Comment by nearbuy

I feel the same way about education, but as someone who received an education, I'm biased. I like knowing things and understanding things.

Studies on education and well-being don't really validate us though. They generally find a positive correlation between education and happiness when you don't control for other factors. But better educated people are usually from a higher social class, have better income, are healthier, are less likely to have been abused, etc. When they control for these factors, the correlation often goes slightly negative.

(If ASI does all the labor, education would no longer cause better income or health, so we want to remove those confounders.)

There are a number of proposed explanations for this, and it doesn't prove causation. But the data isn't on my side.

Also, I think there are two kinds of learning, easy learning and hard learning, and most people will only do easy learning without extrinsic motivation.

Easy learning is fun. It's why there are so many edutainment videos on YouTube and TikTok. Learning cool facts, or reading an educational book (without doing exams or problems) fall into this category.

Hard learning requires more effort. An example would be learning Cal II. You have to study and practice, and you likely won't get it right away. People do hard learning all the time, but usually because they have to.

Before online courses were a thing, friends or family would sometimes tell me they wish they could go back to college and take some courses they were interested in. Now we can, for free, at our convenience. But they don't. We'll watch endless edutainment videos on YouTube, but we'll only enroll in Cal II if we think we may need it.

If future AI can do everything, the extrinsic motivation is going to disappear. People will naturally tend towards easy learning. Maybe that's good enough. Easy learning will help us get funny jokes, recognize references, and appreciate good movies. But you don't need school for this type of learning. It's everywhere, and people seek it out because it's fun.

> still, i think getting ASI to distribute itself properly is going to be harder than people give credit

I'm guessing you mean getting AI to allocate resources and distribute wealth fairly without employment? Assuming we don't get a doomsday scenario, I see two likely possibilities. If a democratic government has control, people will vote to give themselves wealth. We end up with something like UBI, and people vote with their wallets to decide what the market (controlled by AI) should produce.

The other option is we get a dictator. With ASI and robotic armies, the factors that normally protect us from dictatorships would be gone. Currently, if the president wanted to declare himself a dictator, he would need support from a lot of people. At the very least, the military would have to back him. And you need your citizenry to be productive. They make all your food and machines and services. But if the army is composed of deadly autonomous drones instead of people and one person has authority over the army, they basically have absolute power and they don't need other people for anything. The factories keep running. The drones gun down anyone who resists. We're left at their whim, and we better hope they aren't cruel.