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The Future of AI: a Non-Alarmist Viewpoint
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.
Dont even put Bills name in the same sentence as Stephen Hawking.... bills an idiot
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.
For those who missed this previous /. news, I guess it's worth having a look at it first:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/04/21/1849213/concerns-of-an-artificial-intelligence-pioneer
AI will obsolete your job before it obsoletes humanity.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
Even though I see the point, I don't believe in all that "loosing job overnight"...
There are millions of people in IT business doing work that could be automated by rather simple (or semi-complex) scripting, which is way more easier to adopt then replacing your fleet of cars, trucks, etc with self-driving variants. Somehow these companies are still paying people to deploy storage, install servers, configure services, etc ...
And btw...
I would deffinitely get rif of 90% of taxi drivers in my city and replace them with self-driving cars though (it would be service to the public). We don't need any more of those "proffesionals drivers" with driving license and no basic social skills.
But at the same time, I would call one of those 10% left, to bring my mom over for Sunday lunch.
I vaguely remember something about Morlocks and Eloi. .. oops gotta run.. shiny things!
I predict that solving the self-driving car problem will be just like voice dictation: They will get 99% of the way there and they will never get the last 1% right. There was a recent news story about a company starting to use a fleet of self-driving trucks. Guess what? The trucks still need a driver to take over when the truck leaves the freeway. Completely self-driving car? I'll believe it when I see it.
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.
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.
> 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.
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*.
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.
... 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.
"for example, thousands of taxi drivers, truck drivers and delivery people will be out of a job practically overnight"
The answer to that already exists and is supported by the majority of the US population if surveys are to be believed.
The federal government should just guarantee a job offer at the living wage to all that want it, working for the public good. A simple employer of last resort function. That keeps demand up, ensures people have something to do with their day where they can demonstrate their worth to others in society, and allows business to get on with the job of automating drudgery out of existence without worrying about job numbers.
Anybody coming up with the tired 'how do we pay for it' line should immediately book themselves on a course of accounting and monetary economics with a strong Modern Monetary Theory component.
... 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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is in no ones economic interests to replace humans with machines. It creates an ecomony that collapse in upon itself. Legislation will emerge limiting/eliminating AI from human jobs.
It is predictable that robots will push out workers everywhere, but the big question is : What do we do then.
The key to this question is wondering who we have to thank for our products. Right now it is the fossil fuel companies, fossil fuel is scarce, we compete for it and that gives advantage to robots over people.
If we which our energy sources to renewables that competitive pressure goes away, and so we get to choose what work we want to do and what machines can do. This is what I call the Roboeconomy. See http://roboeconomy.com/
AI is a threat, but not because it will become superhuman, but because it will serve the scarce fossil fuel economy to control everyone's move to make it last as long as possible. To prevent this problematic use of AI we need to 1. Set human related goals for our industry, so no economic indicators. 2. Drive renewable expansion as hard as we can.
How is that non-alarmist?
"You're scared about [A]? That makes no sense, you should be scared about [B]."
Look how many assembly lines are now automated and do not need humans to assemble units.
Everything from building cars to sticking the heads on dolls are no longer a manual job, except when outsourced to a country where they pay people less than the price to oil the assembly line robots.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Two Words:
Butlerian Jihad.
You outnumber the 1%'ers literally 99 to 1.
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.
It seems to me it's not AI we fear, but our own reaction to it. AIs will not deprive people of their jobs, it is people who will deprive each other, through their use of AI. AI can be scary, but as with splitting the atom, the use we make of it will determine the outcome.
What scares me more are the human corruptions that will plague this new power. Imagine an advertiser using deep learning to design a "perfect" ad that tunes in to your every microexpression and adjusts its colors, shapes and sounds to suggest an unconscious need for the product, without you being aware of it. I don't want that (no customer would) but as long as there is a profit in it, it'll happen.
On the other hand, I would welcome an AI, trained by a nutritionist, that suggests healthy meals according to my activities and biological needs so I don't have to worry about eating right ever again.
It's all about trust in the end. I trust nutritionists because they have my health at heart, and less advertisers because I know they do not care about individuals. If AI is going to be the power of the next century, who should we trust with it ? (I'm tempted to say "not the ones developing it" at the moment)
"A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates"
Usually one declares not dropouts as well-educated, even if they drop out of Harvard.
so this means someone actually managed to define what intelligence is? :)
It might be of interest that The Reg (last link) is also a climate science denier hub. Which makes sense, as the logic seems to be similar: Why worry about climate disruption, if the really serious effects are not taking place RIGHT NOW? Gas leaking? Let's worry about it once the house has exploded.
