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I think the megapolitical perspective on violence in The Sovereign Individual[0] by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg can be helpful here. Unions

I think the megapolitical perspective on violence in The Sovereign Individual[0] by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg can be helpful here. Unions were powerful because they could limit access to labour, which was required for production. Now they are increasingly powerless. Mass manpower was once required to wage war. Now is increasingly less useful in a world of high-tech warfare. What prevents the powerful from going straight to the source of production and value? I'm not talking about off-shoring manufacturing to China, I'm talking about something more extreme, along the lines of a small cabal of wizards in a tower conjuring spells to extract energy directly from the wind and sun, and materials directly from the ground? The tech is far off, but the direction is clear. Maybe y'all think you're going to be one of those wizards. We'll see. But what's going to happen to the rest of us? Are we all going to wake up some day as basic-income supported artists, happily chewing on organic granola and self-actualizing (or not) as we please? I think a study of history suggests it's not going to be that easy. Those union rights were hard fought. People died. What happens when those at the top decide it's not worth keeping 8 billion people around just for kicks, when they can make do with ... 5 billion? 500 million? How many programmers, painters and yoga instructors do we need? On a planet with dwindling resources, tough decisions are going to get made. So yeah, watch out for those robots. Especially the ones with the lasers on their heads. (That's a joke. But the rest?) [0] https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transition-Information/dp/0684832720/ https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transi...

