Our Servants Will Do That For Us

The implicit promise of modernity is: we have to work really hard for a few centuries, but eventually we’ll get to the Star Trek future where we’ve automated all the drudgery, and all work is meaningful, heroic, and dignifies the spirit. We will be artists, scholars, captains of the starship Enterprise, etc. There’s a few problems with this idea: “Drudgery” and “meaningful work” are in the same complexity class, so the technology to automates the former also automates the latter. Our revealed preference seems to be that we prefer solipsistic convenience over human relationships. The rest of this post elaborates the argument. Task Complexity and AGI We’ve spent the last 250 years building machines to automate one task at a time, and the result has been overwhelmingly positive, for the simple reason that if a human can design a machine or an effective procedure to perform some task, then by definition the task is drudgery. And so the economic incentive to automate work has led to more…