Soon, AI tools will do what only very talented humans can do today. (I expect this to go mostly in the counter-intuitive order--creative fields first, cognitive labor next, and physical labor last.)
Great for society; not always great for individual jobs.
Using artists as an example, when anyone can create amazing art, there will be incredible upside for humanity, but downside for most individual artists.
(On the other hand, totally new kinds of art will be possible, and the skill that will matter will be imagination.)
Artists will be much more productive and have new capabilities, but the barrier to entry will be much lower.
And as the tools get better, "regular people" will be able to do almost anything they want themselves.
Eventually this will happen almost everywhere.
On the whole, I think this is a great trend–we will all be able to do almost anything we can think of–but it is obviously not downside-free.
I think it's unavoidable and certainly not helpful to pretend otherwise.
I think it should also push towards more equality.
In the future, I imagine we will need to figure out how to fairly distribute 1) wealth, 2) access to AGI systems, 3) governance decisions about how AGI systems are used.
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There are two ways to reduce economic inequality—you can work to lift up the floor, or work to lower the ceiling.
(Notice the extreme streak of authoritarianism that often accompanies the latter.)
Said another way, you can either believe
1) the pie can grow a lot (and so, e.g. we should encourage trillionaires and the creation of far more wealth), or 2) it can’t (and so, e.g., we should abolish billionaires and divide up everything we have now equally).
The former leads to continual improvement in quality of life for most people; the latter is a one-time improvement for most people and then ongoing stasis where we sacrifice long-term excellence in the name of short-term equality.
No matter what you think about Worldcoin, I think some of the ideas in here are likely important to the future of privacy: worldcoin.org/privacy-by-des…
I think Worldcoin is more privacy-preserving than centralized services we use today. All Worldcoin, or anyone, could ever tell is if someone has already signed up for the service.
The hash is cryptographically decoupled from the wallet and all future transactions.
Experimentation with new approaches to privacy and identity seem good to me. Everyone can decide what they want to use and not use.
Imagining an AI future (with some amount of redistribution) is an interesting lens for the Great Resignation.
Less people will have to work in the traditional sense and people will be less willing to do jobs they don't like.
People won’t have to work to survive, and we will have to pay more for less desirable jobs, or automate them, which seems great all around.
I predict that it will turn out that, contrary to think tank wisdom, people can be happy and fulfilled without a "traditional" job. There will be plenty of new things to do and new ways to get status.
After 9/11 (3k US deaths), we got so much societal change and spent trillions of dollars.
After COVID-19 (700k+ US deaths), we seem to be getting very little change, and spending very little money.
I felt confident we'd get real change–competent planning for future pandemics, severe regulations on gain of function research, FDA reform, rapid-response vaccines for new viruses.
We are struggling to commit even a few tens of billions.
What's gone wrong?
I'm quite nervous about the next pandemic–it could be much worse and it doesn't really look like we're going to prepare.