The Promise of AI: Saving the World and Solving Its Problems

The Promise of AI: Saving the World and Solving Its Problems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being hailed as the technology that will revolutionize our world and solve many of its problems. According to Andreessen Horowitz, the most validated core conclusion of social science is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better. Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity. With AI, we have the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes much better. AI can help us take on new challenges that were previously impossible to tackle, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.

The potential benefits of AI are enormous. An AI assistant can be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes. Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet. AI can also improve warfare by reducing wartime death rates dramatically.

Perhaps the most underestimated quality of AI is how humanizing it can be. Rather than making the world harsher and more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer and nicer. However, there are concerns that AI could lead to societal disaster and the end of the world. These concerns are often irrational and driven by what Andreessen Horowitz refers to as “Baptists” and “Bootleggers.”

The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. However, the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive.

The proponents of “trust and safety” and “AI alignment” are clustered into the very narrow slice of the global population that characterizes the American coastal elites. This includes many of the people who work in and write about the tech industry. The fight over what AI is allowed to say/generate will be even more important than the fight over social media censorship. AI is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered. In short, don’t let the thought police suppress AI.

The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs.