What people have got wrong about AGI

What people have got wrong about AGI

It will change the jobs to combine them with your personal life, not eliminate them

At the moment people are talking about AI and AGI (artificial general intelligence) and the consequences of that.  People have been talking about UBI (universal basic income) as something that could compensate for people losing their jobs due to AI but counter-intuitively the exact opposite things are happening.  There was supposed to be driverless cars but instead there is a big demand for drivers. 

People have talked about UBI but instead the government is looking at raising the retirement age when that is the only wide scale UBI that exists.  

What if these trends were somehow reversed and we had the situation where all jobs could be replaced by AI and the retirement age lowered to zero?  Let's imagine a simple substitution situation where by everyone is given a robot that can simply go and do their job so they can stay home and do whatever they want, while they receive their regular pay.  In that case the economy is doing exactly what it did before but the goods and services demanded would change markedly.  The main change would be in the demand for leisure services.  People wouldn't want to act like retirees at a young age or like it's a covid lockdown, rather they would want to act like they're on holiday.  People would want to travel and have a good time.  They would probably drink more and take drugs.  They wouldn't want to stay in their dreary hometowns but would rather flock to holiday resort areas and places where the weather is generally good.  People would probably be less inclined to pursue education and would want adventure and novelty.  Overall there would be a huge demand for the resources to provide all the travel and entertainment that people would want to stop them getting bored so the price of such resources would rise.  This could lead to frustration as people had income but still not enough money to pay for the leisure activities that they wished to partake in.

In the simple substitution scenario people would seek to generate additional income to provide the kind of life that they now desired but unless there was a dramatic expansion in the economy there would be little scope for increasing income.  The toll on the environment would be large if there was a big increase in resource use to provide for these desires.  However, this is only the first stage of the implementation of AGI.

In the medium term what we could expect from AGI is a shift in value to the remaining things that humans could do that a machine couldn't do.  The biggest medium term possibility here is in child bearing and rearing.  If people had the desire to bear and rear children a machine couldn't do that even if it had the intelligence and abilities of a human.  To some extent a machine could rear a child but this may be undesirable as it would not be a human that was teaching the child and thus ultimately the child may be maladjusted.  In terms of childbearing however a machine simply couldn't do it with current or projected technology and so since people can have a desire for this the cost of it could rise exponentially as the only remaining thing a machine couldn't do.  I am thinking of surrogacy for instance but realistically it would extend to all mating and reproduction.  Males would want the highest quality females and females the highest quality males just as they do today and so sexual selection would create the conditions whereby there was a demand for human 'labour' in pursuit of these goals.  

There could be android 'sex bots' for instance but in terms of creating a human family those would not be useful and so in order to pursue actual reproductive goals only human interaction could bring that and the desire for social status would be intense as social status is a prime indicator of reproductive fitness.  In the medium term once AGI is achieved therefore we could expect human society to reorganise along the lines of a new social paradigm of social popularity and persuasion whereby the economy is based around social influence and an individual's impact on it.

What this could mean, in effect, is that the entire economy and jobs market is based around something like 'sales & marketing' and personal data.  The primary thing of economic value that an individual would have to offer would be their personal data and the influence within their social circle.  Think of life as one gigantic out-of-control Tupperware party.  This model would have the effect of maintaining the existing power dynamics as they exist today.  A mother would have influence over her children at any age.  A physically beautiful person would have more influence than a less attractive one.  A highly social person would have more influence by having more friends than a loner.  All of this could be extensively monetised.  

Where the only thing that mattered was brand loyalty and business expense was the marketing budget then companies could literally 'buy' their customers.  Their methodology would be much more intense and wide ranging than today.  A person's income would come from various companies that wished to influence them and their 'job' would be to convince their friends and family to use and continue to use the same kinds of goods and services as the the company offered.  Within this kind of horrible situation you could actually have what would present as 'labour shortages' which would simply be a shortage of people willing to put up with the kind of nonsense demanded of them.  But it is entirely possible that people just adjust to the new reality to the extent that they are soon complaining after AGI that they have to work every hour god gives them just to put food on the table for their family.  The 'work' would be entirely abstract bullshit that had no ultimate meaning but realistically compared to hunter-gathers, people in western society are already in that situation, so the only real difference would be that this would be another level of abstraction again.  

Life and work would become very much 'offline' as the only thing that would really have impact on a person would be the direct interpersonal contact with another person.  Literally it would be opening the door to your uncle when he knocked on it when you wouldn't open it for a 'sales robot'.  Companies may not even be so crass has to say that you have to directly sell to your friends and family but rather they would algorithmically incentivise some kinds of behaviour and financially penalise others.  This wouldn't be everyone 'Truman showing' each other but rather a dynamic and constantly shifting algorithm that everyone would be trying to keep up with and adjust to.  How it may manifest is money appearing in your bank account after certain behavioural decisions but if you go to repeat those very same actions you get nothing.  So within this crazy pantomime of everyday life, this insane Tupperware party it may get to the point whereby traditional and conservative lifestyles are reenacted like some history reenactment.  It may be everyone's 'job' to do their job as if they did have a job, when in fact they don't have a job, because it can all be done by AI, but they're not having it be done by AI, because people wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they had all that free time on their hands.  

So actual life in the future appears as a simulation of current life now with people traveling around doing various tasks that don't need doing by humans but it looks more regular and appealing to human eyes to have that kind of bustle in the city and happy merchants walking their wares and people passing around meaningless pieces of paper into each others hands in exchange for goods and services.  What if, what if indeed, it ended up that the currency that people paid for goods and services by in this simulation was directly related to their actual income in the real economy?  It would be kind of like if you went to a themepark and the issued currency the 'in-game' money was the real money.  

Sorry only humans allowed to play this game.