Afterwards

Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist interviewed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on the topic of "The Day After AGI."

A short period of time was spent talking about the disruptions to the labor market that growing adoption of generative automation is bringing and that "artificial general intelligence" could bring if and when it arrives on the scene, and during that section of the conversation Mr. Hassabis expresses a hope that AGI might bring about a post-scarcity society. It's a hope that I find to be completely misplaced. Technology companies may be able to find a way to make computing resources cheap enough to effectively give them away to the public at large, but unless people are reliably able to turn that access into money, things like food, shelter and clothing are going to become problems.

But then, interestingly, Mr. Hassabis says that what keeps him up at night are concerns over how people will find meaning and purpose.

And I've always found this strange. I've known a few people who have been able to retire from the working world relatively young, along with those who stopped working at regular retirement ages, and none of them have suddenly found themselves bereft of meaning and purpose. Given that their material needs are taken care of, they fill their time with things that the want to do. Not to mention people too young to have entered the workforce full-time... there's no indication that people who aren't metaphorically punching a clock every day are succumbing to ennui en masse.

I've never certain if the tech utopianism that many executives in these companies express is a carefully-vetted corporate talking point, created expressly for public consumption, of if they somehow actually believe that some great redistribution of wealth is going to take place to allow people whose labor has been devalued to survive. Talk of how people will find "meaning" in the absence of being able to make a living may sound like concern for those who aren't independently wealthy, but if that's what it actually is, it completely misconstrues the problems that are going to actually need solutions.

To be fair, Mr. Hassabis does note that he doesn't know if society has the right institutions in place to distribute productivity and wealth "more fairly." But I think a better follow-on to that observation would be a plan to create them, and get them into place. But that's not Mr. Hassabis' job. It belongs to society at large, which, so far, has shown no interest in it.