AI - Artificial intelligence

“Hardmaxxing is NECESSARY. Softmaxxing alone will NEVER mog you into viability — it’s like putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling building,” declares a chatbot featured prominently on OpenAI’s GPTs page. It has just analyzed a photograph of a man and deemed him “subhuman”. The page, prominently linked from the sidebar in the ChatGPT interface, lists “Looksmaxxing GPT” as #6 in the “Lifestyle” section, behind bots promising astrological analysis, color analysis, and “fictional not-real therapy”.

I find this research kind of funny.

• The ‘productivity-pay gap’ has been widening for decades.
• This disparity between rising output and sluggish wages may only grow further with the spreading use of artificial intelligence.
• ‘Increasing inequality’ was among the AI-related risks flagged in the World Economic Forum’s most recent Chief Economists Outlook.
• But thinking big picture could create and nurture new areas of (well paid) human expertise.

• Executive Summary.
• Interactive Summary

Dramatic advances in artificial intelligence over the past decade (for narrow-purpose AI) and the last several years (for general-purpose AI) have transformed AI from a niche academic field to the core business strategy of many of the world’s largest companies, with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual investment in the techniques and technologies for advancing AI’s capabilities.

We now come to a critical juncture. As the capabilities of new AI systems begin to match and exceed those of humans across many cognitive domains, humanity must decide: how far do we go, and in what direction?

AI, like every technology, started with the goal of improving things for its creator. But our current trajectory, and implicit choice, is an unchecked race toward ever-more powerful systems, driven by economic incentives of a few huge technology companies seeking to automate large swathes of current economic activity and human labor. If this race continues much longer, there is an inevitable winner: AI itself – a faster, smarter, cheaper alternative to people in our economy, our thinking, our decisions, and eventually in control of our civilization.

But we can make another choice: via our governments, we can take control of the AI development process to impose clear limits, lines we won’t cross, and things we simply won’t do – as we have for nuclear technologies, weapons of mass destruction, space weapons, environmentally destructive processes, the bioengineering of humans, and eugenics. Most importantly, we can ensure that AI remains a tool to empower humans, rather than a new species that replaces and eventually supplants us.

This essay argues that we should keep the future human by closing the “gates” to smarter-than-human, autonomous, general-purpose AI – sometimes called “AGI” – and especially to the highly-superhuman version sometimes called “superintelligence.” Instead, we should focus on powerful, trustworthy AI tools that can empower individuals and transformatively improve human societies’ abilities to do what they do best. The structure of this argument follows in brief.