The emergence of AI has left everyone a little stunned. We don’t really know what to make of it. Will it kill us or are we heading to a golden future?
At this stage we already have powerful enough AI to do some revolutionary things. With a simple written prompt Claude AI can animate a ball rolling around a spinning box. Midjourney can design incredible buildings. Sora can create life like movies. As far as jobs go the writing is on the wall. AI will enable workers to be massively more productive. One lawyer armed will AI will do the work of 10. One waitress can manage 10 serving robots. One animation artist can create an entire movie that previously took 100 animators. One worker will be leveraged to do the work of 10.
This will lead to a massive redundancy. What are the call centre workers to do? What about the production line workers? There will be a massive increase in people on Social Security.
How will this affect society? People need meaningful pursuits and a way to contribute. I can imagine without a proper plan a great number of people will fall into hopelessness. Will the unemployed become drug addicts or will they use the welfare money to expand their lives? Will they travel, have adventures, climb mountains, listen to music and write poetry? In my opinion, without intervention, AI is going to cause massive despondency and drug addiction. The ownership of the wealth will be controlled by the governments. No longer beholden to the tax payers the bureaucracy will control everything. They will operate like a communist government and give the resources to their supporters. The same goes with travel credits. It will be a terrible situation in which the lower motivations of human nature triumphs. Human ingenuity, creativity and motivation will be blunted, given up for the daily allowance which is allocated depending on social credit. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With some small adjustments the people can be content. What they need will be land given at birth, enough for a small house and growing food. They are then free from control of the government if it decides to use AI to free itself from the social contract. With a little land for a house and food citizens can choose to take part in the new economy or not. This is the system that they have over in a number of Pacific Islands. Every boy is given a piece of land as a child. They can choose to be self sufficient or they can join the capitalist economy, for better or worse. As a result I think many places in the Pacific contain the happiest people on earth.
Apart from the obvious risk to jobs, what other dangers does AI present? Will it actually kill us?. If there is a plan to eradicate us it will be coming from humans ourselves, something that we will need to be vigilant against. There will also be incessant attempts of people using AI to control humans. This is a huge risk and one that will absolutely come to fruition. Countries will need to maintain care of their citizens and not only not try to control them but also let them remain free from control of other countries.