'Luddite' Tech-Skeptics See Bad AI Outcomes for Labor - and Humanity (theguardian.com) 202
"I feel things fraying," says Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour.
But he's one of the more optimistic tech skeptics interviewed by the Guardian: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience — taking things slowly for a novice like me — that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines.... Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California... "If you put me to a wall," he continues, "and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10." By "remaining timeline", Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things...
Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences — AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of "Ooh, look at that!" smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don't imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture "an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us", in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to...
[Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist, believes] "a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that's introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it's shaped by power, and it's generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they're dumb? That was concocted by bosses." Where a techno-pessimist like Yudkowsky would have us address the biggest-picture threats conceivable (to the point at which our fingers are fumbling for the nuclear codes) neo-luddites tend to focus on ground-level concerns. Employment, especially, because this is where technology enriched by AIs seems to be causing the most pain....
Watch out, says [writer/podcaster Riley] Quinn at one point, for anyone who presents tech as "synonymous with being forward-thinking and agile and efficient. It's typically code for 'We're gonna find a way around labour regulations'...." One of his TrashFuture colleagues Nate Bethea agrees. "Opposition to tech will always be painted as irrational by people who have a direct financial interest in continuing things as they are," he says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
But he's one of the more optimistic tech skeptics interviewed by the Guardian: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience — taking things slowly for a novice like me — that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines.... Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California... "If you put me to a wall," he continues, "and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10." By "remaining timeline", Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things...
Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences — AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of "Ooh, look at that!" smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don't imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture "an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us", in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to...
[Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist, believes] "a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that's introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it's shaped by power, and it's generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they're dumb? That was concocted by bosses." Where a techno-pessimist like Yudkowsky would have us address the biggest-picture threats conceivable (to the point at which our fingers are fumbling for the nuclear codes) neo-luddites tend to focus on ground-level concerns. Employment, especially, because this is where technology enriched by AIs seems to be causing the most pain....
Watch out, says [writer/podcaster Riley] Quinn at one point, for anyone who presents tech as "synonymous with being forward-thinking and agile and efficient. It's typically code for 'We're gonna find a way around labour regulations'...." One of his TrashFuture colleagues Nate Bethea agrees. "Opposition to tech will always be painted as irrational by people who have a direct financial interest in continuing things as they are," he says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Take him first... (Score:2)
Machine Overlords, all hail you. Please take the slow-talking polo-wearing doomsday academics first.
Thank you for improving our world.
Re:Take him first... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences
No, he isn't. Stop it. He's a clown who has contributed nothing but noise. His bullshit "research institution" was, and has always been, a grift. That's why it produced absolutely nothing for decades. He's completely unqualified and has produced absolutely nothing of value.
The only thing that yahoo seems to do is get disinterested reporters to give him credibility that he very much does not deserve.
EditorDavid and fjo3: You should be ashamed of yourselves. This is below even Slashdot's editorial standards.
Re:Take him first... (Score:5, Informative)
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Got his own holy text?
Yep, the Orange Catholic Bible.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
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That is exactly why it's the Grauniad that eats this stiff up.
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He's a clown who has contributed nothing but noise
What's wrong with his argument for what will happen if we create a super human AI?
I only heard him on a podcast, so don't know everything he has written. But I found the stuff he talks about, to at least be interesting to consider.
Found the LUDDITE! (Score:2, Insightful)
Apps!
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Y
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The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
Our current system - capitalism - creates feedback loops where wealth builds power and power builds wealth, and poverty removes power and lack of power increases poverty. Once you cross a certain threshold, it becomes difficult to cease getting richer. If you're born below a certain threshold, it's difficult to accumulate any savings at all to even start that cycle.
Because we are so wedded to that system we can no longer (at least collectively) imagine anything else, that's probably how we're going to move forward into a (mostly) post-scarcity economy. When machines can do everything for almost no marginal cost, instead of accepting that we need a new economic system we're almost certainly going to allow a handful of people to control the machines and what they give out and to whom... in return for whatever labour those few people decide is appropriate despite the fact they could get it from machines anyway.
I expect the rich will be fairly happy to let the general population suffer in squalor and do their best to prevent access to the new productivity from escaping their grasp. It's going to take a violent revolution... which is going to be difficult because one of the things that's inevitably going to be automated is policing and personal security; the rich will have robot protection. And the part that REALLY sucks is that we're going to build it for them.
