Of course it will, how could it not. But that’s because I’m not doing real work: if I were, it wouldn’t replace me.
And you’re calm about it?
How could anyone be calm? But I have no other options, so why agonize over it — let’s get on with real work instead.
And how are you going to live, and on what?
It will shake us up, and we will get through it. It is probably not another Great Depression on the doorstep. And afterwards it will be two days on and five off instead of five on and two off, at the same level of consumption. The robots do the grinding, you know that yourself.
So you naively hope that somebody needs you?
Nobody needs me at all, but the crowd is something they will always have to reckon with. The robots are not going to replace me alone — that is already a mass of people used to consuming at a certain level. Keeping such a mass hungry costs more than it saves, so their consumption will have to be propped up palliatively, and at the same level too. You surely don’t believe the principle “to each according to his labor” is at work. You would have to be blind not to notice the Sisyphuses all around. Look, to keep the wolf from catching you, you don’t need to be first — you need to not be last. It is the same here: be more modest, rethink your consumption and fear nothing.
And what if the AI bubble bursts?
I don’t think it will burst: they will let the air out of it skillfully, and the market will feel out the balance between silicon and carbon intelligence. Humanity has long produced far more than it needs to consume. But the engine of that consumption is capital, and it will keep the flywheel spinning. Neural nets will speed the flywheel up several times over, and it will grind people down.
So everyone is afraid of some AGI, while capitalism has been playing that part for ages.
That is exactly it. And human nature helps consumption along. Take mechanization, introduced at the start of the last century — everyone knows how the economy met it: with a world crisis. The same thing is coming now, though I hope not on that scale. The novelty itself, however, is far greater. It always stings a person more to be a fool than to be physically weak: losing at chess cuts deeper than losing at, say, football.
You take an optimistic view of things.
Human nature, unfortunately, is not ready to swallow neural nets painlessly, but on the whole artificial intelligence is a fantastic and very much needed discovery. Though I would rather have lived a hundred years later — assuming, of course, that AI has not taken over the world by then.