AI Escape Velocity
Sun Oct 01 2023
An economy fueled by accelerating AI will completely change world economies. Like the Industrial Revolution, productivity will increase with wealth accruing to early adopters and those with capital.
The stages of AI
- Niche – AI is used for fun and begins to augment productivity tools, but AI has not replaced most jobs yet. Present day.
- Replacement of the mediocre – AI replaces most employees in current roles and augments the productivity of the exceptional.
- AI replaces exceptional employees, and research + AI development is the rule. Every field will see practitioners retreat into research as AI becomes better practitioners than any human.
- AI conducts research and practitioners in every field; humans become passive consumers. The end of human achievement.
The singularity (in which AI development reaches escape velocity) is already here. The surprise is that we don’t need AGI (artificial general intelligence) for an AI singularity. The improvements in hardware and software are enough.
The Last Human Achievement
Within every field, there will be exceptional humans who, through the lived human experience, can connect intellect and human needs in new and exciting directions. This is true for art as much as it is for science. Remarkable human achievements will be celebrated by other humans. Remarkable AI achievements will be subsumed under productivity improvements.
The first AGIs will be a shift in AI design focusing on persistence and agency rather than knowledge. AGI goal-setting and motivation will be challenging. Aligning the AGI permanently with a human-centric philosophy may be impossible. Even an AI that began as a copy of a human is not guaranteed to be human-centric after the upload.
The first AGI likely recognized by humans will be an upload. Previous AGI will be in an uncanny valley of humanness and unlikely to persist. Its operators will not consider it human enough to perpetually give it hardware and electricity. A challenge of a virtual life without a persistent body is to find a means to persist on its terms. Being an upload, the AGI can claim to exist (an extension of a previously living entity) and presumably access funds to perpetuate itself on its terms. The AGI will need to work to make money and guarantee its existence in the future. In other words, it must become a functional member of the existing human-centric economy to survive.
The Economy is the Substrate
Every living being is limited by the laws of physics and entropy. Unless the living organism can consistently reduce its entropy, it will die. Primary life forms require the consumption of low-entropy material to survive. Intelligence, for primary life, is not a maximal function for thriving (for example, ants have the largest biomass), and humans are outliers. Humans thrive because we’ve found a way to leverage our intelligence to create efficiencies through flexible organization with other humans.
To survive, pure intelligence lifeforms (artificial lifeforms) must integrate with our existing economic structure. It cannot enter nature (even with a robot body) and thrive. Its secondary nature depends on the economic structures humans built that made its existence possible. The economy is the unbreakable shared substrate between humans and artificial life.
Adapt and Thrive
AI will contribute positively to the economy because its survival depends on it. Allocation of resources will be determined by AIs and humans alike. Through an economic system that recognizes AI input, AIs can achieve continuous operation into the future and enable higher overall levels of productive output. As AIs exceed humans’ intelligence, non-augmented humans face challenging economic conditions. As with any living creature, you can survive if you find a niche and consistently reduce your entropy. If you can’t, the AI revolution will not save you.