In today’s episode, we’re shifting gears to address the potential downsides of AGI, moving beyond science fiction tropes to focus on the real-world risks. You’ll discover the social and economic challenges AGI presents, such as job displacement and widening income inequality. You’ll learn why these issues demand immediate attention and what steps we can take to mitigate negative consequences. Tune in to understand the potential perils of AGI and become part of the solution!
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
Christopher Penn: All right, let’s continue our five-part series on artificial general intelligence. This is part four: the perils of artificial general intelligence, unintended consequences, and risks.
Let’s recap real quick. General intelligence, artificial or not, is the ability to address a problem, without having experience in it, to solve or start solving it with no background with it—we haven’t been trained to do it.
You and I have this ability. Many animals have this ability, and machines—we’re trying to get them to that ability. There are five levels of AI, from narrow use, to more broad use within a domain, to collaborative use (where the AI is semi-autonomous and doing things), to expert super intelligence (where it can… it can exceed human abilities for a given task), to fully autonomous, kind of self-directed—”does its own thing”. That’s sort of the pinnacle of artificial general intelligence.
AI in general, and AGI in specific, have some interesting perils. A lot of people have sort of latched onto the existential perils—or, like I call them, the “Skynet and Terminator” perils, like, “Oh, the machine becomes sentient and self-aware, and kills us all.”
It’s not that that can’t happen. I mean, if you think about it, if you gave a machine—absent other guidelines—you gave a machine and said, “Optimize for the maximum biodiversity and overall health of planet Earth, of the ecosystem you’re in,” rationally, logically, scientifically, you would look at the earth and all the different complex systems on it and go, “Wow, humans kind of suck. Time to get rid of you.”
That would be the logical thing to do because humans are most of the problem on the planet. If you gave an artificial intelligence a very broad mandate to say, “Optimize for maximum biodiversity and overall long-term health,” it might say, “Yeah, yeah, those humans, they got to go.”
That is the least of our problems.
Could it happen? Yes, if you have a machine that’s sufficiently… sufficiently sophisticated, and is not air-gapped (which means it’s directly connected to the internet and stuff), you, you theoretically could have a Skynet/Terminator scenario. It’s unlikely, at least in the near term.
What is a lot more likely is machines becoming really good at lots of general tasks. What does that mean? It means things like job displacement.
We’ve been saying for a while that AI is not going to take your job—a person who’s skilled with AI will take your job. That is true, but as generative AI continues to accelerate, and we start seeing a path towards general intelligence, that statement becomes less and less true. There are jobs now that can be done by a machine, entirely, soup to nuts.
Give you an example: I worked at a PR firm, and the most junior person on staff, the account coordinator on this one team—this is now, granted, this was about 10 years ago—this person was copying and pasting results from Google into a spreadsheet. That was their job, 40 hours a week; that and taking notes in meetings, and writing up the meeting notes, and sending it to the client. I can do the meeting notes part, no problem. I can do the copy-paste from Google, no problem. So that job goes away.
That’s a kind of… That was a trade-off, because, on the one hand, that person no longer has employment, because you don’t need people doing those tasks. On the other hand, that’s kind of a soul-crushing job, so it might not be the worst thing for it to go away.
But, as we work up that ladder toward general intelligence, job displacement increases for existing jobs. Now, one of the flip sides to this is that there will be entirely new jobs we don’t know about yet. We can’t see, we have no idea what they will look like.
We’re starting to see… Christopher Penn: …that now. A friend who has a PhD in England—they have a job, they have a job writing content… for AI. They write content to train AI. That’s what they do. They get paid, like, $80,000 a year to do it; their content never sees the light of day, no human sees it. It’s just being built—they’re just being a trainer of machines. That job did not exist three years ago. Brand new job. There are going to be lots and lots of jobs that we don’t have any idea what they are yet.
They’re going to—and we talked about this recently on the x-factors video—there’ll be jobs that we have a sense of where they’re going to go, based on other macro trends.
But job displacement, as we work up the ladder, will increase. It will not be overnight. It’s not going to be, you wake up one day, and no one has jobs. It will be a slow erosion of today’s jobs, and the challenge for us as a society will be, “Can we create new jobs at the same pace we are eroding away the old jobs,” so that we don’t have structural unemployment. That’s a big problem.
The second big problem on our way towards general intelligence is economic inequality. This is a big one. The more sophisticated and skilled AI gets towards AGI, the more you have income inequality, because you are now no longer paying humans wages, you’re now essentially having machines take over more and more labor. As that happens, people who use that output pay the owner of the machine. That money goes up to the owner, but does not then go back down to other people in wages, and that creates very severe income inequality problems. To the point where, if we don’t get a handle around this, we will have issues with things like civil unrest, because of structural unemployment.
One of the challenges of AI that we do not have with previous generations’ technologies is the literal generation. In old times, the move from agriculture to industry happened over a century. Okay, over, like, a century and a half. So the way you did things, the way your kids did things, the way their kids did things were different, but you, yourself, never had to retrain because, by the time the technology changed enough, your kids were doing it differently. They just learned in a different way. That gradual change allowed for labor markets to shift.
AI is progressing towards general intelligence so fast that a person who is 35 today, in five years, will be 40, and they may have to reskill entirely. They don’t think… There’s not enough time for their kids to grow up and learn to do that same profession differently.
So that income inequality is going to be a significant problem.
The third major problem on our march to general intelligence is misuse. Misuse, from political manipulation, and deepfakes, and simulations, to just distortions of truth, and there’s no good answers for that yet. There may be some down the road, as machines evolve to basically fact-check us, but that’s going to be an issue for a while.
The existential risks are not as big as those societal risks. Those societal risks are going to be the problem we have to solve in the next five to 10 years. If we don’t, there will be very bad consequences.
Generally speaking, when you have substantial inequality, that’s when the pitchforks and the torches come out, and that’s never pretty. That’s always, always bloody. Generally, when you have a politically unstable system, bad things happen. Again, that’s not a huge surprise. And generally, when you have structural unemployment, bad things happen.
So we need to solve for these things sooner rather than later, and there are ways to potentially solve for things, like universal basic income, and robot taxes, and things—or, frankly, just enforcement of existing corporate tax laws. There are ways to solve that, but we need to do it soon.
All right, that’s going to do it for this part. In the next part, let’s talk about ethics and governance and the likely road ahead. So stay tuned.
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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