To paraphrase Goggins, "Who's gonna carry the cabbage?"
While it's true there are a lot of jobs obsoleted by technological progress, the vision of personal AI teams creating a new age of prosperity only makes sense for knowledge workers. Sure, a field worker picking cabbage could also have an AI team to coordinate medical care. But in this brilliant future, are the lowest members of society suddenly well-paid?
The steam engine and subsequent Industrial Revolution created a lot of jobs and economic productivity, sure, but a huge amount of those jobs were dirty, dangerous factory jobs, and the lion's share of the productivity was ultimately captured by robber barons for quite some time. The increase in standard of living could only be seen in aggregate on pages of statistics from the mahogany-paneled offices of Standard Oil, while the lives of the individuals beneath those papers more often resembled Sinclair's Jungle.
Altman's suggestion that avoiding AI capture by the rich merely requires more compute is laughable. We have enormous amounts of compute currently, and its productivity is already captured by a small number of people compared to the vast throngs that power civilization in total. Why would AI make this any different? The average person does not understand how AI works and does not have the resources to utilize it. Any further advancements in AI, including "personalized AI teams," will not be equally shared, they will be packaged into subscription services and sold, only to enrich those who already control the vast majority of the world's wealth.
The thing is: robotics is knowledge work. Supposing a scenario in which AI makes advancing fields of engineering and science much more rapid, it will be leveraged to build and cheapen robotic labor. There would be a gap period where AI is smart but unable to perform labor without humans, which could be ugly, and then we reach effective post-scarcity and post-humans-being-useful. Where we go from there could be heaven or hell depending on who's in charge.
While it's true there are a lot of jobs obsoleted by technological progress, the vision of personal AI teams creating a new age of prosperity only makes sense for knowledge workers. Sure, a field worker picking cabbage could also have an AI team to coordinate medical care. But in this brilliant future, are the lowest members of society suddenly well-paid?
The steam engine and subsequent Industrial Revolution created a lot of jobs and economic productivity, sure, but a huge amount of those jobs were dirty, dangerous factory jobs, and the lion's share of the productivity was ultimately captured by robber barons for quite some time. The increase in standard of living could only be seen in aggregate on pages of statistics from the mahogany-paneled offices of Standard Oil, while the lives of the individuals beneath those papers more often resembled Sinclair's Jungle.
Altman's suggestion that avoiding AI capture by the rich merely requires more compute is laughable. We have enormous amounts of compute currently, and its productivity is already captured by a small number of people compared to the vast throngs that power civilization in total. Why would AI make this any different? The average person does not understand how AI works and does not have the resources to utilize it. Any further advancements in AI, including "personalized AI teams," will not be equally shared, they will be packaged into subscription services and sold, only to enrich those who already control the vast majority of the world's wealth.