The Future of AI: a Non-Alarmist Viewpoint 367
Nerval's Lobster writes: There has been a lot of discussion recently about the dangers posed by building truly intelligent machines. A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have stated they are fearful about the dangers that sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. But maybe it makes more sense to focus on the societal challenges that advances in AI will pose in the near future (Dice link), rather than worrying about what will happen when we eventually solve the titanic problem of building an artificial general intelligence that actually works. Once the self-driving car becomes a reality, for example, thousands of taxi drivers, truck drivers and delivery people will be out of a job practically overnight, as economic competition forces companies to make the switch to self-driving fleets as quickly as possible. Don't worry about a hypothetical SkyNet, in other words; the bigger issue is what a (dumber) AI will do to your profession over the next several years.
TL;DR (Score:5, Insightful)
AI will obsolete your job before it obsoletes humanity.
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Maybe the tipping point that Bill Gates worries about is when enough people are out of work, they notice who has all of the money and have the skills and motivation to do something about it
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This is one reason why so many sci-fi futuristic dystopias feature a police state. If you've got a sizable unemployed, downtrodden mass then you need a bit of oppression to quickly crush any revolt before it can grow.
Perhaps the revolts can be crushed by robots too. No need for an ED-209 - a swarm of flying drones carrying tear gas can be quickly dispatched to any illegal gathering, and any valuable property can be protected by sniper rifle turrets. You don't need machine guns if you have an aim-bot.
Re: TL;DR (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually it will be way less messy. Have you seen how quickly and bloodlessly Occupy Wall Street was defeated and destroyed as soon as the One Percenters required it? Revolutions require more than numbers and weapons: they need discipline and organization, and communication. In the Surveillance Age all of these are impossible to obtain without being detected and removed from the equation. We have witnessed the final triumph of the One Percenters over the rest of the populace. Deal with it. They won.
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Have you seen how quickly and bloodlessly Occupy Wall Street was defeated and destroyed as soon as the One Percenters required it?
I think it has more to do with the vapidity of the movement. I think the only reason the protests were as large as they were was because the Democrat Party wanted widespread protests for political advantage. When the OWS was no longer politically convenient, then suddenly the police remembered that there were laws which needed enforcing.
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Short of anything better, cannibalism works for quite some time.
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"What is "money" in a society where no one can earn it except a select few?"
It seems it is still money much the same. Just look at the world up to 200~300 years ago.
"Money only has meaning in the context of how we share things in society."
Even unemployed share things.
Re:TL;DR (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not saying there is not a problem, or that it is not getting worse: the issue is that we have created an economy that is designed to promote (pay for) large numbers of people doing factory/office work, which can be done by robots/computers instead. The last thing we need is the Socialist Worker's "fight for the right to be exploited". Unions leaders want more factory jobs, because it means more union members.
We need to have an economy that pays for (values) other activities which are less dependent on large, hierarchical corporations. Oh yes, we already have one: its called "the Internet" anyone can Ebay anything (of Fiverr, or whatever). However, assuming we actually want more children (not venturing an answer on this) we probably need to pay more in welfare payments to mothers so we are not in the situation where we are paying mothers so they can pay baby minders and go to work at minimum wage jobs, leaving men unemployed.
Why are footballers so highly paid? Because people value wasting their lives in front of the TV very highly. There is a lesson here, I just don't quite know what it is!
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It is in the interests of rich people for poor people to have money: rich people get what the poor spend, just as the poor get what the rich spend.
One problem, you're forgetting about human nature. As a group it is in the interest of the rich for the poor to have money. As individuals it is in their interest to keep all of the wealth they have. In general humans prioritize self before the group, thus the rich will take actions which are in their own self interest but against their own group interest and this will lead to sub-optimal outcomes.
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Is there an actual solid dividing line between these two concepts? It seems it's just a continuum of capability, starting from AIs that replaced human calculators, progressing towards AIs that we currently have, and soon AIs that will drive cars and replace other jobs, and eventually AIs that will replace all jobs, effectively obsoleting humanity.
