What would life be like if AI (artificial intelligence) solved all your problems? You wouldn’t have to work anymore. You could get anything you wanted by just moving a finger. You could feel pleasure whenever you wanted. Death would become almost a choice—you could turn into a digital form (数字化的形式) and keep going for a million years.
All that sounds terrible to me.
It’s true that humans don’t like problems. But if we had no problems to solve, what would be the point of living? How long would we be happy sitting on top of our big mountains of candy? For me, a long weekend would be enough. A million years of perfect happiness would feel like a terrible dream.
Professor Nick Bostrom from a famous university believes that even if AI could do everything perfectly, people might still “work” at “jobs” in “offices”. “But these jobs would really be more like hobbies.”
That wouldn’t be a problem, you might say, as people could stay busy doing other things. They could go shopping, do some gardening or take care of their children. But one reason people get satisfied with such activities is that they pride themselves on being good at them.
They know how to find the right beds, grow roses or dry a child’s tears. However, AI will probably do these all better than you. In a world like that, you might feel like you’re doing more harm than good to your child if you try parenting on your own.
But life in that “ perfect ” world might still be bearable (可忍受的), says Bostrom. For example, we could ask our computers to give us interesting tasks. In Greg Egan’s sci-fi novel Permutation City, a man forces himself to develop new hobbies every now and then to keep from being bored. He finds joy in making table legs and ends up making 162,329 of them.
Bostrom suggests we not rush to make a decision. We might end up liking the future. “The question here is not how interesting a future is to look at, but how good it is to live in,” he says.
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