The solution, just like with the last 100 "robots will take your job" articles, is the unconditional basic income. We should be celebrating the fact that in "the future", not everybody has to work full time (or at all) to survive.
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, but they are imbued with the biases and motivations of those that designed them and set their parameters.
And since many of the major players have these systems and they act on largely overlapping data (market prices, major positions held by known investors, risk models with overlapping criteria), in some respects these independent systems kind of form a larger system since each system is capable of influencing the others' by the guidance they provide which influences the actions of the humans making major decisions and the automated trading systems themselves.
I sometimes wonder if maybe phenomena like wealth inequality isn't just capitalism's inevitable outcome, but perhaps the inbuilt motivation of these financial systems represented in the kinds of financial goals they've been programmed with.
On even simpler levels, what about a building's management system that's allowed to set the building temperature on its own based on energy prices and doesn't let the occupants ever determine the temperature? Sure, the risk is low (too cold or too hot), but it's the kind of dumb AI control system that we trust to make the "right" decision but whose motivation ("reduce energy costs") and lack of human control ("no thermostat adjustment") that exposes a kind of risk from an AI even though it's not HAL9000-sentient.
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.
Until that self driving vehicle can unload that new bed, or book shelf or 65 inch TV, people will still be involved. They just won't be driving the vehicles.
If I had the "on" button for an AGI and there was a 50% chance it wipes humanity out - I will turn it on. I care about the progress of intellect (e.g aim towards The Singularity). I am probably not the only one (and one is all it takes) who would do the same so you should lynch us now if you care about humanity's survival in its current biological form.
NIce to get an alternate viewpoint. Now how about one for global warming hysteria? A negative opinion of crony oligarch Elon Musk? Wind and solar power. The blessing of burning coal? Driving a big car?
I don't think it is true that technological progress ever reduced the number of jobs. I guess, except when the slaves were not needed anymore to power the oars when the engines took over their role to pull ships. To me, it seems that progress requires a change in qualifications rather then making people not needed. Look at the number of people needed (and that number growing quickly) to design, program and maintain the smart devices of today (fridges, washing machines, etc). In Poland, the undestanding is that 30% of the IT jobs are vacant because of not enough people ready to take them despite the sallaries in IT being well above the median sallary. I wonder what is this number for US. It's true that people already having a job, may need to gain new qualifications. But this happens over time with jobs unrelated to the technological progress just as well. See, how much fewer people with degree in biology, history or georaphy are hired now than they used to be? Migration yes. Jobs going away - I don't think so.
Lets have a similar article:
The future of climate change from a non-alarmist viewpoint
People will just hate the people who make it, no matter how intrinsically interesting it is or how much benefit it can provide in other areas of society.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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!"
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.
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.
I am not afraid of an advance A.I. because of the following idea :
A.I. will require human because it will feed on human experience and because A.I. will be hungry for knowledge and not air, food or water. Our experience will be the most importance thing for an advance A.I. The A.I. require the experience of all living life form. From these experiences, the A.I. will growth to become what it is destine to become.
The human will be require to monitor the A.I. state and behavior during it growth. For example, self driving car will require one or many human to monitor it behavior. While a human can monitor one or many A.I.. So all A.I. will require to implement a monitoring function that report on it state. A A.I. won't object to us monitoring it many function.
Human and A.I. will coexist just a plant and human coexist.
One of my philosophy professors is an expert on the foundations of cognitive science and is heavily immersed in the literature from all the hard and soft scientists working on AI/cog-sci and he was a start post-doc of Daniel Dennett. One class I pressed him to make a prediction for when we'll see fully capable AI... "I understand your reluctance but just give me some sort of timeline." He said definitely not this century and maybe not next century but probably the one after. Of course Dennett himself, one of the most staunch supporters of the enterprise being obviously possible (despising dualism and such), fully acknowledges that it might be so complex that we'll never achieve it but, "it's not like there is some definite predetermined wall out there waiting for us that we'll logically never be able to pass."
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.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The AI community has been promising human-level AI since the 60s - the prophecies by luminaries like Marvin Minsky are there for everybody to see. It hasn't happened, just as Kurzweill's singularity won't happen when he has predicted, or even ever. The problem is the substantially the same as as that in theoretical physics in the 20th century: all the "easy" problems have been solved. What is left now is the really tricky stuff. Or, to put it in a different, somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, 90% of all the problems have been solved; the remaining 10% of the problems will take 90% of the total time. Thus, in 30 years time we'll have vastly more powerful computers, but speech recognition will be only somewhat better than it is today, and probably still far from what is depicted in the Star Trek series - and we still won't have flying cars beyond the impractical, expensive and all around pathetic folding-wing-airplane contraptions that we already have and nobody uses. I'd be happy to be wrong about this - but I am afraid I won't.