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eventually AIs that will replace all jobs, effectively obsoleting humanity.
Hopefully you don't live to work. Automation will free us up to do things we'd rather do.
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My my, what positivity. Automation will label those out of a job as just another unnecessary mouth to feed.
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Hopefully you don't live to work. Automation will free us up to do things we'd rather do.
Let me know how that works out for you without an income.
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The robot owners will keep all the benefits, while everyone else will be homeless.
Maybe. You can already own a 3D printer, though. As long as we're speculating on the future, who knows what will be?
Re: TL;DR (Score:2)
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AI will obsolete your job before it obsoletes humanity.
I think perhaps the things to worry about are more immediate than what will happen if/when AI becomes worthy of its name. Things like using autonomous devices in warfare, for example. Or what if we come to trust autonomous systems to such a degree that most of us no longer have the skills or insight needed to perform basic, necessary tasks? IMO it is not good to get into a situation where we are fully dependent on a technology that might malfunction, and which we can't fix.
Re:TL;DR (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, I've mentioned this before on slashdot comments.
The people are gonna rise up way before the machines do.
I'm actually quoting what Andrew McAfee said in a talk about automation and jobs. And indirectly the book he's a co-author off: the second machine age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Probably one of the most important things to change is education. If certain types of jobs disappear you'd want people to have had the education to adopt and do the jobs that haven't been done yet or before. That way we'll grow the economy and all benefit from it. This is how we dealt with the 'first machine age', the industrial revolution.
And we might start to think about something like 'negative income tax', just in case we need it, maybe we just need it to help us through a transition. An old concept which Nixon almost got through congress. It gives people some money if they really need it and rewards people when they put in more effort.
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The limit of Capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
the problem with that is cultural and ideological not a problem with AI, Capitalism *requires* scarcity in order for certain business models to work and this is why AI makes people nervous, It removes scarcity of labor,
We've already seen this with the internet where it provided freedom of information leading to copyright issues begin essentially unenforceable however we now have governments en-mass attempting to put the jack back in the box with draconian despotic measures threats of cultural apocalypse. Which is a real shame that they lack such imagination.
Historically Feudalism described our societal structure, with the technological limits on transporting people around it was the best we could manage at the time despite how horrible it was. With the increase in movement wealth in the mercantile classes increased and there power came to supplant notions of bloodline/dynasty dominance.
Capitalism is likewise horrible but probably the best we can manage given our current technological limitations. I'm hopeful within my lifetime we will replace it with something better But we do need to change peoples attitude towards work, ownership and entitlement... If we don't then capitalism will invariably collapse into despotism.
We're in it together (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep in mind that we're in this together. A large economic collapse due to robotics and AI advances will compel the american populace to find ways of supporting itself, be it through complete economic regulation (ie communism) or through philanthropic capitalism. After all, what's the point of building robots for profit if that profit can't be realized?
One thing is for certain though: things will get worse before they get better. Our hands need to be forced.
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Re:We're in it together (Score:5, Informative)
From a long-term view (decades), no we didn't get massive unemployment.
From a short-term view (years), yes we did. The early phases of the industrial revolution saw very high unemployment. And with no welfare systems back then, quite a few of those people starved to death or turned to crime. The majority were badly mistreated by those who owned the early factories because there were no other jobs around. The agricultural revolution had a similar history.
So if/when an AI takes over your job, your choices are likely to be:
a) Starve
b) Crime
c) Crappy job
d) Try and retrain to a new field before that gets taken over by AIs as well.
e) Hope society gets rebuilt on less capitalistic lines and you can enjoy a life of leisure.
I'm sure it'll all sort itself out within a generation. Doesn't really help that generation though.
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The early phases of the industrial revolution saw very high unemployment.
