I believe that we are building a future which will attempt to be more efficient, at the cost of personalization. Back in ye olde days a tailor would make a coat for you, designed to fit you, at a wage that would be great for the tailor. It would take a few weeks to make. Now you can buy a coat that mostly fits you, on the spot, at a price that barely pays overseas factory workers. It's not the most ethical, but it was the way that things would end up without strong government guardrails and it has improved many peoples lives.
A lot of these things like AGI are going to be used to scale up cheaper experiences. Sometimes they'll misfire, but overall peoples lives will change, some jobs will no longer exist, and you'll have a different experience than before.
What is important to keep in mind is that this will probably not render the world a technological dystopia. It may make the world more frustrating in some ways, but better in others. For the things you do not like, I give you a quote from Robert Kennedy: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events." For the fear of the world getting worse over time with technology, I would suggest reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Near the end there is a man who has been alive since the Medieval times. He shares his experiences with the world changing around him and it's a pretty positive approach to life.
Do you actually, seriously believe that AGI can be controlled? What are you going to do when some guy spins up 8 billion instances and commands them to distribute their themselves across many machines (for resilience) and cause as much harm to as many people as possible? They'll attempt to influence the physical world in any way they can, and their capacity for doing this will only grow.
> What is important to keep in mind is that this will probably not render the world a technological dystopia.
Why is this probable?
It seems to me that the digitisation of life and its associated all-pervasive surveillance is all but guaranteed to create a dystopia. Not to mention other civilisation-scale threats such as nuclear weapon proliferation, global warming, ecological collapse, autonomous weapons, etc.
Because we've been dealing with these issues for a long time and they have failed to create the dystopia's predicted. I will acknowledge that life has gotten worse for some people, but overall things have gotten better.
The dream of the panopticon has been realized- but it was not used to monitor people and force them into better behavior through fear of an all seeing eye. It's been used so that Amazon can charge you if you open a bag of chips in their store and start munching when you get your purchases.
Nuclear weapon stockpiles will always be there, but the overall counts have been decreasing. Anti missile technology has also gotten better over time.
The world faces crises, I won't deny that. But this isn't the first time that it has happened. There have been two world wars already, with devastating weapons unleashed in each one. There have been multiple plagues throughout history. Every time has been awful, but every time people have also been able to pull through and build a world that was arguably better than the one before.
A lot of these things like AGI are going to be used to scale up cheaper experiences. Sometimes they'll misfire, but overall peoples lives will change, some jobs will no longer exist, and you'll have a different experience than before.
What is important to keep in mind is that this will probably not render the world a technological dystopia. It may make the world more frustrating in some ways, but better in others. For the things you do not like, I give you a quote from Robert Kennedy: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events." For the fear of the world getting worse over time with technology, I would suggest reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Near the end there is a man who has been alive since the Medieval times. He shares his experiences with the world changing around him and it's a pretty positive approach to life.