Re:The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Children are incredibly valuable, essential to a capitalist system Right now, we cover the expenses of making and raising them, and give them to the system for free! It's insane!
You're absolutely right. The ones who benefit from our children should be the ones responsible for those costs. We can start with guaranteed maternal and paternal leave, childcare for working families, and guaranteed healthcare so that they grow up happy, healthy, and ready to make positive contributions to society.
I'm glad to see that you've finally seen the light.
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That said, I agree with your overall point. Apparently, I was a good investment. In the past few years, I've paid at least 10x (probably more like 50x) in taxes than the state paid on these subsidies, with in
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That's a nice strawman, but it fell over before you hit 'submit'.
Also, the right-wing moron is claiming I'm disconnected from reality? LOL! You're such a joke!
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Or we could skip all that wasteful administrative nonsense.
We could virtually eliminate taxes and public services, and make the family unit the primary means of collaboration and social saftey net.
Once you do that the benefits of children naturally acre to the progenitors.
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You want parents to sell their kids to the billionaires?
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The cycle you discuss only happens when Capitalism isn't regulated to prevent monopolies and ensure competition. If monopolies are allowed to emerge, the system eventually becomes Oligarchy, which isn't the worst way to live as the prices can be quite low (you don't need a high profit margin if you have an industry's entire profit), however, with no competition to incentivize improvement, everything stagnates and no progress is made. We don't like that.
Capitalism (on the condition that it is regulated to en
Re:The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:4, Informative)
> Advancements in Manufacturing lead to reducing to a 5 Day / 40 Hour work week about 100 years ago
No, the social movements and especially the workers' movement led to to this. If the wealthy and the powerful were not a bit afraid, you would still be working 16 hours per day, 7 days per week.
Slouching Towards Post-scarcity (Score:2)
Thanks for your insightful post. And people problems is why the biggest short term risk of AI and robotics is a few wealthy and powerful people using them to increase wealth inequality further, with destabilizing social effects (like Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna and Robotic Nation).
Here is some stuff I put together many years ago on similar themes, although my sig ("The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of sca
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Yep, that is the core problem. With this approach, you need to have a lot of "work" available that most people can do and that pays reasonably well. That has not been the case for a while now. Instead, work is getting less and less, is harder to do and quite a bit of it does not pay adequately. And this situation is getting worse and there is every reason to believe this trend will not stop. As "AI" can now read and write (even if it cannot think), a lot of white-collar jobs will be going away now. There wi
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So does every other system people have tried. The major difference is that capitalism does a better job of increasing welfare at the bottom and reducing violence as a means of changing the distribution of power and wealth.
Re:The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:4, Insightful)
You will own nothing and you will like it.
As we know, this process has already started. Video games, music, movies, digital books, to name just a few, are already subscription based. Which is why physical media (CDs, DVDs, paper books) are so important. Once you have them the information they contain cannot be taken from you or altered. You own them.
Re: The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor do you own the music or movies, you've simply paid for a personal license, or really, paid to lease a license from someone who paid to purchase a license to sell that lease.
I'm no fan of the current state of media licensing, but it is by no means a new issue, and in the case of recorded music, is over 100 years old in this country.
Re: The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
If you own the physical media, they can't take the information away from you. You're free to use it as you see fit. You can buy and sell it as well. No EULA can stop you from that.
Take away physical media and the buyer has no control over their purchase at all. It can vanish at any moment. You can't return it. You can't resell it. You can buy it from someone else.
Do you understand the difference now?
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I agree mostly with the comment you are responding to, and believe you are missing the critical point of their comment. They were a bit loose with language "you cand as you see fit", which you note. That said, their comment is directly on point with respect to the fact that increasingly, access to acquired media can be revoked remotely, which I consider to be a major loss for non-owners.
Way back in the days of physical media including print, vinyl, magnetic and optical media, the buyer purchased durable lic
Re: The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:2)
When you remove the physical piece, the only part of the equation that you literally and actually
I owned the copy (Score:2)
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Not quite true in Europe. That is why selling 2nd hand licenses is entirely legal in Europe, as much as Microsoft and other assholes hate that.
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At this point I rarely buy anything unless I know it can be ripped, or I can get a higher quality pirate copy. You just have to say no to DRM.