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 predictor of the future. Why would it start working now?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
There's nothing new in TFA. Only the same old lowbrow stuff. Not worthy of my superintelligence time.
You would need unions to succeed in that kind of change.
Good luck promoting that idea.
The effects of the rise of automation can best be described as a loss in the value of labor and a gain in the value of capital.
The implication of this is that people must take action to become capital owners. That doesn't necessarily mean you should go out and buy a robot. You probably won't be able to afford one and you won't be able to gain remunerative work. The solution to this is to buy capital now, in the form of corporate stocks, and to do estate planning to insure that your children inherit your capital ownership because they likely won't be able to acquire it themselves. All inheritance taxes should be abolished.
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?
That's what I was going to say. Almost nothing occurs "overnight", really, there's usually a lot of unpublicized effort in the years preceding it. Trucking companies will still require drivers in the trucks as backups, if nothing else. And there are still a lot of crappy roads out there that aren't auto-driving friendly.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Then every fucking thing you say after here is the same bullshit hand wringing as postulated by someone who doesn't have a clue either.
"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 because of not enough people ready to take them despite the sallaries in IT being well above the median sallary."
You can hail this to two things, neither of which are going to last long: Poland has demand for IT jobs because it's easy for their value to be sold in the other side of the world producing a value delta in the process. That is globalization plus low standards of life on your side. The same can be said about wages: it is not that IT salaries are above median and still they are not covered but they are above median *because* they can't be covered: moving efforts towards IT will certainly lower the wages as it will do other depressed economies entering the game. Do you want a hint in Polands future? Then look, for instance, at Spain's last 40 years.
"I wonder what is this number for US."
I already told you about globalization: USA IT labout market is depressing -or not growing at the pace it could, because Poland -and India and others, are outcompeting them in wages costs.
"It's true that people already having a job, may need to gain new qualifications."
Good luck requalifying your heavy industry people from Gdansk into white collar IT workers. Just look at how well it ended to other regions going through the same path.
"Migration yes. Jobs going away - I don't think so."
You are aware that migration means exaclty "jobs going away", are you?
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"Overnight" relative to a human's career. Do you consider 10 years overnight? While ten years seems long, it is two generations of vehicle development and an almost complete turnover of the fleet. At the same time it is very quick in terms of human careers: millions of drivers being out of work in a period that short is too quick to absorb elsewhere, too quick for them to reboot their careers, too quick for retirement/attrition to be much help.
Always wondered about this. IF AI gets really really good, robots might ... some day .. decide to kill people.
Right now, around the world, zillions of people are deciding to kill other people. Right now. Fact.
So, why are killer robots "scary" but killer people is staus quo ?
Whatever happened to automation leading to a leisuretopia with a five-hour work week?
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.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Here is a decent example of why computers can't drive trucks.
The other day one of the drivers at my wife's company pulled into dock normally and damaged the truck.
What happened?
There was a dip in the pavement sufficient to, when entered while turning, fold the truck at the hitch to the point where the cab extenders (wind breaks on the side) came in contact with the trailer.
What could have been done?
If the driver had been significantly more experienced he would have seen the dip in the road and made a 3 point turn and backed straight into the dock, with both cab extenders folding to the side of the trailer.
Because of this and ten thousand other possibilities and special cases I don't think autonomous delivery is going to be possible in the near future if at all.
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.
but then I read that it was not alarmist. I'll take my AI articles as infuriating as they are terrifying, thank you very much.
No more swearing at acres of empty handicap, police, pregnant mom, EV and other reserved parking spaces. Just door to door service that won't take away jobs from anyone except maybe a few hotel and restaurant valets.
At that point of full automation, the only purpose of financial system is to control overpopulation. But as long as poor won't have access to money they won't have access to that automation, that means the population will shrink and starve cause "the faith" won't let births become bureaucratic by removing financial system to a state controled births and deaths with a quota resources for every one. Simply there will be no discussion about it cause govern do not lead anymore, tech (not tech people, just tech) leads. Open source or not, its unavoidable, unprecedented change on human history. Govern could pose that has the control by marketing fear, but its just that, ads for votes.
I'm pretty sure people in the UAW, AFL-CIO, and USW work 40-hours a week, in industries that are highly automated.
