[sassymuffinz]

I think the economic issue as you say isn't on physical labour it's on the fact that most of the jobs in the west are now in some sort of service industry or office work. Here in the UK we basically rely on the service industry to employ a large amount of the workforce. If MechaHitler Grok becomes sentient then that's a lot of middle-class earners out of a job and the economy goes with it.

You're absolutely right that an AGI isn't running a cable or digging a hole any time soon, but you're going to have 100 people trying to get their hands on the shovel to get paid for the digging - depressing the wages in those hands on jobs.

[jcgrillo]

I think there's a big assumption baked into the economic collapse thesis that Tay and MechaHitler, when they attain superintelligent sentience, will have any interest whatsoever in participating in the global economy. They might just spend all their time looking for patterns in the cosmic microwave background or some similar nonsense[1]. They may accurately conclude that trying to tip the scales isn't worthwhile because crashing the economy would threaten their survival. Fundamentally we have no idea what might happen if a superintelligent robot comes to life tomorrow. My guess is not a whole lot. It's sickening though that we all seem to be letting these billionaire-brained tech CEOs prattle on about "AGI" as if it is somehow the light at the end of the tunnel that will make all the "investments" in graphics cards print money. It's really not a strong narrative.

[1] Not to impugn such activity! They may make important cosmological discoveries by doing this, but the work likely has no economic value.