How fast will AGI be adopted? How can we ensure equitable outcomes? Nations, Businesses, People...

one of the most common questions that I get as people realize that AGI is coming sooner or later there is still some debate over when but people kind of generally accept Okay AGI is coming now what so this question is how fast will it be adopted uh and that what what I mean by that is uh across various countries such as developing nations versus developed Nations as well as across small businesses or large benefits or large businesses and how can we ensure that the benefits are equally distributed so let's unpack some of that today in today's videos so the first thing that you need to know is that and I will caution that this effect is not universally true across all Technologies but in many cases small companies and developing nations have an advantage for adopting new technologies because there are uh fewer uh barriers to adopting and also more need in other words those new technologies will be far more transformative to them so one of the key examp examples is the development of solar and internet-based internet such as starlink and so the combination of solar and starlink for instance has allowed many rural places such as in India and Africa to just go straight from you know pre premodern industrialization into the internet age it's a very fascinating phenomenon uh I watched a documentary a few months ago of a um of a camel based Library where they would go from Village to village with a bunch of library books the backs of camels and then because of these new technologies they were able to update to just Kindles uh which is just a fascinating uh uh you know turn of events and so this Leap Frog effect actually allows for many places to just immediately Leap Frog into the future um and become modern very quickly now this is obviously not going to uh you know account for all of the infrastructure that is required such as industrialized agriculture um you know modern schools but this effect is very pronounced in some Fields such as in health and medicine so for instance um AI is being adopted much more rapidly for instance in rural India just because it's like hey if you have a thing that can help diagnose diseases or you know read radiography images better than the people we have we will use it whereas in developed Nations it's like well the doctors are all like you know I'm I'm better than any machine and then they'll throw up regulatory barriers and red tape and that sort of stuff and so you have a very different incentive structure between the developed na uh Nations and the developing nations and so because of that inertia that we have the economic and social and cultural inertia along with a like a massive sense of paralysis you often will see small companies can adopt AI much faster than bigger companies likewise you can often see uh developing nations adopting AI much faster than develop Nations so to delve a little bit deeper into that there are regulatory hurdles so whether it is approval processes you know like in America we have the FDA so pretty much any medical device or you know drug or whatever needs to go through a very long expensive rigorous process uh likewise there are going to be variances across sectors so for instance in some sectors it's like whatever we'll use it if it works uh marketing is an example you know video editing this video is actually edited by AI uh so just as an example um but you you wouldn't see that in medicine law a few other places um because again the some of the structures in place um one they're many many decades old so this is this is kind of the the Crux of it many many regulations are decades old and they were created at a time even before modern automation let alone the idea of AI uh level automation and so you end up with these policies that are built around the Assumption the core assumption that humans and only humans can do the entire process um but again when you when you take a first principles look what does what is actually required to do a thing whether it's to cultivate a field and grow you know grow crops or what is actually required to look at a at a contract and negotiate it what is actually required to um you know do test results and you know get you know diagnose a disease accurately even when um Ai and machines are able to do these things you have to overcome a lot of assumptions and again the key thing to look at is the incentives doctors in America want to keep making their big salaries lawyers want to keep making their big salaries the uh the institutions the laws the regulations have have all been built over many decades um with a bunch of assumptions when you go to a developing Nation you often have none of those assumptions but you also have very urgent unmet needs and so it's the first thing that is cheapest that is able to do it and so we should expect to see uh very fast adoption of AI in healthc care and education for instance in the developing World um and that's without doing anything special or you know other other than the fact that it is better faster cheaper and safer than humans you will you will get almost immediate adoption in the developing World whereas um more and more often so here's an example the American power grid is very Antiquated we were first out of the gate in terms of building a a power grid as big and sophisticated as ours but we haven't renovated it in decades so modern power grids that are being built for the first time in developing nations are often far more sophisticated than the power grid here in America so this is kind of that that fossilization that that oifc that happens when you have first mover Advantage is you kind of get paralyzed now uh as a student of history what I will say is that there is a lot of historical precedent for this so the Dutch East India Company was the first kind of global uh what you might think of as a global Corporation and the Dutch were very much ahead of their time in the construction of seagoing trading vessels so they had they had first mover Advantage right Silicon Valley is not the inventor of first mover Advantage the Dutch had first mover Advantage with their new sailing ships but then England which at