I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.
The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.
> I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.
IMHO, that's the obvious end-state of AGI: the economy eats the world and a few trillionaires sitting atop AGI armies control the economy, and nearly everyone else becomes powerless, irrelevent, and eventually "ended."
The problem with that dystopia is how those people would remain rich if nobody below them could afford their products. Henry Ford was a terrible person in many ways, but his idea of paying his auto workers decently so they could afford to buy the Model T's they were building was not only good for the workers but smart business.
> The problem with that dystopia is how those people would remain rich if nobody below them could afford their products.
That's not actually a problem with it.
For a business owner, customers and employees are actually just a means to an end (customers yield profit, which is money, which is power and control within capitalism; employees are the means of converting money to power and control).
AGI could let a select group of well-positioned business owners to skip straight to power and control. There will probably be a transition state while they suck the resources out of the rest of society by providing some product or service, but once that's done they can just use AGI to use those resources for their own ends without needing anyone else.
An economy with AGI would be a radical change from our current economy, and would work very differently.
Basically: imagine Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos owning all the vast majority of all resources of the world, made invincible by AGI drone-swarms, harnessing those resources to build whatever whim they have. Does Musk want cover New York City with massive pyramids built in his honor? AGI will demolish it, mine the needed materials, and build them for him.
But still, that doesn't make sense. Say, they tell AGI to collect all the gold in the world. What makes that more interesting than just yellow rock unless there is an economy underneath them that sees gold as valuable?
The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.