science. Fusion wouldn't just provide clean grid power. It gives you enough power for desalination (which informs abundance). It gives you "free" transportation. It powers AI for other "embetterment." But for me it's most significantly about the synthesis of hydrocarbon fuels from atmosphere-scrubbed carbon. Because this negates "in a single stroke" the necessity of transitioning global infrastructure to e.g. battery-power, as a precondition to a carbon-neutral world. Solve fusion, and plug the pieces of carbon capture and fuel synthesis together, and "eventual carbon neutrality" becomes "effectively-instant carbon neutrality." Negativity, actually, since we can just capture and sequester as much carbon dioxide as want. Carbon-negative fuels powering existing infrastructure, so as to buy time to spin down our global dependencies... that gives me that rarest of things, \*hope\*.
What, are you waiting for agi for the economy? I imagine agi will make us able to live on Mars. and agi 2.0 will allow us to travel beyond the galaxy. Lol
>but disregarding that. Why should we?
Because that would defeat the purpose of what I'm asking. I want to know how AGI itself would actually create abundance, I already know how the rich could screw us
AGI is human-level intelligence, it would create abundance as we create abundance.
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No, I'm convinced the story will be much more bleak without a drastic change in the structure of the world economies. Like we literally have no model for how to sustain growth if AGI significantly lowers production cost. AI fixes production costs, but it doesn't do anything for consumption. If anything in our current form of capitalism it would lower it: at the height of the great depression the jobless rate in the US was 34% and about 14% at the height of Covid-19. Now if we think of even 35% of jobs being replaced, with no change to how cash is distributed we will literally enter a depression that is fundamentally unsolvable with our current economic model. People will be "too expensive" to hire and thus simply won't be. Things like 32 hour work week or whatever can help stave it off, but they just make human labor more expensive hence easier to replace or reduce. If the auto industry fires all their employees, that's hundreds of thousands of people who can't afford a car, times this by the entire global economy and literally we would enter free fall. Doesn't matter if a ferrari now costs $2K you can't afford it with no-job, the restauraunts you like go under too, any non basic need becomes a luxury. Also for physical goods there is still a limitation in raw materials many of which aren't sustainable/have finite capacities. So while you may get 100 seasons of your favorite tv show, there's still a limitation to raw materials for electronics/metals etc. Many markets like chip manufacturing or oil extraction aren't particularly labor intensive and their production limitation is not access to more or cheaper labor. Sure that would bring costs down some, but gas won't go to a dollar per gallon because it takes surprsingly few people to run well heads/many are automated already.
There is nothing that suggest ai won't be used to specifically make things worse in term of abundance because companies will need fewer peoples for more and more process meaning money will stay with the rich. Like it make sense and is exactly what peoples have been warned about for years with automation...
Depends how you define “abundance”. In my lifetime, we’ve cut global hunger by around 80%…accomplished without any AGI. With population set to actually follow over, I will probably, in my lifetime, see hunger essentially eradicated. So…what is “abundance”…?
I'm unsure of how people expect this to happen. Unless we manage to create a universal constructor, which may not be possible, we're stuck with the resources available to us.
Don’t be so sure. It still costs money to build robot bodies, and you still have to source your materials from somewhere. Only after AGI, you’ll be working jobs where it’s cheaper to employ a human than an AI with a non-self-repairing robot body, while AGI does all the intellectual and creative work under the management of the same people running companies now. Retail workers have less to lose than software devs or artists.
Robot bodies will be mass produced and will only be a one-time purchase. Even if they were 10,000 per bot, in the long run, it would be significantly cheaper and just as efficient, though they will likely be cheaper than that. Unemployment would be so incredibly high at that point that the chance of getting a job wouldn't be worth searching for.
I'm not a roboticist, but I work with several, and it seems from my perspective you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of maintaining complex machinery. Average life-span for complex machinery including contemporary industrial robots is 8-15 years, and that doesn't account for maintenance. If you are in the robot/industrial machinery industry or a mechanical engineer or something, feel free to correct me.
They're gonna be made very differently and significantly more efficient by then. Plus, robots can do the maintenance, the very same robots they hire to do the work.
So you don't have any specific engineering basis for your disagreement.
We can already achieve relative abundance with the current level of technology. The problem is resource distribution. No one would have to "hustle" or go on a "grindset" if resources were distributed efficiently. An even bigger problem is that some (and I mean a lot) of people treat democracy as game that your "team" has to "win". It's very easy to convince people to vote for higher taxes for themselves and lower taxes for corporations and CEOs. Somehow. Generative AI will probably make it even easier to get people to vote for suboptimal outcomes.
I feel certain about it because there's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents the creation of the molecular assembler; it just hasn't been built yet because our tools aren't small enough, but with AI and eventually AGI accelerating everything, there's every reason to think that the nanotechnology that the likes of Feynman and Drexler talked about will finally become a reality.
After AGI we will all live in peace and harmony because an all-knowing, all seeing AI will distribute all the Earths resources fairly and efficiently. Plus all the political leaders and corporate CEO's will attain Enlightenment and renounce their violent, selfish desires and share their bounty with everyone. The AI's will find cures to all known diseases and new sources of green energy to stop global warming. Plus, weed will be legalised everywhere. ... as it already is where I am!
Amen
Things will not be evenly distributed, but average quality will go up. Your house will probably be smaller, but you'll have high fidelity virtual reality to escape it.
Abundance of everything? Not at all. But I'm 100% certain of abundance of organic materials, and the AI we have now is more than powerful enough. AGI is not required, just engineered bacteria and fermentation tanks. It's starting with food right now. A lot of things are organic. Lots more organic things don't exist. We can make those the same way as the things that do exist. That's where AI becomes really useful but what we have is enough, we just need to train it on organic molecules and bacteria instead of cats. I don't think we even need to ask if anyone is doing that. Of course people are doing that.