Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…The optimistic version goes, even if we hand the machines the wheel, broadly aligned AI keeps us comfortable. the machines of loving grace future. We put that to David. His worry isn't that we'll feel useless. The thing that I'm worried about is starvation. Like whether, like us all feeling like we don't have meaningful jobs or whatever, like that's not a serious problem in my point of view compared to literally not being able to eat enough or... maybe like being forced to be uploaded so that you have a much smaller footprint, but then also on very unfavorable terms so that you don't get to choose when you run and maybe you just only get trotted out for special occasions or never, who knows. I kind of think that's what like sort of like the slowest possible observation looks like. So again, and so the reason people aren't happy is because they can see that there is a agency that's maybe like government or some other like giant thing that doesn't particularly care about their welfare. I care much more about some other types of being welfare. And there's nothing they can do about this. And of course, if humans are still making decisions, then maybe there's some things they can do. But I don't actually think that's the crux of the matter. I think not being needed as producers is sort of the important part. And maybe here's a thing to give intuition. So imagine I'm a North Korean farmer or soldier, and tomorrow Kim Jong-il, I think that's the current leader, is like replaced by a robot or like an LLM or something. Then I'm like, I don't know if that's good or bad. Like maybe the island's going to be nicer or maybe it's not. But like ultimately they still need me to like farm to run the state or whatever. But if tomorrow we keep the same human leader, but now there's suddenly like robot farmers and robot soldiers and you realize that now the state doesn't actually need you. I would be much more scared of the second state of affairs. And then the other intuition I want to give is that humans are not going to be the most competitive thing by whatever standards there are for the state to give out goodies or like UBI or whatever like post scarcity stuff. Like I guess I'll say, I think post scarcity is like a sort of nonsense term and people should think of it as like temporarily temporary abundance that will soon be eaten by whatever growth manages to like, you know, whoever manages to have most babies or build the most robot factories or reproduce the fastest. And whatever it is that like the formula is for giving out UBI, machines are going to be better at optimizing that formula than humans because they can adapt faster. And so I don't really know exactly what the state's going to care about, but whatever it is, like it's going to seem criminally decadent to spend whatever you be on like a few humans when you could be simulating like millions of ultra blissful and politically correct and up-to-date, like more deserving beings than these like backwards humans who are just like, you know, parasites of the state or something like that. So that's the situation I kind of expect us to be in, as you say, even if we solve alignment. The standard economic rebuttal is comparative advantage. Even if machines are better at everything, the theory says there's always something humans get paid to do. We asked David to answer it.…

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