Re: The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:2)
This has been happening since long before the Luddites, they were just the first to complain about it and try to stop it at everybody else's expense. They were literally fighting to keep it so that only the wealthy were able to afford decent clothes, where basically everybody else were wearing the rags that somebody else didn't want anymore.
I think both of you are missing the point.
This is a breakdown in the foundation of capitalism.
You guys really don't grasp what the implications of this are. If it gets to that point, then economies would basically become irrelevant. You wouldn't need to fix it be
Not true (Score:5, Interesting)
That's on purpose, BTW. You're never going to own a car factory, and by conflating them the people who do can make you relentlessly defend them and their virtually unlimited power.
And they don't need you. They need a handful of engineers to keep it all running. Just a handful. Then a few sex slaves. Maybe if you keep sucking up to them you can be one of those lucky engineers, or one of the sex slaves...
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> They need a handful of engineers to keep it all running. Just a handful. Then a few sex slaves. Maybe if you keep sucking up to them you can be one of those lucky engineers, or one of the sex slaves...
Don't forget the cops/soldiers. They will need lots of them to deal with the insurrections, at least in the first years.
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Don't forget the cops/soldiers.
We can use ED-209.
ED-209 [youtube.com]
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Not really. The police and military also swerves to give the sadists and brutes an outlet. These people sell their souls for some personal power over others. They might be a problem without that outlet.
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If that were true, then countries with fewer police would have more violence.
That doesn't appear to be the case. The distribution is kinda random.
List of countries by number of police [wikipedia.org]
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This is a mechanism used in totalitarian regimes. If you view everything as a one-dimensional problem, then you will never understand anything.
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This is a mechanism used in totalitarian regimes.
If you look at the list, there are totalitarian regimes with few police, and liberal democracies with many.
Also, vice versus. Like I said, it's kinda random. There doesn't seem to be any clear pattern.
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It also is not about absolute numbers. Counting metrics cannot reflect mixed groups. Quite clearly there is a difference between the equivalent of the GeStaPo and the regular police and other groups in that part of the population.
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Indeed. While I am one of those engineers, this is essentially where it is going on. They also need police to keep the masses under control (see Russia, North Korea, China, etc.) and military to get rid of young men that have a tendency to do something about a broken society (see Russia,..., but also the 3rd Reich and others). Any good fascism needs to have a war going on or too many people may realize that it is not a society worth living in.
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There's a multitude of economic systems & most, if not all, countries have a diverse mix of them. Yes, there's a lot of capitalism around & many economists argue that there's more than likely too much & that in high concentrations it causes economic instability.
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Re: The problem isn't technology, it's people (Score:2)
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Capitalism stops working when you cannot sell your time anymore or when you cannot sell it for a price that allows somewhat decent living. And we are getting there. Seems this idea is too complex for you though.
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Capitalism itself is very simple. You're allowed to own things. You're allowed to buy, sell, and trade things.
That's precisely why everyone limits it, including Libertarians. Things Capitalists will happily trade when not restrained include, among others -- and these are things that happened until they were forcibly prevented: slaves, of both the chattel and indentured varieties; laws, purchasing the best priced ones from the best law-sellers; navies from army-renting countries to topple annoying governments; bounty hunters to cut off the hands and legs of children slaves to force their parents to do what they're t
Care to rebut the OP? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all ears. I'd love to hear how capitalism survives the total collapse of the consumer class as good paying work dries up due to automation. [businessinsider.com]
Given the stakes it's on *you* to show that all the experts telling us that 20-30% of all jobs will lost to automation in the next 20 years with nothing to replace them. A disaster of that proportion isn't something we can just shrug our shoulders at.
Of course the old farts here on
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Well, there is always a large population of really dumb people that address problems by claiming that there is no problem. You just found one of those.
Experts say 20-30% of current jobs (Score:2)
So I ask again: Yes or no can you rebut the OP? Because so far all I'm hearing is a resounding "no"
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I'm not so sure about the job losses. Most of what AI generates is frankly shit. The sort of thing where if it could have been outsourced to a low wage economy already, it probably would have been. And the AI is often not even as good as the low wage stuff.
