How the world may look like Post AGI - My assumptions

I don’t consider AI revolution like everything that has happened before like scientific revolution or industrial revolution. This is because of the intelligence and cognitive abilities that are associated with it

So in this essay, I tend to anchor less on history but more about the behaviour and utility of people.

I really have many questions just like you do. What will happen to economy? How the resources or intelligence is going to be distributed? What will happen to the societies and nations? What psychological implications it will have on humans?

What’s Artificial General Intelligence?

Simply, if a computer can perform human level task autonomously without the interference of humans and this isn’t limited to one task but about any given task.

PS: This above definition gets blurry and everyone has their own version on what’s AGI is.

We humans has 1 fundamental job in this planet. It is to survive and reproduce. That’s what all our internal systems has been optimised for.

For that, we learnt how to hunt, we were programmed how not to die, how to reproduce, how to be organised in groups to build better societies which was necessary for survival. Every actions that human do will be focused on survival and to pass the gene from one generation to another

I believe AI systems will have their internal goals as well. It could be to serve humans better, to colonise the universe or it could be any given goal which we don’t know yet. For this internal goal, AI systems will replicate and optimise all of their workflows to serve it. Same like humans, it has to learn independently on how to achieve the goal its been set to do. I think the human level performance to achieve the goal that its been set to do is what can be termed as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

What will happen to economy?

I think we all will have universal high income or universal basic compute. Both concepts are fascinating. We all will be given some units which will be traded off against goods, experiences or any sort of value that we want to transfer between individual or systems

I highly suspect a distribution problem on how universal income or universal basic compute will work. But I guess - AGI will have relatively better ability to solve for distribution

We humans are always wired to think interms of scarcity. I’ve X money and I’ve to make Y and how can I goto Y with X. With AGI being democratised, we’ll live in a world of abundance. We can get whatever we want with our thoughts.

I don’t think new jobs will open up. I like to be optimistic here somehow humans will find their place to operate in this world. But I don’t think that to be true if we consider the IQ of people in different regions of the world. So practically, we’d not have jobs or the jobs would be optional. And it’s not going to be a job based economy. It may look like sci-fi movie, but robots will most likely take over all our physical labor with the multi modal abilities of current LLM’s and we really don’t have to do both physical work as well as cognitive works. So economy wouldn’t be over the grounds of labor or money or intelligence. It’d be probably run on the collective goodness of human civilisation - whatever that fuzzy definition could be.

What will happen to societies and nations?

The world become more individualised, decentralised and yet connected. In the shorter term, politicians, regulators and decels across the globe will be fighting against the implementation of AGI systems. Even if we’ve achieved AGI, the adaptation by nations is going to be slow. We definitely will be moving from democracy or authoritarian regime to technocratic government system.

Our current political system is based on the ‘likeness’ (democracy) and not efficiency. But we need to have technocratic leaders who have understanding on Empathy+ AI and impacts +Human sociology & psychology+ Economics

If any country is still dependent on likeness, they’re more likely to be vulnerable by other AI systems of other countries. The political power shift will be extremely necessary but the transition will be super messy.

And I also believe human’s social identity of them being ‘humans’ will likely to be of all time high. We’re currently split between gender, race and every small identity but when faced with a larger threat or a larger component that we need to be solving for, we all will come together with a greater social identity of being 'humans’

What’s going to be the psychological impact on humans?

We know what social media is doing to us and the kids of this generation. Instant gratification, information overload, increased dopamine hits per hour. We may even have a neural systems in future where we are able to feel the happiness or sadness of other person with the help of AI.

Not to the ethicality of it, but our brains need to be embedded with AI systems if we’ve to survive. Because we have bandwidth problem when it comes to brain consumption. Eg: If a video is 1 hour, we’ve to sit entire 1 hour to get the knowledge/experience. Imagine it can be directly encoded to the brain within a click? So the later problem will come to treating brains as processing units.

AI’s will need lot of GPU and no amount of compute will go waste. So does our brains. So AI will most likely to be embed to our brains for better performance in the future which would be also the only way of remaining psychologically sane

In short term, if we’re not okay with boredom and peace, we’re going to face a lot of problems in near future. Because we find meaning through our work which is more likely to be replaced by AI. We all will be in search of meaning and probably AI’s will help us here too

In summary, these are assumptions. But I see future to be scary and exciting at the same time :)