I haven't dug deep into the theory of current Chatbots but I see many with better understanding of this than me argue that we will never get general intelligence from the language models that ChatGPT and similar systems are built upon.

One will need a fundamentally different approach but that doesn't mean systems like ChatGPT cannot become better tuned and still be highly useful for us. I mean it is already very useful despite its limitations.

I never finished Kahneman's book but I remember finding it interesting. On my bucket list to re-read again. Not sure how I would characterize current AI systems in that framework. I still feel that are "thinking" in a fundamentally different ways from us.

I believe someone once made the analogy about machine thinking to how we humans fly. We haven't really emulated the complex ways in which birds fly. We just invented an entirely different method that works well for machines.

Yes, at some point AI will help generate a lot of wealth. I am sure of that. But as I remarked on with the industrial revolution. If the past tells us anything about the future it suggests that it is not given that that wealth will benefit everyone. It may very well accumulate among the 1%.

I mean the US the last 20-30 years has seen something similar. The working class has not seen wages grow very much despite a tremendous growth in value creation. You know I am not just writing about technology but is also quite political.

I do think our political choices will decide a lot how people will benefit. But of course the nature of the technology may be such that everyone benefits without any hard choices.

I think my perspective is that none of us can really know how this will pan out. I just think we have to prepare for the possibility that this wonderful technology creates sharper divisions. If it makes everybody much better off then that is not really something we have to prepare for. Even the most clueless individual can handle sudden abundance a lot better than sudden poverty.

I have long been interested in the concepts around poverty and inequality. I have a friend who has studied poverty in both the UK and Vietnam. Ironically it was in many ways worse in the UK. That sounds strange but I can relate it to stories from my American and Norwegian side of the family. In the early 1950s American lived in a significantly more prosperous society than most Europeans including Norwegians.

However interestingly it is from my American side of the family that I hear stories about the difficulties of poverty. Objectively speaking they had more material wealth and higher standard of living than the Norwegian side. But with sharper divisions they felt that poverty stronger. The feeling that you are not as good as everybody else. That you are ashamed of having friends over because your house isn't very nice compared to the norm. Visiting friends houses and seeing them having a lot more nice things than you. A reminder that your family is poor.

On the Norwegian side everybody lived much more similar and thus never felt they were poor. They just felt they were like everybody else. But there was of course also some difference in stability. Norwegian families generally lived less on a knife edge. Jobs were more secure. Welfare services better built out. Public health care etc.

Adam Smith even talked about this physchological effect back in 1776. Even him writing hundreds of years ago percieved poverty to be a relative phenomena tied in with whether you felt shame about your standing in society or not. He had an example with how it was common and not shameful to walk barefoot in France while a workman in England who could not afford shoes would feel utterly ashamed.

Future AI wealth may generate a new abundance that will raise the standard and expectations once more about what living conditions a normal family should have to be part of regular society.