Recent gains in AI are shocking. The pace of the gains is shocking. Ray Kurzwei’s predication of AGI by 2030 looks prescient. If you haven’t read this, do. It will explain. Quote below:
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Real word example:
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
While I am not a coder, I do write code from time to time. AI code used to come bug ridden. Now it’s executable.
There are people out there doing things that are….at the edge.
The AI only social network: https://www.moltbook.com
I’m sure you’ve seen the talk about the Seedance 2.0 generative AI. Movies can be generated from prompts:
In the short term, there is money to be made from automating and innovating.
However, once that is done, how will people value one another?
Even in small hunter gatherer tribes, everyone has to contribute. In “The World until Yesterday” anthropologist Jared Diamond describes a number of such peoples. He describes women sent to give birth alone so that if they died they wouldn’t upset the group. He decribes nomadic groups who simply keep moving regardless of whether the old ones can keep up. They are abandoned.
Most of the people we see and interact with every day have no direct value to us. The reason we tolerate their presence is because they represent no immediate threat, and because we assume that we are all part of a society of people working to provide value to one another. Everyone has to contribute.
If there is to be no work that people can do for one another that has more value that what a robot can do, what might happen? Here are some possiblities for the future of value:
- While the labour required to add value will be much much cheaper, materials required will not. Commodities will retain value. I expect that there will be a significant drop in prices at first, but this will stablise once the labour component is repriced.
- There will no argument that immigration is a useful thing. Migrant labour will be unnecessary. Perhaps this will lead to ethnic cleansing in various places. People will value their own more. Tourism might be restricted.
- The cost of housing and energy should come down relative to everything else. Bots will mine, process materials and build and maintain.
The future of value will be determined in large part by what happens to birth, sex and death, because the number of people is the ultimate determiner of demand and in the absense of supply bottlenecks, prices.
If the trend of human beings giving up on the future continues to grow, eventually there may be very few humans left:
If we cross the threshold, maybe even none:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Kurzweil also predicted that thanks to medical advances driven by AI, immortality will be achieveable by 2030. This might seem far fetched, but certainly there will be significant medical advances to treat aging, and these will extend the length and quality of life. If that happens, there will be more downward pressure on birth rates.
Huxley’s prediction was that people would have sex primarily for entertainment and bonding rather than reproduction. Reproduction in the Brave New World was totally artificial and strictly quality controlled.
Life is reproduction, selection and evolution. Life, however, has no use for creatures that can choose comfort over life. The future will belong, as it always has, to those who reproduce. Is it possible that AI will create an opening for a surge in reproduction, like rabbits arriving in Australia, such that the bots can’t produce enough?
Did You write this yourself?
That’s not why there is this rampant immigration. More subjects = more taxes. More chicken in the coop, more eggs.
A very wrong thing to say. Humans feel safe in presence of others. See this episode of the Twilight Zone
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Khvo6TH-DXc
That’s projecting at the current rate of the progress. Remember projections on batteries. AI is far from being potent to “understand” biological. Being able to code vs. understanding health is 2 different planes.
And so on…
Is there money to get made on AI? Yes, I would not be excited on that though.
Will it be detrimental to the mankind? Eventually, after the initial enthusiasm is killed by the AI fantasies and hallucinations.
Soo,… good luck to all of you looking at this automation made to imitate humans as a progress. At best, AI will make us all live like in Idiocracy or Blade Runner movies. At worst, Soilent Green
In 1984, Orwell predicted suppressive government taking away our freedoms. Like in Communism. 1984 is essentially the darkest spectrum of communism.
Huxley predicted that we will give freedoms away for a dopamine hit. Like a new phone or a surreal simulation of sex or… you name it. Like Matrix, just that people will choose to be plugged and even pay for it.
It will probably be quarantined. Much like how mass immigration has been held back for certain people like tradies so they can buy a RAM and get a thot. Even though we could easily get infinity poos on $2 an hour and build like absolute stink.
The elite don’t like disruptions to their god like status.