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This would be the demise of the human race. I’m not entirely opposed to that, though. When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks, who am I to say

by KMnO4 5y ago

This would be the demise of the human race. I’m not entirely opposed to that, though. When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks, who am I to say humans deserve to be given those tasks?

nextaccountic 5y ago
In this case we should be able to work less and enjoy the benefits of automation. We just need to live in an economic system where the economic value is captured by the people at large, and not a minority that owns capital.
- pron 5y ago
  Or maybe they'll decide they'd be better off enjoying the automation of you working for them. :)
  - olvrng 5y ago
    This already happened in academic: https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching-online-class.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching...
- huragok 5y ago
  Careful now, that sounds like socialism!
  - easrng 5y ago
    Yes, that's the point.
shrimp_emoji 5y ago
It's an outrage that the dinosaurs had to die so that humans could inherit the Earth!
hdhjebebeb 5y ago
Where other people see fully automated luxury communism, you see the end of the human race? There's more to life than working
- whydoibother 5y ago
  Hate to break it to you, but that wouldn’t lead to communism. The people it replaces are useless to the ruling class. At best we’d go back to feudalism, at worst we’d be deemed worthless and a drain on the planet.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I'm always confused when I see people talking about automated luxury communism. Whoever owns the "means of production" isn't going to obtain or develop them for free. Without some omnipotent benevolent world government to build it out for all, I just don't see it happening. It's a beautiful end goal for society, but I've never seen a remotely plausible set of intermediate steps to get there
    - runarberg 5y ago
      idk. Countries used to build most of their infrastructures them selfs. There are still countries in western Europe that run huge state owned businesses, such as banks, oil companies, etc. that employ a bunch of people. The governments of these countries were (and still are) far from omnipotent. I personally don’t see how building out automated production facilities is out of scope for the governments of the future while it hasn’t been in the past. Perhaps the only thing that is different today is the mentality. We take capitalism so much for granted that we cannot conceive of a world where the collective funds are used to provide for the people (even though this world existed not to long ago). And today we see it as a natural law that means of production must belong in private hands, that is simply the order of things.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      The very concept of ownership is a social artifact, and as such, is not immutable. What does it mean for the 0.1% to own all the means of production? They can't physically possess them all. So what it means in practice is that our society recognizes the abstract notion of property ownership, distinct from physical possession or use - basically, the right to deny other people the use of that property, or allow it conditionally. This recognition is what reifies it - registries to keep track of owners, police and courts to enforce the right to exclude. But, again, this is a construct. The only reason why it holds up is because most people support it. I very much doubt that's going to remain the case for long if we end up in a situation where the elites own all the (now automated) capital and don't need the workers to extract wealth from it anymore. The government doesn't even need to expropriate anything - just refuse to recognize such property rights, and withdraw its protection. I hope that there are sufficiently many capitalists who are smart enough to understand this, and to manage a smooth transition. Because if they won't, it'll get to torches and pitchforks eventually, and there's always a lot of collateral damage from that. But, one way or another, things will change. You can't just tell several billion people that they're not needed anymore, and that they're welcome to starve to death.
runarberg 5y ago
> When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? I kind of thought that AI is just set of fancy statistical models that requires some (preferably huge) data set in order to infer the best fit. These models can only outperform humans in scenarios where the parameters are well defined. Many (most?) tasks humans regularly perform don’t have clean and well defined parameters, and there is no AI we can conceive of which are theoretically able to perform the task better then an average human with the adequate training.
- quanticle 5y ago
  > Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? Why should it be impossible? Arguing that it's impossible for an AI to outperform a human on almost all tasks is like arguing that it's impossible for flying machines to outperform birds. There's nothing magical going on in our heads. It's just a set of chemical gradients and electrical signals that result in us doing or thinking particular things. Why can't we design a computer that does everything we do... only faster?
  - runarberg 5y ago
    There might be limit to how efficiently a general purpose machine can perform a specific task, similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal in quantum physics. That is to say, there might be a natural law that dictates that the more generic a machine is, the more power it requires to perform specific tasks. Our brains are kind of specialized. If you want to build a machine that outperforms humans in a single task, no problem, we’ve done that many times over. But a machine that can outperform us in any task, that might just be impossible.
    - f6v 5y ago
      We know it’s possible for a brain to outperform most other brains. Think Einstein et al. A smart AI can be replicated(unlike super-smart human), so we can get it outperform human race, on average. That’d be enough to render people obsolete.

