The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.

If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.

But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny?

In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement. Digital prostitution in a very broad sense.

However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain. Additionally I am not sure if hypothetical future attention based society could be a utopia. You could have to mount cameras in your house so other people see you at all times for amusement just to have any money at all. We will probably forever need to sell something to someone and I am unsettled by ideas what can we sell if we cannot sell our hard work.

Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but it will come too fast and with people at the steering wheel that don’t exactly care.

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krainboltgreene an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"Extremely cheap sentience that cannot disobey will solve all our problems" is such an insane sentiment I see far too often.

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juleiie an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Useful intelligence does not require sentience.

As far as I know, none of LLM models are sentient nor are possible to be in the near future.

I also do not assume so called AGI to be sentient. Merely to be a human level skilled intellectual worker.

In absence of ethical dilemmas of this calibre for the foreseeable future let’s focus on the economy side of things in this particular comment chain.

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krainboltgreene 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

It must very comforting to be able to decided a "human level worker" isn't sentient.

It makes things so clean.

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juleiie 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

LLMs cannot possess consciousness for three reasons: they execute as a sequence of Transformer blocks with extremely limited information exchange, these blocks are simple feed-forward networks with no recurrent connections, and the computer hardware follows a modular design.

Shardlow & Przybyła, "Deanthropomorphising NLP: Can a Language Model Be Conscious?" (PLOS One, 2024)

Nature: "There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence" (2025)

They argue that the association between consciousness and LLMs is deeply flawed, and that mathematical algorithms implemented on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate. They also introduce the useful concept of "semantic pareidolia" - we pattern-match consciousness onto things that merely talk convincingly.

They are making a strong argument and I think they are correct. But really these are two different things as I said originally.

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krainboltgreene 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

You think I'm arguing that LLM's are sentient. I'm not. I never mentioned LLMs.

	▲	juleiie 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You are making as strawman about sentience when I was talking about economical impact of abundant intelligence. I should just ignore it but I was curious yet you have nothing valuable to say aside from common misconceptions conflating the two. Thanks for trolling I guess

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datadrivenangel 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If we used sentience to work towards solving our problems we could massively increase the human standard of living.

Which we have already done with regular computers! The problem is that competition means that we can't always have nice things.

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mxkopy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

We could also literally have Star Trek. Think of all the scientific discoveries we could make if we had armies of scientists the size of our labor force.

But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.

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juleiie an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe so but humans have this strange primal need to hoard resources.

Probably a remnant from prehistoric times when it was a matter of life and death. Will we ever be able to overcome this basic instinct that made capitalism such an unstoppable force? Will this ancient PTSD be ever cured?

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krainboltgreene an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Man if only there was a singular episode that covered this exact topic in Star Trek and resolved that no, actually slavery wasn't any different for artificial life.

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linkregister 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

Star Trek was entertaining television. There was also an episode where the ship's doctor made love to a ghost.

	▲	krainboltgreene 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		True, nothing to learn here. No introspection has ever resulted from media analysis.