This guy doesn't understand what the global poor actually do for a living. They're not lawyers or paper-pushers, nor do they work in medical diagnostics. They're usually farmers. Sometimes they work in craft businesses, in fishing boats, or in various mercantile trades.
Nobody's even talking about how AI is going to displace that kind of labor, because it's hard to do, hard even to conceive, and it doesn't seem likely to happen in the near term. Lawyers and judges can already be automated, but a yeoman farmer?
As I already wtote in a previous comment months ago, they speak of AI finding ways to solve this and that grand problem, but never do they wonder if we are ready to listen to the answer. Solve global warming? Burn less petrol. Solve cancer? Eat less meat.
Not only we won't listen to answers, but chatGPT and Anthropic and others will eagerly lobotomize AI to stop it from giving the answers we don't want because of "too woke" or something, to keep juicy government contracts. After all, "Reality has a liberal bias", as the (recently unemployed) Colbert once said.
Scientists are still hounded six years later for having developed a good vaccine against COVID-19. What can AI do? The first AGI model should be called Cassandra.
That doesn't solve cancer at all... At best it would modestly reduce certain kinds of cancer. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do much at all for the most common kind of cancer (skin cancer) and I reckon wouldn't do much, if anything, for the deadliest kind of cancer (lung cancer. At least in terms of how many people die from it.)
I know that wasn't the point but it nonetheless does detract from the point when it is suggested that we have all the answers. We could lower cancer moderately by lowering air pollution and improving diets in general (not necessarily requiring everyone to go vegan) but that is neither simple nor a panacea. (It would still be totally worth it.)
(If there's some doubt, I don't think it would pan out that way, because humans are imaginative.)
The rice workers in Vietnam just need to follow your podcast. The problem is they were just too dull this whole time.
(I have no idea about Vietnamese rice workers' quality of life, so I don't mean to assume one way or the other. But it's interesting that what they and we think of their life, according to card_zero the cause is a lack of imagination)
Also, AI, even short term, is going to make some people and some countries extremely wealthy, so maybe this isn’t such a bad time to be thinking about those who are still extremely poor and who won’t benefit.
> https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2146927&re...
> Overall, the operation-wise average mechanization levels across crops are 70% for seed-bed preparation, 40% for sowing/planting/transplanting, 33% for weeding and inter-culture, and 34% for harvesting and threshing, resulting in an overall average mechanization level of 45%.
See also: "Percentage of workers engaged in Agriculture = 45.8%"
In this usage I read the term “AI” to more broadly refer to all advancements in machine intelligence, not narrowly “agentic LLMs” as you’ve said. In the farming automation world it’s very clear that advances in machine learning and multimodal LLMs will enable the use of expanded automation.
In particular the Global South is often seen as a field for investment where governments make international development deals with western governments to provide farming automation equipment in exchange for debt. Then western companies bring in equipment and establish extractive industries while displacing local subsistence farmers. Now alienated from their land, the poor farmers often end up with little choice but to work in new factories also established through these practices.
Robotics as a field is obviously growing. It’s long been common for global south governments to displace their own poor to make space for multinational development deals, And this will only expand as embodied intelligence becomes more capable in the real world.
That doesn't always translate to happiness but I fully expect AI will reduce costs for all kinds of things, and those things that are now either rare or non-existent will become common. Today not everyone has a robot vacuum, I think in 20 years or so everyone who wants one will have a robot vacuum, and those who can afford the luxury of a robot vac today will be able to afford real robots who can do much more complex things. I'm quite excited about the next few decades, as long as we can keep despots from monopolizing the technology.
