>A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia.
I understand where you're coming from on that, but there are a ton of people living in slavery, or in unsafe working conditions, or with food insecurity, or dying of preventable disease.
There will always be something to strive for, even if it's made up. You think that the best football players in the world are doing something real? No, it's a made up game. We'll make up more games.
I agree with your points. My problem is that I don't see any way to "stop" AI development at a level just below human capability where you get most of the benefits but still have humans firmly in control.
Regarding entertainment jobs like sports star, musician, artist, actor, etc., the problem is those are professions where, for the most part, only the very best can make a living. Nobody is that interested in seeing the matches of the 324th best tennis player in the world, despite that person being in the top .01% of tennis players globally. Similarly, only a tiny percentage of actors "make it", everyone else does it for a few years and then leaves because they enjoy eating, or they accept poverty wages for a long time.
I get pretty scared when I hear the AI utopianists rattle off all the benefits that are coming (and when they play down the risks) because it feels clear to me that they really haven't wargamed out what society would look like with very powerful AI.
The game is made up, but the effort, and process to be one of the most skilled sports players is still real. And sports players would probably feel something missing life if AI could replace them too
Computers surpassed humans at chess nearly 30 years ago. Yet human chess is more popular than ever, and people still dedicate their life to improving at chess.
As a more silly comparison, forklifts didn't stop people from weightlifting.
Chess is inherently a leisure activity. The incentive for playing chess is just to be better at chess. But things like woodworking, typesetting, and welding, while all possible to do recreationally, are not leisure activities. They are effort used to produce something. The desire is always there to engage with the thing or idea, but if the resource cost is far too high or the knowledge required is more than one person can reasonably learn the effort will not be expended. A leisure activity will always persist so long as someone knows how to do it because it exists for itself. But many other activities exist in service to something else, and if that something else ceases to exist then the activity will as well. You lose entire domains of useful cross-disciplinary knowledge that way.
I understand where you're coming from on that, but there are a ton of people living in slavery, or in unsafe working conditions, or with food insecurity, or dying of preventable disease.
There will always be something to strive for, even if it's made up. You think that the best football players in the world are doing something real? No, it's a made up game. We'll make up more games.