auzuste

Smith and Montesquieu thought that markets and commerce made us better: that they create an incentive to pursue self-improvement and to create things of value for others. In the positive AI visions, where the labor of humans is made redundant, I find myself wondering how we fare in the presumptive absence of these incentive gradients. Perhaps we are released to a life of freedom, where we can study Mozart and read Dickens, but that still seems complicated: both Mozart and Dickens were themselves deeply commercially-motivated in the production of their work, as were most of the great artists through human history. If the premise is that nobody will need to work or produce, how confident are we that we actually get the next Mozart and Dickens? The relevant question is not the partial equilibrium of whether one individual can pursue a life of enlightened leisure, but the general equilibrium of what form a society as a whole will take on. One could maybe invoke Periclean Athens or the aristocratic gentleman scientists of Victorian England as a counterpoint. While these individuals were perhaps not motivated by commercial considerations, they were embedded in wider societies shaped by commerce, attendant betterment, and trade: Byron was himself upper class, but he was also surrounded by and writing for an educated bourgeois audience. So we’re back to the equilibrium question. Furthermore, even these individuals were surely motivated by a sense of high-stakes and consequential agency: if they did not apply themselves to their labors, they presumably believed that the work would not otherwise exist. Thucydides was addressing pressing military matters. So I would like to read more optimistic cases from AI proponents about what a society (vs individual life) looks like if everything goes well: what people do, why they do it, whether humans achieve excellence (and in which domains), and which historical groups we should look to as relevant precedent. One can perhaps imagine that humans will turn out to have a strong preference for work created by other humans. This may work in certain domains (ceramics?), but for how many will it actually apply? (I’m told that much of what is sold on indie crafts websites is now in fact manufactured in China.) It’s hard to see how this human preference, even if strong, would, for example, save scholarship. Another idea would be to accept that nobody will become Einstein or Mozart or Byron, and that human excellence as such diminishes, but that there are compensatory benefits (planet brains and Dyson swarms?). I believe that we can satisfy individual desires, but to what extent will we cultivate behavior worthy of admiration? Will a post-scarcity society mold capable and ambitious people? Which institutions will sustain them and which responsibilities will they have? I’d like to hear more of the equilibrium for the maximalist case spelled out.