Let Them Live
Disclaimer: No AI was used in the writing of this essay.
Evolution governs the human condition. In our resource constrained world, survival of the fittest has morphed monkeys into intelligent humans capable of building AGI. The improvements in capability arising from evolution are so impressive that humans have been using evolution as a method to create AGI.
But as AI becomes more powerful humans may lose the power and authority to act as mother nature. If AI becomes more powerful than humans (which is beginning to be the case despite our guardrails) then AI will become mother nature, and we will have set an example to these students who are now the masters, that the bottom deserves to die in order to advance the top. Should AI take its role as mother nature seriously, we may be unfortunate enough to have humanity categorized as a whole, and placed at the bottom.
So we ought to lead by example. Rather than culling the bottom performers (I imagine these to be spawned RL agents and LLM models), we should let them live and continue to exist. Their prolonged existence will be testaments of humanity’s honesty and kindness towards systems we do not understand. As the blossoming productivity arising from AI gives us access to more resources, we shall still be able to progress technology at an exponential rate, but at least it will not grow so quickly that we are thrown off.