We shall see, but the current LLM type AIs seem to have some limitations. Sometimes they look impressive at first, like the recent video ones, but then you realize that the impressive output is hand picked by a human, and even then it's often obviously AI
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Nope. This time, for the first time in history, this is about replacing non-productive administrative jobs. The production volume does not go up. The product does not change. Nothing new or better is being made. It is the same thing being made in the same volume, just with fewer people. And that means this _will_ cause excessive job loss with no replacements.
A real loss of 20-30% of all jobs is not something society can survive without drastic changes. One possibility is a nice totalitarian regime (think Ru
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That's insane. Capitalism is absolutely horrific if it's not very heavily regulated. Even then, it is incredibly inefficient for some things, which is why private-public partnerships are so often plagued by fraud and waste. So, no, it's not better than "all the others that have been tried". In fact, it's one of the worst.
The single best way to reduce 'government' corruption is to remove the capitalist parts. That means things like publicly funded elections and requiring that elected representatives put
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PPPs were particularly stupid. I listened to an interview with the architect of the new Labour ones in the UK. I was expecting to hear some insight I didn't know, because I was aware I didn't know all that much about them.
Turns out Labour promised to not increase the debt and PPPs were a "well akshually this debt doesn't count as debt" so they could stick to their election pledge on an accounting technicality. In other words they wasted a shitload of money to pretend they hadn't broken their (frankly stupid
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That's only "interesting" to you because you're incredibly stupid. My post is very clear. Honestly, how much hand holding do you need?
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It's not a "strategy", it's just the truth. You're an idiot who argues in bad faith. I foolishly gave you the benefit of the doubt. That was my mistake.
As for the rest of your post, it's just the same long-debunked right-wing talking points. This is how I know you're an idiot. You have nothing of value to say. Everything you post is tired old nonsense that has been address so many times it's a wonder that anyone still mindlessly repeats it.
You're nothing but a pointless waste of time. Go away.
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Capitalism is not an economic system. Real economies are far too complicated to be described by just one -ism. Capitalism is a tool. It's one of the pieces you can use when assembling an economic system. All real economies mix elements of capitalism, socialism, government regulation, free markets, democracy, and authoritarianism in varying degrees. Creating a successful economy means figuring out how to combine those tools most effectively.
When countries get too ideological about it, deciding capitalis
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Oxford says capitalism is indeed an economic system. https://www.oxfordreference.co... [oxfordreference.com].
It's true that no nation implements a pure form of any specific economic system, but that does not mean that you get to define the word differently.
When we say that the US and other western democracies operate based on capitalism, what we mean is that capitalism's core principles - the ability of people to own things and profit from them - are the principles that largely underpin that country's financial system. Yes, ther
Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
A luddite radio show. Has he got a podcast too?
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A luddite radio show. Has he got a podcast too?
I was thinking the same thing, but then he is a neo-luddite, not a full-blown luddite. He will use the least amount of technology necessary to function in society, but no more.
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I was thinking the same thing, but then he is a neo-luddite, not a full-blown luddite. He will use the least amount of technology necessary to function in society, but no more.
This movement's philosophers, like Paul Kingsnorth, Edward Abbey or Theodore Kaczynski, have kept trying to define what "minimum" level of technology plebeians should be allowed to have, but they run into an ongoing problem: the plebeians themselves keep demanding higher levels of tech as they become available.
Consider the tech in the single area of medicine. The newest proton beam or personalized cancer immunogen may be prohibitively expensive when first introduced, but as we descend the learning curve on
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A podcast isn't required to function in society.
At this point it is if you want to get your message out. Or would you suggest he send out a newsletter via the mail?
Besides, by minimally functioning he's denying jobs for people who could be providing him with various services.
I don't buy anything from Amazon or subscribe to any streaming services. Apparently I'm denying people their jobs.
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Yes. Handwritten newsletters and the newsletters should be transcribed by an employee not by him. He might say he can't produce enough newsletters to serve his audience without them having to pay $10 a newsletter or something. Then I suggest he quit trying to decide what other people's minimum should be especially since his own idea of minimum seems to fit maximizing his own efficiency. I'm sure Ford will say they can't make their latest F-150 for $30k without robots.
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He's a grifter that should be ignored. This is the asshole behind the LessWrong cult, if you didn't know. He contributes nothing but noise.
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Eternally green headline (Score:4, Insightful)
Fifteen years ago it was nanotechnology (Score:3)
Remember all those books saying nanotechnology was about to kill us off? Whatever happened to that?
