CHAPTER 161: SECOND MONDAY (6)

"Okay, but why? What good is A.I.? What problems does it solve?" Jack asked Madison.

"I can use it to write code. Something that would have taken me days, I can accomplish in hours with A.I. And I can make decent art with it, or get it to summarize documents, or answer questions. It allows me to be more productive."

"So you can use A.I. as a productivity booster now, but what happens when it becomes advanced enough to be considered AGI? When it’s good enough to not merely help you with your job, but able to do it for you?"

"Sit back and play games while the A.I. does the work?" she said hesitantly.

"And why would a company pay you to sit on your ass and watch an A.I. do your job? If an A.I. can do your job, then they’ll get rid of you and just keep the A.I."

"Yeah, but they would still need people to keep an eye on the A.I. To tell it what it what to do."

"Sure, the company will need a few managers. At least until AGI is good enough to do that job too. And what happens when you put AGI in a robot? All those manufacturing jobs. Maintenance, landscaping, cleaning, menial labor. All those workers will be replaced by robots. What then?"

"But robots are expensive, like hundreds of thousands of credits. Why would a company spend so much money on a robot when they can just hire someone for minimum wage?"

"Robots might be expensive now, but once you have enough demand, the cost will drop like a rock. And companies are too greedy to pass up the opportunity to replace expensive human liabilities with less expensive machines. Companies have been doing this for centuries already."

"But most people still have a job. So manufacturing automation didn’t destroy the job market. And besides, it’s going to happen. As fast as things are going, I’ll be surprised if we don’t see the first home assistant robot in ten years."

And that was what bother him. Some of the most interesting conversations he’d had with Fran and Jacob had concerned the impact of technology on society. Was A.I. good or bad for society? Would robots destroy the economy, leaving millions without jobs, or would those people find work elsewhere?

The ultimate question was, what would humans do in a post-scarcity society? What do you do if you don’t have to work?

Would everyone become addicted to social media? Fight wars over their favorite WebTube star? Or would they turn to more intellectual endeavors?

Even if humans remained firmly in control of A.I., avoiding a skynet situation, there was still a growing population problem. Eventually, there would be global food shortages.

There were already tensions between the Asian Alliance and Serica over fishing in the Serician Sea region. If populations continued to grow, those tensions might turn into war.

The way he saw it, there were two problems that needed to be solved.

The first was the population problem. Either population growth needed to be reduced, or food production needed to be increased. But that had an upper limit. Even if food production was rendered infinite, eventually there would be more people than land.

The second was the job problem. Or, more generally, a question of how to occupy the minds of billions of people. If they had jobs, that was fine. But what happened if most people no longer had jobs?

Even if they had food and shelter, they would get bored. People needed something to do, and if you didn’t give them something productive, they would look for ways to entertain themselves.

If what he’d seen on WebTube was any indication, a few billion bored people could quickly lead to chaos.

Thinking about the population problem reminded him of his birth parents. Both his birth parents were discarded as infants on the doorstep of a charity. Discarded almost as soon as they were born.

When he was eight, he’d asked his parents why they were orphans, and why their mothers would abandon them. His mother had said that many times, a woman will become pregnant even though she was not ready to be a parent.

When he was older, he’d looked into it and found that nearly half of all pregnancies were unplanned. He’d asked Fran and Jacob about it and Jacob had bluntly replied, "People gonna fuck. And they rarely consider the consequences until much later. And nobody likes condoms, or the pill."

The only way to curb rampant population growth was to create an effective birth control that didn’t have unpleasant side effects. Then find a way to get everyone to use it.

As for the other problem, he had two ideas.

If companies were going to develop AGI and robots, he might as well be the one to dominate the market. That way, he could at least have some control over how the tech was used.

As for what people could do to satisfy their boredom. Madison had just mentioned a solution. Virtual Reality.

If he could create a truly immersive VR, then he could provide entertainment, education, and other forms of intellectual stimulation. If people still needed to pay for food, then a virtual world could provide employment opportunities.

Until that moment, he’d been headed towards a nebulous goal. Sure, a universal cure for cancer was a noble goal, but it had felt lacking. Like it wasn’t enough. Like it was just a placeholder until he figured out what he really wanted to do.

But now he had a plan. Something big he could work towards.

The world was going to change, with or without him, and until Genesis Heart, he would have been powerless to push those changes in a direction he wanted. But with Genesis Heart, he had the power to shape the world.

And if he was going to shape the world, he might as well go all out and aim for true post-scarcity.

Nora was working on nanotech. With it, he could revolutionize resource management. Instead of garbage in, garbage out, he could achieve garbage in, products out.

Recycling was primitive compared to what nanotech could achieve. With nanotech, they could even turn medical, food, and industrial waste into raw materials ready to be used for manufacturing or agriculture.

Madison, who had been watching him as he thought, said, "You decided something, didn’t you? Something big."

"Yes. Tell me, do you know how to prevent a skynet situation?"