>We need to figure out how we adapt to a world where our work does not and should not define us.

Precisely. Nobody seems to talk about this particular point but let's put it like this: If the artificial intelligence revolution will be bigger than the splitting of the atom why the hell would we allow the private sector to govern these tools? Do we allow private companies to handle atom bombs?

> You're cherry picking. He addresses this in the article. We can't afford to be left behind, yet we also don't understand what we are racing towards.

> > But I don’t think these laundry lists of the obvious do much to prepare us. We can plan for what we can predict (though it is telling that, for the most part, we haven’t). What’s coming will be weirder. I use that term here in a specific way. In his book “High Weirdness,” Erik Davis, the historian of Californian counterculture, describes weird things as “anomalous — they deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations, sometimes quite radically.” That is the world we’re building.

> > I cannot emphasize this enough: We do not understand these systems, and it’s not clear we even can. I don’t mean that we cannot offer a high-level account of the basic functions: These are typically probabilistic algorithms trained on digital information that make predictions about the next word in a sentence, or an image in a sequence, or some other relationship between abstractions that it can statistically model. But zoom into specifics and the picture dissolves into computational static.

> > That is perhaps the weirdest thing about what we are building: The “thinking,” for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human. And the more inhuman the systems get — the more billions of connections they draw and layers and parameters and nodes and computing power they acquire — the more human they seem to us.

None of this seems actually profound or useful to me. Saying that the AIs that we build will be alien to our own thinking? To me that, in his own words, is in the laundry list of obvious.

> Automation has also already cost jobs. It will cost more. This is not controversial. We need to figure out how we adapt to a world where our work does not and should not define us.

And that I fully agree with but every time I suggest heavily taxing automated jobs as a means to fund Universal Basic Income I have hypercapitalists call me a socialist for believing people should be allowed to live without the need of working.