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Machines can eat petroleum and electricity like cows can eat grass. That's why we have symbiotic coexistence with both of them. If machines could only eat hum

Machines can eat petroleum and electricity like cows can eat grass. That's why we have symbiotic coexistence with both of them. If machines could only eat human food, there would be a lot less of them. For example, it takes two acres worth of land to make enough biodiesel annually to fill up an suv gas tank. Properly cultivated, that could feed a significant number of people.

pygy_ 7y ago
That's about to become a problem once a sufficiently large share of humanity is economically obsolete and not worth feeding by the industry. With an automated agriculture and seed production in the hands of a few companies (among which Monsanto/Bayer), it becomes trivially easy to start producing GMO seeds that are toxic to humans in massive amounts.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  You could do that, but why? There's no motivation.
  - pygy_ 7y ago
    Why divert food to machines? Growth, competitiveness. Why make inedible seeds? As a safeguard.
    - EGreg 7y ago
      That’s the problem. Horses and mules were necessary for plowing the fields. And no matter how they unionized, fields have been turned into parking lots for cars. But those were animals. Will we value humans?
      - pygy_ 7y ago
        We're animals too. Machines will not value humans, and they will be in power. Even before that, many among the very rich consider the poor as sub-human, but few do it in public. Do you remember the PG tweet where he equated unions with potential energy ripe for startups to tap into, rejoicing at the idea of burning down people's life to get richer (edit, here: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104)?
- narrator 7y ago
  What if we could power people with electricity though? I am sure they would be far more energy efficient vs. machines. 1888 calories = 2.95kw hours per day. So less than $1/day of electricity. Someone just has to figure that one out. We could probably live indefinitely off of a big enough solar array.
  - pygy_ 7y ago
    Now that's an interesting take :-) Distributing said energy to cells would be non-trivial, and you'd still need nutrients. Also humans need rest and unlike machines, the range of environmental conditions in which they can rest is narrower than their operational conditions (all of which are rather narrow and non-existent beyond the biosphere). Also, you can't suspend or reboot humans. Once they crash, they must be recycled.
  - dthrown 7y ago
    This would of course put a much higher value on proximity to renewable hydroelectric power, e.g., “Florida Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World“.
pygy_ 7y ago
In the same vein... Rich people are only rich because there are poorer people that are economically relevant. We all use dollars to buy food, money gives you the ability to have others do your bidding. It is just a social construct though, a convention. Once humans are economically obsolete (Sam Altman plans to have OpenAI make super-human investment decisions, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Alpha Zero take an executive seat at Google in the coming years), human money becomes worthless to the industry, and even rich folks will be powerless.
- EGreg 7y ago
  No, rich people are rich because money is fungible. It is a medium of exchange and readily convertible to other mediums of exchange. And the rich have a lot of it. So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Now, it can be that computers (or those with computers) will be able to attract more and more money, as we have had with the speculation bubble in cryptocurrencies, and before that with the Web bubble, there may be new stuff with AI like that. It will attract tons of money and maybe make trillionaires. Ultimately, though, we may have a new phenomenon: autonomous programs earning cryptocurrency endlessly, at all parts of society, for generating content / doing useful computation / facilitating tons of things. At that point they will have most of the money. What will the money the robots earn be used for then? We need UBI to redistribute money back to people continuously, while the robots don’t have an AGI to spend the money on stuff they want :)
  - pygy_ 7y ago
    > So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Money is, quite literally, the power to have others act for you within the rules of society (i.e. laws, for the plebs, and nought for the very rich). Why would computers value human money in a world where human work is worthless (to computers)? There goes fungibility. Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the power of the very rich disappears as well. > What will the money the robots earn be used for then? Making more robots. > We need UBI [...] UBI is lubricant. If we were to take in an even larger dick, it would be humane, but it's a chainsaw that's coming up our collective butt. Lube will only make it spin faster. Less figuratively, UBI is the acceptance of humanity's obsolescence. A large population with UBI is completely powerless and can be unplugged at will.

pygy_ 7y ago

That's about to become a problem once a sufficiently large share of humanity is economically obsolete and not worth feeding by the industry. With an automated agriculture and seed production in the hands of a few companies (among which Monsanto/Bayer), it becomes trivially easy to start producing GMO seeds that are toxic to humans in massive amounts.

whatshisface 7y ago
You could do that, but why? There's no motivation.
- pygy_ 7y ago
  Why divert food to machines? Growth, competitiveness. Why make inedible seeds? As a safeguard.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    That’s the problem. Horses and mules were necessary for plowing the fields. And no matter how they unionized, fields have been turned into parking lots for cars. But those were animals. Will we value humans?
    - pygy_ 7y ago
      We're animals too. Machines will not value humans, and they will be in power. Even before that, many among the very rich consider the poor as sub-human, but few do it in public. Do you remember the PG tweet where he equated unions with potential energy ripe for startups to tap into, rejoicing at the idea of burning down people's life to get richer (edit, here: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104)?
narrator 7y ago
What if we could power people with electricity though? I am sure they would be far more energy efficient vs. machines. 1888 calories = 2.95kw hours per day. So less than $1/day of electricity. Someone just has to figure that one out. We could probably live indefinitely off of a big enough solar array.
- pygy_ 7y ago
  Now that's an interesting take :-) Distributing said energy to cells would be non-trivial, and you'd still need nutrients. Also humans need rest and unlike machines, the range of environmental conditions in which they can rest is narrower than their operational conditions (all of which are rather narrow and non-existent beyond the biosphere). Also, you can't suspend or reboot humans. Once they crash, they must be recycled.
- dthrown 7y ago
  This would of course put a much higher value on proximity to renewable hydroelectric power, e.g., “Florida Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World“.

pygy_ 7y ago

In the same vein... Rich people are only rich because there are poorer people that are economically relevant. We all use dollars to buy food, money gives you the ability to have others do your bidding. It is just a social construct though, a convention. Once humans are economically obsolete (Sam Altman plans to have OpenAI make super-human investment decisions, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Alpha Zero take an executive seat at Google in the coming years), human money becomes worthless to the industry, and even rich folks will be powerless.

EGreg 7y ago
No, rich people are rich because money is fungible. It is a medium of exchange and readily convertible to other mediums of exchange. And the rich have a lot of it. So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Now, it can be that computers (or those with computers) will be able to attract more and more money, as we have had with the speculation bubble in cryptocurrencies, and before that with the Web bubble, there may be new stuff with AI like that. It will attract tons of money and maybe make trillionaires. Ultimately, though, we may have a new phenomenon: autonomous programs earning cryptocurrency endlessly, at all parts of society, for generating content / doing useful computation / facilitating tons of things. At that point they will have most of the money. What will the money the robots earn be used for then? We need UBI to redistribute money back to people continuously, while the robots don’t have an AGI to spend the money on stuff they want :)
- pygy_ 7y ago
  > So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Money is, quite literally, the power to have others act for you within the rules of society (i.e. laws, for the plebs, and nought for the very rich). Why would computers value human money in a world where human work is worthless (to computers)? There goes fungibility. Provided they don't have the command of the industry, the power of the very rich disappears as well. > What will the money the robots earn be used for then? Making more robots. > We need UBI [...] UBI is lubricant. If we were to take in an even larger dick, it would be humane, but it's a chainsaw that's coming up our collective butt. Lube will only make it spin faster. Less figuratively, UBI is the acceptance of humanity's obsolescence. A large population with UBI is completely powerless and can be unplugged at will.