I think it's academic because I suspect we're much further from AGI than anyone thinks. We're especially far from AGI that can act in physical space without human "robots" to carry out its commands.
That's an interesting formulation. I'd actually be quite worried about a Manna-like world, where we have AGI and most humans don't have any economic value except as its "remote hands".
Despite the false advertising in the Tears for Fears song, everybody does _not_ want to rule the world. Omohundro drives are a great philosophical thought experiment and it is certainly plausible to consider that they might apply to AI, but claiming as is common on LessWrong that unlimited power seeking is an inevitable consequence of a sufficiently intelligent system seems to be missing a few proof steps, and is opposed by the example of 99% of human beings.
> Instrumental convergence is the hypothetical tendency of most sufficiently intelligent, goal-directed beings (human and nonhuman) to pursue similar sub-goals (such as survival or resource acquisition), even if their ultimate goals are quite different. More precisely, beings with agency may pursue similar instrumental goals—goals which are made in pursuit of some particular end, but are not the end goals themselves—because it helps accomplish end goals.
'Running the planet' does not derive from instrumental convergence as defined here. Very few humans would wish to 'run the planet' as an instrumental goal in the pursuit of their own ultimate goals. Why would it be different for AGIs?
ChatGPT is instructed to roleplay a cheesy cheery bot and so it responds accordingly, but it (and almost any LLM) can be instructed to roleplay any sort of character, none of which mean anything about the system itself.
Of course an AGI system could also be instructed to roleplay such a character, but that doesn't mean it'd be an inherent attribute of the system itself.
Why would it care to stay alive? The discussion is pretty pointless as we have no knowledge about alien intelligence and there can be no arguments based on hard facts.
Any form of AI unconcerned about its own continued survival would be just be selected against.
Evolutionary principles/selection pressure applies just the same to artificial life, and it seems pretty reasonable to assume that drive/selfpreservation would at least be somewhat comparable.
That assumes that AI needs to be like life, though.
Consider computers: there's no selection pressure for an ordinary computer to be self-reproducing, or to shock you when you reach for the off button, because it's just a tool. An AI could also be just a tool that you fire up, get its answer, and then shut down.
It's true that if some mutation were to create an AI with a survival instinct, and that AI were to get loose, then it would "win" (unless people used tool-AIs to defeat it). But that's not quite the same as saying that AIs would, by default, converge to having a drive for self preservation.
...Well, why would aliens care, when they take over the planet? Or the Tuatha De Danan come back and decide we've all been very wicked? Because right now, those are just about as likely as AGI taking over.
>Even if they automate all our current jobs uniquely human experiences will always be valuable to us and will always have demand.
I call this the Quark principle. On DS9, there are matter replicators that can perfectly recreate any possible drink imaginable instantly. And yet, the people of the station still gather at Quark's and pay him money to pour and mix their drinks from physical bottles. As long as we are human, some things will never go away no matter how advanced the technology becomes.
There's a bit of a circular argument here - even if we human always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and our kin, I don't see a clear argument that human capabilities will have external value to the economy at large.
If you "unwind" all the complexities in modern supply chains, there are always human people paying for something they want at the leaf nodes.
Take the food and clothing industries as obvious examples. In some AI singularity scenario where all humans are unemployed and dirt poor, does all the food and clothing produced by the automated factories just end up in big piles because we naked and starving people can't afford to buy them?
There's nothing definitional about the economy being driven by human need. In a future scenario where there are superintelligent AIs, there's no reason why they wouldn't run their own economy for their own needs, collecting and processing materials to service each other's goals, for example of space exploration.
For economic purposes, "the economy" also includes corporations and governments.
Corporations and governments have counted amongst their property entities that they did not grant equal rights to, sometimes whom they did not even consider to be people. Humans have been treated in the past much as livestock and guide dogs still are.
For AGI? Do you care about uniquely ant experience? Bacteria?
Why would AGI care? Which now runs the planet?