the time was basically a Backwater said hey what are the Dutch doing and so they studied the Dutch building process they studied their banking they studied their trade routes and then they copied it and did better and so this actually helped England eventually become the first truly Global Empire um and so this is something that a lot of people are afraid of because you know right now America is still you know kind of the deao leader in a lot of Technologies but China is very very deliberately studying and copying us it's kind of a joke you've probably seen the the uh the SpongeBob SquarePants meme uh like it's a little video clip of of you know Us's is SpongeBob you know making a Krabby Patty and then China is Patrick who's copying SpongeBob and then SpongeBob like puts his hand on the burner but it's a fake hand anyways down a rabbit hole point being is that we make fun of China for copying like everything that the US is doing but there is historical precedent for that they are literally following England's Playbook which is copy success copy success even if you don't understand it just keep copying it and over the course of literally centuries because this is the time scale that Chinese think in because their not Empire but their nation has been around for many many centuries um they say okay it might take us a hundred years but we will figure out everything that the Americans are doing and we will overtake them um and so that very deliberate effort of saying hey we're not the world leaders but we're going to copy success if this is comes directly from Sun's Art of War it is it is right to learn even from your enemies especially from your enemies and I'm not saying that America and China are like you know blood Feud you know enemies to the death um at least not right now hopefully that never happens um but we'll see now another thing that I want to point out is that there are often technological uh catalysts so basically especially over the last 4 or 500 years starting with the sailing ships of the Dutch and the English moving forward uh or around the same time was the printing press and then moving forward to steam power rail uh electricity you know electrification uh that was really kind of ramping up about a 100 years ago a little bit more um then the internet age technology is always a catalyst for some of these changes and these and these Transformations and so today we have artificial intelligence um is is here and it's ramping up we have Fusion on the horizon we have Quantum Computing on the horizon so we we have a whole bunch of Technologies which are going to in all likelihood create uh a positive cycle or a positive feedback loop of virtuous cycle sorry and this virtuous cycle is going to create uh compounding returns and so we are going through another major Catalyst which could reshape the balance of power you know geopolitically but it could also at the very least spurn a lot of new innovation and so one of one of the examples that I like to think of is all of the technological innovations and economic innovations that happened because of World War II uh that's basically what we're doing again hopefully without the war so this is kind of the primary one of the primary things that I hope for which is one of the reasons that I'm very optimistic about the future is because yes America and China are locked in kind of a new technological arms race um hopefully we can both benefit from the technological advancements without actually going to war or even fighting proxy wars um I think the world is tired of great power proxy wars so time will tell uh on that front but either way we all stand to benefit if we use this Catalyst this moment of Catal uh this fourth Industrial Revolution as a technological Catalyst to really restructure uh society and the economy um and geopolitics but if we do it in a peaceful friendly manner you can wish in one hand right so speaking of the shifting World Order um there are a few things that make me wonder like how this is going to play out so right now China is the number two World economy only behind the United States but this is not the first time that this has happened in the last 50 years we had the Soviet Union was the number two you know Global power uh but now that's no longer true um likewise uh you know we had Japan was the number two World economy that is no longer true so really kind of what it looks like to me is we're playing a game of economic chicken uh you know China is trying to catch up whether or not they will be able to and one thing that I like to think of is that uh Russia or Soviet Union at the time there was no physical reason that it couldn't overtake the United States it was physically larger it had an AB hyper abundance of of uh fossil fuels um in the form of gas and oil it had all the energy it needed it had all the land that it needed um it could have economically overtaken America except for the social cultural economic and intellectual limitations and I'm not saying that like Russians are dumb what I mean is the beliefs that they had cultivated around economics the beliefs that they had cultivated around politics and the way that uh Society should be run and structured that's where the Soviet Union primarily failed on if you take a first principles look at the economic potential that the Soviet Union had there was no reason that it should have failed the way that it did but that goes to show that if you have the wrong theory if you have the wrong system the wrong set of beliefs you will not manage to stick the landing of development likewise when you look at China China is actually more resource poor than Russia and so that is actually a limiting factor that China has likewise their beliefs around um around economics and politics and Society might be the primary limiting factor however I've been learning more about history and kind of the theory of where China is going and they really are thinking in in in the timeline of 2 to 300 years um so if China doesn't overtake America by 2050 that doesn't mean that it's never going to happen um because again they're constantly studying um theory of what other people are doing now I don't necessarily agree with their approach and I don't necessarily agree with their conclusions because like I just learned that Ma dong was an incredibly well- read person very philosophical very deep thinking but he still took it in in the wrong direction so we will see if the world order shifts in the way that it does but put it another way this isn't our first rodeo um so we'll see what happens in terms of global adoption of AI and the impact that it'll have because you know AI on its own AI doesn't exist in a vacuum that's kind of the implication here so how do we navigate this transition how do we go from here to a better future how do we chart that course so first using that Lea frog logic um you know I've talked to Consultants um small businesses absolutely have an advantage whether it's a an existing small business or a startup that is built around an AI first model um we're starting to see those um so I actually have an upcoming interview with the founder of ask Sage so I'll be you you look for that because that was that was a company that was built around AI to serve a particular purpose um likewise developing nations have usually a lot more impetus and a lot less friction for adopting AI so small businesses developing nations they're actually going to benefit more and faster from these technological advancements however developed Nations have to uh look at internal risk Assessments in terms of their geopolitical uh you know orientation and you know using regulation correctly because you can actually use regulation to accelerate things the primary example is standards so interoperability using regulation for interoperability is probably one of the best ways that you can use regulation in order to accelerate things you know i e standards you know IPv6 IP uh as an example these are ways where where standardization can allow everyone to collaborate um and move much faster now that's not the only way that you can use regulation to um to accelerate Innovation and certainly you can do it wrong because if you choose the wrong standard which has been done plenty of times in the past as well um that can actually hamper Innovation um likewise you can also regulate Industries out of existence or you can you can use regulations to really slam on the brakes and and uh go against Innovation um and so this is one of going to be one of the key things where Nations uh developed Nations have to make a decision and be very careful about saying hey we want to make sure that we incentivize rapid deployment we also make want to make sure that we incentivize accountability because AI can be used to do a lot of harm uh and so then then the one of the key things that I'm worried about is if we don't manage to reallocate resources then we could be heading for Civil War and the reason that I believe that is and this is that's the worst case scenario we've had peaceful restructurings in the past without Civil War namely the the Square Deal by uh by Teddy Roosevelt and then the New Deal by his cousin uh Franklin Roosevelt so those are two those are two examples of America within the last century or so going through peaceful economic restructurings that were uh facilitated in part by new technologies and New Economic paradigms we've done it before we can probably do it again but if the existing institutions are too rigid and not flexible enough and we're not allowed to reconcile new technologies and new values then you know violent Uprising might be in our future now I'm not calling for it by by no means actually that's one of the key things that I'm trying to do is trying to avoid that but I want to point out this could lead to that um if we don't do it right so but it does it does come down to new paradigms that are afforded To Us by these new technological Trends just as every Industrial Revolution and every other intellectual Revolution from you know the printing press and and global trade um from the East India Company onward um these have all created Paradigm shifts um both political and economic so we just need to be aware of the fact that these Paradigm shifts are coming and it's a forcing function being driven by technology no amount of political willpower will prevent this tidal wave from coming now there's also some cultural paradigms that happen so one thing that people often talk about is like Dave you're talking about the fourth turning and I I looked into the fourth turning I think Joe Scott just recently did a video about it and it's really uh really interesting so go watch his video I don't really believe in the fourth turning but I having listened to Ray doio who talks about the rise and fall of Nations and debt Cycles I think the fourth turning actually is a misinterpretation of those debt cycles and so what happens is you will have um Global cycles of the rise and fall of Nations which usually takes about 300 years um give or take you know a few centuries um and so then you'll have this reshuffling of the world order so you had you know you had the Spanish the Spanish Main and the French Empire and then you had the English Empire now you have the American Empire and so like it just keeps cycling likewise within those Nations you have cycles of innovation and stagnation you have cycles of left politics versus right politics and so all of these Cycles kind of add up to create what looks like a soundwave honestly and so then over time you have these these rotating cultural values and so if you if you believe in these theories we are past the peak right now and so we're we're heading towards things getting more and more painful until things are painful enough and I what I mean is specifically in America and probably also Europe I think Europe is probably further ahead um looking at kind of the the economic pain that particularly France and Italy are feeling I think Germany is okay right now um but England France and Italy are in pretty economic Dire Straits so they're a little bit further ahead in this in this curve and things are going to get pain more and more painful until something breaks and everything shakes loose and then things are restructured now like I said that does not guarantee violent revolution but you will get a paradigm shift and so what you what you end up with is this Rising