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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale.

But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions:

- if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for now, but surely there's only so long until they themselves are automated.

- if suddenly the whole economy is ran by robots, how is the wealth distributed? Will there be a huge grey underclass of non working humans and a tiny owner class? Some kind of egalitarian paradise? I suspect neither, but not sure what in-between.

It could be great. If I knew I will be fed for a lifetime, have a house, my kids well schooled, and not much more, I can live a great life. I'll take that over the daily grind any time.

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I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want...

When these discussions go long, and you start to think the whole idea through, you really start to question the whole idea.

Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why would it exist in physical, robot form ? Like, why not just be a light orb that lives in space or something? Wouldn't having an IQ of 5000 make you come up with something better than clunky robots?

Maybe we've stretched our own imaginations as far as they can go and we really have no idea where it's all going.

> I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want...

That's anthropomorphisation: the AI we have now only "want" to maximise whatever reward function we give them. The alignment problem is that any reward function is only a rough approximation of what we want, so the machines may well rush off and turn the universe into paperclips or tile it with molecular-scale smiley emoji because that's what we told them to "want" without really understanding what we were telling them.

But even then, regardless of IQ (which itself isn't a great description of even just human intelligence), any given AI may or may not have anything we'd consider to be qualia, an "experience" of getting this reward, because that's the hard question of consciousness which isn't solved.

The only thing I can be sure of is that we definitely have no idea where it's all going.

The “whatever the fuck they want” part is what I’ve always wondered about. What would a non-biological (super?) intelligence, stripped of any physiological desires, even want? Would they experience anything like emotion? Would they care to preserve themselves, or would they find this meaningless existence boring and simply decide to exit 0?

All I can do is agree with the other commenters that it’s clear that no one knows where anything is headed.

> Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why would it exist in physical, robot form ? Like, why not just be a light orb that lives in space or something?

Well, someone will have to plug cables and maintain solar panels or batteries or whatnot. Maybe the AI overlords will be ethereal neural networks in the cloud, but some kind of mechanical being (humans or robots) will need to do some groundwork.

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