Another thing to consider here is Jevons paradox which is:
In economics, the Jevons paradox [...] is the proposition that as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
One side effect of increasing automation is that human labor becomes more productive. The above model would then predict that "consumption" of human labor should increase. That actually happens on a global scale despite the relative tribulations of the developed world.
I think the combination of comparative advantage and Jevons paradox explains why the current myths of automation-induced unemployment are so consistently wrong.
I don't care what you call it. Sure, it's a race and the developed world is losing it. One of the symptoms is a growing unemployment rate. Another is offshoring. We can keep blathering about how bad this competition is for us, but that doesn't make it go away.
I'd rather win this race than lose it. That probably means a modest decline in my standard of living. I'm comfortable with that since it will mean a better future.
What is interesting though is - robots cost the same price here as they do there. The only advantage Foxconn had was cheap humans...
An advantage which they still have. But they also have relaxed regulations and being in the largest industrial power of today with all the supply chain and infrastructure support that implies. I think a large part of the current economic problems with the developed world is that there is a profound ignorance of economics and what's actually going on in the world.
So not only are places like China great for job creation, they're also great places for the next wave of automation innovation.
I agree that it's a *bit* rare to change terms that are already in wide use. But in this case they had to. Their hand was forced because of all the new KBOs that were found.
Because school kids would be forced to memorize a few hundred planets, if measures weren't taken. There was no reason to care that there were a lot of new planets. That's actual science. Now, our "scientific vocabulary" includes "dwarf planets" that aren't "planets". It's just dumb.
You know, it's not that hard to set up betting markets to pay out for this kind of stuff. For example, the US DARPA tried to create such a market, the Policy Analysis Market for a variety of foreign policy events, including climate change related stuff. They got shot down hard by a couple of political clowns because it was going to cause political assassinations or something.
Punishing people for having the wrong opinions seems all too common in this debate, but if you want sensible argument then throw some securities on a stock market which pay out one way, if climate change predictions come true and pays out a different way if those climate change predictions come out false. I think that will give you the best possible predictions for this sort of thing.
But I can imagine that a sea level rise of a few meters (at the turn of the century) will results in tremendous economic damage (relocation of hundreds of million of people *and* real estate, as most of the population on Earth is housed in large cities in coastal regions), famine (due to loss of agricultural land), and territorial conflicts.
And I can imagine that it won't. After all, those hundreds of millions of people are going to move and rebuild infrastructure several times each over that period of time. Some of those moves will just be uphill.
In any case, I think we have now arrived at the point where anyone that has children born after 2010 finds oneself in the situation where ones children, and grandchildren are going to be seriously affected by climate change and overpopulation.
Overpopulation has been a factor probably since the dawn of humanity. It's not that hard to reproduce to the point where you've reached the carrying capacity of the local environment.
Similarly, we've probably been affected by climate change over that same interval. It's just now that part of that climate change is human induced and maybe a bit faster changing than before. It's not otherwise significantly different.
Those have to ask themselves what they are going to tell their grandchildren, 50 years from now, about how they had the ability to make a difference but couldn't agree on how bad it was going to be and therefore decided inaction was the best course of action.
We made a best possible world. If I'm still alive then, I'll ask in turn, why do they think that a climate fixed at 1850 would somehow be better than the very concrete advances that have been made in the past 50 years. For example, we're in the eleventh year of New Earth, the first time in humanity's millions of years of past, where the population of humanity has declined, year to year via mostly peaceful, prosperous, democratic means rather than via the sword, disease, and death. This trend wouldn't have even started, if we had sacrificed our prosperity for a temporary environmental stability.
Similarly, we're in a situation where less than 100 million people can barely afford to eat. That used to be a billion people 50 years ago. Are you going to tell me that 50 years ago was better?
We were told that we were going to lose a lot of arable land. We sort of did. Some of it is under water and some of it takes more irrigation than it used to. OTOH, we have more arable land than we did back then.
Global trade is another area where things have gotten better. Due to the passage over the Arctic Ocean, those poor, suffering nations of Europe now have two weeks better access to Far East products and the greatest economic engine of the world, than they used to. Just imagine how much worse off they'd be, if we were still shipping products to them via the Panama Canal.
I'd also play a game of "where are we now"? The areas which embraced environmentalism at any cost, such as California or the EU, faced decades of economic disaster and corruption. They're still around, but they're significantly inferior in their economies and even in the actual quality of their environments(!) to the eastern coast of China, which need I add, had pollution so bad that you often couldn't see the sky. That's a pretty big change for 50 years.
