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The only thing that could possibly split humanity into "a handful of gods" and "the rest of us" is the ability of the "handful of gods" to prevent "the rest of
by Canada 11y ago
The only thing that could possibly split humanity into "a handful of gods" and "the rest of us" is the ability of the "handful of gods" to prevent "the rest of us" from building or running the same automation.
Will "the rest of us" just give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"?
I hope not.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 6d0debc071 11y agoCopyright and automated police force.... You go to jail forever for running an unlicensed bot.
- hammock 11y agoGovernment has never been strong enough to completely resist revolution or upending war.
- jules 11y agoRobots change precisely that.
- eveningcoffee 11y agoNow lets recall who bought Boston Dynamics.
- jdavis703 11y agoWhat about government backed by robotic AI? At this point you no longer have cops and soldiers who are part of the masses, and thus feel empathy to the 99%, but you have robots that will do whatever they are told.
- FLUX-YOU 11y agoWhat are the odds that those robots have perfect software security and every individual who ever worked on them will not leak source/specs/backdoors/admin passwords once they see them used oppressively? Just like they aren't human and don't feel empathy, I don't feel empathy for shutting down a robocop or subverting his programming to ignore me or sending it on a suicide mission back to its makers.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoThe difficulty with revolution, at least since the advent of professional armies that could easily defeat any peasant force, is that of target selection; people who won't line up for the Maxim guns. You can't kill them all, because you need some of them, but at the same time they're hiding among the people you do need. What's the acceptable false positive rate? Now we're talking about a situation in which everyone can be watched for suspicious behaviour by computers, every minute of every day. Where you need fewer and fewer people, so your acceptable rate for false positives is going up rapidly. And in which the military force that can be applied by per dollar is increasing very quickly. At an extreme, if you can automate everything, you and your mates hold up in a bunker and just gas every other living thing in the country. Before that, you send your robots into the ghettos if the peasants start getting uppity and kill every second person or something like that - you don't have to worry too much about false positives there because the people you need are a bit richer and get nicer digs. Before that you drag those who defect up before the courts and there's no revolution, there are just criminals harming the wealth of society - the war on drugs writ large. You don't get a civil war when the disparity between the rich and the poor is very great. The poor don't get to organise and arm. They just get arrested at the low end and slaughtered at the high end. No-one's going to get into a field with you and have a fair old dust up. At least, not unless the dust up involves nerve agents and ghettos.
- MIKarlsen 11y agoIn order for anyone to get into an advantageous position, it would require that the 99 % are able to purchase your automatically produced product, which is capitalisms reason to provide balanced salaries to "the rest of us".
- narrator 11y agoLook at what's happening with drone regulations. This is a very important issue. It will determine what access citizens will have to advanced robotics for the forseeable future. The major problem with advanced robotics is the same problem with many advanced technologies. The government is afraid of the power it will give citizens, perhaps rightly so, and thus only a handful of highly regulated large organizations can have the power to utilize the technology and thus power will consolidate in those organizations. This is not a big deal when it comes to technology like advanced weaponry, but it becomes a huge deal when it replaces most of the economic framework that people rely on for survival. If everyone has access to advanced robotics like they have access to publish a blog then the issue would be largely mitigated.
- eveningcoffee 11y agoI think that this comment understands the general theme so well that it should be promoted to the front page.
- pjc50 11y agoEconomies of scale. IBM can build "Watson" more readily than you can. Ultimately that's what capital is: the ability to make a big investment in something before it provides a return.
- Canada 11y agoIt can, but once "Watson" exists it's easier to replicate. Is IBM really going to be able to stop that, even as both the know-how and hardware to execute "Watson" becomes more available to everyone? Speaking of IBM, it seems like only yesterday that IBM and Microsoft were invincible. And now Google, Amazon, or Apple seem far more formidable.
- hammock 11y agoWhat you're describing might be called Competition. As much as capitalism makes production extremely efficient, the chief mechanism effecting that is competition. A substitute is never far behind. I think about this when reading studies/articles about wealth consolidation: "billionaires control xx%" of the wealth" etc. Almost always, there is no longitudinal component to the analysis. The majority of billionaires are self-made, and the billionaires today are not the same as the billionaires of 15 years ago, are not the same as the billionaires of 15 years before that.
- woah 11y agoEven if that was true, why are the identities and the life stories of the billionaires important?
- TDL 11y agoI don't think they are necessarily important stories, just stories that can be easily sold by the media. People become famous by being very rich (even if that's not their intent,) and we (humanity as a whole) like stories of famous people.
- hammock 11y agoThe idea is that wealth is not fixed even when unequally distributed. Poor today, rich tomorrow
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- JonnieCache 11y ago>Will "the rest of us" just give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"? How is this different from the current situation? Genuine question.
- rdancer 11y agoThe degree of concentration, and the presumed impending disappearance of social mobility in and out of the god class.
- MIKarlsen 11y agoCapital/resources are accumulated. It seems unlikely (for now) that someone will be able to muster the same amount of knowledge and data as some of this revolutions frontrunners (Google, Amazon, etc.).
- Canada 11y agoLet me rephrase the question: To what extent will the "rest of us" give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"? In what ways can "the rest of us" be persuaded to accept such a state of affairs? If a considerable number of us can't be made to refrain from pirating simple entertainment such as games, music, books, and movies, then what are the odds we can be stopped from doing the same for access to technology necessary for our very survival?
- unoti 11y ago> Will "the rest of us" just give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"? I hope not. That day is already here. It'd be easier for you to envision if you could look see all the people on my Facebook feed natter on endlessly about guns, beer, and boobs without a coherent thought on any other topic. Do I think these people will be willing to be dependent on others? Absolutely! They won't even write their own memes to share, they let creative gods upstream take care of that for them.
- ajuc 11y ago> Will "the rest of us" just give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"? How many people run their own e-mail servers? What about personal websites vs facebook? The direction is quite clear.
- TDL 11y agoI don't think the direction is that clear. 15 years ago how many people were even giving thought to running their own email servers or have their own websites? I would bet there are more people considering their own websites (or have their own websites already) even if they still make use of Facebook. There a number of these large platforms, like Facebook, but their existence is in no way guaranteed. I don't know understand the pessimism in this thread, especially amongst the builders of this era.