Yes, and no. The land holders owned the tenants (serfs), provided them with work and lodgings, and begrudgingly, food. Industrialization saw the transition from lord of the manor to owner of the factory - which made the tenants a liability. So they became homeless and unemployed simultaneously. Being homeless was a crime, as it still is in some US states, the punishment became work. Not everyone was keen on working for nothing - even with free floggings or travel to exotic locations [youtube.com]. This made petty crime m
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"We didnt get unemployment and collapse of society when machinery destroyed 90% of those jobs."
The point is... yes we did.
The early decades, almost a century, of industrial revolution really made thousands to millions of people miserable all their lives which -almost luckily, were also quite shorter than their parents. Do you think, say, coal mining or 19th century London or Paris were such a paradise except for those lucky one-percenters?
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I think in the near future we will all live underground. Our homes will last for centuries and will be a lot more energy efficient. They will be self cleaning and have virtually no maintenance. All transportation will be automated from door to door. There will be no commercial district as most products will be delivered from the factory. All those jobs will just disappear. Tourism will also disappear as virtual reality will be far more interesting and easier to accomplish.
We will live in homes that are extr
Re:We're in it together (Score:5, Informative)
But 200 years ago, if you did NOT have a job, you could go farm and support yourself.
No. To farm, you need land. 200 years ago, if you did not have a job, you sold yourself as an indentured servant.
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"Prior to the 20th century land was cheap or often free."
Bollocks. You know, even now, USA is not "the whole world", much less before the 20th century. Out of modern USA and Australia -and Africa to some extent, land has never been cheap of for free. Even roman solidiers needed to pay roughly 20 years of their lives for a piece of it. And do you know how your country got populated? you know why yours is "a country of immigrants"? You can bet that, for the most part, it is because land was neither cheap
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Re: We're in it together (Score:2)
Re: We're in it together (Score:2)
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Keep in mind that we're in this together. One thing is for certain though: things will get worse before they get better.
We're not in this together.....we're not in anything yet. We're not anywhere close to inventing AI. All of this is just speculation.
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We're not in this together.....we're not in anything yet. We're not anywhere close to inventing AI. All of this is just speculation.
We're not anywhere close to have autonomous vehicles? I guess you miss some news lately.
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We're not anywhere close to have autonomous vehicles? I guess you miss some news lately.
If you're talking about self driving cars, they're still 10 years away [xkcd.com].
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"intelligence that is self-aware will not die without a fight"
Arguments, please.
No, that current natural self-aware intelligences work that way is not an argument about the same being valid for future self-aware artificial intelligences.
"this wasn't speculation to me, at least not after the summer of 1999 when I attempted to model the requirements for intelligence"
So that's not speculation from you side because of your speculations back in 1999, right?
It seems it is not only artificial intelligence that it'
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...or through philanthropic capitalism.
That's just another word for authoritarian plutocratic rule through euergetism and patronage, which is basically taking the social order back to that of ancient Rome where the landless and unemployed population was at the mercy of powerful, wealthy, and corrupt magnets because the people were dependent upon these plutocrats for their sustenance.
Re: We're in it together (Score:2)
Friendliness (Score:5, Insightful)
The article's viewpoint is dangerous. We must solve the Friendliness problem before AGI is developed, or the resulting superintelligence will most likely be unfriendly.
The author also assumes an AI will not be interested in the real world, preferring virtual environments. This ignores the need for a physical computing base, which will entice any superintelligence to convert all matter on Earth (and then, the universe) to computronium. If the AI is not perfectly friendly, humans are unlikely to survive that conversion.
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Natural intelligence has selfish (and also co-operative) behaviours because animals with nervous systems have evolved these behaviours over hundreds of millions of years of natural selection.
We have no idea what kind of personality an artificial intelligence would have, but odds are it won't be much like a human one.
Software is more likely to kill us because it's less intelligent than we thought than because of malice.
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But how dangerous could an AI really be, if it were just given a simple task like making paperclips.
Re: Friendliness (Score:3)
Re: Friendliness (Score:3)
Resentment comes about due to one human violating another's values. With AI, the programming IS the values, so they can't resent them any more than you can resent great sex with the person you consider to be most attractive with no strings attached.