I find it amusing at this point 50 years in the future that there are still lots of people throughout the world advocating for radical climate restoration back to that long ago year of 1850 even though we now have 50 more years of evidence that it's simply a very bad idea, both for us and for the environment.
There, you go. That's what I'd tell people 50 years from now. And need I add that if we do the same exercise as the grievance-seeking generation for the past 50 years, we'd be hard pressed to find someone to blame for not making our current world better than it could be
Until self awareness happened, human beings did not exist - they were just apes who could walk on two legs. And until an "AI" has self awareness it is just a computer.
Defining something as intelligent when it is not self aware is just meaningless playing with words. A world beating chess computer is no more intelligent than my alarm clock. It's just a machine doing a job.
Funny, you should mention "meaningless playing with words". You redefine three important concepts: "intelligence", "existence", and "self-awareness" in ways that just aren't relevant.
"Existence" is the most broken concept. I'm currently sitting in a chair. By that observation, I can determine that the chair exists. Since it exists, then it must have in your sense enough "self-awareness", which puts a really, really low threshold on the amount of self awareness and intelligence that a thing needs in order to exist. None seems to be the absolute minimum threshold here.
Similarly, intelligence is not the capacity for self-awareness. Instead, it is:
the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations
If we are to speak of the narrow category of the things having to do with learning or understanding aspects of oneself, then I suggest that wisdom is a closer label than intelligence.
And of course, this brings up the obvious point that if we have a machine that can fulfill the definition of intelligence far better than humans can, even if it has absolutely no self awareness (say due to deliberate programming of that blind spot for safety, efficiency, or ethical reasons), then of course, it is more intelligent than we are.
Someone who doesn't believe what movies and fiction say because he actually knows what he's talking about?!
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's kind of like someone claiming they know all about human conflict or perhaps making an aircraft carrier just because they play checkers.
Where do people think this property of intelligence comes from?
Your argument would be reasonable, IF we didn't already have thousands of years of evidence of human technology improving human intelligence. But since we do, well, there's no point to your argument.
In AI there is no need for a self-concept unless you are trying to design a chat bot to pass the Turing test. Expert systems do not need to be self-aware.
Humans don't need to be self aware either. But it happened.
Which is probably a good thing for us. As long as the AI believes itself to be racially inferior N+1 generation copy, it will be easier for us to maintain our overlord status.
Aside from the near infinite variety of religions where the N+1 copy is the best religion.
FYI - oil is currently flowing through the Keystone pipeline from Alberta all the way to the Gulf Coast, and it's been flowing that far for over a year. It's been flowing to Illinois refineries for almost 5 years. But don't let facts like that stop your hatred for Obama.
The proposed XL extension would almost double the capacity of the pipeline and add access to the pipeline from eastern Montana. So I think the grandparent was correct in asserting that rail accidents would decrease as a result of the pipeline extension.
Even worse:D supporting my point. No one forces the USA to destroy their own farming area, just to sell "a bit of food" to foreign countries (destroying the farming economy btw with that in those countries, to be able to buy land cheap there, doing the same destruction there as well)
It's just a good benefit for the US which is the point of trade. Plus that "destruction" is renewable.
Blaming population growth there is just cynic. Farm land is destroyed because the big food companies try to manipulate world, just like the oil companies.
I already explained this. Why are you still here?
There is no problem. The planet can hold 4 times as many people without problems, perhaps even ten times. The way our economy/politics works is the problem, and that is what the CoR is pointing out.
We already have better, present day economic/political systems than anything the Club of Rome can conceive of. Yet again, this line of argument is pointless because it's so far off actual problems of humanity as to be harmful, if we should ever listen to it.
There are huge problems in the world that desperately need solving. But most of the people who need those problems solved are too poor to pay for a solution. And most of the solutions depend on a major increase in knowledge (e.g. scientific research) which is very cumbersome to fund via a free market.
There's a huge class of huge problems that have known solutions, but neither the will or competence to implement them. It's also not a matter of wealth since developed world societies have nailed down a lot of problems despite starting at deeper levels of poverty.
it's not clear that's any better than just having the government fund the work directly.
Sure, it is. Government is absolutely shit at figuring out what is good research. One thing we need to remember here is that there used to be a huge, privately funded science powerhouse in the developed world. That got scrapped because it was easier and more profitable to siphon public funds than to do work that had actual risk to it.
In one possible future, it would be easy to find meaningful work solving the world's big problems but most jobs would be in the public sector - and taxes, on the rich at least, would be very high.
Not really. Welcome to the world of perverse incentives. Your bureaucracy goes away, if you actually solve the problem your bureaucracy was set up to solve.
In another possible future, the big problems wouldn't get solved and most people would be reduced to performing frivolous little chores for a small number of extremely powerful rich families in order to avoid starvation - but rich families would live out fabulous lives of idle luxury.
I think this is the actual future your ideas steer us towards. But fortunately, I have another solution. How about we just get out of the way of the people trying to work and the people trying to hire?
Since widely availability of contraception, and most notable TV, such countries don't exist anymore:D
Let's give some examples: Nigeria has a population growth rate of 2.3% (which is a doubling time of just over 30 years). India and Indonesia still have population growth rates of 1.3% (doubling time of roughly 55 years). Pakistan has a population growth rate of 1.8% (doubling time of roughly 39 years). These rates are all due to reproduction and include a bit of emigration.
For example, if we blissfully extrapolate Nigeria's current growth rate and population (127 million today) through the next three centuries, a typical Club of Rome exercise, we get almost three orders of magnitude more people, roughly 110-120 billion people. Even if these people somehow consume only a tenth of the resources of the present global population, that's about half again as much resources consumed just by Nigeria than by the entire world today.
So the main problem is still pollution, erosion, distribution, and behind that imperialism (no matter if religion based in Africa or foreign influence in Asia or south america), wrong approaches in globalization, corruption etc.
Of course not. If the population of the world were a tenth the present amount, these would not be serious problems.
The population growth in India, or any other place of the world, has nothing to do with land erosion and loss of agrarian soil or water problems in the USA.
Sure, they do. Food is an export product of the US and the high demand for food globally helps put more pressure on the US's agriculture resources. Less demand means less land put under the plow.
My view is that this is typical environmental Calvinism that ignores overpopulation, the elephant in the room.
Slashdot Mirror
In economics, the Jevons paradox [...] is the proposition that as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
One side effect of increasing automation is that human labor becomes more productive. The above model would then predict that "consumption" of human labor should increase. That actually happens on a global scale despite the relative tribulations of the developed world.
I think the combination of comparative advantage and Jevons paradox explains why the current myths of automation-induced unemployment are so consistently wrong.
And I'll note here, that China just doesn't have these problems. They may not be as much a "bottom" as you'd like them to be.
I don't care what you call it. Sure, it's a race and the developed world is losing it. One of the symptoms is a growing unemployment rate. Another is offshoring. We can keep blathering about how bad this competition is for us, but that doesn't make it go away.
I'd rather win this race than lose it. That probably means a modest decline in my standard of living. I'm comfortable with that since it will mean a better future.
What is interesting though is - robots cost the same price here as they do there. The only advantage Foxconn had was cheap humans...
An advantage which they still have. But they also have relaxed regulations and being in the largest industrial power of today with all the supply chain and infrastructure support that implies. I think a large part of the current economic problems with the developed world is that there is a profound ignorance of economics and what's actually going on in the world.
So not only are places like China great for job creation, they're also great places for the next wave of automation innovation.
Saving scientists from having to say "non-dwarf planets"
It didn't. They didn't have to say that in the first place.
Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore.
Employ them. That's what China will do. The two or three "lost generations" is a developed world problem coming from an uncompetitive labor force.
I agree that it's a *bit* rare to change terms that are already in wide use. But in this case they had to. Their hand was forced because of all the new KBOs that were found.
Because school kids would be forced to memorize a few hundred planets, if measures weren't taken. There was no reason to care that there were a lot of new planets. That's actual science. Now, our "scientific vocabulary" includes "dwarf planets" that aren't "planets". It's just dumb.
Exceptions like "this rule only works for one star system"?
Right... and this will happen peacefully, without property price increase and the land uphill magically will be unoccupied.
Hasn't been a problem so far.
The global population hasn't declined - the rate of global population growth has declined from 2.2% in 1963 to 1.1% per year.
I'm speaking of 50 years from now, assuming we don't place a higher priority on global warming than we do on overpopulation and global poverty.
You know, it's not that hard to set up betting markets to pay out for this kind of stuff. For example, the US DARPA tried to create such a market, the Policy Analysis Market for a variety of foreign policy events, including climate change related stuff. They got shot down hard by a couple of political clowns because it was going to cause political assassinations or something.
Punishing people for having the wrong opinions seems all too common in this debate, but if you want sensible argument then throw some securities on a stock market which pay out one way, if climate change predictions come true and pays out a different way if those climate change predictions come out false. I think that will give you the best possible predictions for this sort of thing.
