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Developers will benefit from some of the income, but won't get it all. This is because their initial benefit will draw more people into software development, wh

by _lex 13y ago

Developers will benefit from some of the income, but won't get it all. This is because their initial benefit will draw more people into software development, which, if not coincided by an increase in demand for software engineers, will lower wages since it'll increase competition for jobs. The poor will get poorer b/c they will have neither capital (money/development machines) and because eventually the rate of cannibalization of industries will increase over time. Software's eating the world, and that process is accelerating. Machines alone won't be worth much more than the sum of their parts because they are mass produced and largely interchangeable, so there's a ton of competition in the market. They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner. When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again.

nyan_sandwich 13y ago
>They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner. >When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again. You are assuming the rule of law holds through all of this. If an autonomous machine intelligence is capable of becoming militarily sovereign (in the sense that it becomes nontrivial to simply "arrest" or otherwise overpower), it matters little whether the rest of us think it has rights, or who nominally "owns" it. If that machine is also able to outcompete human capitalists at wealth accumulation (assuming market holds) or human generals at military power (assuming nothing)... And let's face it, it's not that hard for even lone smart humans to be militarily untouchable. Think cybercriminals: If today we decided that cybercriminals weren't people and were owned by the government, would the they care? No; they are sovereign through anonymity, and their legal status is not an impediment to their work. Likewise with autonomous machine intelligence.

by _lex 13y ago

nyan_sandwich 13y ago

>They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner. >When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again. You are assuming the rule of law holds through all of this. If an autonomous machine intelligence is capable of becoming militarily sovereign (in the sense that it becomes nontrivial to simply "arrest" or otherwise overpower), it matters little whether the rest of us think it has rights, or who nominally "owns" it. If that machine is also able to outcompete human capitalists at wealth accumulation (assuming market holds) or human generals at military power (assuming nothing)... And let's face it, it's not that hard for even lone smart humans to be militarily untouchable. Think cybercriminals: If today we decided that cybercriminals weren't people and were owned by the government, would the they care? No; they are sovereign through anonymity, and their legal status is not an impediment to their work. Likewise with autonomous machine intelligence.