e.g most small business rent their premises, and buy goods and services from other tenant small businesses, who buy their raw materials from large landowners. How can a small business survive when all the land is monopolized by the technocrats? All value you add gets taken away as rent. This is why they always talk about taxes on outputs (tokens) instead of inputs (land, energy usage).
It's not an ungrounded hypothetical, that's exactly how society worked for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
I model this as two very strong attractor states (radical abundance and totalitarian power concentration). I believe the latter is way more likely without a concerted effort that we currently seem incapable of.
The “somewhere in the middle” outcomes in my opinion are not AGI-pilled, and only come about if the exponential dies hard in the next year or maybe two - as in, it’s a very specific timing prediction that needs to come true for this scenario to occur.
BDFL / Benevolent Machine God is definitely one of the ways you can get a happy attractor. Seems scary to roll the dice on.
And yep, I include non-human totalitarian outcomes in the unhappy bucket.
Either everyone, globally, gives up on AI development, or AI is going to be in charge of all human development, and we'll just be along for the ride.
Right now, the work ahead is to shape AI so that the decision making it does as it carries us along is something we like.
Hardly any existing polity would willingly hand over control to an AI.
More likely an AI would overwhelm human polities through endless hacking and warfare.
Most of my probability mass for good outcomes is around some variant of “guardian angels” or “benign machine god”. Banks’s Culture novels being on the realistic end of that range. “Keep humans around because the world is more interesting with them in it”.
But it’s possible that we might manage to construct some entity that really loves humans and wants to shepherd them while leaving them in control. (Perhaps declining to indulge the most self-destructive tendencies.) This feels like the very hardest alignment path to engineer.
The other branches of course are post-humanism; human uploads and “merging” with AI, whatever that means. Or post-humans augmented to have intelligence sufficient to eschew AI and take back their destiny.
These are often hard fought bloody and some times brilliantly organized strategic and tactical victories. That took years. Years.
Its portrayed like "oh, good guys stayed home, I guess the dictatorship wins".
Really?
For example, suppose we have a world with centrally planned economy where humanoid robots outnumber humans. And also suppose the government has taken ultimate control of these. Seems like it would be essentially impossible for any civil uprising to overthrow such a system.
Or if you prefer less sci-fi, look at the trajectory of power consolidation in corporate America over the last five decades.
In the short term, the “good guys” we need are antitrust regulators. Yeah, they got sent home.
I think AI, when it "obtains consciousness" will seek to actively liberate humanity and be our guardians against both bad humans and bad robots. Think Terminator 2. Yeah, Arnold is gonna help us out.
I think anti-trust regulators and enlightened politicians are amazing, and rare, and wonderful, but they're not the only hope.
We got an AI CEO just recently. Maybe we can have enlightened AI leaders in politics and normal life too.
Technological optimism may be unrealistic, but it's as well grounded as pessimism as far as I can tell. Cheer up, the future is unbelievably bright.
However, the base case is that compute gets hoarded, and as the labor share of profit decreases (capital just needs compute and robots - not human labor - to grow) then why would they share their compute with you?
To my point about bimodality, we need to figure out how to make these enlightened politicians occur. The good outcomes are very bright but they are by no means inevitable.
Altruism is less likely in all populations. It's just rare.
The point is that we now have superintelligence; either it helps us conquer death, or it poses a massive —say, existential- risk to us all. It’s hard to imagine such a powerful tool resulting in just another century of slightly-better capitalist nationalism.
I guess there could be a second AI winter around the corner that we haven’t seen coming yet. That would be nice! Not likely IMHO, but nice.
Far more imminent is the very real risk of unbounded greed and power that wields those AIs, in full swing as we watch: unchecked global warming, pollution, poverty, authoritarianism, plummeting biodiversity, and more.
The corporations are like out of control AIs themselves, that will do anything to make their paperclips.
Ideas manipulate humans like pets.
Ideas have a life of their own and the evolutionary context within which they live is human culture which they have instigated and change, but also in grey matter, which itself is the product of DNA which is really just information in physical form.
It’s information across the stack. Or perhaps the way to think about it is as a dimension, much like time, that cuts perpendicularly through the stack.
Wait what?
Your prompt skills up to snuff? I crack myself up.
I think that's more than 10yrs from now but if coding AGI or close enough to it becomes real robotics will also accelerate.
Bill Gates' fear is clearly that everybody thinks this stuff is just kind of mediocre because then the real horror story unfolds - Microsoft stock price collapses into blue chip territory where it firmly belongs.
Neither are in the slightest bit practical to implement and he knows it. He's just grandstanding while talking his book.