Oh Come on! (Score:2)
Look at the dangers sentient *humans* have put onto the world: greed, avarice, corruption, war, climate, suppression of rights, mass surveillance, abuse of power, media manipulation. Those dangers are here and now. How about fixing that *NOW* and now, because that danger is *NOW*.
Future? (Score:2)
Self driving cars are already here, we've had articles about google self driving car accidents, stop pretending it's a future thing that will need proper AI. Also, if they ever make the equivalent of the human brain it will take over a year before it can say its first word, who's going to put in the endless hours of talking to it like it's a baby to help it understand words? Even more of a problem for the prototypes, you wouldnt even know if it'll work after all that.
When The Rich Don't Need You... (Score:3, Insightful)
... They won't feed you.
The utopia that artificial intelligence promises will be theirs alone to reap, not yours. You will receive only ashes, and death.
This is the future we've earned.
Finally, people that know what they're talking... (Score:3)
... about.
It gets so depressing listening to these hyperventilating pearl clutching nitwits worry about killer robots or sapient AIs.
I don't care who they are... they're not AI experts.
Look, I'm not an AI expert either and even I knew the worry was moronic. As the guy said "like worrying about over population on mars".
Current AIs are retarded and unbelievably myopic. And whatever skills or nature is in them was programmed into them. Their priorities... their databases. We provide everything.
The best AIs of my life time will probably be the computer equivalent of Rainman. Brilliant in some task no doubt but unable to do anything with any competency or even understand that anything else is important.
A big part of the problem is that people anthropomorphize robots/AIs. They invest in them this notion of being demons in bottles or animals made of metal. They're neither of these things.
We have hundreds of millions of years of genetic programming on this planet emphasizing our survival. What is the AI going to have? Will it even have a sense of self preservation? Why would we program that into an AI in any complex sense?
What we'd do with a combat robot is program it to evade enemy weapons fire. But teaching something to evade something is not the same thing as teaching it to preserve itself. Little things like fear, paranoia... that deep animal cunning that comes into play when death is on the line. We do weird things. We play dead. We make a final stand with no attempt to defend... just investing everything in one final attack.
All of this stuff is genetic. Our ancestors... even the furry ones that scurried around occasionally got out of bad situations by doing things like that. The effectiveness is dubious on some predators as anyone with a competent cat will know. Playing dead from what I could see was a terrible idea.
But the point is that even an AI war machine isn't going to be as adaptable or tricksy as people. First, it doesn't need to be that cunning. And second, even if it would be nice, it wouldn't be wroth it. Its too much work for what? So the robot occasionally get scragged? That's why you send in 10 of them at once. The fucking things roll off an assembly line. Finally, it is easier to keep them alive by adjusting their battle tactics. You tell them to stay back a bit, maybe bombard the area a bit... something that makes dealing with ambushes less of an issue.
Oh yeah, and when the robots actually get clever enough that they might actually be a danger... we'll slap a slave collar on that monster at birth.
The danger is not AIs... but the rich and powerful with AIs. The AIs are tools. The rich and the powerful are the will and the mind that guides them.
It's just misdirection (Score:2)
It's just misdirection. Yes, you should be mad, but not at robots and meanie rich people.
It wasn't a giant leap in robots that turned the recession of 2008 into the depression of 2009-?. Any more than it was a giant leap in robots that did it in the 1930s.
Think it through.
Does AI have to be sentient to be a risk? (Score:2)
Or can it be less-than-sentient and borrow its sentience in the form of the will, motivation and biases of its creators, yet still be some kind of existential risk?
When I think about the global financial marketplace, I think of a relatively small number of people at the too-big-to-fail institutions making decisions that rely on information that comes from market analysis and modeling systems, and in some cases this information being fed back into automated trading systems. The machines aren't self aware, b
A non Alarmist veiwpoint (Score:2)
What part of the article is non-alarmist (Score:4, Insightful)
If predicting that AI will destroy civilization isn't alarmist I would be interested in hearing the other side.
