The field before AI was build up so that humans can learn and understand and teach other humans how to advance these fields.

AI is here 'suddenly'.

Let them discuss this out, let them go through the emotions.

And its unclear today IF we still need anyone doing anything in 5 years or not. In theory we could also just freeze 90% of things we do and put everythig into AI as a human race and just let AI do everything in 5 years.

We are not doing this because we don't know yet if it will play out like this, we don't know how much a human still needs to understand.

And to be clear, what you see as a 'problem' is just a capitalistic issue, not a human race issue: Its absolutly fine for us as humans to persue understanding for the sake of it

With the current power structures in place, assuming AI can really do all labor, why would the people in power keep us around then? What for?

They probably wouldn't go for the mass murder option right away because of the logistics issues and possible revolts but there is no reason to keep excess population around long term.

Yes, technically, they could realize that there is enough wealth for everyone now. They will not. The problem with capitalism is that it can't stop. They will try to accumulate more and more wealth until the planet is destroyed.

We will see the future that Start Trek promised, eventually. If humanity does not get wiped out before. But what is coming first will be a wave of bloody revolutions, it will not be pretty but necessary.

Thankfully we probably have quite a bit more time than five years left, realistically.

> put everythig into AI as a human race and just let AI do everything in 5 years.

That’s the SV sci-fi fantasy to World Domination via LLMs, which is actually a delusion.

There is a huge gap between an AI doing a specific task better than all humans and AIs working on all the tasks humanity needs. Humans do trillions of those tasks everyday.

Yes, this is another goalpost, but it’s nowhere in sight.

Human race is huge. Even if we focus only on compute, human race has 8 billion AGIs, each work with very little power. Yet sustaining energy (food) for human race is a real problem.

The main fallacy here is setting some variable to infinity in a back-of-the-envelope estimation. But there is no infinity in the real world and things don’t have to scale as predicted.

That last value is what has unleashed the knowledge and power under the prosperity capitalism depends on.

True, but then you're into the super big picture questions that The Culture books were generally asking.

I'm sorry but this can't be a serious take. Can AI chop wood in my backyard? Can it go grocery shopping for me? Can it build my garden shed? I highly doubt, in fact I disagree completely that "AI can do everything in 5 years"