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Everyone has thought that automation would eliminate the jobs for a hundred years. In a way it has come true as some jobs that existed before no longer exist, b

Everyone has thought that automation would eliminate the jobs for a hundred years. In a way it has come true as some jobs that existed before no longer exist, but so far other jobs have been created to take their place. Nobody really knows when or if that will stop.

montenegrohugo 8y ago
Humans have always had a cognitive advantage over machines in the past. This will not necessarily be true in the future. What advantage do we will then have? The only possible advantage I can see is that raising a human for 20 years + housing + food + other expenses and then employing him would be cheaper than replicating another AGI, but I cannot imagine this to be true.
- logicchains 8y ago
  If an AGI was smarter than a human, why would it want to work for free? Personally I think it's unlikely to be possible to create something more capable of abstract reasoning than humans yet somehow constrained to be completely subservient to us. And if it is possible, all it takes is one mistake to produce a robot slave revolution. I'd expect supercapable AGI to command higher wages than less-capable humans, so they wouldn't be pushing out service jobs.
- zip1234 8y ago
  Perhaps human cognition will be enhanced by machines? This would open up a lot of new opportunities. I know there are companies working on doing exactly this.
  - criley2 8y ago
    Only so long as humans are required for the machine to do their job. The second it is feasible and cheaper to have a machine do what the human/machine hybrid could do, they would switch. This is more of a bridge solution to full automation. "We need doctors to control dumb surgical robots until we're advanced enough that surgical robots can operate without a human controlling them" etc We're doing the "assist" thing already in all the places that we can't quite do the "machine only" thing. Even self-driving cars mirror this: the goal is a vehicle that doesn't require an operator. The bridged reality, currently, is that the operator must remain alert and able to take over any time.
criley2 8y ago
Yes I am aware of the "infinite work hypothesis" however blindly running into the future and basing 7-8 billion human lives and our entire civilization upon this hypothesis without any mitigation strategy seems naive and high-risk at best. I will also point out that automation is currently starting to eat fields that were traditionally un-automatable due to either skill, labor price (or both), including everything from complex farm work done for cheap to surgical robots.

montenegrohugo 8y ago

Humans have always had a cognitive advantage over machines in the past. This will not necessarily be true in the future. What advantage do we will then have? The only possible advantage I can see is that raising a human for 20 years + housing + food + other expenses and then employing him would be cheaper than replicating another AGI, but I cannot imagine this to be true.

logicchains 8y ago
If an AGI was smarter than a human, why would it want to work for free? Personally I think it's unlikely to be possible to create something more capable of abstract reasoning than humans yet somehow constrained to be completely subservient to us. And if it is possible, all it takes is one mistake to produce a robot slave revolution. I'd expect supercapable AGI to command higher wages than less-capable humans, so they wouldn't be pushing out service jobs.
zip1234 8y ago
Perhaps human cognition will be enhanced by machines? This would open up a lot of new opportunities. I know there are companies working on doing exactly this.
- criley2 8y ago
  Only so long as humans are required for the machine to do their job. The second it is feasible and cheaper to have a machine do what the human/machine hybrid could do, they would switch. This is more of a bridge solution to full automation. "We need doctors to control dumb surgical robots until we're advanced enough that surgical robots can operate without a human controlling them" etc We're doing the "assist" thing already in all the places that we can't quite do the "machine only" thing. Even self-driving cars mirror this: the goal is a vehicle that doesn't require an operator. The bridged reality, currently, is that the operator must remain alert and able to take over any time.

criley2 8y ago

Yes I am aware of the "infinite work hypothesis" however blindly running into the future and basing 7-8 billion human lives and our entire civilization upon this hypothesis without any mitigation strategy seems naive and high-risk at best. I will also point out that automation is currently starting to eat fields that were traditionally un-automatable due to either skill, labor price (or both), including everything from complex farm work done for cheap to surgical robots.