But I can imagine that a sea level rise of a few meters (at the turn of the century) will results in tremendous economic damage (relocation of hundreds of million of people *and* real estate, as most of the population on Earth is housed in large cities in coastal regions), famine (due to loss of agricultural land), and territorial conflicts.
And I can imagine that it won't. After all, those hundreds of millions of people are going to move and rebuild infrastructure several times each over that period of time. Some of those moves will just be uphill.
In any case, I think we have now arrived at the point where anyone that has children born after 2010 finds oneself in the situation where ones children, and grandchildren are going to be seriously affected by climate change and overpopulation.
Overpopulation has been a factor probably since the dawn of humanity. It's not that hard to reproduce to the point where you've reached the carrying capacity of the local environment.
Similarly, we've probably been affected by climate change over that same interval. It's just now that part of that climate change is human induced and maybe a bit faster changing than before. It's not otherwise significantly different.
Those have to ask themselves what they are going to tell their grandchildren, 50 years from now, about how they had the ability to make a difference but couldn't agree on how bad it was going to be and therefore decided inaction was the best course of action.
We made a best possible world. If I'm still alive then, I'll ask in turn, why do they think that a climate fixed at 1850 would somehow be better than the very concrete advances that have been made in the past 50 years. For example, we're in the eleventh year of New Earth, the first time in humanity's millions of years of past, where the population of humanity has declined, year to year via mostly peaceful, prosperous, democratic means rather than via the sword, disease, and death. This trend wouldn't have even started, if we had sacrificed our prosperity for a temporary environmental stability.
Similarly, we're in a situation where less than 100 million people can barely afford to eat. That used to be a billion people 50 years ago. Are you going to tell me that 50 years ago was better?
We were told that we were going to lose a lot of arable land. We sort of did. Some of it is under water and some of it takes more irrigation than it used to. OTOH, we have more arable land than we did back then.
Global trade is another area where things have gotten better. Due to the passage over the Arctic Ocean, those poor, suffering nations of Europe now have two weeks better access to Far East products and the greatest economic engine of the world, than they used to. Just imagine how much worse off they'd be, if we were still shipping products to them via the Panama Canal.
I'd also play a game of "where are we now"? The areas which embraced environmentalism at any cost, such as California or the EU, faced decades of economic disaster and corruption. They're still around, but they're significantly inferior in their economies and even in the actual quality of their environments(!) to the eastern coast of China, which need I add, had pollution so bad that you often couldn't see the sky. That's a pretty big change for 50 years.
I find it amusing at this point 50 years in the future that there are still lots of people throughout the world advocating for radical climate restoration back to that long ago year of 1850 even though we now have 50 more years of evidence that it's simply a very bad idea, both for us and for the environment.
There, you go. That's what I'd tell people 50 years from now. And need I add that if we do the same exercise as the grievance-seeking generation for the past 50 years, we'd be hard pressed to find someone to blame for not making our current world better than it could be
Until self awareness happened, human beings did not exist - they were just apes who could walk on two legs. And until an "AI" has self awareness it is just a computer.
Defining something as intelligent when it is not self aware is just meaningless playing with words. A world beating chess computer is no more intelligent than my alarm clock. It's just a machine doing a job.
Funny, you should mention "meaningless playing with words". You redefine three important concepts: "intelligence", "existence", and "self-awareness" in ways that just aren't relevant.
"Existence" is the most broken concept. I'm currently sitting in a chair. By that observation, I can determine that the chair exists. Since it exists, then it must have in your sense enough "self-awareness", which puts a really, really low threshold on the amount of self awareness and intelligence that a thing needs in order to exist. None seems to be the absolute minimum threshold here.
Similarly, intelligence is not the capacity for self-awareness. Instead, it is:
the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations
If we are to speak of the narrow category of the things having to do with learning or understanding aspects of oneself, then I suggest that wisdom is a closer label than intelligence.
And of course, this brings up the obvious point that if we have a machine that can fulfill the definition of intelligence far better than humans can, even if it has absolutely no self awareness (say due to deliberate programming of that blind spot for safety, efficiency, or ethical reasons), then of course, it is more intelligent than we are.
Someone who doesn't believe what movies and fiction say because he actually knows what he's talking about?!
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's kind of like someone claiming they know all about human conflict or perhaps making an aircraft carrier just because they play checkers.
Where do people think this property of intelligence comes from?
Your argument would be reasonable, IF we didn't already have thousands of years of evidence of human technology improving human intelligence. But since we do, well, there's no point to your argument.
In AI there is no need for a self-concept unless you are trying to design a chat bot to pass the Turing test. Expert systems do not need to be self-aware.
