This entire post reminded me of this section from Human Compatible, especially the section I’ve put in bold:
“There are some limits to what AI can provide. The pies of land and raw materials are not infinite, so there cannot be unlimited population growth and not everyone will have a mansion in a private park. (This will eventually necessitate mining elsewhere in the solar system and constructing artificial habitats in space; but I promised not to talk about science fiction.) The pie of pride is also finite: only 1 percent of people can be in the top 1 percent on any given metric. If human happiness requires being in the top 1 percent, then 99 percent of humans are going to be unhappy, even when the bottom 1 percent has an objectively splendid lifestyle. It will be important, then, for our cultures to gradually down-weight pride and envy as central elements of perceived self-worth.”
In scenarios where transformative AI can perform nearly all research or reasoning tasks for humanity, my pride will be hurt to some degree. I also believe that I will not be in the 1% of humans still in work, perhaps overseeing the AI, and I find this prospect somewhat bleak, though I imagine that the severity of this sentiment would wane with time, especially if my life and the circumstances for humanity were otherwise great as a result of the AI.
The first point of your response calms me somewhat. Focusing more in the near-future on my body, health, friends, family, etc… the baselines would probably be good preparation for a future where AI forwards the state of human affairs to the point where humans are not needed for reasoning or research tasks.
These are very good points. For instance, I used to wonder, what is the point of learning how to compose music if soon a machine will be able to do it 1000 times better than I do?
But the thing is, I think that’s a false problem. There is already a huge amount of people who can make music better than I do, and I still can find it a pleasant activity.
This entire post reminded me of this section from Human Compatible, especially the section I’ve put in bold:
In scenarios where transformative AI can perform nearly all research or reasoning tasks for humanity, my pride will be hurt to some degree. I also believe that I will not be in the 1% of humans still in work, perhaps overseeing the AI, and I find this prospect somewhat bleak, though I imagine that the severity of this sentiment would wane with time, especially if my life and the circumstances for humanity were otherwise great as a result of the AI.
The first point of your response calms me somewhat. Focusing more in the near-future on my body, health, friends, family, etc… the baselines would probably be good preparation for a future where AI forwards the state of human affairs to the point where humans are not needed for reasoning or research tasks.
These are very good points. For instance, I used to wonder, what is the point of learning how to compose music if soon a machine will be able to do it 1000 times better than I do?
But the thing is, I think that’s a false problem. There is already a huge amount of people who can make music better than I do, and I still can find it a pleasant activity.