We won't even mind

AI is crazy. It simultaneously poses an era of abundance and unfathomable progress while at the same time posing a threat to humanity, in countless ways we can't even imagine.

At the moment AI is going well, there's already been leaps in productivity with AI uptake, mostly in coding but in many other ways too like radiology and genomics. If we were to take that same progress and scale it up exponentially (the same rate at which AI is getting better) then we get exponential progress. In the next decade all knowledge work could be done by this artificial superintelligence and physical tasks would be learned and later done by robots. Leaving I think just human interaction for us to do, until robots look and act human enough. Sounds simple enough.

Though every graduate nowadays sees the unemployment this causes as the biggest problem to come very soon from this new technology and it's a fair assessment. Whether it is in fact the case or AGI will identify demand and reallocate these people to new projects who knows, maybe that's a crazy pipe dream but maybe it's worth exploring.

Jobs exist by demand and humans don't run out of things to want. Food, designer shoes, boba drinks and Amazon next day deliveries, exist because we want them. However, evolutionary psychology tells us that desire is a response to suffering. We're hungry, so we want food. We're cold, so we want warmth. We're uncertain about the world, so we want AGI to solve it for us etc. I'd say these were all reasonable and pretty universal wants, but AI could give us everything we want in a much more economical way than providing material abundance.

Without getting too technical, the anterior cingulate cortex and other parts of the brain are responsible for emotional processing of pain. So when you're angry you stubbed your toe or upset because you got rejected by your crush, the ACC was probably stirring up that emotion. Since we know this, we know that if we want to solve for suffering, we should probably target the ACC mechanism in the brain.

If AI was to help develop some sort of neurological modulation with some sort of neurotech or drug then we wouldn't suffer anymore, but nor would we desire. If there's no suffering to want away from then we'd feel nothing less than extremely serene.

To say this is a dangerous slope to go down would still be operating from our current survivalist framing. Many cultures take up practices to get away from this framing for the same reason that we would use AI to solve for it. I think there's a greater question in how far should we or AI take it? The only argument I can think of is that struggle causes growth. No pain no gain. But that still comes from the egoic survivalist mentality. Why would we need to grow if we don't suffer?

That brings us back to unemployment. In a world without demand there are no jobs, there's nothing to build, there's nothing to manage, just a whole load of nothing. Should we stop people stop suffering? Can we have a society where people can choose to not suffer anymore? There's loads of ways AI could wipe us out but the one no one's talking about is one sugar coated in euphoria.

AI will give us bliss, whether we take the pill or breathe the airborne pathogen, we'll die off

And We won't even mind.