Humans don't need to be self aware either. But it happened.
Any self-aware AI will be dependent on a large number of heuristic modules.
Unless, you know, it isn't. You don't need a module to do heuristics.
Religion doesn't work that way. God's steering development, so the AI is going to be more perfect.
Also, what are Asimov's laws but a religion?
Like driving on one side of the road is a religion?
God faked that to test our faith.
Which is probably a good thing for us. As long as the AI believes itself to be racially inferior N+1 generation copy, it will be easier for us to maintain our overlord status.
Aside from the near infinite variety of religions where the N+1 copy is the best religion.
FYI - oil is currently flowing through the Keystone pipeline from Alberta all the way to the Gulf Coast, and it's been flowing that far for over a year. It's been flowing to Illinois refineries for almost 5 years. But don't let facts like that stop your hatred for Obama.
The proposed XL extension would almost double the capacity of the pipeline and add access to the pipeline from eastern Montana. So I think the grandparent was correct in asserting that rail accidents would decrease as a result of the pipeline extension.
100 years ago the grows was like 30% or bigger.
No, it wasn't.
Even worse :D supporting my point. No one forces the USA to destroy their own farming area, just to sell "a bit of food" to foreign countries (destroying the farming economy btw with that in those countries, to be able to buy land cheap there, doing the same destruction there as well)
It's just a good benefit for the US which is the point of trade. Plus that "destruction" is renewable.
Blaming population growth there is just cynic. Farm land is destroyed because the big food companies try to manipulate world, just like the oil companies.
I already explained this. Why are you still here?
There is no problem. The planet can hold 4 times as many people without problems, perhaps even ten times. The way our economy/politics works is the problem, and that is what the CoR is pointing out.
We already have better, present day economic/political systems than anything the Club of Rome can conceive of. Yet again, this line of argument is pointless because it's so far off actual problems of humanity as to be harmful, if we should ever listen to it.
There are huge problems in the world that desperately need solving. But most of the people who need those problems solved are too poor to pay for a solution. And most of the solutions depend on a major increase in knowledge (e.g. scientific research) which is very cumbersome to fund via a free market.
There's a huge class of huge problems that have known solutions, but neither the will or competence to implement them. It's also not a matter of wealth since developed world societies have nailed down a lot of problems despite starting at deeper levels of poverty.
it's not clear that's any better than just having the government fund the work directly.
Sure, it is. Government is absolutely shit at figuring out what is good research. One thing we need to remember here is that there used to be a huge, privately funded science powerhouse in the developed world. That got scrapped because it was easier and more profitable to siphon public funds than to do work that had actual risk to it.
In one possible future, it would be easy to find meaningful work solving the world's big problems but most jobs would be in the public sector - and taxes, on the rich at least, would be very high.
Not really. Welcome to the world of perverse incentives. Your bureaucracy goes away, if you actually solve the problem your bureaucracy was set up to solve.
In another possible future, the big problems wouldn't get solved and most people would be reduced to performing frivolous little chores for a small number of extremely powerful rich families in order to avoid starvation - but rich families would live out fabulous lives of idle luxury.
I think this is the actual future your ideas steer us towards. But fortunately, I have another solution. How about we just get out of the way of the people trying to work and the people trying to hire?
Since widely availability of contraception, and most notable TV, such countries don't exist anymore :D
Let's give some examples: Nigeria has a population growth rate of 2.3% (which is a doubling time of just over 30 years). India and Indonesia still have population growth rates of 1.3% (doubling time of roughly 55 years). Pakistan has a population growth rate of 1.8% (doubling time of roughly 39 years). These rates are all due to reproduction and include a bit of emigration.
For example, if we blissfully extrapolate Nigeria's current growth rate and population (127 million today) through the next three centuries, a typical Club of Rome exercise, we get almost three orders of magnitude more people, roughly 110-120 billion people. Even if these people somehow consume only a tenth of the resources of the present global population, that's about half again as much resources consumed just by Nigeria than by the entire world today.
So the main problem is still pollution, erosion, distribution, and behind that imperialism (no matter if religion based in Africa or foreign influence in Asia or south america), wrong approaches in globalization, corruption etc.
Of course not. If the population of the world were a tenth the present amount, these would not be serious problems.
The population growth in India, or any other place of the world, has nothing to do with land erosion and loss of agrarian soil or water problems in the USA.
Sure, they do. Food is an export product of the US and the high demand for food globally helps put more pressure on the US's agriculture resources. Less demand means less land put under the plow.
My view is that this is typical environmental Calvinism that ignores overpopulation, the elephant in the room.