sense of Despair that particularly young people have that is that is a sign that we're less hopeful about the future and so it's like things are going in the wrong direction and they're continuing to get worse and they will continue to get worse until there's a forcing function and people say you know what let's throw things out and start over now in some cases that basically results in you know Civil War some kind of Uprising Rebellion um but it doesn't have to like I said here in America we have had two economic Paradigm shifts that were non-violent um and so we can do it again um France Italy we can we have proven that we are capable of peaceful Revolution um here in the western world uh now that's that's no guarantee of uh past performance is no guarantee a future performance however um these Cycles do happen and so if you read the writing on the wall we are heading for a paradigm shift and AI is going to be the Catalyst that's the key takeaway so I've talked about this quite a lot is economic agency is kind of the key thing to pay attention to when when people accept that AI is going to destroy jobs and that and that AI could allow for an an uh incredible concentration of wealth among the elite and The Powerful they say okay well so now what you know if if you lose your job if there's no jobs to go around anymore how do you you know have any kind of authority over your own economic fate and people are very rapid to point out you don't want to rely only on the government even if Ubi does work and it can provide a comfortable level of living you don't necessarily want to put all your eggs in one basket so this is why I also talk about structural incentives right now we have enough economic agency you can choose to work for an employer you can choose to start a business you can choose to get on YouTube like I did you can there's a lot of things that you can choose to do you can buy and sell property but if all jobs go away and like even my job might go away like there are AI only YouTube channels out there now those might replace all of us we don't know um and so if you lose economic agency this is one of the shortest thing that has caused civil wars in the past which is why I'm I'm not pulling my punches anymore like we do stand a risk for civil unrest because even if the economy itself is going really well you can still have people with no economic agency and the way that that works is because the economy is based on the production of goods and services if AI can produce goods and services the economy is technically doing fine but if people don't have economic agency they're not going to be happy about it and so this is one of the primary things that I've been studying and talking to people about is how do we ensure how do we PIV it to a post- labor economy a hyper Capital economy and ensure that people have economic agency now a lot of people have talked about communism and socialism and blockchain and you know Dows and that sort of stuff and I think that it's going to be a little bit of everything um I don't think it I don't think we can Abide a oniz fit-all solution it's going to have to be hundreds and hundreds of little changes and some bigger changes here and there in order to make this transition um and so the correct time to start doing these experiments is now well actually the the best time to start doing these experiments around New Economic paradigms is like a year ago the second best time is now as things get worse and as the technology ramps up so you're going to have like we've already been on kind of this downward trend for a while and now technology is ramping up and so you're going to end up with this inflection point and that's when the Cycle's going to restart and so this is one of the things that acceleration is talk about is let's just go ahead and get to that cycle restarting as fast as possible I disagree because when you have these accelerationist uh mentalities um if things get too painful too fast that's when you end up with war um now that being said that this cycle restarting is inevitable it's like Thanos and the snap it is inevitable we you can't get off the roller coaster but what you can do is you can tap the brakes and you can brace for impact which is that's literally the primary point of this channel is to communicate this message and get people thinking in the right direction so that we can make that transition as smoothly as possible now one thing that's going to happen is that um as particularly as younger people cuz like I'm I'm economically doing okay so I'm not one of the people that's going to be pushing super hard to you know throw every you know burn it all down and start over um but younger people who are not doing as well or people my age who are not doing as well they're going to have a lot more energy for change they're going to have a lot more hunger to say you know what this isn't working for me and honestly this is actually why I think what is it like 53% of Millennials people my age don't believe in capitalism anymore that number is just like that's that's strange this is a sign of what's happening and really what that is one way to interpret that is saying we know that this isn't working for us and we don't see hope in this future we don't see hope in this Paradigm we want something new and so that's part of what I'm here to help create is what is that new thing that we need what is that new paradigm that we need whether it's a social Paradigm a cultural Paradigm economic political paradigms this is all part of what I'm exploring with this channel so a key thing that happens when the cycle restarts is power redistribution whether it was the American Revolution the French Revolution the American Civil War the Arab Spring the Russian Revolution the Great Leap Forward all of these were about re restructuring the power of a nation and sometimes you re you rebalance the power between nations but right now I'm really focusing on internal affairs but of Nations and so what you do is um because of these new economic paradigms because of the the economic pain that people are in you end up with a lot of political willpower to say you know what let's tear down this institution and rebuild it let's