That being said, recent developments in AI have me wondering how social mobility might work in the scenario of AGI. If our human efforts / intelligence is relatively inconsequential compared to that of AGI applications, how does one climb up the socio-economic ladder? Curious to see HN takes on the topic...
But democracy is usually a good alternative for extreme change. America seems to be locked in a two party system though, which may be insufficient.
In my opinion, access to free education is key to social mobility.
AGI doesn't change anything. It enriches everything. It's a tool. A bicycle for the mind (not to sound cliché). AGI, could be compared to the invention to writing. It doesn't invent anything new but reinforces what we know. Everyone gains from it, of course some more than others. But nonetheless AGI will enrich our lives, and hopefully help those struggling out of a life of hunger/poverty and into a a life that they can support themselves and their families.
Ambitious people are a small subset of the chimp troupe, and they usually end up in charge cause they dont mind doing mindless bullshit everyday, as long as they get their status elevated. Society calls this activity 'hard work' and rewards it cause it keeps the factory lights on. When the chimps run a factory/institution/military/govt you need a "socio-economic ladder" structure to keep the chimps in line. A hierarchical structure based on domination and obedience, rewards and punishment, respect and trust and even that thing called love. Will we require all this when robots do things better?
Sort of like in sports you have these ever optimizing robotic humans practicing night and day, to gain some milli second advantage over some other robot. For what? So nike and coke can sell more unnecessary shit to everyone. Now if coke and nike can entertain you with two AGI robots instead, ever optimizing to entertain and "break records" every other game (for optimal attention capture) then what do we need sports stars for?
When robots do what robots do - their 'hard work', 'calculated risk' night and day, day in day out, do we call it Ambition to climb the 'socio-economic ladder'?
Maybe life is cushy enough now that we can stop trying? But don’t you think that if we put I. Another hundred years of hard work, we will look back and think of the 2020 life as pretty brutal by comparison to 2120?
I expect there will be more social mobility after AGI due to AGI being an excellent teacher.
There is a new class of entrepreneurs right now on Fiverr. They use AI to cover for their deficiencies and they use AI to become above average at many office jobs. They can single-handedly out compete corporations.
In the 1990's the meme was "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog." Everyone wanted to start a business but needed 30 more degrees to learn everything they needed to know. Today the training and help is provided by AI.
However,
- AGI isn't here and won't be for a good while. There's little in LLM like chatgpt4 that resembles biological intelligence which is the only thing that unambiguously demonstrates general intelligence
- theoretically individuals can already migrate up through education. How/if people try and just how impactful it is highly depends on the individual's desire to improve. And I doubt there will be a sea change just because, in the first 2/3rds of AGI revolution, that everybody will leverage it.
- mental health will continue to impact negatively the ability of individuals to adapt
If there is AGI AND enough computing power, it will either make social mobility disappear because everyone would be up the socio-economic ladder, or it's an apocalypse, there is no in between.
During the time there isn't enough computing power for every jobs, but running it costs less than a salary, then I guess there would be high unemployment rates for a few years.
The key to success will be in knowing thine own self.
Are you capable of social mobility if you had the free competent labor of an assistant?
There are those who will take every opportunity and those who will wait and see.
Those who take the opportunity will arrange their thoughts and priorities to bootstrap their success, whatever that may be.
Everyone else will be watching to see what others will do!