ericjang 10y ago
I like your insight. Is that the main message conveyed in [0]? (I haven't read it) What do you think is going to happen? Can society do something to prevent mass concentration of wealth into the 0.00001% of people via the march of technology and innovation, or is this an inevitable outcome?
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  It's a great book. Their analysis of violence as the organizing force of society was what stuck with me the most. They also talk about how the core values people will need are trustworthiness, self-reliance, etc. That's where the title comes from. But it's anything but a self-help book. > Can society do something to prevent mass concentration of wealth into the 0.00001% of people via the march of technology and innovation, or is this an inevitable outcome? That's the ultimate question. Very much looking forward to finding out the answer! I'll let you know if I figure it out. ;)
  - ericjang 10y ago
    I'll be grinding my magic lvl in the meantime.
- stale2002 10y ago
  The top percent would probably just let everyone else have the scraps. If it costs them little to nothing to keep the masses under control, then why wouldn't they?
  - ben_w 10y ago
    If I have been correctly informed, because psychopathy (and narcissism?) are over-represented in positions of power.
blacksmith_tb 10y ago
The problem with a vision of robots manufacturing things for 'wizards' seems to me that it replaces the production side of our current system, but not the consumption side. If we are all made redundant, how will we buy their wares? Or, if you take the more sanguine view, why would they need to make them at all if no one would buy them? Either way, it would be a dramatically unbalanced arrangement...
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  They don't need anyone to buy their wares if they are self reliant and can produce everything they need. We're not talking about making more and faster cell-phones with less labour, we're talking about a small group of people making everything they need without the need for any labour at all. That might not be a "handful" of people, but it's certainly a smaller number than our current population. Who needs coal miners if we have all the cheap solar we can use? Who needs farmers if we automate farming? Who needs drivers, maids, schoolteachers, cooks, etc. if we can have the machines do it for us? Who needs lawyers if our disputes are simply settled by some AI judge? Who needs cops if our streets are patrolled by security robots and we have a Minority Report style crime-prediction system. In a way, it's paradise -- if you're at the top. Oh, and I'm pretty sure they suggest democracy as we know it is dead. One person, one vote? Only in an age of massed human warfare. If you can take out a million or a billion people with high-tech biological warfare (and those people aren't producing anything anyway) what good are they and why do they deserve the vote? Not saying it's right, but the logic of megapolitical violence is cruel and unyielding. It's quite the lens.
  - Thetawaves 10y ago
    So where does everybody go when their jobs have been eliminated? What will young people do to make themselves valuable and provide for themselves and their families? Eventually the losers in this equation will risk everything to correct the inequality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Muammar_Gaddafi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Muammar_Gaddafi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Unions were powerful because they could limit access to labour, which was required for production. Now they are increasingly powerless. Given how little is actually automated right now, I'm always a little skeptical that automation drove the labor union extinct. It seems like politics, corruption, and mismanagement drove American unions near-extinct. A lot of countries still have very active trade-unions that take a strong hand in production and economics (Germany and Denmark, for instance).
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  One could argue that the shared prosperity created by automation/mechanization and distributed in part by unions raised people's living standards to the degree that they no longer believed that unions were necessary to maintain their lifestyle. As corporations sent jobs to other countries and Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, people were complacent enough to let it happen while they succumbed to their own pleasures.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    I don't know, but I like the idea that prosperity took the workers' eyes off the ball and management[sic] took the opportunity to wage war against unions as a concept.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      This was somewhat addressed in Adam Curtis' newest documentary, HyperNormalization. One line in the beginning really encapsulated the situation: "While we were dozing, the money crept in."
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  Unions can and have negotiated for sharing the benefits of automation with workers and for compensation to workers whose jobs were automated away.
  - 10y ago
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I only fear for the future of humanity in the presence of AI when I see how poorly humans treat each other. We design machines in our own image to solve the problems familiar to us; a manufactured brain is the fullest extent of this process. If we as a society develop tools to remove people from production and leave them at the mercy of the modern jungle then the machines designed to do this will follow this path as well. If we design machines to accomidate the needs of a large global population without regards to age, race, religion, productivity, or other factors that have historically been used to separate the "us" from the "them," then the machines will continue to solve the problems we designed them for. We could, as a species, unanimously abandon all AI tomorrow, Dune-style, and the problems and paths of history would largely be the same. The strong will do as they please and the weak will suffer as they must. We just need to be better to each other.
- ericjang 10y ago
  agreed. my worry is that even if people decide to ethically develop AI, there will be those who disagree with those ethics and/or willingly ignore their conscience. I don't see a way out short of a political revolution / bloodshed.
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  > We just need to be better to each other. I believe that the fundamental problems of our time are ethical, not technological. If we can figure that part out, the technology should take care of itself. I would love to live in a post-scarcity utopia where we all run around self-actualizing. I don't think we need to give up AI to get there -- in fact, I think technology will be the key that unlocks the gate. But we have to have the wisdom to pass through it with style and bring as many people as we can on the way. Otherwise we might find ourselves fighting for our place in line and possibly even annihilate ourselves in the process.
- geomark 10y ago
  "We just need to be better to each other." Yes, that is the answer. Sadly it seems unlikely since throughout history a large portion of the population remain cruel and uncaring. Many thousands of technologist in the US are involved in making the weapons and targeting systems that are killing people across the globe. Seems unlikely they are going to wake up and decide to treat others better.
nickthemagicman 10y ago
You're right. It's terrifying but holy shit haha! When a single drone can kill thousands of people you won't be able to revolt either.
- ENGNR 10y ago
  Centralised control... means single point of failure The drone could also be hacked by a terrorist or enemy state The real damage is rolling back education and destroying the media, destroying the will to fight if ever needed and basically guaranteeing that someone will set those drones up and take the whole pie
  - nickthemagicman 10y ago
    I'm sure there won't be ONE person controlling 50 thousand drones. There will be teams and squads like there is now.. just 'remote'. As for hacking, you have the best engineers in the world at DARPA, I'm sure it will be somewhat robust... The last part about rolling back education, I can't agree with you more. I feel like this current wave of Nationalism around the world might have something to do with that.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >As for hacking, you have the best engineers in the world at DARPA, I'm sure it will be somewhat robust... Our governments are filled with people who set their passwords to "password". Yes, the drones will get hacked.
      - ben_w 10y ago
        To back up your point, they already have been: * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident * https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-ame...
  - mooreds 10y ago
dingbat 10y ago
> What happens when those at the top decide it's not worth keeping 8 billion people those "people at the top" will (or should) be the first to go. these "wizards" will be unnecessary and redundant, offering little of value that could not be provided more efficiently by the true machine wizards.
- ben_w 10y ago
  I suspect the "wizards" are likely to be those who own the means of production.
  - dingbat 10y ago
    it may be an underestimation of AI to assume that AI will respect the concept of human ownership
pmalynin 10y ago