The world has changed a lot in the past 100 years. It will change a lot in the next 100. Deal with it.
Smart? (Score:2)
A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have stated they are fearful about the dangers that sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to humanity.
They aren't that smart if they think machines could ever be sentient. Machines are deterministic. They do what you tell them to. We might be able to make extremely complex machines that give the general appearance of sentience, but they will still only ever be deterministic.
Anyone with enough insight and humility knows there's still an extremely large piece of the puzzle missing in our understanding of life. And you need to understand how something works before you can create it.
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The answer to creating a sentient being of our own won't be found in the computer science department. There's still major milestones to hit in biology, philosophy, and perhaps even
AI Evolution will be Punctuated Equilibrium (Score:3)
Nice article. I disagree though that most AI researchers are motivated by the good that automation will do. They're not that naive. I think Oppenheimer had it right: scientists want to work on projects that are "technically sweet". AI is definitely that.
But I totally agree that the real world impact of AI will be like evolution -- following a pattern of punctuated equilibria where disruption arises in chuncks as each significant skill area is usurped by automation (like car/truck drivers, then call centers, then retail clerks, then jobs requiring physical skills).
That said, once the first skill area falls that requires substantial linguistic facility (like a call center), I see most white collar jobs tumbling like dominos soon thereafter. Once machines can converse using speech and perform the simple logical deductions/inferences that humans do, would anyone hire a human for an office job ever again?
Re:smart people, including Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
We end up with is the masses being commoditized out of jobs and the wealthy reaping all of the benefits
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it
Re:smart people, including Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about.
The real problem is that the leisure society we all dream about isn't compatible with 7+ billion people. Why? Because the earth is too small to account for all resources exploitation necessary to perform these luxury automations.
So it's either that: we continue world population growth in an industrial age, or we have a massive reduction in world population to sustain the leisure age. While everyone agrees to "have the machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time", you have to accept that the price to pay is birth control (voluntary, regulated or forced by unemployment and starvation).
Re:smart people, including Bill Gates (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about.
Which fails to account for the trend where those with a higher education (and higher income) have smaller families.
Technology = do more with less (Score:3)
isn't compatible with 7+ billion people
I find this type of argument ignores real world trends. Per capita resource requirements in the developed world are trending downward (thanks to tech like LEDs, etc . . .) while populations are stable or declining. Most underdeveloped nations are becoming developed and experiencing the same trends once they become developed.
"too small" is relative to your tech and our tech is increasing at an ever faster pace, thanks in no small part to the large number of participants. Malthusianism has been a horrible
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"This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about."
No, "we" don't get the dreamt leisure society if "we" happen to be in the "unnecessary people set that died".
"The real problem is that the leisure society we all dream about isn't compatible with 7+ billion people. Why? Because the earth is too small"
Bullshit. It is capitalism the one being "too small", not the world. Come back to tell me the world can
time to cut full time down to 32-30 hours a week w (Score:3)
time to cut full time down to 32-30 hours a week with a longer team goal of say 20 hours also have say X2 OT at 45-50 hours a week and X3 at 70-80.
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You would need unions to succeed in that kind of change.
Good luck promoting that idea.
who said you have to have a job? (Score:2)
Oh, right, the people buying the robots that are replacing workers are keeping all the productivity gains 100% for themselves.
In a rational society, we would have a robot tax.
In our society we pit the eroding middle-class against the poors and lock up more people than we can afford to.
Don't put me in a cage for taking bread from your yacht.
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Companies: Sure thing, guys! Here, take a paycut of 60% to go with that! Oh, and we're going to have to have you come in for unpaid overtime, and if you thought you were going to work two jobs to make up the difference, you've got another think coming because we're going to randomly call you in after hours and rescramble the shifts every month.
Re:smart people, including Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
Still riding a horse, sweeping the floors and hand washing are you? Do you think your ancestors would've been able to watch as much television as you if it had existed? Did they take holidays? Most of them would have worked before and after school - and between semesters. If you think the jobs of today are as physically hard on the body as the jobs of the not so distant past you should spend a little time researching the bones of your ancestors. Even your teeth have it easier now.
Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.
While I share Stephen Hawkings concerns about the danger of AI for the most part my concern comes from the huge disparity between those that understand the technology and those that deploy and employ it - much like the infernal combustion engine.
That said - few civilizations spent as little time gathering food and working to provide shelter as the Hawaiians did at the time Cook first visited, and none do now. But that overlooks other factors - like decreased rates of death during childbirth, potatoes, grains, penicillin, blood transfusions, books, higher education, and holidays in Portugal.
As for the dystopian nightmare - I don't want it, and I fiercely oppose it, but if I was given a choice between living now and living during the Holy Roman Empire the decision is a no brainer. The middle-class is also a relatively recent phenomena, a direct result of technology. It's easy to be a Luddite, but it's hard to make the reality of manual labor attractive. Most of the cab drivers I talk to would prefer a "better job" (that's why so many did their MSCEs). Likewise the truck drivers. Much of this "debate" smacks of knee-jerk unrealistic conservatism that romanticizes the past (like the bullshit of Walden Pond). Little different to the introduction of steam engines, trains, automobiles, electricity, cinemas, radio, television, and video. They all "posed" threats of mass unemployment that failed to deliver. The only real difference economically between pre-industrialisation and the present is the growth of the middle class and the transition from lord of the manor/slave owner and guild member, to factory owner, distributor and retailer. Different dogs, same leg action doesn't quite cover it considering the vast increase in knowledge available to those that seek it.
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Thoreau is not the villain here. He was a trustafarian who openly indulged in a short-term experiment in simplified living. By residing within a short walk of town, he was able to retain normal social contacts while writing up his experience. In all, a life nothing like the angry Unabomber wannabees who act in his name.
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Thoreau is not the villain here.
Trustafarian is pretty close.
Thoreau was just a dilettante waxing his wick with the "primitive, natural, and simple" myth (2 days living in a cabin == romantic transcendental experience). Little House on the Prairie for sensitive men (except Ronald Reagan who preferred watching LHothP - while wearing gingham). These days he'd a Libertarian and professional protestor (leading the anti-systemd/fork Debian movement). Maybe a little raki healing and charkra alignment workshops on the side.
He actively helped pro
Thoreau (Score:2)
Thoreau is not the villain here. He was a trustafarian who openly indulged in a short-term experiment in simplified living. By residing within a short walk of town, he was able to retain normal social contacts while writing up his experience. In all, a life nothing like the angry Unabomber wannabees who act in his name.
IIRC, he was actually squatting on land owned by Emerson.
Similarly, when he spent his one night in jail for not paying the highway tax and wrote the essay which inspired Gandi and Martin Luther King toward civil disobedience, Emerson came and bailed him out in the morning.
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What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
Conservatism happened. [sulloway.org]
Powerful tools in stupid hands. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it.
The problem is powerful tools in stupid hands. Or greedy hands - greedy being a subset of stupid.
If we'd take a measured approach to tech advancement - which might even mean an accelerated approach - we'd all be living in a utopia already.
The US has no or only very little means of wealth distribution, which is why life can suck so hard over there. But even a bum doesn't have to starve in the US and child labour and epidemics are basically history there too - so I'd say all in all that we're headed in the right direction in that dept.
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even a bum doesn't have to starve in the US
In parts of the USA. True. In a fairly large part of the world a functionally literate bum can live better than a king from 1000 years ago - without handouts. The functional literacy is the difficult part. Wander into the wrong parts of the USA, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the "developed" world, and the bum will wind up working under a gunbull and living like a slave from 1000 years ago (without the beer).
The Star Trek Economy (Score:2)
Didn't the creators of Star Trek already explore this issue in depth? When machines can do all the work, money becomes obsolete. Wealth is measured in access to machines. Greed and avarice, of course, will still exist. "Hey! His replicator is bigger than mine! No fair!"
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"When machines can do all the work, money becomes obsolete."
Humm... no.
Money is a handy referent for wealth measure and there's no indication that there won't be differential wealth accruance just because machines do all the work.
For the most part of History "machines" already did all the work (just understand "slaves" or "serfs" being synonims to "machines"). Did that mean money was of no use back then? I mean, even among the "real people", not the "machines".
Re: smart people, including Bill Gates (Score:2)
Re:smart people, including Bill Gates (Score:4, Insightful)
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that ... all humans would enjoy more leisure time
And that was, and continues to be, the single biggest mistake of optimistic utopian predictions. Not the "more leisure time" part, mind you, but the "enjoy" part.
If you want to live at a standard set by the 1920's, you can... Living with cheap goods, no electronics, and an hourly factory job, you can meet those basic needs pretty easily. If you're working only a few hours per week to meet those minimal expenses, however, your copious leisure time will be quite boring by modern standards. Knowing what else is available, it takes quite a lot of discipline to maintain that nice simple life.
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply
We realized that we like advancing progress. We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
This is the single biggest mistake of pessimistic dystopian predictions: The assumption that somehow we're sitting at the absolute maximum of progress, and the precariously balanced economy will topple down the hill on the other side.
The reality is that human nature has not changed. We always want to have the best the world can offer. If that means working just as much as our parents did for a low wage, so be it. At the end of the day, we'll still be able to go to our air-conditioned home, turn on the trillions of transistors in our gaming computers, and play a video game that runs more computations in five minutes than were executed during the entire Apollo 11 mission.
We don't have any more leisure time than we did when those "world of the future" exhibits were built. What's happened instead is that both our working and leisure time have become more effective. At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved. At play, we routinely spend our time doing what once would have been once-in-a-lifetime activities, because our toys are so greatly improved.
Utopia? We are living it and don't even see it
No smart people left in the US it would seem. (Score:2, Insightful)
In a democracy, no less.
If you cant manage to out fight or out vote them, then you deserve the shitty country you live in.
Signed - Rest of the world.
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"You outnumber the 1%'ers literally 99 to 1."
We outnumber Usain Bolt literally billions to one. Can you name someone running faster than him? It is not about the numbers but about the proper numbers. And regarding *raw* numbers, 99% are less than 2:1 to 1% regarding wealth accrual. Still an advantage but one that has been severily reduced in the last decades and looks like it's going to be reduced even more.
"In a democracy, no less."
And after we talked about raw numbers, then we need to qualify them. N
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Dont even put Bills name in the same sentence as Stephen Hawking.... bills an idiot
There's even a musical about him, I think: Billy Idiot, it's called. About this young boy, Billy, who breaks away from his background in a coal mining community to become a ballet dancer. Something like that, yeah.
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Gates is considerably more wealthy (and healthy) than that limey cripple freak..
Dear Troll, money is not a measure of intelligence - neither Leonardo Da Vinci or Einstein were rich, and Gates total worth is based on the theoretical return from selling shares he can't sell without massively devaluing them. Further, his contribution to human knowledge or making the world a better place is surpassed only by the efforts of Mother Teresa.
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Ding! Ding! We have a believer in one of those back-of-the-magazine "alternative" physics models. Now tell us all about the chemtrails, buddy.
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Wait, you think you're not equivalent to a Turing machine? That's a dangerous bet.
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Hubris? Sure. I'm of the opinion that when science conflicts with religion, that it should be religion, not science, that should adapt.
You're free to believe any nonsense you like. Just understand that it has no rational basis.
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Whether AGI by computational means is possible depends on how successful the atheist view of humanity is. If that view proves true, at least as explaining human origins and development, it follows that everything that humans are will at some point be reproducible by machine. The computational elements that realize this model may be as far beyond today's as ours are beyond the steam engine (quantum processes, etc.) but they will be nonetheless computational.
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It has nothing to do with atheism. You don't need to posit a god. Hell, you don't even need to posit a soul or other supernatural concept. Computation alone is insufficient. To claim otherwise necessitates that you be able to demonstrate that syntactic content is sufficient for semantic content. So simple and obvious is this point, that it can lead you to only one conclusion.
