SvennoJ said:
Is the world ready for a Star Trek utopia (Starfleet is pretty fascist as well, but the chosen ones live well)
If robots and AI are doing all the work, will people still be motivated to learn any skills? Or are we all going to be spoiled children with robot nannies in this Utopian fantasy. How many robots are needed to serve 8.3 billion people, global workforce is about 3.7 billion people. How much power do 4 billion robots need on top of 8.3 billion people living in leasure.
8.3 billion people just looking to entertain themselves travelling to already overcrowded tourist destinations, nothing else to do. Besides that, human biology thrives on routine, which is school -> work right now. What is going to replace that structure. Human routines were based on farming / gathering before that. How will the human pshyche cope with nothing to do. Rise of pedophiles? Billionaires don't seem very stable people to me, but that's the lifestyle this 'Utopia' promises.
Anyway there's a coming food crisis to solve first, water crisis, energy crisis, all linked with climate change. Hoping AI will solve it all in time sounds defeatist to me. Don't want to tackle these problems head on, just keep building data centers and hope AI will solve our problems while only making them worse in the short term.
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Borrowing from Yudkowsky's words, life should not always be made easier for the same reason that video games should not always be made easier, but that doesn't mean we can't eliminate low-quality work to make way for high-quality work. Eliminating subsistence work is emphatically not the same as eliminating all challenge, and arguing against Utopia using the prospect of endless boredom is more of a failure of imagination on our part rather than a law set in stone saying the future can't be fun or meaningful.
We can generate 3,000 times more electricity than we currently use by covering just 1% of the Earth with solar panels, by the way. That's plenty of energy to power as many robots as we feasibly need, and enough for *trillions* of AGI virtual workers even just using the limits of the current CMOS computer chip paradigm.