When pay is tied to the number of hours worked, it's the workers that want more hours. When you're paid a salary, management wants you to work more hours. The Unions would never agree to a reduced number of hours unless there was a corresponding increase in hourly pay.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Wrong. Because my opinion was 100 percent what the AI expert's opinion was before he even opened his fucking mouth.
Why is that?
Coincidence? I randomly had the right opinion? Or maybe I actually do know something about AI systems as demonstrated by my further comments but I wouldn't call myself an expert.
I don't program the fucking things. I work with some expert systems at work and they're useful tools. But take over the world? Not on their own. Maybe if someone told them to.
AIs don't want anything. They have no will. They have no sense of self preservation.
All the AI fear is based on cartoonish anthropomorphizations of what are machines.
Most of the speculation makes about as much sense as the movie "cars" where all the cars are self aware people.
AIs are not self aware and they're not people. They don't have our genetic history.
Now if you want to fear something... fear cyborgs. A cyborg could be pretty fucking scary. All the power of your best AI/robot with the core mind of a man/woman. Then you're dealing with something legitimately dangerous. Not because the machine is dangerous. But rather because the man was always dangerous. The machine just let him do things he couldn't do before.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm mad as hell to the shitty level of thinking that goes into the alarmist scifi nonsense we've seen so much off of late. I'm an old AI developer who used to do this stuff for a living (but then thought better of it) and have digged deeper into more human and philosophical issues, and I wrote this a couple of weeks ago; http://sheltered-objections.bl...
-- Home, James - it doesn't matter where that thing has b
That would make an interesting project. Anyone know how to crowd fund it?
btw if you want the Marxist classification, he defined those people (probably us, I expect you own some stock) who own some means of production as the Petty Bourgeoisie. He said, "A petty bourgeois is the owner of small property." That is, someone who owned some of the means of production.
As you mentioned, times have changed, and in Marx's days a typical person would not own stock; so I had to extrapolate what Marx would have thought. You can form your own opinions, here is a good page. Last year I spent a good portion of my surplus labor at work reading through Marx trying to answer exactly this question.
It's worth noting that Piketty also considered the stock-holding middle class to be a problem, because they are roadblocks on the path to equality. Personally, my own solution to inequality would be to teach the poor to be richer, but that's just me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Thanks for the link. I'm still not sure why you disagree with me though. I'm guessing maybe you don't, after all?
> Personally, my own solution to inequality would be to teach the poor to be richer, but that's just me
The topic at hand is how the effect of automation on economics is going to play out in the future. You're going to have to explain to me how this is relevant to the topic.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Maybe there's a better word than "deterministic", because that is certainly not a given for any AI. If, for example, it uses (true) randomness as a last ditch resort to break decision making deadlocks it is no longer deterministic, is it?
The means of production are not limited to ownership of small factories. A 19th-Century shoemaker might well own specialized tools that would enable him to make shoes efficiently, and that counts as means of production. A farmer might own his own farmland. Back then, a lot of people were self-employed and owned their own tools. I don't know how that compares to the relatively fewer such people nowadays and the larger number of people who own stock.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In the Marxian view, farmers who owned their own land were pre-industrial. You had to get to the industrial age before you could get surplus value.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Oh, I don't believe that a small group of people controls the economy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You have given an example of a specific scenario in which a predictable mechanical effect happens. If the on-board computer keeps a model of what's going on, it will indeed see that such a thing will happen, and maneuver accordingly. There are lots of things that can happen that a computer would probably handle worse than a human, but this is not one of them.
I think the biggest human advantage will be in understanding what other humans are likely to do. I still can't articulate how, several years ago, I correctly tagged a pedestrian waiting to cross the street as intending to run across the street right in front of me. I don't know what a computer-controlled car would have done.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Who will buy all the products the machines make and transport if very few humans have income? I hope this happens in my lifetime, I know it's going to suck, but I'd like to be part of it.
Is far more of an issue in the short term.
Without a change to how our economy functions, specialist AI will make millions of people's employment positions redundant. Not only does this take them out of the workforce, under our current economic system, it takes them out of the consumer force. This reduces the marketability of goods produced by the AI workforce, since consumers will have no ability to afford them.
Fearing Skynet is for ignoramus; the real threat is Manna...
I'm designing and building a real Strong AI and even I cant answer that question.. An interim solution though is very simple, get lawmakers to pass a law for 'equal pay for machine workers' - a massive profit for the Strong AI companies without destroying the world..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
So now I have to worry whether my taxi will try to run me over if I get snarky with it. I've seen this movie...
No sig for you! Come back one year!