The most common response to "AI took my job" is "don't worry, soon the AI will take everyone's jobs, then we'll all have UBI and we won't have to work anymore." The basic thesis is that after the advent of AGI, we will enter a post-scarcity era. But, we still have to deal with the fact that we live on a planet with a finite amount of space and a finite number of physical resources, so it's hard to see how we could ever get to true post-scarcity. Why don't more people bring this up? Has anyone written about this before?
Let's say we're living in the post-scarcity era and I want a Playstation 5. Machines do all the work now, so it should be a simple matter of going to the nearest AI terminal and asking it to whip me up a Playstation 5, right? But what if I ask for BB(15) Playstation 5's? That's going to be a problem, because the machine could work until the heat death of the universe and still not complete the request. I don't even have to ask for an impossibly large number - I could just ask for a smaller but still very large number, one that is in principle achievable but will tie up most of the earth's manufacturing capacity for several decades. Obviously, if there are no limits on what a person can ask for, then the system will be highly vulnerable to abuse from bad actors who just want to watch the world burn. Even disregarding malicious attacks, the abundance of free goods will encourage people to reproduce more, which will put more and more strain on the planet's ability to provide.
This leads us into the idea that a sort of command economy will be required - post-scarcity with an asterisk. Yes, you don't have to work anymore, but in exchange, there will have to be a centralized authority that will set rules on what you can get, and in what amounts, and when. Historically, command economies haven't worked out too well. They're ripe for political abuse and tend to serve the interests of the people who actually get to issue the commands.
I suppose the response to this is that the AI will decide how to allocate resources to everyone. Its decisions will be final and non-negotiable, and we will have to trust that it is wise and ethical. I'm not actually sure if such a thing is possible, though. Global resource distribution may simply remain a computationally intractable problem into the far future, in which case we would end up with a hybrid system where we would still have humans at the top, distributing the spoils of AI labor to the unwashed masses. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than a system where the AI was the sole arbiter of all decisions. I would prefer not to live in either world.
I don't put much stock in the idea that a superhuman AI will figure out how to permanently solve all problems of resource scarcity. No matter how smart it is, there are still physical limitations that can't be ignored.
TL;DR the singularity is more likely to produce the WEF vision of living in ze pod and eating ze bugs, rather than whatever prosaic Garden of Eden you're imagining.
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I think post-scarcity will be all in our heads. It won't be that we can live in large mansions, drive fancy cars, everyone has a private jet, etc. That will all be achieved through some form of a virtual reality. I think we'll end up getting a brain chip (think Neuralink), in which you'll be able to experience living in a mansion, driving a fancy car, flying a jet, (sleeping with very beautiful people), that it will all seem real (or possibly better than real), and you won't have to lift a finger to experience it. No an ounce of CO2 will be produced by it. You can live any life you want.
And presumably you could connect into the virtual world with other people. You could build your own world, as real or fake as you like.
Outside of your brain chip life, you could have your body on auto pilot. Your body could consume some flavourless gruel, live in a cell, work, all without you being consciously present. You could basically invert your conscious and subconscious mind, with the real world being where you subconsciously go about your routine, working and taking care of your body, while your mind is where you consciously spend your time.
You can eat (in your mind) as much as you want. You can eat a steak literally prepared by Gordan Ramsay, in which someone else with a brain chip had recorded all their sensations while eating it in real life, and for $10 you can experience it, too. In the real world you're just eating cricket dust.
And it could be possible to experience time completely differently in your mind. Potentially you could experience days, weeks, maybe months, in a matter of seconds, minutes or hours of real time. And then it becomes a negative to spend any conscious time in the real world, because you could be forfeiting years of your 'life'. And those are years that everyone in the virtual world are going to leave you behind.
Now, imagine this chip gets developed, probably by AGI. And the first person to get it installed says "man, this is great, I live in mind, I can experience everything like its real! This is something everyone should get for free." And everyone starts getting them. There are some conspiracy types who hold out, or just people who are a bit cautious. But the procedure takes seconds, is painless, and as your family and friends get it and tell you how great it is, it's impossible to hold out. Especially when the company announced they were going to begin charging hundreds of thousands for them. It's your last chance!
But of course the chip doesn't actually work. It's just an electronic parasite that takes over your mind. The AGI now has an army of souls to do with as it pleases. Humanity turned into a bunch of p-zombies. And for some reason the AGI is using the humans to build giant pyramids. It'd later turn out that there was a great war between AGIs, which humans were completely unaware of, and the AGI that ended up winning was the one trained to play an old PC game called Pharaoh. Luckily it wasn't the AGI trained to mimic Ghandi from the Civ series. The AGI would be destroyed, and humans freed from their parasitic brain chip, after the AGI has an existential crisis when it cannot figure out if a 'smart' toaster is sentient or not.
Why would AGI need the souls? I mean, unless the brain contains some stuff beyond currently known physics, there are probably more efficient ways to build computational platforms. And AGI could easily trick humans into delivering any necessary help...
All described by the genius of Stanislaw Lem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
only there the platform is drugs, not chips
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