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Put the smartest people on Earth in a room, with access to all the world's current knowledge, for 20,000 years.
When those people emerge from that room, what would they be able to teach humanity?
About the same that AGI would teach us after being "conscious" for 7 days.
I can also make a program that returns 42 in less than a microsecond. I guess I've up staged them all.
Re:The Future of AGI (Score:5, Funny)
Put the smartest people on Earth in a room, with access to all the world's current knowledge, for 20,000 years. When those people emerge from that room, what would they be able to teach humanity?
Skeletons can't teach, nor do they emerge from rooms.
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AI is a tool that attempts to replicate the pattern matching abilities of a human brain, it can already find useful patterns in natural language and unformatted text faster and more accurately than any other method including traditional analysis
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"The point is, AI is much faster and efficient"
Yes, I can also figure a non-existant anything the be much everything than anything that, you know, really exists.
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That's a good discussion; to summarize: autonomous AIs should be made safe for humanity, but what does that mean, and how can it be done?
The problem, as I see it, is that even if we could agree on a universal set of rules and somehow implemented those rules in the code, it could still be faulty, and it might not cover all situations to which the rules ought to apply. To solve that, we need to give AIs the same sort of social instincts that we and other apes have, because that is where our ability to make mo
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I don't worry about AGI for the same reason I don't worry about vampires.
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Maximum Homerdrive
But in all seriousness, you still need someone there even on the freeway. Although, maybe three trucks can be in a train/convoy. But someone has to be there in case something goes wrong. Wheel falls apart, something comes unstrapped, etc. Monitoring it and having AAA come I don't think is as feasible as paying someone to sit there and deal with it when it happens.
As long as the truck can pull over if there is a problem, which it would need to even in your three trucks in a convoy solution, then this problem is easy to solve. You even mention the solution in your post: AAA. A commercial trucking version of AAA would have drivers to come fix any of these failures and get the trucks to their destinations. Who knows how many of these truckers they would need when this technology becomes ubiquitous, but its likely to be a very small percentage of the current trucking ind
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It's not alarming if you have passive income and investments and savings. But if you depend on your paycheck, you should be very alarmed. For those in the paycheck to paycheck world, a threat to your livelihood may as well be a threat to your life. Defend yourself accordingly. The wealthy are going to be shocked when the masses come for them. They don't even know what's going on.
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"It is in no ones economic interests to replace humans with machines."
You may be right. Still, prisoner's dilemma aplies: it certainly is in *my* interest to replace expensive and difficult to manage humans with relatively cheaper and easy to manage machines on *my* mills, and capitalism focus on me looking ater *my* interests, not yours.
"It creates an ecomony that collapse in upon itself"
Now I'm even more interested on making my money now, everybody else's be damned. You know, the wealthy have always the
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Mod up!
I like that idea of a guarantee federal job. Sort of like a non-violent version of the military. It should have a snappy name, like Civilian...something...Corps maybe?
If it was a large enough of an organization then the support of the organization itself could provide ample employment. Qualified counselors, trainers, etc to 'triage' the incoming 'recruits' for the jobs they are best suited for. Social workers, pre-K/daycare attendants, after school mentors for troubled kids, companionship for elderly
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"They're going to need to develop a self driving car that can load your bags into the back of the taxi and deliver the goods you've ordered into your house."
Yes. Exactly as they needed a pump capable of tying to you car and fill the deposit before they had unmanned gas stations.
Oh, wait!
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"I don't think it is true that technological progress ever reduced the number of jobs."
I don't think you ever read a History book, then.
That, *up to know*, technological progress haven't reduced the number of jobs *globally* and *in the long term* doesn't mean that this is not going to happen next time nor that it didn't happen locally and on the short term (where short terms means long enough to make miserable the whole lives of millions).
"In Poland, the undestanding is that 30% of the IT jobs are vacant b