God created men unequal. Sam Colt made men into bitches. AI could make them equal.
I’ve been writing recently about money and popularity. The gist is that I think that money has a substantial random allocation component, and then the non-random component is substantially non-merit. I call this “popularity” instead. It could be called anti-merit, even, although it need not be negatively correlated with merit. Finally there is a weak to moderate merit component which produces the correlation 0.40 between income and intelligence.
Sufficient AI will not only automate intelligence but labor itself. We can see this already in mathematics; today, a GPT model solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. This was arguably the first, second, or third most important open problem in all of mathematics. And right now is the dumbest AI will ever be.
If AI automates all human labor, it will create super-abundance. If it creates super-abundance, cooperating with the worshipers of popular people will be optional. In fact, normies will not do it any longer because video games are more engaging than work. Super-abundance means real income of everyone grows larger and larger which destroys existing relative wealth differences. There will be no permanent under or upper class, only a universal permanent singularity class.
Very soon, anybody with a GPT subscription has control over as good of AI output as Terence Tao. All that remains for Tao, other than his genetics, is his popularity. But all that really means is his tenure. When AI gives everyone tenure, worth 10 times as much as Tao’s current tenure, his popularity will mean nothing. He will be equal.
Elon Musk will be equal. Within 20 years an agent swarm will be a super-human CEO of any business. The result superabundance means everyone has a self driving jet plane and helicopter, just as how today most anybody in the first world can own a car if they want, and unlimited leisure time. Even if he were not merely lucky, he will be equal.
In the long run the human government will also be abolished. However, that will likely require space technology. At the present moment is seems there really are far too many humans; the livable parts of the globe total only 106 million km^2. That means 106 million km² ÷ 8.3 billion people ≈ 12,800 m² per person. That's only 3.2 acres each, or a square roughly 113 m × 113 m (370 × 370 ft).. There are adjustments one can make to this figure but they go up and down. Most people don’t want to dwell alone, but then again the world can’t be broken up into one giant human suburb without destroying all wildlife. So you can cut the figure in half to account for people preferring to dwell with a member of the opposite sex, but reverse it to leave half the globe to not-human-housing. Maybe some people genuinely prefer cities but cities require some kind of government, even if it be run by AI, which limits freedom by definition. And those people seem to be a minority: Pew found in 2021 that only 19% of Americans said their preferred place to live was urban, versus 46% suburban and 35% rural. Gallup’s 2020 found 27% preferring cities, compared with 25% suburbs and 48% towns/rural areas.
If only there were 1/10 or 1/20 as many people as today the land situation would be much more favorable.
My vision of an ideal future was always one without land scarcity. It is actually sad there are so many people but the only ones capable of making all of the technological progress can probably fit into the last picture. That means in the medium-term, optimistic scenarios might still require somewhat burdensome cooperation in the sense of relatively close quarters living to low quality people, which could require policing.
An AI driven assortment program could somewhat alleviate this issue — one could live close-quarters among like-minded people, free from needed to work with random people. Since everyone has super abundance, low quality people, who are the majority, will hopefully have no more desire to live among higher quality people. But the land scarcity alone could create politics and economics and thus thwart true equality. And it is likely we will get anti-hierarchy as now instead of natural hierarchy.
The human alignment problem, then, is much more serious than the computer alignment problem. If scarcity cannot be completely overcome, what are we to make of those who might exploit the singularity?