Quote (ofthevoid @ Jul 9 2023 08:23pm)
Hard to wrap ones head around it, and personally i'm leaning towards the luddite camp.
I think AI will threaten millions of jobs, many white collar jobs which it might be a great positive for the corporates looking to maximize profits but not so much for the people impacted. I look at my current job now and think large swaths of it can probably be automated through AI. People in tech may say well, it will also create jobs kind of like the internet did, but i think this time it's different and the level of disruption would be far greater and more impactful.
I think it also can be a devastating tool in warfare eventually. Imagine a hivemind able to control and give real time intel, decision making, tracking, etc of enemy troops, hardware, logistics, incorporating feeds of real time satellite data. Basically ability to process tens of millions of data points and developments in real time and find 'optimum' or most impactful responses. Or swarms of tens of thousands kamikaze drones that instead of having a human operator for each you have the AI multi-task and controlling large numbers of them.
I listened to a podcast that talked about other threats and one that really stood out to me was, imagine you ask your AI to basically find your enemies weaknesses in electrical grids and then exploit it to damage it. Current iterations of AI's are already able to write complex code, sophisticated ones will for sure be able to become master hackers.
Some of this is not reality yet but at the pace we're moving i could see things like this being reality in 10 years.
From a job perspective, at least, we'll just degenerate (or evolve) into neo-Feudalism. Wealth exists to be consumed, and is meaningless if not. Fewer people with wealth will still find ways to spend it, albeit less equally, and as the value of human labor declines, the availability of that labor for work currently priced out (e.g. servants) could rebound. I wonder if we're not seeing an impersonal version of that already with the rise of the gig economy.