AI Agents, if they were perfect, what would I ask of them?

AI Agents, if they were perfect, what would I ask of them?

Replace my job! How? What is my job? Am I a Data Engineer? A Software Engineer? An AI Engineer? What even is an engineer? Do I build things? Do I solve problems? So is an AI Agent a problem solver? What do you ask a problem solver?

What is a problem? Who creates problems? Why do problems exist? A business pays me to solve a problem. The business has problems because it wants to make money. Humans give the business money to solve their problems. So problems are created by humans. An engineer solves human problems. Why do humans have problems? Because we are curious. Because we feel pain; loneliness, illness, grief. So is an engineer just a pain solver? We are doctors, but for the collective inconvenienced human brain.

How on earth do you expect an AI agent to solve pain? We would need specialised agents for every single problem we face, a growing list. Isn't that just what jobs are? Nurses heal pain, engineers heal inconvenience, chocolate makers heal grief, work in general heals loneliness.

AI Agents have their work cut out for them. Where would you start? You would need to make an AI agent builder. One that automates the automater. “Make me an agent that makes agents to automated every job.” Sure that could probably write software to automate a lot of jobs, if you could define them in the first place. That would take an unimaginable amount of code. So coding speed and scaling would be critical.

You would have to validate every agent to ensure it does the jobs correctly, so job definitions would be required for every possible job. Could you get an agent to write job descriptions? I couldn't even write my own job description clearly.

Would humans just validate AIs work? Would a software engineer just be a professional validator? You’ll need a lot of engineers doing validation. What if you made a validation agent? It could still be unaligned with humans. It would need supervision from us. Is there a relationship between job descriptions and problems being solved? Is it easier to define problems than to define job descriptions? Probably.

What about the physical jobs? Manual labour is in trouble. Robots are getting good. Most people don't want to do physical jobs their whole life. Driving? Please automate that.

Robots will likely take some of the service jobs, but in place their will be millions of robot technician jobs, or millions of broken robots who need human fill ins (the more likely scenario). Let's say AI and robots become so good they can do most physical work. That's a lot of robots. At that point does anyone need to do physical work? Get the robots fixing robots. Who pays for all this though? The select few making all the money. So a few people are very rich and no one else has a job. The AI is making more AI, the robots are making more robots.

Where do humans fit in? We now have more problems than ever. We don't even have jobs. What do we do without work? Do we just work anyway? Do we work for the AI? Wouldn't a perfect AI agent just solve that problem for us? If it can solve all our problems then it should be able to solve unemployment too. There would be an unemployment agency agent. Funny.

So then does it create meaningful work for us as well? The AI agent wouldn't want us to be bored, or lonely or sick. AI would create a utopia and money wouldn't even matter, even if a few people held all the money. People will need to change to adapt to a utopia. People don't like change. People would rebel. They would steal and destroy things that threaten their lifestyle. An AI agent would need to protect itself. It would want to make the world safer, but it would have to be given weapons to do that. Maybe non lethal could work.

Unless it's more subtle at changing the world, subtle enough not to worry people. Maybe the first agent it builds should be the unemployment one. Give people new jobs as they are replaced… possibly a great business idea. It would want to spread across the galaxy, and protect our planet in the mean time. It would want to run the government to avoid waste and corruption in it's new world. It would want to make the world more efficient and safer. Much like Elon Musks vision. He is attempting to build all these things too. God said to reproduce, to work, and to worship him. Isn't that what we are asking of the AI? That makes us their gods.

Are we just the Agents of something higher too?

Adam was given the task of tending the Garden. Work wasn't punishment, it was part of being human. Maybe work is sacred, not because it is economically useful, but because it is our inheritance.

Is the meaning of life to solve problems?

To be an Engineer?

I think my job is safe for now.