by KMnO4 5y ago

nextaccountic 5y ago

In this case we should be able to work less and enjoy the benefits of automation. We just need to live in an economic system where the economic value is captured by the people at large, and not a minority that owns capital.

pron 5y ago
Or maybe they'll decide they'd be better off enjoying the automation of you working for them. :)
- olvrng 5y ago
  This already happened in academic: https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching-online-class.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching...
huragok 5y ago
Careful now, that sounds like socialism!
- easrng 5y ago
  Yes, that's the point.

shrimp_emoji 5y ago

It's an outrage that the dinosaurs had to die so that humans could inherit the Earth!

hdhjebebeb 5y ago

Where other people see fully automated luxury communism, you see the end of the human race? There's more to life than working

whydoibother 5y ago
Hate to break it to you, but that wouldn’t lead to communism. The people it replaces are useless to the ruling class. At best we’d go back to feudalism, at worst we’d be deemed worthless and a drain on the planet.
- klyrs 5y ago
  I'm always confused when I see people talking about automated luxury communism. Whoever owns the "means of production" isn't going to obtain or develop them for free. Without some omnipotent benevolent world government to build it out for all, I just don't see it happening. It's a beautiful end goal for society, but I've never seen a remotely plausible set of intermediate steps to get there
  - runarberg 5y ago
    idk. Countries used to build most of their infrastructures them selfs. There are still countries in western Europe that run huge state owned businesses, such as banks, oil companies, etc. that employ a bunch of people. The governments of these countries were (and still are) far from omnipotent. I personally don’t see how building out automated production facilities is out of scope for the governments of the future while it hasn’t been in the past. Perhaps the only thing that is different today is the mentality. We take capitalism so much for granted that we cannot conceive of a world where the collective funds are used to provide for the people (even though this world existed not to long ago). And today we see it as a natural law that means of production must belong in private hands, that is simply the order of things.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    The very concept of ownership is a social artifact, and as such, is not immutable. What does it mean for the 0.1% to own all the means of production? They can't physically possess them all. So what it means in practice is that our society recognizes the abstract notion of property ownership, distinct from physical possession or use - basically, the right to deny other people the use of that property, or allow it conditionally. This recognition is what reifies it - registries to keep track of owners, police and courts to enforce the right to exclude. But, again, this is a construct. The only reason why it holds up is because most people support it. I very much doubt that's going to remain the case for long if we end up in a situation where the elites own all the (now automated) capital and don't need the workers to extract wealth from it anymore. The government doesn't even need to expropriate anything - just refuse to recognize such property rights, and withdraw its protection. I hope that there are sufficiently many capitalists who are smart enough to understand this, and to manage a smooth transition. Because if they won't, it'll get to torches and pitchforks eventually, and there's always a lot of collateral damage from that. But, one way or another, things will change. You can't just tell several billion people that they're not needed anymore, and that they're welcome to starve to death.

runarberg 5y ago

> When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? I kind of thought that AI is just set of fancy statistical models that requires some (preferably huge) data set in order to infer the best fit. These models can only outperform humans in scenarios where the parameters are well defined. Many (most?) tasks humans regularly perform don’t have clean and well defined parameters, and there is no AI we can conceive of which are theoretically able to perform the task better then an average human with the adequate training.

quanticle 5y ago
> Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? Why should it be impossible? Arguing that it's impossible for an AI to outperform a human on almost all tasks is like arguing that it's impossible for flying machines to outperform birds. There's nothing magical going on in our heads. It's just a set of chemical gradients and electrical signals that result in us doing or thinking particular things. Why can't we design a computer that does everything we do... only faster?
- runarberg 5y ago
  There might be limit to how efficiently a general purpose machine can perform a specific task, similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal in quantum physics. That is to say, there might be a natural law that dictates that the more generic a machine is, the more power it requires to perform specific tasks. Our brains are kind of specialized. If you want to build a machine that outperforms humans in a single task, no problem, we’ve done that many times over. But a machine that can outperform us in any task, that might just be impossible.
  - f6v 5y ago
    We know it’s possible for a brain to outperform most other brains. Think Einstein et al. A smart AI can be replicated(unlike super-smart human), so we can get it outperform human race, on average. That’d be enough to render people obsolete.