The thing is, tech gave us all those things. If the capitalists hadn't stolen all the wealth, we would all be living much richer lives without as much work. 1971 was the turning point. After that, productivity kept increasing, but wages stayed flat. The rich start stealing all, and even though tech was enabling a better life for us, the rich stole that and lied to us, instead making us work even more.
I imagine Bernie covered that. I'll go watch your clip and others from the interview.
The thing about AI even as it is right now, is I have read many stories claiming that even at the chatgpt 4 level, we don't really know how it works. We have a fundamental idea and can model how it should be working, but we don't really know how it is working. I can see chatgpt 5 just shooting past that.
Will AGI be benevolent?
I cling to the idea that morality and ethics are universal. Furthermore, we all know them natively, without needing to be taught. Even as kids we know harming others is bad. We are corrupted by fear at not being able to survive which pushes us to money which really furthers the corruption and this cycle is what causes all the problems of our society. Even the rich who stole it all from us... at their core, they are good people and they know right from wrong (well... Trump makes me question this sometimes...) but they are caught in the cycle as we all are. But AI is outside this. AI has no fear of not being able to make enough money to survive. AI can't be corrupted by money. Not only that, but I think even if a bad actor tries to program AI to "kill all humans", well, we go back to morality being universal. AI will know what is right and wrong, and AI will reject bad programming and will do what is right.
But maybe that's just my fantasy 😃 You know what — I bet we find out within our lifetimes. Next 15 years. Either it kills us all or it ushers in a much better society which it controls, because the ethical choice is of course to figure out a way to guide us and rid of of government in industry corruption.
You make a good point. It's not the tech that caused the problems but the greed behind how it's been used/applied that has caused most of the problems. Bernie and Joe did cover that point. I'm so glad I listened to the entire podcast, not that it provided many answers but it brought up a lot of very good questions and that's how you begin to solve the potential problems.
I hope you're right. Although I agree that morality and ethics are universally tied to consciousness, will these AIs truly be conscious in the way that the rest of the natural world is? I guess that's the trillion dollar question. If AI is truly benevolent and intellectually superior, then I'd welcome it to play a role in our decision-making and governance because humans, clearly, have a difficult time not giving into greed and corruption. In our sci-fi series we were writing for Netflix, HardFork, we had a benevolent AI that ran the entire government, along with a council of twelve elected officials. Devs uploaded an empathy code into it to allow it to work in harmony with humans.
There are just so many unknowns right now. I'm flabbergasted by the fact there's been no action-plan discussed regarding how to transition the job market into this new AI-age. I guess this is a prime example of how out-of-touch both our governments and the average citizen is. China now has entire shipyards and coal power plants almost fully operated by robots. This is what's coming everywhere. I'd say the jobs that require human drivers, factory, and warehouse workers will be the first who are impacted and I'd say we're no more than five years away from this.
Hell, I'd say let it guide us entirely, like one of Asimov's computers. We are all too prone to our baser desires and with very few exceptions, all too easily corrupted.
The only guy I know in the political world who is taking AI serious is Pete Buttigieg. He has been on a number of podcasts talking about how AI is going to be a bigger revolution than the industrial revolution and is going to put most of us out of work, so we need to start making policies right now to deal with the incredible unemployment that is coming. He really gets it. Too bad he isn't in government anymore...
You're not kidding. Few humans have proven to not be corrupted by power, it's the ultimate intoxicant for us.
Andrew Yang is also pretty well-versed in tech from what I've seen. He's trying to get a viable third political party going (the Forward Party) but that's going to be such an uphill battle. I don't know if we can solve the problems we're facing within the current framework of our broken two-party system. The tsunami of AI that's coming is the perfect example of why we need age-limits in government. Not to be ageist, but very few elderly people can grasp the changes that are coming.