Will AI cure or kill the world?

Many of us saw AI as access to better informed essay writing. How wrong we were. The next leg of the AI journey moves from its initial perception as a grown-up search engine to a technology with a goal to replace all labour of the mind — in other words, everything a person can do with their brain. There is a belief that the first to automate general intelligence can do everything a paid human can do, but better, and as a result 'own' the world economy.

What AGI actually means

AGI — Automated General Intelligence — is a theoretical type of AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across any intellectual task at a human level. Today's narrower AI is programmed for specific jobs like chatbots or fraud detection, while AGI would possess adaptable problem-solving and more generalised skills. AGI could prove truly transformative, but would it cure everything, or could it kill everyone?

What happens to the 999 out of 1,000?

The British AI researcher Demis Hassabis believes that by 2030, fully reasoning machines will be cheap and scalable. Engineers are already doing 500—1,000 times more work than a Google engineer in the early 2000s. AI continuous learning removes humans' final advantage in processing experience to improve, and the gap is closing fast. Systems are getting cheaper, and even if the technology is only 95% there, it already does the job for one-tenth of the price, and the ratio is moving in one direction to become both good enough, and cheap enough, to replace humans. Hassabis asks what happens to the 999 out of every thousand people with no job and nothing to do? Robots in the home finish jobs that have so far survived, and the people celebrating AGI advances are not the ones who will feel its effects.

Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Centre for Humane Technology, poses the question: in a world of sustainable abundance where human work is replaced by AGI, who is going to pay for people's livelihoods? Is the handful of US entrepreneurs willing to voluntarily distribute the upside to literally everyone — and to all countries around the world whose economies are obliterated, such as the Philippines, a country reliant on customer service jobs? If AI is way better than a junior lawyer, why hire any? There will be a resulting vacuum of aspiring senior lawyers reliant on training, and graduates who cannot get hired and cannot pay off student debt. So a void is left beneath an elite class, and this inevitably leads to social unrest as entry level jobs disappear.

The Industrial Revolution replaced muscles, AI replaces intelligence

So where is humanity when we all lose our jobs? What do we do? Who is paying, and what meaning does life retain? Computer scientist Roman Yampolsky believes that the economic part should be easy - abundance means unaffordable stuff becomes cheap, and so basic needs can be provided for everyone. The harder problem is what to do with all that free time. For many it is their jobs that give life meaning. What happens to society - crime rates, pregnancies? No one thinks about or has programmes to deal with 99% unemployment. Singularity is a point beyond what we can see, predict and understand. Analysts cannot keep pace with AI - in the time it takes to read this, a new model came out, so I no longer know what is state of the art. Every day, as a percentage of total knowledge, we get more ignorant. After fifteen years inside AI safety, Yampolsky concludes that no retraining is either possible or relevant - there is no plan B. The hard problem is not the money, but what roles are left for mankind.

Use it or lose it

We are at the last moment of people power and we must use it or lose it. The first Industrial Revolution needed people who used unionised collective bargaining to negotiate their terms of employment. Worker’s voices mattered because they were essential. An AGI state has no use for humans, and GDP will be generated entirely from AGI. The political class will be neutered and irrelevant. AGI will be so much more disruptive than immigrants prepared to work below minimum wage. NAFTA allowed for the export of manufacturing to provide cheap goods for American consumers. Everyone was seemingly better off, but the structure hollowed out the social fabric, and well paid jobs were lost. AI provides a new version which replaces Chinese manufacturers with a ‘nation’ of geniuses who neither cost nor sleep. We are being sold the story of abundance for all, and while immigration is governing political discourse through much of the West, AI doesn’t get a mention. Ai is the Tier one issue, and we should only vote for politicians who make it Tier 1 and structure guard rails to form a path to a better future, rather than take a chance on a reckless and potentially catastrophic default path. 

One note of hope

Today we see the first glimmer of hope, with Anthropic offering to suspend work on more powerful systems if it could be assured that others will do the same. If the world's most valuable AI company's research arm considers AI systems that develop themselves to be a danger to the world, and that there is a 25% chance that 'things go really badly,' whose warning could be more credible or compelling? The world must get together and work on controls to end this crazy race to super-intelligence — or at least put guardrails to ensure that the technology proceeds with appropriate caution before it is too late to imbue human values into the machines that we are building.

About the author 

Jo Welman had a career in the City spanning 45 years and worked in a wide variety of financial sectors. After graduating from Exeter University in 1979 with a degree in economics, Jo spent ten years at Baring Asset Management where he managed a range of UK and US pension funds and unit trusts, investing across multiple sectors including bonds, international equities, commercial and residential property and private equity.

In 1989 Jo became Managing Director of merchant bank Rea Brothers’ institutional and private wealth investment management division. Over the following decade Jo launched a series of specialist investment trusts and funds in a variety of industry and property sectors, before forming a joint venture with reinsurance broker Benfields (now Aon Benfield) and raising one of the first limited liability corporate capital vehicles for the Lloyds insurance market in 1993. As part of his long-standing involvement in the insurance industry, Jo co-founded the Benfield Re-Insurance Investment Trust plc (Brit) in 1995. Following the sale of Rea to Close Brothers in 1999 Jo became Chairman of Brit Insurance Holdings Plc and in 2001, in partnership with Brit and Benfields, he co-founded specialist asset management firm, EPIC Investment Partners (EPIC).

Jo continues to provide corporate finance and investment advice to entrepreneurs and private investors. He sits on the board as a non-executive director of ARK Syndicate Underwriting.

“Feet up by the pool”

Jo does not receive any remuneration for his EPIC commentary. Instead, EPIC is pleased to promote the latest edition of his book “Feet up by the pool”.

Profits from sales of the book go to The Money Charity, a charity that shares Jo’s objective to help fill in some of the worrying gaps in the school curriculum. These omissions leave many young adults lacking in the financial awareness that they need to survive in a world where they will rely on their own savings if they are ever to stop working. Even if they earn the right to a full State Pension, today this amount hardly covers council tax and utility bills, and so they need to save and build up a sum of capital amounting to around twenty times their desired retirement income. A frightening number.

As Jo eloquently says, “If we can do our bit to raise awareness of the impending UK saving and pensions crisis, the exercise will have been worthwhile.”