It’s somewhat intentional that I say “professionals” instead of “workers”, because if I understand correctly, by now the majority of the workforce in the most developed countries is made up of white-collar workers. I think AI is especially relevant to us because professionals rely almost exclusively on intelligence, knowledge and connections, whereas e.g. cooks also rely on dexterity. (Admittedly, AI will probably progress simultaneously with robots, which will hit people who do more hands-on work too.)
I think in the scenario you describe, one of the things that matters most is how well the police/military can keep up with the AI frontier. If states maintain sovereignty (or at least, the US maintains hegemony), people can “just” implement a wealth tax to distribute the goods from AI.
Under that model, the question then becomes who to distribute the goods to. I guess the answer would end up being “all citizens”. Hm, I was about to say “in which case we are back in the “but wouldn’t people’s capabilities degenerate into vestigiality?” issue”, but really if people have a guaranteed source of income to survive, as long as we are only moderately more expensive than the AI and not extremely more expensive, the AI would probably want to offer us jobs because of comparative advantages. Maybe that’s the sort of scenario Habryka was getting at...
(Admittedly, AI will probably progress simultaneously with robots, which will hit people who do more hands-on work too.)
This looks increasingly unlikely to me. It seems to me (from an outsider’s perspective) that the current bottleneck in robotics is the low dexterity of existing hardware far more than the software to animate robot arms, or even the physics simulation software to test it. And on the flip side current proto-AGI research makes the embodied cognition thesis seems very unlikely.
It’s somewhat intentional that I say “professionals” instead of “workers”, because if I understand correctly, by now the majority of the workforce in the most developed countries is made up of white-collar workers. I think AI is especially relevant to us because professionals rely almost exclusively on intelligence, knowledge and connections, whereas e.g. cooks also rely on dexterity. (Admittedly, AI will probably progress simultaneously with robots, which will hit people who do more hands-on work too.)
I think in the scenario you describe, one of the things that matters most is how well the police/military can keep up with the AI frontier. If states maintain sovereignty (or at least, the US maintains hegemony), people can “just” implement a wealth tax to distribute the goods from AI.
Under that model, the question then becomes who to distribute the goods to. I guess the answer would end up being “all citizens”. Hm, I was about to say “in which case we are back in the “but wouldn’t people’s capabilities degenerate into vestigiality?” issue”, but really if people have a guaranteed source of income to survive, as long as we are only moderately more expensive than the AI and not extremely more expensive, the AI would probably want to offer us jobs because of comparative advantages. Maybe that’s the sort of scenario Habryka was getting at...
This looks increasingly unlikely to me. It seems to me (from an outsider’s perspective) that the current bottleneck in robotics is the low dexterity of existing hardware far more than the software to animate robot arms, or even the physics simulation software to test it. And on the flip side current proto-AGI research makes the embodied cognition thesis seems very unlikely.