Most likely the countries who will have unconstrained AGIs will get to advance technologically by leaps and bounds. And those who constrain it will remain in the "stone age" when it comes to it.
Assuming AGI doesn't lead to instant apocalyptic scenario it is more likely to lead to a form of resource curse[1] than anything that benefits the majority. In general countries where the elite is dependent on the labor of the people for their income have better outcomes for the majority of people than countries that don't (see for example developing countries with rich oil reserves).
What would AGI lead to? Most knowledge work would be replaced in the same way as manufacturing work has been, and AGI is in control of the existing elite. It would be used to suppress any revolt for eternity, because surveillance could be perfectly automated and omnipresent.
That's a valid concern. The theory that the population only gets education, health care, human rights and so on, if these people are actually needed for the rulers to stay in power, is valid. The whole idea of AGIs replacing beaurocrats, the way for example DOGE is betting on to be successful with, is already axing people's livelihood and purpose in life. Why train government workers, why spend money on education, training, health care plans, if you have an old nuclear plant powering your silicon farms.
If the rich need less and less educated, healthy and well fed workers, then more and more people will get treated like shit. We are currently going into that direction with full speed. The rich aren't even bothering to hide this anymore from the public because they think they have won the game and can't be overruled anymore. Let's hope there will be still elections in four years and MAGA doesn't rig it like Fidesz in Hungary and so many other countries who have fallen into the hands of the internationalist oligarchy.
> If the rich need less and less educated, healthy and well fed workers, then more and more people will get treated like shit
Maybe. I think it's a matter of culture.
Very few people mistreat their dogs and cats in wealthy countries. Why shouldn't people in power treat regular people at least as well as regular folks treat their pets?
I'm no history buff but my hunch is that mistreatment of people largely came from a fear that if I don't engage in cruelty to maximize power, my opponents will and given that they're cruel, they'll be cruel to me when they come to take over.
So we end up with this zero sum game of squeezing people, animals, resources and the planet in an arms race because everyone's afraid to lose.
In the past - you couldn't be sure if someone else was building up an army, so you had to build up an army. But now that we have satellites and we can largely track everything - we can actually agree to not engage in this zero sum dynamic.
There will be a shift from treating people as means to an end of power accumulation and containment, to treating people as something you just inherently like and would like to see prosper.
It'll be a shift away from this deeply corrosive idea of never ending competition and growth. When people's basic needs are met and no one is grouping up to take other people's goodies - why should regular people compete with one another?
They shouldn't and they won't. People who want to do good work will do so and improving the lives of people worldwide will be its own reward. Private islands, bunkers and yachts will become incomprehensible because there'll be no serf class to service any of it. We'll go back to if you want to be well liked and respected - you have to be a good person. I look forward to it :)
> Very few people mistreat their dogs and cats in wealthy countries. Why shouldn't people in power treat regular people at least as well as regular folks treat their pets?
Because very few regular people will be their pets. These are the people who do everything in their power to pay their employees less. They treat their non-pets horribly... see feed lots and amazon warehouses. They actively campaign against programs which treat anyone well, particularly those who they aren't extracting wealth from. They whine and moan and cry about rules that protect people from getting sick and injured because helping those people would prevent them from earning a bit more profit.
They may spend a pile of money on surgery for their bunny, but if you want them to behave nicely to someone else's pet, or even someone else... well that's where they draw the line.
I guess you are hoping to be one of those pets... but what makes you think you're qualified for that, and why would you be willing to sacrifice all of your friends and family to the fate of feral dogs for the chance to be a pet?
I'm not suggesting that a few people become rich people's pets.
I'm saying it isn't inherent in human nature to mistreat other conscious beings.
If people were normally cruel to their pets, then I'd say yeah, this species just seems to enjoy cruelty and it is what it is. But we aren't cruel to pets, so the cruelty to workers does not stem from human nature, but other factors.
I gave one theory as to what causes the cruelty and that I'm somewhat optimistic that it'll run its course in due time.
>I'm saying it isn't inherent in human nature to mistreat other conscious beings.
I suspect (but not sure) it may be more inherent than is generally believed. Then again simple physical pain is easy to gauge and relate to, but passing some law is an academic process where one can distance oneself from the ill effects on the adherents of the law. Then there are more variations - people will be tribalistic, they will be kind to their own kind/family even sacrificing, but murderous to some one of another tribe. All in all the average human is bundle of contradictions if you were to analyze simplistically, though it will make good sense when viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology.
History just flies in the face of what you've said. We've done monarchies and serfdoms in the past. If the king is good, life is good. But you better hope they're good forever because if the king is bad, it's really bad.
Also, I would rather die than be someone's pet. Why should I have to rely on the charity and good humor of a ruler? Pardon my language but Fuck that entirely.
A few thousand rich people don't need 8 billion pets.
"Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature" (Georgia Guidestones, a monument describing someone's ideal future that is surrounded by conspiracy)
Will you be one of the 500 million pets? Or one of the 7.5 billion leftovers? Sure would be a shame if billions become unnecessary and then a pandemic 100X worse than covid got lableaked.
I mean that itself is a hotly debated idea. From your own link " As of at least 2024, there is no academic consensus on the effect of resource abundance on economic development."
For example US is probably the most resource rich country in the world, but people don't consider it for the resource curse because the rest of its economy is so huge.
Probably it doesn't have to be an AGI that does tricks like passing Turing test v2. It can be an LLM with context window of 30GB that can outsmart your rival in geopolitics, economics and policies.
Perhpas, but meanwhile making it legal to have racial profiling AI tech in the hands of government and corporations does a great disservice to your freedom and privacy. Do not buy the narrative, EU regulations are not about forbidding AGI, they're about ensuring a minumum of decency in how the tech is allowed to exist. Something Americans seem deathly allergic to.
Or maybe those countries' economies will collapse once they let AGIs control institutions instead of human beaurocrats, because the AGIs are doing their own thing and trick the government by alignment faking and in-context scheming.
Or it will be viewed like nuclear weapons and those who have it will be bombed by those who don't.
These are all silicon valley "neck thoughts." They're entirely uninformed by the current state of the world and any travels through it. It's fantasies brought about by people with purely monetary desires.
It'd be funny if there wasn't billions of dollars being burnt to market this crap.
Ok but what lead you to that particular belief in the first place?
Because I can think of a large number of historical scenarios where malicious people get access to certain capabilities and it absolutely does not go well and you do have to somehow account for the fact that this is a real thing that is going to happen.
I thibk today there are are less malicious people than in the past. And considering that most people will use the AI for good, there is a good chance that the bad people will be easier to identify.
Why do you think that? There's more people than ever and it's easier than ever for the ones with malicious impulses to find and communicate with each other.
For example, several governments are actively engaged in a live streamed genocide and nothing akin to the 1789 revolt in Paris seems to be underway.
The new regime in Syria is rather reactionary, I'd say. Rojava is a revolution however.
Sure. The ancien régime was considered illegitimate so they got rid of it, and if a state is involved in genocide it is since the Holocaust considered illegitimate and it should lose its sovereignty.
Canada had a case a couple years ago where a disabled person wanted canadian-medicare to pay for a wheelchair ramp in her house and they instead referred her to their assisted suicide program.
> An investigation by VAC found four cases “isolated to a single employee who is no longer an employee of the Department” of assisted dying being brought up inappropriately to veterans.