You just described the plot of The Time Machine by H G Wells. I also recommend the movie (the original).
PavlovsCat 10y ago
> What prevents the powerful from going straight to the source of production and value? Nothing. Certainly not this crowd. Which is why I expect the long term future to hold something akin to a Blitzkrieg that will actually be over in a flash. After the delete function has been prepared and perfected, the delete button gets pushed. Not by the naive fools who built it, mind you. Those will a.) hardly know what they're working on and b.) be gone first.
- willholloway 10y ago
  I have an extremely strong feeling that this is the most important comment ever posted to Hacker News. We won't understand that it was until it's over, but then, looking back forensically over the waste and ash heap before us, we will see that PavlovsCat predicted all of this, and we should have listened.
L_226 10y ago
There's probably not much preventing a society similar to what you describe from arising. I've had some thoughts regarding this, in no particular order; - Surplus non-elite human stock will be used for mass colonisation of solar system/extrasolar bodies where mortality is high (aside: and possibly beneficial, in terms of accelerated evolution due to reduced reproduction cycles). - The elite/AI cabal at the top will subject the unknowing masses to physiological and psychological experimentation for their own ends. (this one is probably already happening :) - A mass uprising of the disaffected non-elites will enforce some kind of Butlerian Jihad (it's just a union to keep the AIs out!). - Elites will be benevolent overlords who take their stewardship of the species seriously, and we all live blissfully in massive space-elevator-anchored orbiting ring habitats with UBI and free soylent, while the mysteries of the universe are probed until the end of time.
- smaddali 10y ago
  "" - Elites will be benevolent overlords who take their stewardship of the species seriously, and we all live blissfully in massive space-elevator-anchored orbiting ring habitats with UBI and free soylent, while the mysteries of the universe are probed until the end of time. "" Regarding the above, that has been the way of life in the past. Feudal lords took "care" of the folks under their dominion. I think the key is "Social/Economic Mobility". If the people who at the apex can perpetually be at top by using AI and stomping out any challengers then it would be a major problem.
  - L_226 10y ago
    That particular one was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, i.e. it's the least likely scenario in that if elites were to attain the status described in GP they would not care for responsible, 'fair' stewardship of non-elites as I had illustrated. However in response to your comment, feudal systems still relied more or less on peasant-powered agriculture, taxes etc for the ruling class to exist. The theorised society in discussion here is one where a very small percentage of humanity can extract all resources required for existence via automated tools - without the need for 'peasant-class' manual or intellectual labour. In this society the vastly larger portion of our species is more or less irrelevant, and thus subject to the whims of the few (as opposed to now, where economies and industries still need peasant-class input to function).
filoeleven 10y ago
Two contrasting outcomes of automation are outlined in Manna, a 2003 essay by Marshall Brain. From the first half: > Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible. The only solution for most people, as they became unemployed, was government handouts. Terrafoam housing was what the government handed out. And from the second: > Inventors would work on their inventions, using materials and equipment provided by the robots. Scholars would do their scholarly research, finally free to study whatever they like, using the infinite intellectual resources available on the network. Scientists would start pursuing their scientific goals using research facilities provided by the robots. [...] There are people who are experts in their various fields -- engine design, scrap booking, fusion reactors, needlepoint -- and they would love to pass their knowledge on to other people. They would write books, make videos or have live lectures and workshops for people to attend. People interested in the martial arts would practice them every day. People interested in video games would play them every day. People interested in gardening would garden every day. The majority of people have a talent and, if they had the time, they would cultivate that talent and use it. The contrasting principles that drive the two societies are clear, and the second quote I chose doesn't convey how advanced their society has become by enabling every human to follow and develop their particular interests. Both visions are on the extreme ends of a spectrum, and while the most likely outcome in reality is closer to the middle, I'd like to try to push it up towards the utopian end. In any case, the things Watson is doing are far more complicated than what Manna started out doing, which was replacing management in a fast food restaurant. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Edit: Here is a recent report from the White House on AI, too: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-report-future-artificial-intelligence https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-r...
graycat 10y ago
AI for self-driving cars? I keep thinking that occasionally in driving we encounter: (1) A situation where we need to stop the car and converse in our natural language, that is, for just our half of the conversation, do speech recognition and natural language understanding. So, the AI approach would be to get the list of the 100,000 most common conversations, tune some speech recognition to those, f'get about the actual language understanding, and, instead, for each of the 100,000 cases implement the most common resulting action or response in the data? Sorry -- in that case I'd rather not be in that car! (2) A situation where the driver needs actually to have real human understanding of a situation that, really, has never occurred before and, thus, is not in any AI training set. E.g., the vehicle ahead is a pickup truck and has some liquid dripping out of the truck bed out back. Somehow the liquid doesn't look like water. Taking a whiff, it smells like gasoline. Hmm. That stuff could catch fire, move to ignite the stuff in the bed of the truck, and maybe something could go "Boom". So, what the heck to do? Sure, slow down, get back, well back of the truck, change lanes and move ahead of the truck, pull off the right side of the road and stop, etc. IIRC, so far such general deductive reasoning is beyond AI. IMHO, such reasoning requires real AI, or whatever we are calling that now, and we don't know how to program computers to do that now. IMHO, first cut, for self-driving cars, the best chance would be to do some extensive re-engineering of the roads. Here is a general point: We don't yet understand how general human intelligence works and, thus, don't know how to program it. So, we are having trouble evaluating the automation we now have and, thus, are vulnerable to overestimating how far to real AI the current work really is. Besides, AI hype, if this is a case, and overestimating how much progress there is to real AI is a very old story: As I've heard, way back in the days of vacuum tube computers, IBM was pushing publicity about their "giant electronic human brains". Looks like IBM is still doing this.
- xapata 10y ago
  1. How about a vehicle AI that allows you to ask it to stop and start? 2. I'm not confident that I would be able to notice a truck leaking gasoline, let alone smell it while driving. I'm comfortable riding in a self-driving car that can't perform that recognition. And again, the rider can simply tell the vehicle to pull over, right?
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Unfortunately, you make great points. Most workers will not be needed and without real push back corporations and economic elites will not want to support them. A little off topic, but the book "The Sovereign Individual" changed my outlook on the world when I read it almost 20 years ago.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Queen Elizabeth refused to grant a patent for the sewing machine because she was afraid that it will be devastating for the livelihoods of her poor subjects. So ya, in spite of having a stellar pedigree, this sort of fear-mongering doesn't exactly have a reputation for successful forecasting.
bbctol 10y ago
I laugh and/or cry every time someone on HN responds to fears of the rich entirely abandoning the lower classes with "but then they'll have no one to buy their products and make them money!" or "but you still need people to maintain this technology!" Complete misunderstanding of what's going on. One wealthy person would be happy to spend a small amount of time administering the vast automated factories that support their high-class lifestyle. To put it simply: If: when technology/automation reach the stage where a group of only ~10,000 humans can fully support a luxurious and peaceful existence for ~10,000 humans, this technology is owned and controlled by the richest ~10,000 humans Then: Earth's population will plummet to those necessary, and no charity will be given to those who do not control this technology. Not through genocide, simply through starvation. Those who own the land will keep it.

