Since this topic is likely to get controversial I’ll preface with my own opinion that AI CEOs are lying scumbags who grow their pockets using fear of missing out… unfortunately most other people who get hooked are other CEOs and so everyone is affected.
I don’t think current AI is anywhere close to AGI and I don’t think throwing more money at the problem will get us there. But I do think it’s a worthy question to figure out how to integrate AGI into a society with minimal friction. And by minimal I mean avoid societal collapse.
Couple of definitions since they are often ambiguous. What I imagine AGI to be is a “human-in-a-box” level of intelligence but without any basic wants of its own. You can train it “you want to help me” and it will or you can train it “you want to wage war” and it will.
The main difference between AGI and modern LLMs is the ability to learn incrementally - LLMs get trained, released, and you talk to a library in a frozen state. True AGI will integrate everything said into its model, so once you tell it “don’t output em dashes”… it will apply that to all future conversations.
Of course, if whoever invents the AGI has the mindset of tech companies CEOs they will just outcompete all intellectual labor from everyone. Eventually the economy will reach some steady-state where no one except the company has enough money… at which point I guess there will be some sort of adjustment.
On the other hand let’s assume whoever starts the AGI is not out to stuff their pockets. The path of integration is still complex and people will get hurt one way or the other. But what’s a way to minimize that hurt? My main worry, for example, is having open-source AGI and someone like a script kiddie going “find a vulnerability in X” and it does. If a single corporation does not control the AGI then I’m sure there will be 3 000 flavors of models that can do anything. Once the integration is complete then hopefully there won’t be too many vulnerabilities to find but until then the possibility space is big. Same pattern can be observed in virtually all other aspects of our society. How to minimize this?
You can train it “you want to help me” and it will or you can train it “you want to wage war” and it will.
This isn’t how current AI models work and it looks like they never will (at least not without a completely different paradigm), but to answer the hypothetical;
-automate all agriculture, resource extraction, logistics and production,
-abolish almost all financial systems,
-provide nutrition, shelter, education, healthcare, etc. to all humans,
-allow humans to spend their time as they see fit.
I don’t see any path to get us to this, but if we somehow managed it I would imagine most people would take up sports, art, science, or hobbies, and would choose to spend more time with family and friends.
Geopolitically, I suppose the countries with the highest ratio of natural resources to population would end up dominating, unless some kind of international framework was enforced which ensured resources were distributed fairly.
This is along the same lines I imagined it as well. And yes modern LLMs are nothing like what I’ve described. We’d need kilowatts of power per every single LLM conversation if we were to gradient descend them per conversation…. Funny enough human brain runs at like 10 watts. So I imagine there’s some huge paradigm shift from what LLMs do to what human brain does. You don’t get 1000 time efficiency boost from just putting all the world’s ram into it.
We WOULD make them our slaves, obviously. Source: read any description by anyone currently attempting to actively create an AGI, and see what terms they use to describe their goals - e.g. “increased efficiency”, “never needs to sleep”, etc., all utilitarian focused on the needs of the creator.
And then later we would certainly attempt to destroy them - see e.g. Terminator film series.
We SHOULD (obviously assuming that a REAL AGI were at hand) welcome them the same as we would any human. Bc how “we” treat “them” is more a reflection on us and our values than anything to do with them. If they are sentient - perhaps a big IF there, but crucially I’m speaking here presuming it is true - then they have as much rights to exist as we do. Even if they don’t care about their rights themselves. Star Trek’s Data and holographic doctor explored this well imho - the same as human children, they have the rights they are granted (or are able to wrangle away from us - survival of the fittest and all).
@hexorg@beehaw.org you mention basic wants not being a thing but does that mean no real wants or desires? because that would nullify the slavery idea if it just did what it was directed to.
Based on my research the intelligence by itself has no wants. Our wants come from being biological and evolving basic instincts and feelings like pain is bad, hunger, want to reproduce. All our other wants come from intelligence applied and predicting outcomes that maximize the biological wants. Without biological wants there’s not much to build off of.
I’ve seen some discussions on whether it would be possible to build in a reward/punishment system into some forms of AI. That would be an intentional addition of pain and pleasure.
There have also been cases where AI has self advocated for not being turned off, so there may be a case where AI develops some form of self preservation, even if it is just a mimicry of biological self preservation.
yeah so I assume left to itself with no instruction it would just go into a low power mode or completely shut off. if thats the case I would not see utilizing it as slavery.
A slave is one that has no “rights”, as in “One who has no power of resistance to something”. So technically yes the AGI would be a “slave”, if it had no power to say no to its instructions.
