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AI Will Create 'Useless Class' Of Human, Predicts Bestselling Historian (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Yuval Noah Harari, author of the international bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," doesn't have a very optimistic view of the future when it comes to artificial intelligence. He writes about how humans "might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts and drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces," writes The Guardian. "Harari calls it 'the rise of the useless class' and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. As artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition." He likens his predictions, which have been been forecasted by others for at least 200 years, to the boy who cried wolf, saying, "But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time." Harari says there are two kinds of ability that make humans useful: physical ones and cognitive ones. He says humans have been largely safe in their work when it comes to cognitive powers. But with AI's now beginning to outperform humans in this field, Harari says, that even though new types of jobs will emerge, we cannot be sure that humans will do them better than AIs, computers and robots.
The government is getting ready for this state of affairs by removing their means of revolt.
Have gnu, will travel.
Written sixteen years ago by Bill Joy One the best articles on the subject.
Experts have been predicting the end of the world for centuries and they've been wrong every time.
I'm going to predict that the world will never end, and I'll only be wrong once.
The driver for self-preservation is what will save humans. AI may become self-aware, but it won't have inner driver to evolve to preserve itself at all costs. In fact, because it will be created by humans, its most primal drive will be the laws of robotics. Humans, at large, will do what specialists do when they see their livelihood threatened. They will pretend to cooperate, but their full drive to make themselves obsolete will be just a facade. They will learn to fail just frequently enough to make themselves relevant, but not frequently enough to make themselves useless. It's how car manufacturers continue to exist. The cars have built-in defects which develop over time. So car manufacturers continue to be needed. Unions, professional licenses... it's all there to slow down the course of history until the people who developed very specialized skills live out their usefulness rather than outlive it. News business was supposed to be dead, but all that's happened is the number of newsmen has decreased. 80% of the population were farmers. Today it's less than 5%. If humans, at large, can become irrelevant, then humans at large will find ways to stretch out the period over which this irrelevance sets in or they will continue to produce AI with imperfections subtle enough to continue ongoing development (just as car companies do). This may seem far fetched, but, as an example, cars in Cuba are all from the 50s. It's not because cubans are "poor", as much as it is because in the absence of new cars, old ones get maintained to last much longer than car manufactures would have you believe cars can survive.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
There is a big difference there. I have a right to my land, which I own.
Without the ability to enforce that "right", you have nothing. If you enforce it yourself, you have the right until someone with a bigger gun than you comes along and wants what you have. If you live in an at least somewhat functioning state, the state enforces your rights so you have what's yours until someone with a bigger gun than the state collectively has comes along and wants to take it.
And obviously "owning" land is in most of the world defined as having paid someone for a piece of land who, in turn, paid someone else for that land, who paid someone who paid someone who...until you reach the point at which the first "owner" in that chain of transactions is the party that killed the previous "owner". And that owner might be the latest in the end of a similar chain which started with killing. That's true about land in most at least somewhat inhabited areas. War has been waged almost everywhere at some point in history. And even when you go so far back in history that the inhabitants were nomadic tribes, it's ambiguous whether the first party to claim a piece of land as their "property" did that without force. Technically, nomadic tribes didn't claim to own any piece of land. They wandered harvesting resources in large areas and moved on when resources seemed scarce in one area. By declaring that they cannot enter any particular piece of land because it's "yours" you deprived them of access to something they previously had even if they had never claimed exclusive access. And when enough land is declared as property like that, such nomadic tribes run out of resources when they haven't even considered the concept of "owning land".
The reason why I'm bringing up nomadic tribes isn't just to make you think about what it means to "own land" in our Western society but also to make you think about how changes in how the world functions deprives people of resources. Nomadic tribes had the resources they needed to survive - until the world changed when the concept of land ownership was introduced. Able-bodied people with a decent work ethic have had the ability to get the resources they need to survive in most of the world until now (not necessarily with luxuries but survive nonetheless). If enough jobs are eliminated through automation, they will be deprived of all resources except what they can literally produce on their own. And who can on their own do much more than perhaps grow food? If you cannot produce anything at a competitive price, you cannot buy anything. And you cannot because you're competing with automation. Not to mention that growing food requires a lot of land and of the right kind, which might be unobtainable for many people even if they otherwise could indeed go back to such a way of living. Essentially, the world is changing in such a way that through no fault of their own, people stop being useful. And when people are desperate enough, they do desperate things no matter how much they have to compromise their ethics. If you have enough self-awareness you know that that includes you. And that's just in terms of obtaining what you need to survive. Criminologists say that literally anyone can become a murderer under the right circumstances. I don't object to automation at all, however, I just want everyone to be able to reap the fruits of it. Maybe a guaranteed basic income is necessary for people who become "useless". Or great reductions on maximum working hours so that the minimal amount of work which still requires humans is split among all who can perform those jobs. I don't have the answers but clearly I'm not the only one thinking about it.