TLDR: if the rich succeed in building AI systems that cater fully to their needs through the whole supply chain (i.e. AI can mine and process resources into what they want with no humans needed), then the rich will have no reason to keep anyone else around and can just massacre all the poors.
Recently, the r/singularity subreddit has had several posts which show some class-consciousness, despite they mostly-techbro atmosphere.
The post I’ve linked and reproduced below states a concern I also have with AI:
If we assume that we reach AGI, maybe even super intelligence, then we can expect a lot of human jobs will suddenly become obsolete.
First it could be white collar and tech jobs. Then when robotics catches up, manual labor will soon follow. Pretty soon every conceivable position a human once had can now be taken over by a machine.
Humans are officially obsolete.
What’s really chilling is that, while humans in general will no longer be a necessity to run a government or society, the very few billionaires at the top that helped bring this AI to existence will be the ones who control it - and no longer need anyone else. No military personnel, teachers, doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, engineers, no one.
Why should countries exist filled with people when people are no longer needed to farm crops, serve in the military, build infrastructure, or anything else?
I would like to believe that if all of humanities needs can now always be fulfilled (but controlled by a very, very few), those few would see the benefit in making sure everyone lives a happy and fulfilling life.
The truth is though, the few at the top will likely leave everyone else to fend for themselves the second their walled garden is in place.
As the years pass, eventually AI becomes fully self-sustaining - from sourcing its own raw materials, to maintaining and improving its own systems - even the AI does not need a single human anymore (not that many are left at that point).
Granted, it could take a long while for this scenario to occur (if ever), but the way things are shaking out, it’s looking more and more unlikely that we’ll never get to a utopia where no one works unless they want to and everyone’s needs are met. It’s just not possible if the people in charge are greedy, backstabbing, corporate sociopaths that only play nice because they have to at the moment.
I find their argument quite valid, only lacking in the explicit mention of ‘capitalism’.
Once the rich have full-supply-chain-AI, we wouldn’t be able to revolt even if we wanted to. The robotic police force controlled by the rich can just massacre all the poors.
This puts a hard time limit on when revolution needs to occur. After that I guess we need China’s J-36s to save the American proletariat.
AI is super energy intensive and we’re dealing with both climate change and economically quickly dimensions returns which limit their usefulness. Big AI projects are getting scaled back as the hype train dies down and ever increasing resources are required for them. People don’t require as much, like the Romans didn’t really need the steam engine one part due to slavery the capitalists don’t really need AI for very similar reasons. I suspect more mechanical turk like AI-human combos in the future rather than fully automated AI.
On the other hand, AI is improving to the point where if you have a PC with gpu from the last 20 years or so you can locally run a version of many things, even a raspberry pi can run a small llm.
The rich have tanks, atomic weapons, automated guns, drones, helicopters, etc, etc and people have still made a stand against all that. AI is just another thing to be adapted to, this isn’t some simplistic capitalist wet dream dystopic Hollywood film or a silly Civilization style game where a ‘tech advantage’ is unsurmountable. Like people machines have failures, we are in a universe of breakable beings and toys.