by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The thing I don’t think we’re thinking enough about is how we’re careening towards a future where there pretty much isn’t anything for humanity to do other than smoke a bowl while playing video games.
Should we get anywhere near to Artificial General Intelligence, there simply may not be any tasks left for humans to do. And given how angry, unhappy and bitter humans become when they don’t have work to distract them, this could make the entire world very, very unstable.
The whole notion of “prompt engineer” is extremely short sighted. It’s the type of job that we think will exist to make ourselves feel better. But if we reach a “Her” like future….why would there be a need for prompt engineers? Your AGI digital assistant would know you so well that it might even be able to preemptly answer your question before you ask it.
So, it seems to me that it’s at least possible that the real danger of AGI isn’t AGI, it’s restless humans. And it could be that any attempt to regulate AGI is moot because if America doesn’t let AGI do this or that thing, some other country will so we’ll feel a competitive demand to not regulate.
It’s very possible that we may see the rise of some sort of Neo-Luddite movement that….grows violent in some way. Implementing a UBI would only go so far. Human nature is such that for every 1 person who writes the Great American Novel with all the time a UBI affords, there will be a 100 Type-A people who will want to burn everything to the ground because they can’t make $1 billion.
Anyway, the point is — we have to take some of the darker possibilities of the AGI revolution more seriously.
