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Notes -
To expand on a comment I made in the previous thread, the situation in Minnesota has made me realize that in the impending AI revolution, in the best case scenario (where we don't get slaughtered by Skynet; we have machines to do our labor for us; and there is some sort of social assistance for all the newly unemployed) it's pretty likely there will be a huge amount of social unrest, separate and apart from issues arising from the AI revolution.
I had assumed that in such a scenario, most people would either pursue interesting hobbies or self-destructive hedonism. But the situation in Minnesota makes me realize that a lot of people are going to look for political causes and use those as an excuse to harass others while feeling morally superior in doing so.
Obviously these things are very difficult to predict, but the Summer of Floyd is instructive, I think. A lot of the rioters were people who were furloughed during Covid and collecting unemployment insurance.
You are also not contemplating the most likely middle-ground nightmare scenario: There is no singularity, but AI is good enough that it puts most of the middle class out of work, there is no UBI and now you have a bunch of people who are purposeless, humiliated, have a lot of free time, and are pissed off and have nothing to lose due to their now degraded economic and social state.
Or the converse: AI gets just strong enough to keep the resulting bunch of purposeless, humiliated humans under control.
Yeah. These middle-ground scenarios are so absurdly under-discussed that I can't help but see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow. It doesn't even take a lot of imagination to outline them.
I can’t rebut the statement that these scenarios are “under-discussed” (since that depends on how much you personally think they should be discussed), but it’s certainly false that these scenarios go undiscussed. For examples of long essays written about (approximately) these scenarios, see here and here.
From the intro to the former essay:
Seems pretty similar to what’s being discussed in this subthread.
It's not just automation, the discussed scenario was " AI gets just strong enough to keep the resulting bunch of purposeless, humiliated humans under control". My emphasis would be on the "under control" part. Even when discussing automation, they have tendency of veering off into fantasy scenarios of full-automation, when the more likely ones are comparative-advantage mediated push towards menial labor in service of the AI god.
I mean, reading these essays, they seem to be pretty focused on the idea that AI can be used for mass control and suppression. Chapter 4 of the first essay that I linked is rather explicit about this:
Is your contention that these discussions are predicated on “full automation” scenarios while you think that there aren’t any obstacles stopping an AI-powered tyranny from happening now?
Sort of. My contention still boils down to "under-discussed", that the issues that are more likely to happen take up less focus than ones that are less likely to happen. The "full automation" thing is an example of this - AI developing to the point where it replaces literally everyone / the vast majority of people can happen somewhere down the line, but a scenario where everybody still has a job, because it makes more sense to let AI specialize in data professing, while humans focus on menial jobs is more likely, and unpleasant enough to warrant discussion.
I only had a skim of the essay you linked, and it's indeed more like what I'd like to see, but not quite there yet.
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