[elijahbenizzy]

The entire idea that we will have "useless mouths to feed" is making a big assumption. "post-scarcity" is absurd -- the more we get, the more problems we will create, its just human nature.

- Sustain everybody on earth? Focus everything on moving off the planet and colonizing the universe. - Infinite energy? Don't have infinite vessels to travel. - Space travel easy? Limited by the speed of light.

And so on... Sure, you may dream that AI will be solving it all and we'll be sitting on our lazy butts, but a society that doesn't have challenge dies very quickly (AI or not), so we've learned to make challenge and grow.

The optimist in me knows that we can't even comprehend the challenges of the future, but the idea that we won't play the pivotal role is laughable.

This is the thing with actual exponential growth -- the curve is so steep that all our minds can do is take the current view of the world and project our fears/preconceived notions into the future.

[rrgok]

Forgive if I'm gonna rant a little bit under your comment. The phrase "the more we get, the more problems we will create, it is just human nature." struck a chord that I cannot myself stop ranting about.

I'm gonna ask again as I've done in some other post. Why we consider ourselves the most intelligent species if we don't stop and ask ourselves this: for how long are we gonna face challenges? What is the supposedly end goal that will terminate this never ending chase? Do humans really want to solve all problems?

I don't really understand and I'm 32 years old. I've been asking this question for a long time. What is the point of AI, raising consciousness, curing cancer, hell beating death, if we don't have a clear picture of where we are going. Is it to have always problems and solving them incrementally or just solving all problems once and for all? If it is the latter, there already is a great solution to it. If it is the former, then I'm afraid I have to break it up to you (not specifically the parent poster, but you as in the reader): you have sick mind.

[eep_social]

I think the way you’ve framed “problems” is off the mark. I’ll try to explain my view but it’s not straightforward and I am struggling a bit as I write below.

The way I see it, what the GP is getting at is the idea that human societies require challenges or else they stagnate, collapse, and vanish. We can observe this on an individual level and GP is generalizing it to societies which I agree with but I doubt this is “settled”.

On a personal level, if you have achieved some form of post-scarcity, you will still complain — about the weather, the local sports team, your idiot cofounder, whatever. A less fortunate person might be complaining that they can’t afford time with their kids because they’re at their second job. The point is that everyone will find problems in their life. And those problems are a form of challenge. And a life truly without challenge is unbelievably boring. Like kill-yourself boring. If there is no struggle, there is no point. The struggle gives humans purpose and meaning. Without struggle there can be no achievement in the same way that shadows require light.

So, with all of that in mind, I think the point is that even with AGI, humans will require new challenges. And if AGI enables post-scarcity for ~everyone, that just means ~everyone will be inventing challenges for themselves. So there is no end game where the challenges taper off and we enter some kind of stability. I, and I think GP, think that stability would actually be an extinction level event for our society.

Person by person, I think the kind of challenge varies. What do you dream of doing if you had no constraints on your time? How many years would you spend smoking weed and playing video games before you got bored of that? Video games that hold your attention do so by being challenging (btw). It was about a year, for me.

> Do humans really want to solve all problems?

No, we want challenges that provide a sense of accomplishment when they have been overcome.

Thank you for reading my ramble, hope it helps.

[nullsense]

>What do you dream of doing if you had no constraints on your time?

I imagine if I were a bored and aggressive, egotistical, charismatic individual then I perhaps might try to conquer the neighboring village.

[elijahbenizzy]

The end goal? Does life have a purpose? Is it possible to "solve all problems"? To even have a picture of where we are going? We move forward because there is nowhere else to go.

Perhaps there is a general state of societal enlightenment, but I've read too many sci-fi books to be anything but a skeptic.

[nullsense]

I've grappled with the same question for a long time now.

I came to the conclusion that the Neolithic Revolution was probably a mistake, albeit a fun one. The total set of problems faced by humanity in it's original form basically boiled down to "what am I going to eat today and where am I going to sleep tonight?". Those two problems never go away. All you can do is shift them around. Every single novel problem we solve in our entire lives is just those two problems endlessly shifted around.

[ramoz]

Bro don’t be a robot.

We do what we do to live better lives.

You’re lucky you don’t have to figure that out at 32 with an unfortunate circumstance such as cancer. It’s sad that you may never without such a thing.

[ericmcer]

Philosophy is boring so it doesn't really play well in political discussions. I agree though, when we argue about something like AI without any kind of philosophical underpinning the argument is hollow.

AI is "good" in the sense of what goal? Becoming a space-faring civilization? Advancing all technology as fast as possible? Building a stable utopia for life on earth?

[iinnPP]

It's not a large stretch to imagine a scenario where AGI or even ChatGPT is used to justify a nuclear war where a select few are secured and humanity is reset under their control.

There's a reason for the plethora of fiction around it.

[incone123]

Nuclear war leads to extremely long term and widespread environmental damage. Forcing technological regression on society by other means is much cleaner. Of course an agi won't care since it won't be limited to a human lifespan nor much inconvenienced by radiological pollution.

[elijahbenizzy]

Its also not a real stretch to imagine a scenario where human decision making by a select few who have control over this leads to exactly the same thing. Do you trust Putin or ChatGPT more? (actual question, I don't know the answer).

[staunton]

I think we can "trust" Putin to keep doing what he's doing. Who knows what GPT-X might do?

[danielbln]

> a society that doesn't have challenge dies very quickly

Do you have an example or a citation for this?

[elijahbenizzy]

Pure conjecture. But I think there are many examples: look at dying empires, corporations, etc... its all the same. They stop seeing challenges, get lazy, and are taken over by some hungrier and scrappier entity. When the real challenge comes they're unprepared.

[mirekrusin]

Do you think AGI will get lazy?

[elijahbenizzy]

A program is neither lazy nor motivated. It does precisely what it is programmed to do.

I would push back on the question, as well as a myriad of implied premises behind it...

[MacsHeadroom]

A machine learning model is not a program, is not programmed, and research on emergent motivation in ML models disagrees with this position.

[mitthrowaway2]

A human only has a comparative advantage over an AI when they can solve a problem at a lower cost than the AI can do the same. It's hard to imagine that would be the case in a scenario where AGI is decently smarter than humans are.

[vasco]

Opposable thumbs are an advantage for a few years.

[mitthrowaway2]

Agreed, we do have a lot of nimble and low-cost actuators in our body. That will probably provide gainful employment for a while. I just don't see it being a very long-lasting advantage.

[tehjoker]

We have the capacity to take care of everyone right now but we don't because private wealth realized that comfortable people creates an equal society and equality means there's no way to be a mogul where everyone has to listen to you. This is in part why they destroyed the middle class, things got too crazy for them in the 1960s and they counter attacked. There are documents from both liberal and conservative establishment figures at that time describing the situation.

c.f. The Crisis of Democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crisis_of_Democracy

c.f. The Powell Memorandum: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

[m4nu3l]

> We have the capacity to take care of everyone right now but we don't because private wealth.

This is very not the case. Wealth is created. It doesn't exist just somewhere to be redistributed. Making the assumption that you will have the same GDP if you redistribute massively is unrealistic.

[ryandrake]

But relative wealth is not created. It is a percentage and by definition distributed. Relative wealth is what drives standard of living and creates the power imbalances OP is talking about.

Absolute wealth (the kind that gets created) is kind of pointless to measure. If you have $50K and all your neighbors have $100K, and then tomorrow you have $100K and all your neighbors have $1M, you and your neighbors created wealth but you are worse off.

[m4nu3l]

> Absolute wealth (the kind that gets created) is kind of pointless to measure.

It's literally the other way around to me. I want to be better off than I'm now, not better of in relative term (which might mean I'll be worse off).

> you have $50K and all your neighbors have $100K, and then tomorrow you have $100K and all your neighbors have $1M, you and your neighbors created wealth but you are worse off.

You literally aren't if there is no inflation. You are worse off of your neighbors. If you want to be wealthy as them then ask yourself about how they are doing it and copy them. That's how the system grows. You don't go and punish people that are successful in producing wealth.

[tehjoker]

This is not a GDP focused argument. We had the capacity to take care of everyone in the 1950s or 1960s.

However, while not an ecological argument, it would even be beneficial within capitalism to rebalance workers and the wealthy as the system is demand oriented. If you give everyone more money and stuff, they will be able to buy more, and one person's spending is another's income. It could be argued that GDP would increase faster under a more equal system, but I don't think the planet could take it (hence, like under our current system, planning will be needed to mitigate the environmental cost).

[bostik]

I've seen a remarkable take on this. In the form of micro-scifi, no less:

> The robot revolution was inevitable from the moment we programmed their first command: "Never harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm." We had all been taught the outcast and the poor were a natural price for society. The robots hadn't.

'Nuff said.

[m4nu3l]

>This is not a GDP focused argument.

The argument was about wealth, which its production is measured by GDP. It's definitely a GDP argument.

> If you give everyone more money and stuff, they will be able to buy more, and one person's spending is another's income.

I disagree. I don't think the system is either demand nor supply oriented. It clearly is both. If you just take money from rich people forcing them to divest and give it to poor people you won't get immediate grow, but inflation. If you just produce and consume there won't be any growth.

> It could be argued that GDP would increase faster under a more equal system.

You would need to provide me with good evidence for this, given all economic systems in history that championed equality ended up with very low growth. It's the reason why China, Russia and many other countries are lagging behind.

> but I don't think the planet could take it (hence, like under our current system, planning will be needed to mitigate the environmental cost).

Growth is not directly related to energy consumption (nor unrelated). You can have economic growth by becoming more efficient. Also a lot of services produced today are intangible (like software) and require much less energy per dollar to be produced.

Also most environmental issues are not just a product of the market, but (if for instance you look at climate change) are at least in equal part Governmental failures. We could have had ~100% nuclear energy production by now if Governments didn't restrict or entirely ban nuclear energy.

[tehjoker]

If we had enough in the 50s, then if we took a hit on GDP now when we have more productivity than the 50s, then we can take care of everyone.

[m4nu3l]

> If we had enough in the 50s

By what standard? In the 50s a lot of things didn't even exist.

> then if we took a hit on GDP now when we have more productivity than the 50s, then we can take care of everyone.

If the hit is closer to 100% than to 0% then no. Examples: The USSR, Maoist China, North Korea.