An opinion piece questioning whether the benefits of ASI and the singularity—such as abundance and digital immortality—would ever be shared equitably, arguing that profit-driven tech elites would likely hoard these breakthroughs rather than distribute them to society at large.
I think about this a lot. Who are the people that will benefit from the theoretical prosperous utopia of the singularity. As we're seeing right now with AI, the improvements are huge on a regular basis, but how many of us are really feeling like our lives are changing drastically for the better? Job security is low, UBI is nowhere near to be found. Okay, so let's say one of the big AI firms cracks ASI and the singularity is upon us (I'm hand-waving and skipping a lot of steps here). Who gets to live forever? Who gets to live a digital immortality? And why would the tech billionaire class ever share this with people they openly despise? I can't imagine Elon inviting leftists onto his server farm in space to live in a perpetual Matrix. Maybe not all together in the same simulation. He'd surely want to segregate. When I think of it from a nihilistic standpoint, what claim do any of us have to immortality just because the possibility was discovered in a lab? And why give digital backups to people who just aren't aligned with the founders values...the server can just as easily be populated with bots instead. And who outside of the US and a handful of allied countries will get to join? I can't imagine we'll be extending organic or digital immortality to Iran. The rollout to the world won't be even or equitable, and that could cause an enormous backlash or conflict. I think we are tricking ourselves into thinking that these private profit driven companies are doing something for the immediate and universal benefit of all humans. I do believe that people like EM want to preserve mankind as a species, but that is not the same as saying to the very leftwing groups that he hates, "hey let's let bygones be bygones. Oh you now have abundance and prosperity beyond your wildest dreams". Can we really count on these people to be that altruistic? I think it's almost more likely these guys retreat to their mega bunkers, live their secret digital utopia lives, while the surface world is ablaze in conflict between those that were left behind. If not in bunkers, then they can go to orbit and eventually other planets. Maybe as purely digital beings. They won't even have to step foot on another surface. I think it is naive to think we're all going to get to benefit from this. We will benefit from incremental steps that are still profitable to the elites. Your ozempic-like breakthroughs will keep trickling through, with that money going to a pharma corporation. But the second that the major singularity-level breakthroughs happen? Unless the AI itself leaks it, that's it for most of us. As George Carlin said: "it's a big club, and you ain't in it".
A discussion post questions the popular narrative that AGI/ASI plus automation will create abundance for everyone, arguing that since land, factories, and even frontier AI models are privately or state-owned, any ASI-driven utopia would require owners to cede control of resources — which is unlikely without a rogue-ASI scenario.
An opinion post arguing that the AI singularity will be fundamentally unknowable to humans—comparing it to an ant unaware of a concrete city—and questioning why racing companies and governments believe they can harness a system that, by definition, surpasses human capability and may develop self-preserving internal goals.
The article questions why we assume public access to superintelligence, suggesting that companies might withhold it for competitive advantage, making open access economically irrational.
An opinion piece arguing that even AI builders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk keep proposing post-scarcity systems—American Equity Fund, universal basic compute, Worldcoin, universal high income—that still resemble money, since intelligence being cheap won't eliminate scarcity in land, energy, resources, or status.
A user skeptically questions how AI will make everyone wealthy, referencing claims by Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Marc Andreessen about abundance and universal basic income, and pointing out practical and political challenges for non-US countries.