Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei is sketching out a vision of how advanced artificial intelligence could reshape the structure of society, pointing to the long-debated idea of technological unemployment as a real possibility in a post-AGI (artificial general intelligence) world.
Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Amodei cites an idea from the revolutionary economist John Maynard Keynes, who predicted a future shaped by labor-saving technologies.
“The structure of a society that has built powerful AI is just going to have to be different. If we go back to John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, he invented this idea of technological unemployment. He suggested that maybe his grandchildren would only have to work 15 or 20 hours a week.”
Amodei says that while some people will always want to work as hard as possible, AI opens the door to a different relationship with work for a large share of society.
“That’s like a different way of structuring the society. Some people will always want to work as hard as possible. There’ll always be segments of society who want to do that, but can we have a world where work doesn’t, for many people, need to have the centrality that it does, that people find their locus of meaning elsewhere, or work is about different things, it’s more about fulfillment than it is about economic survival, that there’s so many possibilities here.”
He emphasizes that the shift he describes would not be dictated by governments or regulators, noting that the people will have to chart their own path through the transition.
“I think society is flexible, and society can [adapt]. I’m not suggesting anything top-down. I think society needs to restructure itself. We all need to figure out how to operate in the post-AGI age.”
Elon Musk echoes the view, recently predicting that AI and robotics will make jobs optional.
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