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by drdaeman 537 days ago
That requires achieving post-scarcity to work in practice and be fair, though. If achievable, it’s not clear how it relates to AGI. I mean, there’s plenty of intelligence on this planet already, and resources are still limited - and it’s not like AGI would somehow change that.
1 comments
roboboffin 537 days ago
One thing I thought recently, is that a large amount of work is currently monitoring and correcting human activity. Corporate law, accounting, HR and services etc. If we have AGI that is forced to be compliant, then all these businesses disappear. Large companies are suddenly made redundant, regardless of whether they replace their staff with AI or not.
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drdaeman 537 days ago
I agree that if true AGI happens (current systems still cannot reason at all, only pretend to do so) and if it comes out cheaper to deploy and maintain, that would mean a lot of professions could be automated away.

However, I believe this had already happened quite a few times in history - industries becoming obsolete with technological advances isn’t anything new. This creates some unrest as society needs to transition, but those people are always learning a different profession. Or retire if they can. Or try to survive some other way (which is bad, of course).

It would be nice, of course, if everyone won’t have to work unless they feel the need and desire to do so. But in our reality, where the resources are scarce and their distribution in a way that everyone will be happy is a super hard unsolved problem (and AGI won’t help here - it’s not some Deus ex Machina coming to solve world problems, it’s just a thinking computer), I don’t see a realistic and fair way to achieve this.

Put simply, all the reasons we cannot implement UBI now will still remain in place - AGI simply won’t help with this.

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roboboffin 534 days ago
I guess the point I am trying to make, is that paradoxically the more an AI company's products are integrated into the economy, the less value they can extract from the economy. As a large amount of the world's economic output is just dealing with the human factor.
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