[sapphireblue]

A general purpose reinforcement learning (RL) agent is a machine that can be taught to perform any task from a very wide range of tasks via sparse rewards given by a human or software trainer.

The agent can, like any software, be snapshotted, saved, loaded and copied, creating as many identical agents as needed (given hardware, of course). Agents can and will be trained to perform various tasks, and their snapshots will be sold or made available for download over the Internet.

By saying that your main concerns are technological unemployment of white-collar demographic and increased state surveillance you make it clear that your views reflect that of an upper-middle class western person. On the global scale affluent westerners are a minority.

So, How would such an agent be used to actually improve society? Consider universally valued, life-critical services: healthcare and education. Only the western people have access to high-quality medicine and education due to a whole lot of reasons (global economical inequality, a very long and hard path to become a doctor or a professor, a very long time needed to establish the necessary social institutions, lack of social stability outside the west, ...).

If we had a general RL agent we could train several variants of it to perform high-quality work in the fields of Diagnosis, Radiology, Paediatry etc. We could also train artificial education agents for many subjects. The training needs to only be done once. Given sufficiently powerful mass-produced hardware (smartphone SoCs with Nervana-like NN accelerators?) these agents could be given almost for free to billions of people that wouldn't be able to afford such services in any point of their lives otherwise.

How could one be against giving essential high quality services to every human with a smartphone?

And if even that is not enough to justify the utility of RL agents, then consider how much progress in molecular biology and medicine could be done if thousands of agents trained to do life science research worked around the clock to push the state of art further. How many people with debilitating diseases could be cured by such an effort?

And then consider how we could make our currently-crumbling cities and infrastructure permanently well-attended by RL agents inside simple robots. The world certainly could use more smart attention everywhere. I guess the quality of life in such a world would be remarkably different.