The most interesting argument is about the ratio of the marginal value of labor to the marginal value of everything else. Let's call it MVLE.
In prehistory, land was plentiful and hunting/gathering skill was scarce, so MVLE was high. In the middle ages, the population had exploded and arable land had become scarce. MVLE dropped dramatically. In the industrial revolution, capital accumulation began, and MVLE began rising. Once labor costs were high enough, productivity became king, and services and information goods became more prominent. MVLE rose much further.
Note the seemingly accidental correlation between MVLE, self-determination and human rights.
Now we're at a crossroads. There's a possibility that MVLE might completely bottom out. One edge outcome is a world with 100 trillionaires, 1000000 concubines, a bunch of butlers and hair stylists, and no other humans.
The key question is: whose utility will be maximized? It's clear that democracy's cracks have turned into fractures. Half of the population has an IQ below 100 and can be gulled into voting themselves into oblivion.
> Half of the population has an IQ below 100 and can be gulled into voting themselves into oblivion.
While technically true, I’d caution against assuming IQ is at all representative of average practical or applied intelligence. There’s plenty of writing out there outlining the issues with IQ as a measurement.
I also think the problems we’re struggling with—insofar as the ethics of utilization of AI—boil down to humanity’s overall inability thus far to reach consensus on what we want to optimize our society for: the most good for the most people, the most good for some people, or something completely orthogonal to good or bad for any number of people (pursuit of knowledge, culture, unity, whatever).
Regardless, a lot of folks seem to have good and widely agreed upon ideas of what we do not want and I’d love to see more conversations around how we prevent the worst case scenarios given the current political and economic environment.
> I’d caution against assuming IQ is at all representative of average practical or applied intelligence
I don't necessarily disagree. Unfortunately, demagoguery has paid off handsomely in recent years. It has been refined as a discipline to the point that the "self-destruction gullibility threshold" might actually be much higher than 100.
In prehistory, land was plentiful and hunting/gathering skill was scarce, so MVLE was high. In the middle ages, the population had exploded and arable land had become scarce. MVLE dropped dramatically. In the industrial revolution, capital accumulation began, and MVLE began rising. Once labor costs were high enough, productivity became king, and services and information goods became more prominent. MVLE rose much further.
Note the seemingly accidental correlation between MVLE, self-determination and human rights.
Now we're at a crossroads. There's a possibility that MVLE might completely bottom out. One edge outcome is a world with 100 trillionaires, 1000000 concubines, a bunch of butlers and hair stylists, and no other humans.
The key question is: whose utility will be maximized? It's clear that democracy's cracks have turned into fractures. Half of the population has an IQ below 100 and can be gulled into voting themselves into oblivion.