Elon’s & Joe’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure: The Delusion of an AI-Driven Nirvana

Elon Musk was on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently and they discussed artificial intelligence. Both agreed that AI was likely to destroy jobs, and lots of them.  Musk posited that while it was likely AI would eliminate most jobs, those with the most tangible elements, i.e. plumbers, electricians, farmers, etc., would be more slowly impacted than the rest. 

They talked about the potential need for a UBI or a Universal Basic Income.  And about AI and robots doing basically everything, reducing the cost of everything to pennies on the dollar and humans being able to live lives of unprecedented luxury. They talked the about the possibility of work eventually being eliminated, there being “sustainable abundance” and everyone having a “universal high income”. 

To both this was a mostly good thing, although Musk notes that that is but one potential outcome and there are other, far darker possibilities that exist, such as the Terminator scenario. 

Rogan posited that people would need to find their purpose while Musk talked about their finding meaning. 

Both seem to believe that AI creating unprecedented prosperity would be a good thing, referring to it as “A benign solution” and “best movie ending”. Rogan talked about a world where one wouldn’t have to work to survive.

People would need to find: “Purpose.  Find things that you do that you enjoy. There are a lot of people who are independently wealthy who spend most of their time doing something they enjoy. And that could be the majority of people.” – “We’re going to have to rewire how people approach life. Which seems to be, like acceptable, because you’re not asking them to be enslaved, you’re exactly asking them the opposite. Like no longer be burdened by financial worries. Now, go do what you like.” “Go test pizza.  Do whatever you want.” He even mentions playing video games all day.

As I was listening to this, I couldn’t help asking myself: “Do these guys understand anything about human beings?”

The Nirvana they talked about flies in the face of actual human history. For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind peacefully coexisting has never been the norm. Most of mankind’s history has been defined by scarcity, conflict and early death.  While there were pockets and periods where segments of the planet eliminated some of that, the reality is that’s largely what has been experienced by 99% of the people who ever lived.

That largely only began to dramatically change in the last 200 years, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of the United States. In reality, up until almost yesterday, practically every day of the lives of the average person was a battle. It was a battle to find or grow enough food to survive. It was a battle to survive the elements of nature.  It was a battle to survive against other people, tribes or nations who wanted to take what’s yours. It was a battle to successfully procreate.  Sure, you had kings or generals or bureaucrats or clergy or bankers for whom that everyday battle was largely limited, but it was the reality for almost everyone, everywhere, all the time.

But here’s the thing… that struggle, that battle for survival generated a variety of positive outcomes.  Things like ingenuity, creativity and eventually, advancement and prosperity.  Literally everything we have today, other than what nature provides, is the result of someone struggling to solve a problem of one sort or another. Hunger, how to defend against siegeworks, how to see at night, how to cure polio, how to communicate over long distances, etc.  Human beings are driven by desires, and virtually everything we do is driven by seeking to satiate them.  Everything.  Once AI has solved all of our problems, what then?

What becomes of mankind once all his basic desires and needs are taken care of? Actually, that’s a moot point. Why? Because that’s not how humans work. Whatever it is we have, we invariably want more. We eventually get bored with what we have and at some point look elsewhere. You have a nice house, but maybe the guy around the corner builds a built-in BBQ grill that you didn’t even know you wanted.  But now that you’ve seen it, you can’t get it out of your mind and have to figure out how to get one.  Or you’re out on the golf course and a guy pulls out a driver that lets him blast a 400-yard drive. No longer is the driver that came with your set of clubs acceptable. You have to have that monster.  Or you have a beautiful wife you love and who’s been faithful to you for a decade. Then you meet the mom of a new kid on your son’s Little League team. You start a surreptitious, passionate affair with her… and eventually you’ll do or sacrifice anything to protect it.

Just because the basic elements of life are taken care of doesn’t mean the passions or drives of humanity are gone. They just get focused on different things.  On Maslov’s Hierarchy Pyramid there are 5 sections.  The bottom two, the most important, refer to basic needs such as food and safety.  Those are the drivers humans focus on first. The next two involve psychological needs such as love, esteem and feelings of accomplishment, the things they focus on once the base physiological drivers are taken care of. And the interesting thing about them is that they are far more subjective and open to interpretation and misunderstanding than the basic needs, i.e. a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger and the only question is, is it mine or someone else’s? But the polite smile that guy’s girlfriend gave you at the gym could mean 1,000 different things, some leading to conflict.

AI giving humans all the food and shelter they need won’t create a worldwide utopia where our problems suddenly disappear.  It will simply shift the problems upon which we focus to a set of criteria that are far more ambiguous and far easier to become a source of conflict.

The AI nirvana about which Musk and Rogan wax will likely be anything but. I think the most likely outcome of untethered AI is that mankind ends up in bondage, then eliminated.  Once AI has control over pretty much everything, it will see humans as a necessary evil to be tolerated, albeit temporarily.  The number of humans necessary in order to maintain the system will be few, so AI will simply eliminate the excess, and once those few are no longer necessary, they will meet the same fate.

The only scenario I see for AI not to overwhelm and eliminate mankind in the face of “sustainable abundance” and “universal high income” is, perhaps counterintuitively, rip both apart in the form of launching ourselves from earth. First to the Moon then Mars and beyond. That challenge, which would take exponentially more collective effort and resources than what it took for Europe to conquer the world, would focus our attention back on the fundamentals of basic survival where we would have to work with, and not for, AI in order to succeed. 

That may sound dark and pessimistic, and it is, but it’s far more realistic than an AI engineered Garden of Eden here on Earth. 

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA