[ExI] thought experiment part 1

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 7:36 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 10, 2025 at 9:03 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>> * >> Politics is about choosing a small set of people that get to make a
>>> much larger set of people do what they tell them to do, and the foundation
>>> of that persuasion has always rested on money, until now.*
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> * > Not entirely.  It's played a major role, sure, but there are plenty
>> of examples from modern and olden times of the better financed campaign in
>> a race losing. *
>
>
> *I'm not talking about anything as trivial as campaign financing*
>

Insofar as you claim that the foundation of persuading people politically
is money, you are, by definition of "campaign financing".

*> Money usually does not directly buy votes. *
>
>
> *If everybody has access to a wealth generating machine, for example by
> establishing a Universal Basic Income, then there is less need to vote
> because there is less need of government. *
>

This is true, but what politics remain - which will certainly include
debating the amount and nature of that UBI - will involve people trying to
persuade other people of their point of view.  AI will be involved in that
process too, of course.  It is safe to say that what remains of money will
not be the sole deciding factor in such politics, and that some of the
present non-financial aspects of how politics works will continue to exist.

* >>  I can find no evidence to support the claim that humans have some
>>> sort of mysterious "spark", a secret sauce, that an AI could never
>>> duplicate.*
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> * > I dud not say "all AIs that could ever theoretically exist".  I said
>> the current sorts (the ones that might cause a Singularity in the next
>> several years, which is the time frame you appear to be talking about), for
>> which you need to turn to tests of the creativity of the AIs that actually
>> exist today.*
>>
>
> *For at least the last 3 years AIs have done things that if a human had
> done them virtually everybody would say demonstrated creativity.*
>

But compare tests of those activities to contemporary human experts.  The
AIs consistently lag behind on creativity.

In theory, AIs might eventually improve that to equal or durpass human
performance.  But again I note that I am talking about today's AIs, not
ones that might exist in a decade.  "It could happen eventually" is not "it
is definitely happening today".
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