Congratulations to Jacob Tsimerman for winning the Fields Medal!

The first "scenario" starts with this description

> By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead.

It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!

The first scenario reminds me of the 2023 LessWrong story "A Disneyland without Children":

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pk9mofif2jWbc6Tv3/fiction-a-...

It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.

What this is yet another demonstration of how being immensely accomplished in one field says absolutely nothing about what one may be able to contribute to another.

Oof. In the AGI scenario, why not preserve a deduplicated set of specimens like the unique set of individuals or groups at the top of their field in all walks of life ranging from sciences, sports and arts. But then there’s the cultural value of the global population in their shared norms and collective patterns. This too would be unique and valuable to an AGI vs not having it. Unless we were an existential threat to it, the AGI would keep us around for things beyond petty resource scarcity.

I recently read Kurt Vonnegut “Player Piano”, a novel that addresses automation taking over the economy. It’s not explicitly AI but addresses the same issues. Published in 1952, it was Vonneguts first novel and a real product of the post war era.[1]

Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2]

[1] https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player... [2] https://marshallbrain.com/manna