What will it be like once AGI is achieved and AI can do everything humans can do?
The obvious answer to this is that it would be a situation where all material needs were taken care of and people devoted their time to leisure activities.
Here’s my take: People will not experience anything much that is different in terms their work and lives from the point of view of their perception of their daily stresses and complaints. From our point of view they will have nothing to worry but from theirs life will be a hard grind and struggle for ‘survival’. How do we know this? Because that’s the exact situation we are in relative to hunter-gathers. From their perspective we don’t have to work to get food – there is abundance all around us and most people aren’t employed in the production of food or even the means to support that production. Instead, most people are employed in weird abstract things related to people’s desires for various other things. Things are going to get even more abstract and people are going to need vastly more to be basically satisfied with their situation because that satisfaction will depend not on their actual material circumstances but rather on what is culturally required to be seen to have a good life.
It will be a mad Potemkin village. It will be an insane Tupperware party.
The one thing there will be to compete for in the post AGI world will be human preference. Presuming we don’t have the situation in which AI’s have rights (in which case it’s all over) people will need to spend all their working time marketing and being marketed to. Essentially all of the human economy will be humans trying to influence other humans to do things and in order to do this it will create as much ‘work’ as there is now. The ‘work’ will be completely meaningless of course but it will fatiguing and tedious nonetheless. The simple advantage that humans will have over machines in the work environment will be that they are humans with the rights and privileges that entails. Essentially the ‘advantage’ that humans have over machines will be a social and regulatory one. The job that the machine won’t be able to do is to be a human.
How this will manifest is that vast sums of money will change hands in the pursuit of human choice and desire shaping. AI’s will provide advice on the psychological means to do this and people’s jobs will essentially consist of taking what seem to us like bizarre actions and delivering lines scripted by AI to other people like some kind of weird filming event. If you want to know the future of work for most people it will be like being an extra in some kind of life action comedy taking place on the streets of your town or city. It will be the Truman show run under AI supervision for the purpose of consent to the thing itself. So the actual personal experience of people will be of sitting around until their ‘part’ is called to do some apparently pointless action like walking down the street and saying something to someone. This ‘live theatre’ will be endlessly nested within itself, with control over ‘inner loops’ given to those who have proved most obedient and accommodating in the most superficial manifestations like admittance to some masonic hierarchy.
All of this may seem nonsensical and laughable from our point of view – unbelievable no doubt, but the same could be said of indigenous understandings of western culture. I believe this or something like this will come to pass by virtue of the inherent nature of things.
Appendix
“In the late 1980s, Kopenawa, who hailed from the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon rainforest, traveled to the United States. The Yanomami, a tribe with limited contact with modern societies, had been studied for years by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.
When Kopenawa visited the U.S., he was not a passive subject; instead, he was keenly observant and articulate about his experiences and observations. His perceptions of American society were a study in “reverse anthropology.” Kopenawa was fascinated but also horrified by certain aspects of Western life. He noted the busyness and individualism of Americans, the vast wealth of resources but the equally profound waste, the detachment from nature, and the lack of communal living and kinship ties that were fundamental to Yanomami society.”
An excerpt:
When I arrived in New York, I was surprised that the city looked
like a dense group of rocky peaks in which white people live piled on top
of each other. At these mountains’ feet, multitudes of people moved very
fast and in every direction, like ants. They started one way and turned
around, then went the other way. They looked at the ground all the time
and never saw the sky. I told myself that these white people must have
built such tall stone houses after clearing all their forests and having
started making merchandise in very large quantities for the first time.
They probably thought: “There are many of us, we are valiant in war, and
we have many machines. Let us build giant houses to fill them with goods
that all the other peoples will covet!
https://letrasindomitas.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/2013-davi-kopenawa-bruce-albert-alison-dundy-the-falling-sky_-words-of-a-yanomami-shaman-the-belknap-press-of-harvard-university-press.pdf
Not in Reality 