Cats and dogs are pretty much crushing it. Rats too.

Many optimists itt. 'Everyday will be like Sunday!' As if people are going to be happily surfing and fly fishing their lives away w/ the assurance that the government will provide instead of God. I'll ask this: What do you think the Longshoremen and the Teamsters are going to do when the robots come for their jobs? Be philosophical? Go surfing?

IMO, those self driving big rigs are going to have to travel in enormous convoys w/ police escorts, including helicopters, and they are STILL going to get shot full of holes.

When the robots win, will the Terminator franchise be their Planet of the Apes?

Read Bostrom's 'Superintelligence.' He writes of what he calls a 'Singleton', an AI orders of magnitude smarter than humans that gains a decisive strategic advantage. This from the director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.

For the same reason that we humans have no problem crushing an ant if it comes into our territory

Everyday will be like Sunday, its inevitable, but no one is saying there are not a lot of Mondays after two all nighters to go through first.

Anyway time for a thread saver:

I look forward to the day I get neutered.

The same thing buggy whip drivers did. Which is to say I have no idea and could care less.

The fact that you think that people are going to be sitting around waiting for government handouts shows that you are thinking about this way too myopically. That is very unlikely to be the situation. To the extent that there is government at all, the jobless layabouts will be giving money to the government to keep IT afloat not the other way around

It's going to end up where there are 12 billion dirt-poor jobless layabouts and 1200 guys with 500 zillion dollars each. If nothing is done, eventually large enough crowds will gather outside the zillionaire's fortresses that they'll be able to overwhelm any defenses and tear them limb from limb. In order to prevent this, the zillionaires will have to make arrangements to keep the masses content.

Or have the robot armies commence with orbital bombardment.

That's not even the scariest scenario.

No. It won't. The gap in American dollars between the haves and the have nots is growing but the gap in things thst actually matters continues to shrink at an astronomical rate.

Or those arrangements will consist of M60s with infinite chains of bullets.

My main concerns with AI.

1. Malevolent AI
2. Robustness. How do you have robustness in a system that springs up overnight and is homogeneous?
3. Assuming you solve the first two problems and now you have a human population that is almost entirely dependent on a robot workforce, and the fruits of labor are acceptably distributed, and thus the only financial limits on reproduction are natural resources and space, what to do about overpopulation? This is exacerbated by an increased life span (Kurzweil predicts infinite lifespan).
4. The effect of greatly increased lifespan on morality.

Here's what I don't get from some posters: Do you realize that wagons (btw, 'wagon driver' has been a profession since pre-history and it's about to be eliminated), tractors, combines and fork lifts were designed to replace MUSCLE and the computers are designed to replace BRAINS. IDK how in the world anyone can say 'everything will be fine' when we are no longer the smartest things on Earth and have handed over everything to those smarter things.

Only one thing actually matters. Power. The rest is just distraction.

This.

There really are two kinds of wealth. I call them ledger wealth, and goods and services wealth. Ledger wealth is stock, bonds, savings accounts, etc. Goods and services wealth is houses, cars, appliances, boats, clothes, etc. Ledger wealth doesn't really make you better off except you can exchange it for goods and services wealth(which means someone else must give up goods and services wealth in order for them to obtain the ledger wealth from you).

Since Goods and services are really the only kinds of wealth that makes people better off, that is the relevant wealth in determining the disparity between the haves and haves-not.

You could take all the billionaires in the world, line them up, shoot them in the head, and redistribute their wealth among everyone else. If you did that nobody's life improves significantly. The remaining people might have more ledger wealth but the rich don't use enough goods and services that redistributing it makes everyone significantly better off. The notion that the rich keep getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is left winged propaganda. Its an outright lie.

They will keep their jobs but they might not actually do anything. The will be paid to come to work, sit in a room and read the newspaper. Once their shift is over they will go home. Eventually they will all retire and replacements will not be hired. Or they will simply be offered a buyout. Sit at home and collect 75% of your wage until you reach age X and are eligible for retirement.

This is what the rail industry has done. The unions will protect those that already have jobs. But you don't have to fire people to get rid of them. Stop hiring(the unions cannot force a company to hire) and just wait until those currently working quit/retire.

I feel like there are two arguments going on here.

There is the "how do we change our wealth distribution policy when automation takes over most facets of production" issue.

Then there is the "we can't even accurately predict an election happening the next day with masses of polling data, yet we think we can predict and control a future in which we live amongst a superior intellect" issue.

Issue 1 is so incredibly inconsequential compared to issue 2.

Goods and services wealth doesn't buy you freedom and security on the personal individual level. In fact, without ledger wealth and the power that comes with it, they actually cost you freedom and security since the prospect of taking them away can be held over your head by institutions and more powerful individuals. Goods and services wealth prevents you from telling your boss or your creditors or the cops to go **** themselves. Ledger wealth enables it.

Abundance would be a good problem to have but it definitely would pose challenges.

Say everyone gets 58k a year for just being alive, what do people do? Does everyone let themselves go and just play video games all day? Who would really want to work for more than that when their friends, family and acquaintences are having BBQ's all day? Do people still have the desire to get married and start a family? What is the meaning of life?

The intersection of philosophy and technology would really come into play here.


And I agree with the poster that said something to the effect of "We couldn't predict an election so who the hell knows how this will unfold?" That is very true. Robo-cars might be here in 5 years like Ford CEO or Musk says, but some of the Carnegie Melon/MIT/Cal academic research suggests it is a quarter century away.

Another problem is some grand singularity doesn't just hit at once, but rather it is a slow grind. Maybe 3-5% of jobs a year become automated for 25 years straight.

Much tougher to craft a societal policy around something that is more of a slow burn rather than sudden disruption.

I'm still struggling to figure why a super intelligent AI would give a crap about humans one way or the other. Or for that matter why it would give a crap about itself?

We are beings that require things to enrich our lives, food water, toys, etc, plus we're born with an instinct to copulate and procreate. Those are the main drivers of human conflict at the end of the day, well that and religion. But the super AI has no such requirements and thus no need for conflict. Assuming by the time it comes online it can work off of a sustainable energy source it wouldn't even need to compete with humans for that.

But in terms of its own survival, if it somehow sees humans as a threat or dangerous that doesn't have to mean it tries to eliminate us. Equally plausible is that it sees engaging with creatures that are as cunning and resourceful as humans as very dangerous and decides to just seek peaceful co-existence.

That is again if it even gives a crap about its own survival. Because if you're a computer system does it really matter too much if you live 50 years or 500? In the end your existence is still finite, so what difference does it make?

Actually as VR technology becomes more and more advanced that might just become the most likely scenario. Would you rather work for 8 hours a day in some factory for your entire life or plug yourself into a VR world and spend all your time as a spy who bang hot chicks day after day or something. Or maybe spend a few weeks at Westworld. I'd go for that.

That's nice to read. Maybe companies will pay some workers for a couple/few decades to read the paper, who knows? Let me ask this: What sort of job of the future do you suppose will replace these type of jobs? What I'm thinking of are the 90 IQ people. The ones that can drive a truck just fine and work at a dockyard but will never be coders or big data analysts.