> Hinton, 78, said that within a decade and possibly sooner, humanity will know whether it can manage the technology’s risks and enable what he called “radical abundance” or whether “we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart”.

lifting people's standards of living -- is _not_ a technological problem. So I don't understand why people think that AI might solve this, even more so because AI is not primarily being developed or used to solve human or social problems, because there is little financial incentive to doing so (not much ROI in developing something that's cheap or free).

The Earth isn't lacking in resources, they're just distributed highly unevenly -- and correcting that distribution is a social and political problem, not a technological one. In fact, AI is more likely to exacerbate inequality than reduce it.

Let's say that AI allows us to crack the code to nuclear fusion. That would be amazing from a technological point of view. But the idea that this will lead to free, or even cheap, energy for all is rather naive -- all we have to do is look at whether the invention of efficient solar power (a limitless resource that is now relatively inexpensive to develop) has lowered energy costs for the average American [0]

[0] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/h...