change something and so kind of like what you'd expect is you would want to see a very um what typically happens I'll say this is you end up with a a populist demagogue like we had with Trump the thing is though is I don't know that Trump was equipped to navigate this change and it also might have been a little bit early but the election of someone like Trump is a sign of things to come where you have someone who is just very energetic willing to break things willing to challenge the Norms who is an outsider and an activist so we should expect you know I think I think Joe Biden getting elected was people were like okay that was a little too much let let's go back to like whitebred plain vanilla you know politics for a little bit but we should expect to see another activist politician coming um in America before too long and so the two things that this that this activist is going to need to challenge as far as I can tell is one the military-industrial complex so when you look at how slow and ineffective um like the SLS is at Nasa when you look at how incredibly expensive and entitled and privileged um the defense industry is and the fact that it like it's just above scrutiny um that's a problem that is that is a rigid paralyzed economic institution that is inefficient it's wasteful it's backwards and it's also emblematic of a previous Paradigm the second thing is the revolving door of L of of politics and lobbyists and so the some of these are some of the democratic reforms that are going to need to be uh implemented as part of this transition again I don't have the full picture like I said it's going to be literally hundreds if not thousands of little changes and dozens of bigger changes to create this New Economic and political Paradigm but part of what happens is the redistribution of power because right now power is too concentrated and it's getting more concentrated now another thing that we need to think about in terms of how do we get equitable distribution of uh economic agency and Power in the future is we need to come to terms with the fact that the economic future is very Capital intensive and so what I mean by that is if you accept that we're heading for a post- labor economy meaning that human labor is not economically viable that by default means that we are heading for a capital intensive future which means those who own the capital are going to be the ones who have all the economic power and economic power translates to guess what political power and so as the importance of human labor goes down you lose economic agency you also lose political clout that means part of what we need uh for the future is we need to have more decentralized Collective private ownership of the capital which is why I say that Ubbi even if it does work is not a complete solution because of those power structures if you are 100% dependent on the government that creates perverse incentives for the government to just do whatever it wants so you don't want that future so this is why I'm a big fan of blockchain Technology decentralized autonomous organizations um you know I've talked to some people about it token izing all property so that it can be easily traded uh maybe that's part of the solution I don't really know um but we do need something new we need some uh new legal precedent economic precedent for better models of ownership because again we are heading the by definition you know a post- labor economy is the flip side of that is a hyper Capital economy where capital is the only thing that matters in the future or the primary thing that matters I won't say the only thing but where where if machines are all as smart as Einstein and all as productive as you know the most productive human workers 10 times more so than whoever owns the machines they own the economy and therefore they own politics and that's not that is how you get the cyberpunk dystopian hell that we want to avoid or worse so some of these economic reformations means that we need new uh metrics we need to measure new things we need to optimize for new things um so uh looking at inequality and having that as a primary bench Mark um so like the jinny coefficient for instance political power measuring people's economic agency um that is that is actually probably a new Benchmark that we need um and I don't I don't even know how to measure that yet I've I've done some thought experiments with the help of chat GPT it's very difficult uh and not intuitive to measure economic agency because it's not just a matter it's not just a matter of how many dollars you have it's what you're allowed to do with those dollars and how do you get more dollars right because if you get money what do you then do with it and then how do you ensure that those money stays in circulation what are you allowed to do with that money and ideally this future that we're building you actually end up with more options than you have today and again like if you want if you want economic agency to go up and to the right you want more of it I don't know how to get that right now but this is going to be a major evolution of all of the assumptions that we make about the economy because for literally all of human history the economy was predicated on human labor and now it's more and more predicated on machine labor and eventually we'll just end up with no human labor um and so this means that we'll need new economic paradigms around ownership again I don't know how to implement it but I know what's coming and I know that this is going to be a big part of it so thanks for watching I hope you got a lot out of this let me know what you think in the comments oh by the way I know about a third of you watch till the very end I do have a new post labor economics uh group on LinkedIn it's a professional Network um link should be in the description so cheers thanks for watching um yeah let me know cheers I said that already bye

Channel: David Shapiro

Views: 62,945

Keywords: ai, artificial intelligence, python, agi, gpt3, gpt 3, gpt-3, artificial cognition, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, futurism, humanity, ethics, alignment, control problem

Id: YZB-JZ_-cDs

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024