Better at everything: how AI could make human beings irrelevant – making the state less dependent on its citizens. This, in turn, makes it tempting (and easy) for the state to sideline citizens altogether

SS: AI won’t need to destroy us – it might just quietly make us irrelevant. In this powerful piece the argument is put forward that as AI systems grow more capable, we risk sleepwalking into a future where human input becomes optional in everything from work and governance to love and creativity. The scariest part? It might all feel normal, even good. Should we be doing more to steer this future before it’s too late?

We already are irrelevant, in the grand scheme of thing. I find this mentality that we need to be useful for the elites or else something terrible happens to us strangely dystopian. Like, what would they do? Toss us into Russel’s Rubbish Bin that has been orbiting the Earth without us noticing? They won’t spare us second thought if they don’t need us. Worst-case scenario is that they keep all the fruits of automation for themselves and we carry on with labour-based economy without their involvement, making goods and services for each other, until new elites become rich enough to buy into the new cloud-castle caste and so on and so forth.

All these stories about how great AI will make society assumes that AI is accurate and infallible. It is not.

As an example of its inaccuracy, I asked the same question 6 times over several days (an engineering question whose answer is not ambiguous, and can be easily found with a search of the internet). AI return the correct answer only 3 times. The incorrect answers were off by as much as 300%.

Another day, another fear-mongering headline about AI to get you to click

AI does not make people irrelevant any more than looms or computers did.

What AI can be is an opportunity to question our society’s assumption that human relevancy derives primarily from people’s status as workers / paid contributors. The belief that most people are or should be workers is the only thing AI need undermine.

People are people first. And the economy exists to benefit people—or at least, it should.

Any tool, any technology, and any paid work acquires conditional value based on how it serves the interests of people or not. But people themselves have unconditional value. We are more than inputs into the economic machine; we’re the users of this system, the ones outputs are produced *for.*

For too long, we’ve thought of ourselves as workers, laborers, business owners, producers, and so on. These are roles that it may be useful to have people play at times; but in an economy with advancing labor-saving technology, we don’t need to assume that the average person is or must be a worker in order to live a valuable life.

There is so much else besides paid work for us to do.

That’s a ridiculous idea. Every system, every technology, all infrastructure, etc. is created and put in place by us for us. AI, which isn’t intelligent, is a tool we use to do some things better and more efficiently. Why do we need AI?

There are three phenomena (more actually, but I’ll focus on these) that will require significant increases in productivity: the aging global population, need to steadily increase GDP, and climate change.

AI increases productivity.
Over the next several decades, barring the unexpected, the working age population will have to generate enough value to support everyone younger and everyone older. But that group is shrinking in proportion to retirees, which means there are relatively fewer workers available to drive up GDP, which is necessary to insure resources are available to support everyone. This means workforce participation and productivity MUST increase to maintain civilization as we know it. AI will be necessary to increase productivity.

Climate change adds challenges, but also opportunities. Technologies can help mitigate the pain of a warming climate and all that brings. AI will be a useful tool in identifying and fine tuning the use of technologies, and help with the creation of new technologies.

AI is being used now to increase productivity, and in the sciences and engineering, and will become more integrated into our lives. AI will never replace us. It will aid us to maintain a decent quality of life given the challenges humanity face in the coming decades and centuries.

Then there is the unexpected. Who can speak to that?

Everything will be fine if we manage to not do stupid things like start new wars. Much more can be achieved through cooperation than war to everyone’s benefit. Sadly, we are an aggressive, violent species. And fearful. So it’s entirely possible diplomacy will eventually fail. But not inevitable.

EDIT
Another risk now and to future generations requiring increases in workforce participation rate and productivity aided by AI is government debt, the current cost of which is over $950 Billion. That’s $950,000,000,000 of our tax dollars used to pay interest on debt.

Powerful tools like AI are essential to help us manage these challenges: an aging population, climate change, rising government debt, all requiring a steadily increasing GDP.

How anyone can think of UBI now boggles my mind. It all hands on deck.

The state is a product of its citizens. Not the other way round.

This has been a known issue for a long time. The current economic model is not designed for rapid mitigation of needed manpower. While this time should be celebrated as the liberation of man, our old and current system seems to lead us into dystopia.

One way to alleviate the imminent chaos seems to be the creation of new classes of jobs, in vast numbers.

It has been done before out of humanitarian needs, allowed by tech progression.

This time the scope is very different though and it will turn into vulgarity if Universal Basic Income isnt succesfully implemented IMO.

>making the state less dependent on its citizens. This, in turn, makes it tempting (and easy) for the state to sideline citizens altogether

This is extremely backwards. AI will make the citizens less dependent on the state, and this, in turn, will make it easy for the citizens to sideline the state altogether. I predict that in a hundred years, most governments will have only ceremonial power, similar to the King of England now.

The question we should be asking ourselves right now is not “When will we start seeing riots, civic resistance and sabotage” but rathet “Once we do, how long will it take for a centrally controlled swarm of armed drones to selectively purge an average city of all undesirables”.