I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the notion that once we have powerful AI coupled with robots that everything is going to be available at prices too cheap to meter. While it may be possible to assemble goods without workers, at some point you have to generate the energy to make all of this possible. There are a number of problems with that:
Burning far more fossil fuels leads to even faster climate breakdown than already predicted
Fusion is still 30 years away, and may well be forever
Solar might work given the amount of available space on the planet, but see the next paragraph
Using more energy will, by itself, cause the planet to heat up. Collecting “free” solar power to strip-mine the rare earth deposits needed to create more solar panels is an inefficient process, generating waste heat at every step along the way. We already know that densely populated areas are heat islands that are measurably warmer than their general climate would suggest.
There is also no known way to implement the heavy industry that underpins all of this in a way that doesn’t lead to large amounts of pollution. Mining sends all sorts of unpleasant materials into the surrounding air, soil, and water. Running a blast furnace not only produces toxic slag but also generates a fair amount of carbon monoxide due to the chemistry required. Rinse and repeat for most other large-scale manipulation of atoms.
Then there are the things that cannot be made that much better. Unless the AI develops some miracle way to grow fields of wheat in a week without huge increases in the water and fertilizer required, there are still going to be limits on food. The higher up the food chain you go the worse this gets. We are already raping the seas for all commercially viable sea creatures; coming up with faster ways to harvest the remaining tuna doesn’t make any more of them. (And farming fish produces a lower-quality product with lots of associated pollution.)
Finally, while it may be that AI is truly transformative and overcomes all of the above objections, it’s always a good idea to look at history for a clue as to how humans might manage this societal upheaval. Looking at the largest-scale changes in human history doesn’t provide happy reading:
Moving from hunter-gatherer communities to agriculture gave us more food, but also doomed a large proportion of people to miserable work conditions. The 1%ers of the day were the feudal overlords, who had a decent existence without much of the improvement being spread widely.
The industrial revolution gave us vastly more power than came from animals and waterwheels, but again there was a fair amount of economic disruption involved—coal mining was a new form of hell on earth, pollution increased dramatically, etc. Again, industrial magnates made out like bandits, but the people working on Ford’s assembly lines didn’t see much of that new wealth
Immediately after WWII, we were going to have electricity that was too cheap to meter because everybody and their brother would have a nuclear power plant providing them with virtually unlimited power. Except it turned out that we forgot to figure out how to dispose of all the byproducts, that the engineering of truly safe plants was harder than we expected (Fukushima wasn’t that long ago), and that power consumption rose to suck up any cheap surplus (terawatt data centers, anybody?) As with the other changes, the companies that produce the energy are living large while the rest of us pay whatever rates are demanded.
It is true that all but the very poorest people today live better than the very richest hunter-gatherers (medical care alone makes a huge difference in life expectancy and enjoyment), so humanity as a whole has gained from all these advancements. However, through all of this surplus we have always had a small number of ruthless people who rose to the top and grabbed everything they could. I find it nearly impossible to believe that Elon Musk and company are going to suddenly distribute their power and access to benefits to the rest of the world just because AI worked out really well.
First, I think this is a good article. However, I have a question about one of your premises:
“What is the problem?? How can you fail to recognize this! Do you not AGREE that DEATH IS BAD?”
Has anybody done a second-level analysis of what happens if we discover immortality tomorrow? While I’m not personally crazy about dying tomorrow, I think that, viewed from the perspective of an entire race, the answer is not so obvious. Despite the fact that Malthus was early with his prediction of widespread disaster, there is still some finite carrying capacity of the Earth. We’re already seeing clear effects from climate change with 8 billion people. If nobody dies, either we stop having children, or the population balloons very rapidly, putting more strain on our resources.
I’m old enough to have lived through the Green Revolution that provided fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides that dramatically increased what a farmer could produce. There are also plenty of other examples of big improvements in technology as well, so I don’t rule out the possibility that we could support an order of magnitude more people on the planet, but I also think it’s far from a given.
There is also the issue that you see in various research fields, politics, etc. Progress is said to happen one funeral at a time; if none of the senior people die, how do the younger ones ever move forward? Do we really want a thousand-year-old politician (of any stripe) still sitting in office? On the flip side, will the average worker who only does the job to make the pay want to continue working for centuries? If they don’t, who supports them? Do we end up like Logan’s Run and enforce maximum age limits?
I don’t know if any of these things are likely to be real problems, but failure to plan is planning to fail. So, I’m wondering if there are any good papers, articles, etc. that examine the societal and planetary consequences of immortality.