Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank

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What happens in a society where nearly all human intellectual output is out-priced and outperformed by AI?

We're human, and we need humans to have value - economic and otherwise. A world where humans have no economic value is very dangerous for us. It sets the conditions for some extremely grim outcomes. For example, we should be very concerned about the actions of a national leadership over citizens that offer no economic value.

The problem? I am absolutely convinced that we are headed for such a world.

To believe this claim, you only need to believe three things:

1. Our AI systems speeding towards and past various measures of human ability will get there,

2. That the cost of AI performing most human tasks will be significantly lower than existing humans performing those tasks,

3. That employers and buyers will choose the lower cost options.

For the purposes of this piece, I will assume the claim is true: that nearly all human intellectual output will be out-priced and outperformed by AI, resulting in most humans having zero economic value.

UBI is a stopgap, not the answer

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been put forth as a solution to AI-driven job displacement, but it only deals with half of the problem created by that displacement.

Let's assume that a UBI policy is implemented, at least for documented cases of AI-driven job displacement. The next equally pressing problem on our hands is finding an activity for AI-displaced people, ideally a productive activity. UBI provides recipients with a minimal claim on goods in the market via money, but UBI can't make the human recipient economically valuable.

As a crisis management tool early in the era of AI job disruption UBI may work, and is probably necessary.

The answer could be leisure time - but the history of idle males especially points to the danger of not giving people something concrete to do with their time.

The timing of a solution to this issue is critical. For that reason, I believe we need a buffer occupation that people can enter by default, at least until we determine a mechanism for allocating human effort to broader areas. What could the buffer occupation be?

I will say at this point that one of my own requirements for a solution to this problem is to preserve human freedom. Humans need not just to have value, but to remain agents with the freedom to decide their own actions in the market and otherwise. And that means, simply, that we need to prevent a slide into a communist dystopia.

In the world I’ve described, the only human output with value becomes intangible outputs. And those intangible outputs can only be valued by other humans.

Ultimately, we need a way to:

• distribute claims on the surplus of society, and

• maintain a price mechanism