I think AGI does add new difficulties to the problem of meaninglessness that are novel and specific that you didn’t tackle directly, which I’ll demonstrate with a similar example to your football field parable.
Imagine you have a bunch of people stuck in a room with paintbrushes and canvases, so they find meaning in creating beautiful paintings and selling them to the outside world, but one of the walls of their room is made of glass, and there is a bunch of robots in the other room next to them that also paint paintings. With time, they notice the robots are becoming better and better at painting; they create better-looking paintings much faster and cheaper than these humans, and they keep improving very fast.
These humans understand two things:
The problem of shorter time horizons—The current paintings they are working on are probably useless, won’t be appreciated in the near future, and will not be bought by anyone, and there is a good chance their entire project will be closed very soon.
The problem of inferiority and being not important—Their work is worse in any possible way than the work of the robots, and no one outside really cares if they paint or not. Even the humans inside the room prefer to look at what the robots paint compared to their own work.
These problems didn’t exist before, and that’s what makes AGI-Nihilism even worse than usual Nihilism.
You raise some good points, but there are some counterpoints. For example, the AIs are painting based on requests of people standing in the street who would otherwise never be able to afford a painting because the humans painting in the room sell to the highest bidder pricing them out of the market. And because the AIs are so good at following instructions the humans in the street are able to guide their work to the point that they get very close to what they envision in their minds eye—bringing utility to far more people than would otherwise be the case.
Instead of a small number of people with the economic means to hire the painters who are sitting depressed in the room staring at a blank canvass, anyone on Earth can get a painting for nearly free. And the depressed painters can still paint for their own enjoyment but not for economic gain. A subset of painters who would paint regardless due to the sheer enjoyment of painting will continue to paint in their free time.
For example, I play basketball even though I will never get drafted into the NBA. If I were in the NBA and suddenly robots were replacing me I might be pissed off and not play basketball anymore. But that wouldn’t effect whether most people would play basketball since they were never going to make any money playing basketball.
Note: I don’t think this will happen since there are some things we only want to see humans do. In this respect popular sports are probably safe from AGI and there will probably be a whole host of new forms of human only entertainment that will sprout up that is unrelated to whether there are robots or AIs that could do it better. For example, are still chess and Go tournaments even though AIs are much better.
I don’t know how it will play out, but a rosy scenario would be that after AIs replace most categories of work people will then be free to do things because they enjoy them and not because they have to sell their work to survive. Presumably, in this scenario the government would print money and sent it directly to citizens rather than to banks. AI will have a massive deflationary effect on the economy and the United States will have to increase its money printing and it’s possible (although certainly not guaranteed) that displaced humans who can vote in elections will likely be the beneficiaries, and then companies will compete to sell them goods and services that are much cheaper due to AI and the efficiencies and productivity gains they will bring to the market.
I think AGI does add new difficulties to the problem of meaninglessness that are novel and specific that you didn’t tackle directly, which I’ll demonstrate with a similar example to your football field parable.
Imagine you have a bunch of people stuck in a room with paintbrushes and canvases, so they find meaning in creating beautiful paintings and selling them to the outside world, but one of the walls of their room is made of glass, and there is a bunch of robots in the other room next to them that also paint paintings. With time, they notice the robots are becoming better and better at painting; they create better-looking paintings much faster and cheaper than these humans, and they keep improving very fast.
These humans understand two things:
The problem of shorter time horizons—The current paintings they are working on are probably useless, won’t be appreciated in the near future, and will not be bought by anyone, and there is a good chance their entire project will be closed very soon.
The problem of inferiority and being not important—Their work is worse in any possible way than the work of the robots, and no one outside really cares if they paint or not. Even the humans inside the room prefer to look at what the robots paint compared to their own work.
These problems didn’t exist before, and that’s what makes AGI-Nihilism even worse than usual Nihilism.
You raise some good points, but there are some counterpoints. For example, the AIs are painting based on requests of people standing in the street who would otherwise never be able to afford a painting because the humans painting in the room sell to the highest bidder pricing them out of the market. And because the AIs are so good at following instructions the humans in the street are able to guide their work to the point that they get very close to what they envision in their minds eye—bringing utility to far more people than would otherwise be the case.
Instead of a small number of people with the economic means to hire the painters who are sitting depressed in the room staring at a blank canvass, anyone on Earth can get a painting for nearly free. And the depressed painters can still paint for their own enjoyment but not for economic gain. A subset of painters who would paint regardless due to the sheer enjoyment of painting will continue to paint in their free time.
For example, I play basketball even though I will never get drafted into the NBA. If I were in the NBA and suddenly robots were replacing me I might be pissed off and not play basketball anymore. But that wouldn’t effect whether most people would play basketball since they were never going to make any money playing basketball.
Note: I don’t think this will happen since there are some things we only want to see humans do. In this respect popular sports are probably safe from AGI and there will probably be a whole host of new forms of human only entertainment that will sprout up that is unrelated to whether there are robots or AIs that could do it better. For example, are still chess and Go tournaments even though AIs are much better.
I don’t know how it will play out, but a rosy scenario would be that after AIs replace most categories of work people will then be free to do things because they enjoy them and not because they have to sell their work to survive. Presumably, in this scenario the government would print money and sent it directly to citizens rather than to banks. AI will have a massive deflationary effect on the economy and the United States will have to increase its money printing and it’s possible (although certainly not guaranteed) that displaced humans who can vote in elections will likely be the beneficiaries, and then companies will compete to sell them goods and services that are much cheaper due to AI and the efficiencies and productivity gains they will bring to the market.