About Planned Obsolescence
AI companies are spending hundreds of billions to make AI agents better at understanding the world, coming up with creative solutions to difficult problems, and pursuing long-term goals in the real world.
This could soon bring us to a world where human intellectual labor (and eventually, physical labor) is obsolete. Where most of the R&D behind all new innovations in every field is being conducted by AI systems, where human executives have to rely on AI consultants and hire AI employees to have much chance of making money, where human military commanders have to defer to AI strategists to stand much of a chance in a war, where policymakers have to defer to AI advisors to make sense of this all and craft policies to respond to it, where law enforcement has to rely on AI surveillance and policing to enforce those policies.
In such a world, economic and military competition would not need to operate on human timescales or be constrained by human limitations, and the world around us could get really weird really fast. This publication aims to grapple with the many-faceted implications of that possibility.
