Comment by hn_throwaway_99
4 hours ago
I commented something similar on a bunch of other posts. The thing that scares me about a lot of the AI community in general is that their utopia is basically more frightening to me than their doom scenarios. They present this "incredible abundance" as the ultimate human endgame, but I agree, when we all end up like the humans in Wall-E, what's the purpose of it all?
And then to get retorts of "it's just just rich techies that want to find 'meaning' in their jobs while millions starve in the third world". Why would we expect the most wealth concentrating technology in history to lead to mass benefits for those in the 3rd world?
Probably the opposite of Wall-E utopia, AI will keep us busy. For one - we are becoming harder to differentiate, competence is hidden deep and surface signals don't carry anymore. Niches and specializations feel threatened by imitation. This means everyone is frantically searching for their own corner, musical chairs. This holds for both people and companies.
Second - every time we learned to transmit better from past experience we saw massive expansion in culture and economy, not shrinking. Writing, printing, computers, internet and AI are just gradations on the scale of transmission from past experience. Everything stands on this transmitted experience.
My analogy to the body - every cell has the same DNA (every human has the same AIs, culture and tools), but they express it differently depending on context. And no one cell is too fat, the organism distributes work and energy. AI won't make anyone too rich. Its wealth is distributed in the system.
I am truly baffled that you think AI is just one more step on the spectrum of "knowledge transmission" between humans. I think that literally nobody who is an expert on this (both from the perspective of the people creating the technology, and the folks on the safety side warning about the dangers) believes that.
100% agree, their utopia sounds far worse than their “humans will go extinct” which still sounds implausible to me. I would rather die than live in a WallE society, and I hate that they’re getting trillions trying to force us there