ericjang 10y ago

I like your insight. Is that the main message conveyed in [0]? (I haven't read it) What do you think is going to happen? Can society do something to prevent mass concentration of wealth into the 0.00001% of people via the march of technology and innovation, or is this an inevitable outcome?

canadian_voter 10y ago
It's a great book. Their analysis of violence as the organizing force of society was what stuck with me the most. They also talk about how the core values people will need are trustworthiness, self-reliance, etc. That's where the title comes from. But it's anything but a self-help book. > Can society do something to prevent mass concentration of wealth into the 0.00001% of people via the march of technology and innovation, or is this an inevitable outcome? That's the ultimate question. Very much looking forward to finding out the answer! I'll let you know if I figure it out. ;)
- ericjang 10y ago
  I'll be grinding my magic lvl in the meantime.
stale2002 10y ago
The top percent would probably just let everyone else have the scraps. If it costs them little to nothing to keep the masses under control, then why wouldn't they?
- ben_w 10y ago
  If I have been correctly informed, because psychopathy (and narcissism?) are over-represented in positions of power.

blacksmith_tb 10y ago

The problem with a vision of robots manufacturing things for 'wizards' seems to me that it replaces the production side of our current system, but not the consumption side. If we are all made redundant, how will we buy their wares? Or, if you take the more sanguine view, why would they need to make them at all if no one would buy them? Either way, it would be a dramatically unbalanced arrangement...

canadian_voter 10y ago
They don't need anyone to buy their wares if they are self reliant and can produce everything they need. We're not talking about making more and faster cell-phones with less labour, we're talking about a small group of people making everything they need without the need for any labour at all. That might not be a "handful" of people, but it's certainly a smaller number than our current population. Who needs coal miners if we have all the cheap solar we can use? Who needs farmers if we automate farming? Who needs drivers, maids, schoolteachers, cooks, etc. if we can have the machines do it for us? Who needs lawyers if our disputes are simply settled by some AI judge? Who needs cops if our streets are patrolled by security robots and we have a Minority Report style crime-prediction system. In a way, it's paradise -- if you're at the top. Oh, and I'm pretty sure they suggest democracy as we know it is dead. One person, one vote? Only in an age of massed human warfare. If you can take out a million or a billion people with high-tech biological warfare (and those people aren't producing anything anyway) what good are they and why do they deserve the vote? Not saying it's right, but the logic of megapolitical violence is cruel and unyielding. It's quite the lens.
- Thetawaves 10y ago
  So where does everybody go when their jobs have been eliminated? What will young people do to make themselves valuable and provide for themselves and their families? Eventually the losers in this equation will risk everything to correct the inequality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Muammar_Gaddafi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Muammar_Gaddafi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Unions were powerful because they could limit access to labour, which was required for production. Now they are increasingly powerless. Given how little is actually automated right now, I'm always a little skeptical that automation drove the labor union extinct. It seems like politics, corruption, and mismanagement drove American unions near-extinct. A lot of countries still have very active trade-unions that take a strong hand in production and economics (Germany and Denmark, for instance).

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
One could argue that the shared prosperity created by automation/mechanization and distributed in part by unions raised people's living standards to the degree that they no longer believed that unions were necessary to maintain their lifestyle. As corporations sent jobs to other countries and Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, people were complacent enough to let it happen while they succumbed to their own pleasures.
- rhizome 10y ago
  I don't know, but I like the idea that prosperity took the workers' eyes off the ball and management[sic] took the opportunity to wage war against unions as a concept.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    This was somewhat addressed in Adam Curtis' newest documentary, HyperNormalization. One line in the beginning really encapsulated the situation: "While we were dozing, the money crept in."
darpa_escapee 10y ago
Unions can and have negotiated for sharing the benefits of automation with workers and for compensation to workers whose jobs were automated away.
- 10y ago

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

I only fear for the future of humanity in the presence of AI when I see how poorly humans treat each other. We design machines in our own image to solve the problems familiar to us; a manufactured brain is the fullest extent of this process. If we as a society develop tools to remove people from production and leave them at the mercy of the modern jungle then the machines designed to do this will follow this path as well. If we design machines to accomidate the needs of a large global population without regards to age, race, religion, productivity, or other factors that have historically been used to separate the "us" from the "them," then the machines will continue to solve the problems we designed them for. We could, as a species, unanimously abandon all AI tomorrow, Dune-style, and the problems and paths of history would largely be the same. The strong will do as they please and the weak will suffer as they must. We just need to be better to each other.

ericjang 10y ago
agreed. my worry is that even if people decide to ethically develop AI, there will be those who disagree with those ethics and/or willingly ignore their conscience. I don't see a way out short of a political revolution / bloodshed.
canadian_voter 10y ago
> We just need to be better to each other. I believe that the fundamental problems of our time are ethical, not technological. If we can figure that part out, the technology should take care of itself. I would love to live in a post-scarcity utopia where we all run around self-actualizing. I don't think we need to give up AI to get there -- in fact, I think technology will be the key that unlocks the gate. But we have to have the wisdom to pass through it with style and bring as many people as we can on the way. Otherwise we might find ourselves fighting for our place in line and possibly even annihilate ourselves in the process.
geomark 10y ago
"We just need to be better to each other." Yes, that is the answer. Sadly it seems unlikely since throughout history a large portion of the population remain cruel and uncaring. Many thousands of technologist in the US are involved in making the weapons and targeting systems that are killing people across the globe. Seems unlikely they are going to wake up and decide to treat others better.

nickthemagicman 10y ago

You're right. It's terrifying but holy shit haha! When a single drone can kill thousands of people you won't be able to revolt either.

ENGNR 10y ago
Centralised control... means single point of failure The drone could also be hacked by a terrorist or enemy state The real damage is rolling back education and destroying the media, destroying the will to fight if ever needed and basically guaranteeing that someone will set those drones up and take the whole pie
- nickthemagicman 10y ago
  I'm sure there won't be ONE person controlling 50 thousand drones. There will be teams and squads like there is now.. just 'remote'. As for hacking, you have the best engineers in the world at DARPA, I'm sure it will be somewhat robust... The last part about rolling back education, I can't agree with you more. I feel like this current wave of Nationalism around the world might have something to do with that.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >As for hacking, you have the best engineers in the world at DARPA, I'm sure it will be somewhat robust... Our governments are filled with people who set their passwords to "password". Yes, the drones will get hacked.
    - ben_w 10y ago
      To back up your point, they already have been: * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident * https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-ame...
- mooreds 10y ago

dingbat 10y ago

> What happens when those at the top decide it's not worth keeping 8 billion people those "people at the top" will (or should) be the first to go. these "wizards" will be unnecessary and redundant, offering little of value that could not be provided more efficiently by the true machine wizards.

ben_w 10y ago
I suspect the "wizards" are likely to be those who own the means of production.
- dingbat 10y ago
  it may be an underestimation of AI to assume that AI will respect the concept of human ownership

pmalynin 10y ago

You just described the plot of The Time Machine by H G Wells. I also recommend the movie (the original).

PavlovsCat 10y ago

> What prevents the powerful from going straight to the source of production and value? Nothing. Certainly not this crowd. Which is why I expect the long term future to hold something akin to a Blitzkrieg that will actually be over in a flash. After the delete function has been prepared and perfected, the delete button gets pushed. Not by the naive fools who built it, mind you. Those will a.) hardly know what they're working on and b.) be gone first.

willholloway 10y ago
I have an extremely strong feeling that this is the most important comment ever posted to Hacker News. We won't understand that it was until it's over, but then, looking back forensically over the waste and ash heap before us, we will see that PavlovsCat predicted all of this, and we should have listened.

L_226 10y ago

There's probably not much preventing a society similar to what you describe from arising. I've had some thoughts regarding this, in no particular order; - Surplus non-elite human stock will be used for mass colonisation of solar system/extrasolar bodies where mortality is high (aside: and possibly beneficial, in terms of accelerated evolution due to reduced reproduction cycles). - The elite/AI cabal at the top will subject the unknowing masses to physiological and psychological experimentation for their own ends. (this one is probably already happening :) - A mass uprising of the disaffected non-elites will enforce some kind of Butlerian Jihad (it's just a union to keep the AIs out!). - Elites will be benevolent overlords who take their stewardship of the species seriously, and we all live blissfully in massive space-elevator-anchored orbiting ring habitats with UBI and free soylent, while the mysteries of the universe are probed until the end of time.

smaddali 10y ago
"" - Elites will be benevolent overlords who take their stewardship of the species seriously, and we all live blissfully in massive space-elevator-anchored orbiting ring habitats with UBI and free soylent, while the mysteries of the universe are probed until the end of time. "" Regarding the above, that has been the way of life in the past. Feudal lords took "care" of the folks under their dominion. I think the key is "Social/Economic Mobility". If the people who at the apex can perpetually be at top by using AI and stomping out any challengers then it would be a major problem.
- L_226 10y ago
  That particular one was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, i.e. it's the least likely scenario in that if elites were to attain the status described in GP they would not care for responsible, 'fair' stewardship of non-elites as I had illustrated. However in response to your comment, feudal systems still relied more or less on peasant-powered agriculture, taxes etc for the ruling class to exist. The theorised society in discussion here is one where a very small percentage of humanity can extract all resources required for existence via automated tools - without the need for 'peasant-class' manual or intellectual labour. In this society the vastly larger portion of our species is more or less irrelevant, and thus subject to the whims of the few (as opposed to now, where economies and industries still need peasant-class input to function).

filoeleven 10y ago

Two contrasting outcomes of automation are outlined in Manna, a 2003 essay by Marshall Brain. From the first half: > Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible. The only solution for most people, as they became unemployed, was government handouts. Terrafoam housing was what the government handed out. And from the second: > Inventors would work on their inventions, using materials and equipment provided by the robots. Scholars would do their scholarly research, finally free to study whatever they like, using the infinite intellectual resources available on the network. Scientists would start pursuing their scientific goals using research facilities provided by the robots. [...] There are people who are experts in their various fields -- engine design, scrap booking, fusion reactors, needlepoint -- and they would love to pass their knowledge on to other people. They would write books, make videos or have live lectures and workshops for people to attend. People interested in the martial arts would practice them every day. People interested in video games would play them every day. People interested in gardening would garden every day. The majority of people have a talent and, if they had the time, they would cultivate that talent and use it. The contrasting principles that drive the two societies are clear, and the second quote I chose doesn't convey how advanced their society has become by enabling every human to follow and develop their particular interests. Both visions are on the extreme ends of a spectrum, and while the most likely outcome in reality is closer to the middle, I'd like to try to push it up towards the utopian end. In any case, the things Watson is doing are far more complicated than what Manna started out doing, which was replacing management in a fast food restaurant. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Edit: Here is a recent report from the White House on AI, too: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-report-future-artificial-intelligence https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-r...

graycat 10y ago

AI for self-driving cars? I keep thinking that occasionally in driving we encounter: (1) A situation where we need to stop the car and converse in our natural language, that is, for just our half of the conversation, do speech recognition and natural language understanding. So, the AI approach would be to get the list of the 100,000 most common conversations, tune some speech recognition to those, f'get about the actual language understanding, and, instead, for each of the 100,000 cases implement the most common resulting action or response in the data? Sorry -- in that case I'd rather not be in that car! (2) A situation where the driver needs actually to have real human understanding of a situation that, really, has never occurred before and, thus, is not in any AI training set. E.g., the vehicle ahead is a pickup truck and has some liquid dripping out of the truck bed out back. Somehow the liquid doesn't look like water. Taking a whiff, it smells like gasoline. Hmm. That stuff could catch fire, move to ignite the stuff in the bed of the truck, and maybe something could go "Boom". So, what the heck to do? Sure, slow down, get back, well back of the truck, change lanes and move ahead of the truck, pull off the right side of the road and stop, etc. IIRC, so far such general deductive reasoning is beyond AI. IMHO, such reasoning requires real AI, or whatever we are calling that now, and we don't know how to program computers to do that now. IMHO, first cut, for self-driving cars, the best chance would be to do some extensive re-engineering of the roads. Here is a general point: We don't yet understand how general human intelligence works and, thus, don't know how to program it. So, we are having trouble evaluating the automation we now have and, thus, are vulnerable to overestimating how far to real AI the current work really is. Besides, AI hype, if this is a case, and overestimating how much progress there is to real AI is a very old story: As I've heard, way back in the days of vacuum tube computers, IBM was pushing publicity about their "giant electronic human brains". Looks like IBM is still doing this.

xapata 10y ago
1. How about a vehicle AI that allows you to ask it to stop and start? 2. I'm not confident that I would be able to notice a truck leaking gasoline, let alone smell it while driving. I'm comfortable riding in a self-driving car that can't perform that recognition. And again, the rider can simply tell the vehicle to pull over, right?

mark_l_watson 10y ago

Unfortunately, you make great points. Most workers will not be needed and without real push back corporations and economic elites will not want to support them. A little off topic, but the book "The Sovereign Individual" changed my outlook on the world when I read it almost 20 years ago.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Queen Elizabeth refused to grant a patent for the sewing machine because she was afraid that it will be devastating for the livelihoods of her poor subjects. So ya, in spite of having a stellar pedigree, this sort of fear-mongering doesn't exactly have a reputation for successful forecasting.

bbctol 10y ago

I laugh and/or cry every time someone on HN responds to fears of the rich entirely abandoning the lower classes with "but then they'll have no one to buy their products and make them money!" or "but you still need people to maintain this technology!" Complete misunderstanding of what's going on. One wealthy person would be happy to spend a small amount of time administering the vast automated factories that support their high-class lifestyle. To put it simply: If: when technology/automation reach the stage where a group of only ~10,000 humans can fully support a luxurious and peaceful existence for ~10,000 humans, this technology is owned and controlled by the richest ~10,000 humans Then: Earth's population will plummet to those necessary, and no charity will be given to those who do not control this technology. Not through genocide, simply through starvation. Those who own the land will keep it.