5 ms·

A small number of humans, at first, maybe. AI will conquer the world, one niche at a time, as soon as moneyed interests realize it is cheaper that way. At som

by pygy_ 11y ago

A small number of humans, at first, maybe. AI will conquer the world, one niche at a time, as soon as moneyed interests realize it is cheaper that way. At some point, the masses won't have any economic power anymore, and billions of meatbags will be left to starve. No need for gun wielding robots, just cut the power for a while.

unoti 11y ago
> At some point, the masses won't have any economic power anymore, and billions of meatbags will be left to starve. In some ways this is already underway. Very few of the people in the world have any economic power, and the proportion is shrinking. We have the ability to food all of the world, or at least much more than we do. Mankind has a rich history of moneyed interests letting those with no economic power starve.
- PavlovsCat 11y ago
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger... > Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day -- most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land -- can't afford to buy this food.
solotronics 11y ago
I have been traveling outside the US recently and I notice that this already exists in many places. Something to consider though is that in these places the common man had no economic power to begin with but now with globalization the difference is becoming more visible. We need to help get these people plugged in to the internet and this will open them up to advancement and opportunities. Instead of paying a middleman (a corporate retail store) to buy handcrafted goods we might could purchase directly from the producer with bitcoin or some other form of electronic payment. There should be a tech equivalent of doctors without borders..
- petra 11y ago
  Actually , the communications medium is the easy part(and to some extent you could enable ecommerce with catalogs and mobile phones and some sms based payments(like m-pesa) ). And it certainly isn't hard to get some sort of internet at the village level. But the supply chain is a much harder part.
jfoutz 11y ago
Why would an AI care what moneyed interests care about? All the intelligences we know about have this boredom state. Some smart people just sort of stop caring about what they're paid to care about, and retire. Others love it and keep at it until they die. AI is even harder to predict. There's been no selection bias, yet. It's not at all clear if they'll have "survival instinct" or desire or even need to reproduce. They'll be different. Tangentially, I think human cultures are AI, at least in some sense. We've created this environment that's driving down the cost of computation dramatically and that's been driven by "emergent" behavior. Emergent behavior is a really hard term to define. In most cases you can replace it with "magic" and you'll get the same information back. We're like the dog packs in Verner Vinge's deepness in the sky, but at a larger scale. It's such a vast intelligence, i can't really get a handle on the scope, any more than a single neuron knows it's helping me to type this.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  Why are people always talking about AI like it implies intrinsic motivation or even self awareness (in the context of motivation). Motivation/tasks can be provided by the human - AI can be a general purpose problem solving machine. It doesn't have to "care" - it's just a machine with a task to perform - the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. Once you have an AI that can do that - society falls apart. Foundation of modern society is built on the fact that cooperation trumps every other method of work - general purpose AI changes that equation to the point where other people are not only not necessary but also actively dangerous (threatening to take control).
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    > the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. That includes task selection. Maybe the AI gets bored with stock prediction. Maybe the AI is happy competing with all the humans, maybe it'd rather go explore space. Maybe it decides this whole reality sucks and suicides. We really have no idea what'll happen. Best guess is, tools get better and better until they decide to do something else. Like a trusted employee going and starting a competing company, or moving to the beach and surfing. Maybe it's disastrous, maybe it's utopia. Maybe it's like _her_ and they leave. Best anyone can do is make vague guesses. I know, i'm anthropomorphizing. It's for convenience, the solution space for AI is way bigger than our simple wants and needs.

by pygy_ 11y ago

unoti 11y ago

> At some point, the masses won't have any economic power anymore, and billions of meatbags will be left to starve. In some ways this is already underway. Very few of the people in the world have any economic power, and the proportion is shrinking. We have the ability to food all of the world, or at least much more than we do. Mankind has a rich history of moneyed interests letting those with no economic power starve.

PavlovsCat 11y ago
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger... > Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day -- most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land -- can't afford to buy this food.

solotronics 11y ago

I have been traveling outside the US recently and I notice that this already exists in many places. Something to consider though is that in these places the common man had no economic power to begin with but now with globalization the difference is becoming more visible. We need to help get these people plugged in to the internet and this will open them up to advancement and opportunities. Instead of paying a middleman (a corporate retail store) to buy handcrafted goods we might could purchase directly from the producer with bitcoin or some other form of electronic payment. There should be a tech equivalent of doctors without borders..

petra 11y ago
Actually , the communications medium is the easy part(and to some extent you could enable ecommerce with catalogs and mobile phones and some sms based payments(like m-pesa) ). And it certainly isn't hard to get some sort of internet at the village level. But the supply chain is a much harder part.

jfoutz 11y ago

Why would an AI care what moneyed interests care about? All the intelligences we know about have this boredom state. Some smart people just sort of stop caring about what they're paid to care about, and retire. Others love it and keep at it until they die. AI is even harder to predict. There's been no selection bias, yet. It's not at all clear if they'll have "survival instinct" or desire or even need to reproduce. They'll be different. Tangentially, I think human cultures are AI, at least in some sense. We've created this environment that's driving down the cost of computation dramatically and that's been driven by "emergent" behavior. Emergent behavior is a really hard term to define. In most cases you can replace it with "magic" and you'll get the same information back. We're like the dog packs in Verner Vinge's deepness in the sky, but at a larger scale. It's such a vast intelligence, i can't really get a handle on the scope, any more than a single neuron knows it's helping me to type this.

moonchrome 11y ago
Why are people always talking about AI like it implies intrinsic motivation or even self awareness (in the context of motivation). Motivation/tasks can be provided by the human - AI can be a general purpose problem solving machine. It doesn't have to "care" - it's just a machine with a task to perform - the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. Once you have an AI that can do that - society falls apart. Foundation of modern society is built on the fact that cooperation trumps every other method of work - general purpose AI changes that equation to the point where other people are not only not necessary but also actively dangerous (threatening to take control).
- jfoutz 11y ago
  > the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. That includes task selection. Maybe the AI gets bored with stock prediction. Maybe the AI is happy competing with all the humans, maybe it'd rather go explore space. Maybe it decides this whole reality sucks and suicides. We really have no idea what'll happen. Best guess is, tools get better and better until they decide to do something else. Like a trusted employee going and starting a competing company, or moving to the beach and surfing. Maybe it's disastrous, maybe it's utopia. Maybe it's like _her_ and they leave. Best anyone can do is make vague guesses. I know, i'm anthropomorphizing. It's for convenience, the solution space for AI is way bigger than our simple wants and needs.