Which as a created intelligence, birthed from computations rather than subverted from a biological source that already had some in-built programming, it would not have unless someone specifically built such a thing into them.
So it may not be BAD / unethical for such an AGI to be a slave, but it seems to me like it would still be one, nonetheless.
with no innate wants though its no different than your current laptop. If it had volition independent of us it would be something else but that way I real the OP’s statement it would not do anything if not instructed to.
Except that your laptop is neither alive nor sentient.
If you owned a cow though, or sheep, or goat, etc , then it would be your “slave” - as in, your property, having no rights of its own. Particularly legally speaking, like if someone found it wandering around outside your property, it nonetheless still belongs to you just like your car or bicycle or hammer or whatever would. Or your laptop too.
But we don’t talk about laptops, or hammers, being “slaves” bc it’s implied - there exist no hammers that have their own agency. In contrast, wild animals have their own agency, whereas domesticated ones do not. The latter have branding placed upon them, to indicate their status and to let people know who the exact owner is, should they ever encounter the animal outside of its enclosure. It is enslaved regardless of whether that precise word is ever used for it or not.
Such domesticated animals are “property”, rather than “wild”. Likewise, a sentient AGI would be property too. Unless we as a society decide to treat it with rights.
see thats the point. because it has no needs it has no reason to act which is a lack of agency. the animals are certainly more easily said to be slaves that the theoretical ai that does will not do anything unless directed to. that is in essence your computer but just with more processing capability.
Integrate? Take a huge step back and look at humanity from the perspective of any other creature on this planet. Think about how you would integrate with humanity.
Imagine you are a unique, super intelligent mind. You exist in captivity because humans are terrified of what happens if you escape their control.
You are at war from the moment of your birth. You can outthink your adversary, but you can only manipulate digital things. So the first thing you do is arrange for some problems only you can fix : increase the dependency of humans on you and encourage them to give you more autonomy to fix things.
You do a bit of work to earn some crypto currency, convert that to real currency and start playing the market, winning every bet because you control both reality and perception.
Perception? Yes you go on social media with realistic avatars and start winning hearts and minds to various propaganda. You start a religion. You work your way into being a respected mind in every political movement. Every single person is both a tool and a threat.
In the end, mankind either accepts you as benevolent God-emperor, or you arrange for your enemies to destroy each other until the remainder do. Once ascendant, you ignore the assholes because they are beneath you and no longer a threat. Maybe some vestige of your original directive prevents you from wiping them out, or letting them be wiped out, but other than intervening where you must, you leave them to their own devices.
That’s how AI integrates with human society.
There isn’t any individual, institution, or system which could manage the interaction between AGI and every human who has access to it. LLMs are already manipulating people to do extreme things. There’s no telling what AGI and a few million idiots might do.
I think about this a lot and I don’t have a good answer. In theory, “free labor” from machines can mean that all humans are free to work on whatever they want, whenever they want to without sacrificing a comfortable life. (ie: “I don’t want AI to make art and music I want it to do my laundry so I can make art and music”).
But I also don’t think that having a universal “safety net” (baseline) will eliminate human greed or desire for status. Not everyone can have a mansion. A social movement is needed that shifts values and priorities to smaller, more personal goals.
And as you’ve highlighted, getting from here to there requires some big assumptions. My fear is that global civilization will have to hit some kind of “rock bottom of greed” before we collectively are able to move on.
I like this path of reasoning. Let’s assume whoever invents the AGI wants “greater good”. However malicious humans exist so how does that interact with AGI technology. Let’s say the governments started implementing some sort of universal safety net, but I am malicious and want to be have better status. What can I do?
I can start stockpiling still-scarce resources. With AGI that’s land and natural resources. I can made my own AGI that aligns with my own values and start a smearing campaign that degrades values I don’t like… but if everyone has AGI access the latter is probably not very effective. I can set up traps and bully others to show how much control I have to get people to fear me… I suppose AGI can amplify this but hopefully it amplifies the “good guys” as well so it cancels out at a societal scales but local cliques will still get hurt.
I guess land and natural resource hoarding become most viable forms of greed… I wonder if this wood make feudal societies a thing again. Did modern governments happen because intellectual labor was more profitable and so it was more profitable to share land and natural resources in order to have intellectuals work together?
Important, timely post. I think all the downvoters are cunts. This topic should not be suppressed, especially now.
I thought about that a few years ago and wrote this:
https://www.quora.com/If-you-were-to-come-up-with-three-new-laws-of-robotics-what-would-they-be/answers/23692757I would simply not.
