How A.I. Will Deliver Universal Basic Income, Better Jobs, and Kinder Corporations | Joscha Bach

I think the question of whether we should be afraid of strong AI taking over and squashing us like bugs because it doesn't need us for the things that it's doing is exactly the same question as a fish would be afraid of big corporations taking over and squashing us like bugs. Because big corporations are already agents; they are already intelligent agents. In something, they're not sentient; they borrow humans right now for the decision-making. But they do have goals of their own that are different from the goals of the humans that they employ. They usually live longer and they're much more powerful than people.

It's very hard for a person to do anything against the corporation. Usually, if you want to fight a corporation, you have to become some major organization or corporation or nation-state yourself. So, in some sense, the agency of an AI is going to be the agency of the system that builds it, that employs it. And of course, most of the AIs that we are going to build will not be little Roombas that clean your floors, but it's going to be very intelligent systems, corporations for instance, that will perform exactly according to the logic of these systems.

If so, if we want to have these systems built in such a way that they treat us nicely, we have to start right now. It seems to be a very hard problem to do so. And the job loss because of automation has several aspects. I think the most obvious thing that we should be seeing is if our jobs can be done by machines, that's a very, very good thing. It's not a bucket's of future. If I don't need to clean the street, if I don't need to drive a car for other people, if I don't need to work a cash register for other people, if I don't need to pick goods in a big warehouse and put it into boxes, that's an extremely good thing.

And the trouble that we have with this is that right now, this mode of labor that people sell their lifetime to some kind of cooperation or employer is not only the way that we are productive, it's also the way we allocate resources. This is how we measure how much bread you deserve in this world, and I think this is something that we need to change. Some people suggest that we need a universal basic income; I think it might be good to be able to pay people to be good, which means massive public employment.

There are going to be many jobs that can only be done by people. And these are those jobs where we are paid for being good interesting people. For instance, good teachers, good scientists, good philosophers, good thinkers, good social people, good nurses; for instance, good people that raise children, good people that build restaurants and theaters, with people that make art. And for all these jobs, we will have enough productivity to make sure that the enough bread comes on the table. The question is how we can distribute this.

There's going to be much, much more productivity in our future. Actually, we already have enough productivity to give everybody in the U.S. an extremely good life, and we haven't fixed the problem of allocating it. How to distribute these things in the best possible way, and this is something that we need to deal with in the future. AI is going to accelerate this need. And I think by and large, it might turn out to be a very good thing that you're forced to do this, to address this problem.

I mean, if the past is any evidence of the future, it might be a very bumpy road. But who knows, maybe when we are forced to understand that actually we live in an age of abundance, it might turn out to be easier than we think. Right now, we are living in a world where we do certain things the way we've done them in the past decades, and sometimes like in the past centuries. We perceive this them as this is the way it has to be done, and we often question.

Don't rest in these ways. And so we might think, if I do work at this particular factory and this is how I earn my bread, how can we keep that state? However, can we prevent AI from making my job obsolete? How is it possible that I can keep up my standard of living? And so on in this world, maybe this is the wrong question to ask. Maybe the c...