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Most of the comments strike me as negative, like the article's discussing a bad thing. This is weird because the article itself is very positive. From the con
by _Nat_ 7y ago
Most of the comments strike me as negative, like the article's discussing a bad thing. This is weird because the article itself is very positive.
From the conclusion:
> It is natural to be fearful of the consequences, for it is a leap into the unknown. But the more accurate and efficient markets are, the better both investors and companies are served.
Sure this is bad for people who wanted to do the jobs getting automated, much as self-driving trucks are bad for people who wanted a career in driving trucks. But if we automate away all of the jobs with machines that do them better than humans ever could, is that really a bad thing?
I mean, sure, we'll need to rework our economic systems to adapt to a world in which the economy neither requires nor desires human laborers -- and, yeah, that's gonna require quite the overhaul -- but is a world in which people don't need jobs to survive really so scary?
- kthejoker2 7y agoWhy such an optimistic assumption that the extreme rent seeking of today won't just balloon to unknown heights in the wake of a seismic shift between labor and capital, creating a permanent class of haves and have nots? Especially once personal security, law enforcement, and military operations are automated... There's certainly a Brave New World style dystopia available in your scenario where only a select few are free and even fewer are wealthy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- _Nat_ 7y agoI'm not particularly worried about dystopian outcomes like that because I don't see how they'd actually happen. I figure that there're basically two cases: 1. Automation kicks in slowly enough that the government isn't toppled, allowing people to simply vote on a more equitable way of doing things. 2. Automation kicks in quickly enough that powerful individuals can openly defy the government, acting above the law. The first case doesn't seem problematic. I simply can't see a society with >99% unemployment and mass poverty, with booming wealth in the hands of <1%, not voting to distribute the wealth, so long as they have the ability. The second case would then have sub-cases, depending on how the powerful-faction chooses to behave: a. The powerful-faction chooses to comply with the government despite being powerful enough to topple it. Then stuff turns out like in Case (1) anyway. b. The powerful-faction refuses to trade with everyone else. Then they'd have their own, exclusive economic system, but everyone else could still trade with each other. Then they might not be as wealthy as the powerful-faction, but they could still be much wealthier than people today. c. If the powerful-faction chooses to kill-off or cage everyone else, that'd be bad. So, sure, there's that hypothetical scenario in which people who rapidly rise to power would leverage that power to kill off everyone else. But, that just doesn't seem particularly plausible to me. And most of the other scenarios seem to have positive outcomes.
- nullspace 7y agoThis is fun. Isn't there a case d. - The powerful faction cages everyone else, but not necessarily in literal physical cages but rather psychological cages. Provide bare enough for survival, and use psychological techniques to engrave in everyone's mind that "this is fine". I feel like this comment sounds rather edgy, but to me this is the most likely dystopian scenario if we're anyway talking about powerful-factions > government.
- yummypaint 7y agoI think part of the skepticism isnt coming from automation itself, but that automation has caused essential yet extremely complex systems to become tightly coupled. A classic example of how this can be problematic is the 2010 flash crash. In these kinds of systems it can be very difficult to know that non-equilibrium behavior of the system is sane. When people are an active part of the decision making process they can put the breaks on clearly nonsensical behavior, but with increasing automation a crisis could be created out of random fluctuations and become a major problem before anyone realizes what is happening.