Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.
That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.
However, that's not useful in predicting what capital owners will do, because they follow their local incentives. "If everyone keeps doing X, we will all be worse off" does not help unless you can create local incentives that point toward an equilibrium where everyone stops doing X.
In this case, no capital owner is individually better off by unilaterally refusing to chase more efficient returns on their capital. We would need an international agreement, with enforcement mechanisms, like I mentioned above.
Of course the structure exists because we allow it, that's the easy part. Hard part is - why do we allow it?
Good luck eating that.
In practice this currently means voting for political options who can correctly identify concentration of power as the root cause of most of our current and future problems, and who pledge to actually do something about it.
We witnessed the same thing with looms and other automation in the Industrial Revolution. Capital that helps you produce more. But owners faced with increased competition under commoditized production see their profit margins fall. Thus they will turn to squeezing workers - the source of value - for profit in the newly commoditized landscape - exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution. It was only when workers got their act together and organized that this decline was stopped and reversed.
It's not the AI you have to convince, it's your government and the people running tech companies. Dario Amodei was cheering for AI to take all programming jobs (along with the others). If that happened, it would be an unmitigated disaster for millions of people. Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.
> the political will to stop AI development
The reason that's not likely is that it's an arms race. You stop AI research here, but how can you trust that China and Russia are doing the same? Unlike nuclear bombs, the potential harms are less tangible.
I don't need to imagine this student, I'm friends with some who are going through this right now. They graduated almost a year ago and haven't found work yet. One of them jokes about suicide often and I don't know how to help him
The social contract between labour and capital has been frayed for a long time, but it is near breaking now. It's going to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before it gets better. If it ever does get better
