This discussion is very old, as it applies to many examples as monarchy/nobles in the French Revolution and other similar revolutions, to horses (and highly specialized humans profiting from them) when cars became cheap, to hunter-gatherers when agriculture developed, and a large etcetera.
The only difference I see in "advanced AIs" as a technology is that the individual immediate wellbeing of almost every human is probably threatened as there will be more jobs destroyed than created.**
PS*: Personal positions in these kinds of arguments depend on other personal opinions and predictions about an specific sociological/technological "advance" being of net positive value for all society. If your opinion is contrary to that, possibly staying as hunters-gatherers or being governed by kings and emperors (or something in between, just some extreme examples to make the point) were better courses of action.
PS2**: I'm talking about human-aligned AIs. Bring a rogue AI agent with misaligned objectives and with direct or indirect physical presence to the discussion and there are no net positives to talk about (for humans).
Didn't the machines ended up creating more jobs than there were before even taking into account the lost ones? They had a point, until it turned out they were wrong.
Also, wasn't innovation getting in the way of other jobs since before? Didn't Uber and similar applications end up becoming competition for the taxis? In my country taxi drivers were protesting for those apps to be banned, yet they couldn't compete with the convenience and safety of the apps. And before that, weren't horse-drawn carriage drivers protesting against cars?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
It wasn't a smooth transition.
What happened to horses after most of their tasks were done better by internal combustion engines? It's weird to imagine a world where humans have so few niches, but I thought we were decades away from passing the Turing test.
Meanwhile people are pushed into shittier and shittier jobs with ever decreasing meaning
> Didn't Uber and similar applications end up becoming competition for the taxis? In my country taxi drivers were protesting for those apps to be banned
And now uber drivers are seen as contractors, which means they miss most workers benefits, while being paid like shit thanks to the race to the bottom, the only winner is uber
We invent new things for people to do. As we have time immemorial. What happens to clergymen when nobody has faith in a religion? They find other things to do than preach.
> What happens to power structures when people become a cost rather than a benefit?
If you want to look at this pessimistically - a good portion of the world's population can already be considered a cost and are a net economic negative on the privileged people's ability to hoard even more insane amounts of wealth. We've, thankfully, decided that mass genocide of impoverished people is inhumane and humanitarian efforts are instead created to try and improve their lives. Even a pessimistic take that the humanitarian efforts only being done to create more workers doesn't hold up given a cost/benefit analysis. More money is invested than could ever be extracted again - and yet we continue investing.
Maybe instead of filling our lives being paid to dig holes so that others can be paid to fill them we could turn more attention and efforts to improving people's lives without having to worry about sustaining society through work?
Further, artificial general intelligence is a resource curse. Leaders can extract value without worrying about the people's wellbeing.
Obviously there are good outcomes but that doesn't exclude bad outcomes.
We didn't cull switchboard operators and calculators when we automated their jobs through technology. They found new jobs.
> Leaders can extract value without worrying about the people's wellbeing.
Historically this has had limits. After those limits have been reached - leaders quickly find themselves 6' under ground if people even gave them that courtesy. There are parts of the world where this has already happened - this century, maybe even this decade. Consider yourself quite privileged if you live in a part of the world where the mere thought of this seems outlandishly absurd and unrealistic.
