Thought Take - 4/12/25 - While many fear the worst, I think it’s possible that Artificial Intelligence could free us up to fix the world
Artificial intelligence is going to take all our jobs, maybe that could free us up to stop doing that dumb shit and start fixing the world.
In Non-Zero: the Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright explains, ““the best place for [an Eskimo] to store his surplus is in someone else’s stomach.” The context is that hunter gatherers, or the original iteration of human society, were better off giving the excess meat they got from big hunts away to other groups so they could survive and provide favors to the successful hunters in the future. When all of them started doing this, they started being more successful as a tribe overall, instead of competing for resources, there was a shared understanding that our success is both reliant on and encouraged by each other’s success.
Then, when society transitioned into agriculture, we became capable of creating far more food than we needed at any given time. As a result, people could live closer together and start focusing on other things to provide alternative value instead of just food. What you don’t hear about is the hunter gatherers complaining about how hunting has been lost as a tradition and how this progressive farming stuff is taking away their livelihood. There haven’t been any history or anthropology lessons I’m aware of where tribal chiefs subsidized hunter gatherers to stay in power to appease them while the farming kept the tribe fed.
Of course, those scenarios are absurd for a number of reasons, but the primary one I am focused on is that the benefit of hindsight removes the anxiety around such massive technological and cultural advancements. The move to agriculture was also slow enough that society could build around it in parallel which made it even less difficult.
The analogous change we’re experiencing today is the move to artificial intelligence. Reading this article from Intelligencer (link: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/for-big-tech-the-future-is-agi-what-about-the-rest-of-us.html), the ground shattering capabilities of AGI (artificial general intelligence as opposed to basic artificial intelligence) are only starting to become clear to us. The one aspect that is clear is that nothing we understand about how society works will be the same once we’ve realized the ultimate capabilities of this technology.
In the short term, that is a scary prospect as the easiest thing to imagine is all the parts of our existing society that will disintegrate in the face of this immense new capability. The odd, mundane, tedious, and even many of the difficult but interesting jobs of today will no longer be necessary, at least not as we understand them today. Much as the farmers started to stockpile food in immense amounts in the hands of very few that could feed the whole tribe, the wealth driven by this technology is likely to be consolidated and stockpiled in the hands of very few engineers and the investors that position them to innovate in the space.
The aspect that’s harder to imagine is what humanity could do with the time this could free up. This assumes we effectively use government to redistribute the wealth created by this technology so people have time and aren’t trying to continue banging their heads against the wall looking for jobs that don’t exist. That said, so much of the modern world needs to be rethought in light of all this technological change, how do borders of countries work in a world interconnected by the internet? How can we start to find ways to gel society back together in the absence of the, largely white and discriminatory, monoculture that’s held us together for so long? These are big difficult changes required of society and will require big thinkers to do a lot of work to make them happen. Maybe this AGI is just the stuff we need to get the time to make these societal changes.
To feed further into this purely optimistic outlook on the AGI, Ray Kurzweil said “We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness … In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through aging we get back from scientific progress.” From the sound of it, the computers will get so smart that we’ll figure out how to live forever in just a few short years, that should give us plenty of time to figure out how to live better.