TWTBACD Ch.35 - The Great Reorganisation

Chapter 35

The Great Reorganisation

2044 — AGI Reshapes Society

2044: AGI reshapes knowledge work, Lucas enrolls

[VAN DEN BERG FAMILY — Lucas, 19]

Lucas van den Berg enrolled in the philosophy of economics programme at the University of Amsterdam in September 2044, which surprised his father and did not surprise his mother. He had been accepted at three better-ranked institutions in more conventional disciplines. He had chosen Amsterdam because the philosophy of economics programme had a joint module with the AI Ethics Institute that had produced, over the previous five years, the most substantive public thinking on the question Lucas had been working on since he was ten: what does an economy look like when intelligence is not scarce?

He was nineteen, precise, deliberate, and already in possession of a framework for thinking about AGI economic implications that his professors, in the first semester, found alternately impressive and unsettling. He was not a prodigy. He was a person who had been paying close attention, with excellent tools and excellent parents, for nineteen years, and who had arrived at university already knowing what question he intended to spend his life on.

Pieter had navigated the Great Reorganisation — the term economists were using for the restructuring of knowledge work that AGI had been driving since 2034 — with the methodical competence he brought to all transitions. The bank had changed around him twice. His role had changed three times. He was now essentially a risk philosopher — the person whose job was to think about what the AI risk models couldn't model, which was, specifically, the risks that arose from the fact that the AI risk models existed.

This was abstract. It was also the most important work he had ever done.

Sofie was medical director of the AI diagnostics programme at the AMC. She oversaw a team of twelve physicians and forty-three AI systems. The physicians spent sixty percent of their time reviewing AI outputs and forty percent on the human work the AI could not do. The AI systems spent one hundred percent of their time doing what they did.

Lucas, home for a weekend in November, ate dinner with his parents and listened to them describe their work.

'You're both translators,' he said.

'Yes,' Pieter said.

'Between the AI and the humans.'

'And between the humans and the decisions the AI enables,' Sofie said. 'Which is different.'

Lucas thought about this. 'The decision is still the human's?'

'For now,' Pieter said. 'That's the conversation we're having.'

'Who is having it?'

'Everyone who should be and some who shouldn't,' Pieter said. 'And not everyone who should be.'