I’ve been thinking about this less as a question about AI taking jobs and more as a question about what happens to civilization when intelligence and labor become incredibly abundant. I do not want this to come across as fear-mongering or doom, as I genuinely think this is a take no one is considering. For all of human history, we’ve had the same basic problem: there aren’t enough resources, there isn’t enough labor, and human intelligence is limited. So we spend an enormous amount of our lives working to produce the things other humans need/want. That constraint has shaped almost everything about society. Work gives people income, but it also gives people identity, status, purpose and a sense that they’re contributing something. “What do you do?” is one of the most common ways we describe ourselves. Now imagine those constraints start disappearing. AI can increasingly handle cognitive work, while robotics handles more physical work. Machines can build things, grow food, manufacture products, maintain infrastructure and perform dangerous or repetitive tasks. And then you have AI systems capable of doing scientific research and designing better technology themselves. That’s where things get really interesting. Imagine an intelligence that can continuously work on problems in energy, medicine, materials, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, construction and computing. A breakthrough in one area can make it easier to solve problems in another, creating a feedback loop of technological progress. We will potentially end up with things that seem expensive or difficult today becoming dramatically cheaper and easier to produce. Energy becoming far more abundant. Manufacturing becoming incredibly cheap. Medicine advancing faster than we’ve ever seen. Entire categories of technology that we currently consider impossible could become ordinary. And if that happens, I don’t think the biggest question is “How many jobs will AI replace?” It’s: What do humans choose to do when we have far more freedom over how we spend our lives? For the first time in human history, we might have the opportunity to separate survival from work. People could spend more of their time creating, exploring, learning, raising families, building communities, competing, playing, traveling, making art, or pursuing things simply because they’re interesting. And we might discover entirely new forms of purpose that don’t exist today because we’ve never had that much freedom before. That’s what I find so fascinating about the future of AI. Maybe the biggest change isn’t that machines do the work for us. Maybe it’s that humanity finally gets to ask a question we’ve never really been able to ask: If we don’t have to spend our lives working to survive, what do we actually want to spend them doing? submitted by /u/SnapsFlat
Originally posted by u/SnapsFlat on r/ArtificialInteligence
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