UWaterloo Electrical Engineering student
Komodo
Karma: 7
I think for Gen Z / Gen Alpha, UBI will melt them. They hang out with friends less, have less kids, scroll more, have less sex,..., you get the point. If you take a 14 year old and say “getting social status is meaningless since everyone is on government welfare, going to the gym is pointless because everyone is jacked from the myostatin inhibitors Eli Lilly put out, talking to a woman is pointless since there are sex bots walking around that are more charismatic and attractive than any human that has ever lived, we have AI generated VR short form video, and also you never formed a “real life” since you grew up on Instagram Reels, anyways go figure it out” they will completely melt down.
I think for people that have already formed a structured life, they can cope with it. But for a lot of kids, they have none of that structure and so they will get torpedoed by extreme hedonistic pleasure given the freedom to.
I will likely never graduate, which is rather inconvenient.
In my senior year of high school when I saw o1 release, I thought if AI continued to get significantly better, I would not go to university and instead go into the trades. o3 came out and blew me away, but I went to university anyways because I got my fancy Waterloo Engineering offer which I worked very hard for, and was much less weird than leaving it and going “trust me bro the robots are coming”.
The writing is very much on the wall at this point. I am very unsure about what the correct move is / what I “should” be doing right now. When I see people on here talk about giving advice to young people, they generally go “I have no idea what to tell them, stay away from SWE I guess?”
Morale is very low, as it seems like nothing I do particularly changes anything on a timescale of >3 years, and as the models get better and better, the actions I take become more and more unimportant. When I say unimportant, I primarily mean career wise / social-status wise, which is what I primarily care about.
Some possible life paths I have:Just stay in school and enjoy my life and hang out with friends until either UBI or doom. This is a very big shift from how I think about life, as I mostly just care about my career.
Drop out and go do trades in the CAF. This protects me from the imminent white collar job crisis, and also the construction recession I suspect would also happen in the civilian trades from the larger scale economic turmoil.
Drop out a year from now and then go do trades in the CAF. This would make me look less weird as it becomes more and more clear that white collar labor (and thus my education) has no future.
Go heavily into AI safety / AI political activism. This is the most “correct” choice in my eyes, but that brings the morale issue back into play, as my impact on risk almost certainly will round down to zero.
Most of these options are enormous shifts from the very “safe and stable” life path I was on, which is inconvenient.
Caring about the weak is not a trait that would be expected to naturally arise from ASI. Humans care about the weak because evolutionarily, taking care of the weak in the tribe was beneficial, and so it got “trained” into us (mostly). ASI would not naturally “evolve” to care about the weak unless we give it incentive to if it had an animal like brain.