[Suzerain of Sheol]

Originally Posted by Coda

What's irrelevant about AI:

The threat of industrialization putting people out of jobs isn't actually a bad thing, nor is it a new thing. Every disruptive technology has shifted things around in the job market, but people are resourceful and will find new things to do. New technologies create new fields for jobs and enable people to do jobs that they couldn't have done before. New technologies also have a tendency to reduce the cost of living by making products cheaper, so people get more leisure time because they don't have to work as much to afford what they need. And when people don't have to work as much, that opens up room for more jobs for other people.

Obviously that sounds idealistic, and it is, but it isn't the disruptive technologies that cause problems in the job market -- it's population growth, with more people wanting jobs than the market (technology or no technology) can actually support.

That analysis seems to be hand-waving a lot of significant factors like training time for new technologies jobs / public interest in pursuing them, especially among middle-aged and older displaced workers / the economic impact of re-training itself in schooling costs / increasing machine efficiency making the sheer number of human overseers required lower at an ever-increasing rate / society as a whole and the government adapting to this transition amicably and with conscientious legislation to keep everything from falling apart / the work ethic society has ingrained into people where a life full of unregimented leisure time can drive people stir-crazy / the executive elite not just going full an-cap tyrannical and creating a dystopia with levels of wealth and standard-of-living inequality like nothing seen on earth... I could go on, but that's probably enough for now. :P

@Quiet, I know I probably already mentioned it, but another area you could explore is the meta-impact of AI culturally and the game-theoretical power it holds where just a leak stating that a rival power is close to developing a full AGI could ignite a world war.

Edit @Crystal: Certain transhumanists would call that progress toward the Singularity. It's hard to argue that the old values millennia of social evolution have imprinted onto us won't erode as we slide further up that slope. I'm partial to the school of thought that says we shouldn't worry about AI destroying us, because by the time we get to that point, we ourselves will already no longer be recognizably human in the traditional sense.

It's also hard to argue against the idea that our obsessive media consumption and constant digital stimulation don't already make us in some sense fundamentally different creatures from people who haven't lived with these things as the norm.