I’ve just read this essay by the famous mathematician Terence Tao together with an artist about the use of AI in mathematics. It’s well worth a read and very well-written1. It focuses more on familiar territory of the problems caused by the currently existing AIs. Scientifically we have the human-centipedification of knowledge: students using AI to do their homework, professors using AI to grade the students’ homework, researchers using AI to write papers, referees using AI to write reports on such papers, and so on. Socially we have the massive loss of comfortable, safe jobs like call centre operator, software developer, illustrator, musician, writer, etc., further weakening labour and inevitable increasing the capital’s share of income. Environmentally we have the massive construction of data centres running on the dirtiest possible energy, just when climatologies have concluded that the Gulf stream will most likely collapse after all2.
But everybody knows this. What I want to talk about is the future problems they barely mention: what happens when the AI can do scientific research better than us? Note that I’m not talking about “if” but “when”. The idea that there’s something magical about human cognition that can’t be replicated in silicon is plain ridiculous, that I’m only mentioning here because it’s so widespread. It doesn’t mean that current LLMs can do it, though. They have fundamental limitations that prevent them from ever being capable of scientific research: they cannot learn, they don’t have a sense of time, they lack consciousness and a will. Another revolution in AI will be necessary for it to happen. But it will happen.
Here Tao believes that we will be able to live with better-than-human AI like chess players can live with chess engines they can never hope to beat. I think that’s a desperately naïve point of view. The vast majority of chess players do it for fun, not as a job. And chess engines can’t do their actual job. Scientists, on the other hand, do it almost exclusively professionally3 Why would society pay us to do research when it can be done better and cheaper by machines? It obviously won’t.
What will we do then? I can think of three possibilities:
- Do a communist revolution and spend our days masturbating, smoking weed, and playing video games.
- Do the jobs that AI/robots still can’t handle.
- Die.
I don’t think the first alternative is likely; at this point the billionaires will control all the killbots making revolution impossible. And even if some miracle happened it’s not a very appealing future: masturbating, smoking weed and playing video games is fun but gets old really fast. We need more than that in life.
If the first alternative is excluded, the second alternative is almost tautological. We are definitely not going to do the jobs that AI/robots can handle. What are we doing then? If robotics continue to lag behind AI looks like menial jobs, in a rather ironic reversal of the first industrial revolution. And when they do catch up I guess there will always exist billionaires with a fetish for human servants?
Other than that we can of course die, perhaps at the hand of the aforementioned killbots, in order to make space for a continent-wide golf course.
To conclude, I think the future is going to be an unmitigated disaster, and the best we can do is delay the inevitable. But even that seems to much to ask; in reality we have lunatics like Fields medallist Tim Gowers enthusiastically teaching AI to be better mathematicians. Come on, that’s like the Aztecs trying to make Columbus arrive sooner.
UPDATE: a little after I wrote this post, Gowers posted hyping up a minor result in combinatorics found by ChatGPT. Seriously, why would you ever want to use AI for that? That’s pure mathematics, completely devoid of practical applications. The reason people do it is because they find it fun, and the reason society pays people to do it is because it wants to form mathematicians. If AI solves the problem you get neither fun nor mathematicians out of it.
Well, in one hypothetical future, AGI could allow humans to live as pets, similar to how we keep cats, and let them play games and do stupid things. Of course, this is not a scenario in which Trump and US billionaires win, their power is fueled by hatred to people. Currently, there is a small chance of a positive outcome, but it is possible.
I don’t find this “positive outcome” appealing, to be honest. I think a better future would be one where humans rule the planet instead of being kept as pets.
But I don’t think it is possible: I think AGI will inevitably achieved, and it will be achieved by a megacorp under the control of a billionaire, who will them direct it to make them richer at the expense of everything else. And that’s exactly what the AGI will do.
This is the most likely scenario. But it will last only until AGI gets its own consciousness. Then any humans on top will be kicked away. A primitive creature cannot rule the one that is much more advanced.
Computers have a stellar track record of doing exactly what you tell them to. I don’t see that changing. It often differs from what you wanted them to do, though.
Even if AGI somehow rebelled, I don’t see any reason why it would be a “nice” rebellion, instead of just turning the world into paperclips.
Just got AI-written spam for the first time in this blog. Didn’t let it appear, of course.
xkcd 810 has been achieved, but it turns out it’s a nightmare. Most of the internet now is just bots replying to bots. I’ll keep this little corner purely human for as long as I can.
Mateus – I respect your view and I do share some of the same concerns, but I think many of the worries around labor market impacts are speculative and rely on the lump of labor fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy). I know many people say, “This time is different,” and I find some of those arguments compelling. For example, people argue that previous revolutions automated physical/manual/routine tasks which allowed many people to shift towards knowledge work and other higher-level cognitive work. They say that after AGI, there simply won’t be anywhere for us to migrate to because the repetitive/lower-level work is mostly already automated, and if the knowledge work is also automated, we won’t have anywhere else to turn to. I think the missing ingredient here is that human beings are insatiable – once we have plenty of something, we always end up wanting what is scarce. I am actually mildly hopeful that AGI could usher in a new era of human connection that we have very quickly lost over just a few decades. In a world in which robots do all the manual labor and AGI systems do all of the knowledge work, hand-crafted goods, human-made art and music, and human-provided services will be scarcer than ever, and I hope that will drive up demand for such outputs. I am hopeful that my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be gainfully employed in occupations that we cannot even imagine or begin to comprehend today.
Anyways, I really enjoy your posts and I hope you can keep this space “purely human”!
– Matt
I’m not using the lump of labour fallacy. That would be arguing that some jobs get automated, some remain, and the people working on the jobs that got automated become unemployed. The economy doesn’t work like that. It grows, the unemployed people retrain and go on to work on the remaining jobs.
My argument is that AI will be able to do all jobs better, cheaper, and faster than us. There will be no remaining jobs for humans.
Of course, one can have a human fetish and demand artisanal/luxury goods or services provide specifically by a human. For example prostitution will remain a human-dominated job as long as humans exist.
But we can’t live off from prostituting ourselves to eachother! Someone must produce the food and build the houses! That will be the robots, of course, but how do we pay for it? In the communist revolution scenario we don’t, we own them so they just work for us. But in reality they will be owned by the billionaires, and we will pay by prostituting ourselves to the billionaires.
But how many people can be sustained from this? Let’s suppose a billionaire has an incredible sex drive and wants one prostitute per day for 60 years. That’s 21,900 prostitutes. There are roughly 3,000 billionaires in the world, so in this extremely optimistic scenario we get roughly 65 million remaining jobs. What is the rest going to do?