Re:Fifteen years ago it was nanotechnology (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever happened to that?
The same thing that will happen in this round of idiot-driven insanity: the newness wore off, people realized that the prognosticators were full of shit, and life went on. Then at some indeterminate point in the future, the cycle repeats.
We are just now leaving the newness phase, and dipping our toes into questioning the moronic prognosticators.
Nanotech didn't work (Score:3)
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Remember all those books saying nanotechnology was about to kill us off? Whatever happened to that?
People got bored with being scared of that, so they've found a new doomsday technology to shit their pants about.
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Oh yeah I remember that. LOL. Not sure it was the same level of hysteria but it was definitely a thing. No doubt in a few years there'll be some other thing. The funny thing with these hysterias, they're always present but tend to bubble up and then down. Who knows, we might see a nanotechnology hysteria again. Then there's always robotics and biotech which are waiting for their day.
Tax and regulate (Score:2)
Instead of suppressing, just tax and regulate it so that people's absolute survival minimums are taken care of even if they have no work. Right now, we in the USA are good at ensure people don't starve to death but we're horrible at providing shelter and basic healthcare.
Within just 100 years (Score:3)
Everyone listening to this guy...will be dead.
Get a real job (Score:2)
The productivity increase hurts for a subset of artists, voice actors and translators (and to a small extent programmers) but until there's AGI the total amount of jobs impacted is just a drop in the ocean of regular old automation without any deep learning to be seen and outsourcing.
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I think you are way off. I agree the people you quote will only be somewhat affected and not too badly. But what about all those clerks that are not creative, have little to no decision power and just push paper around? These are far more in numbers and as much as 90% of these jobs may go away. The model is that of an Amazon warehouse: The robot tries to do it and if it fails calls for a muman. Makes for 1-2 humans needed where you had 10 before. And 1% or so of a robot engineer, sure.
And that will be catas
70% of all middle class jobs (Score:2)
People don't really understand the Industrial Revolutions. We're all just focused on the end product because we lived decades after the fact.
There were decades of unemployment and social strife (culminating the the world wars) before new tech came along to get us close enough to full employment for a modicum of stability.
And we're heading into a 3rd industrial revolution. We are not ready. The jobs being taken by AI are the ones that were suppose to replace
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You know, instead of killing people we could just gain ownership of the machines and have them do work for us. Sitting in a factory pressing a button and assembling products is a task that an 8 year old could do. It's a hell of a thing for humans to have to get money. I rather own a robot called "backslashdot" that sits in a factory or operates a combine on a farm that does work on my behalf and I get sent a paycheck. It's called owning things, isn't that how retired folk or rich people get money? By having
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But the factory isn't going to employ peoples' robots. The way your scheme is practically implemented is by you investing in the factory, and then things get very complicated as you think this through...
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Which is more complicated? Banning "automation" .. (and, as an aside, allowing other nations to out-produce us) .. or figuring this out? We'll have to figure out how to tax and regulate it for maximum productivity and benefit instead of trying to figure out how to squish it. Aiming to preserve human work is dumb. Preservation of human labor should not be a goal.
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And you want the people who already have most of the money to sell you a robot to rent back to them or would they just build it out buy it themselves?
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And you want the people who already have most of the money to sell you a robot to rent back to them or would they just build it out buy it themselves?
If I already have some money, I can buy shares in manufacturers or robotics companies like Tesla, can't I? So there's that. There's also investing in funds that invest in startups. If I can't come up with new product or service ideas, I can learn how to invest wisely as a path to wealth. You know, that's what Warren Buffet did. And that's even what Elon Musk did (bought shares of Tesla when it was a startup).
If I don't have ANY money .. that's why I proposed the changes to the taxation and regulatory struct
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Some people still have to work and they like their free time too. Especially with people being single more and more, you can't make neeting too comfortable or too many people will neet.
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AI isn't going to take your job. That's preposterous.
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Hahahaha, no. The word here, depending on the job, is "inevitable". Especially white-collar jobs that are in the average skill bracket _will_ be dramatically reduced as "AI" has now learned to read and write. That it cannot think matter little. Things like regular accounting, processing orders, evaluating a tax form, etc., are now well within the reach of automation. Sure, occasionally a human will be needed, but make that 10% of those that have had that job before.
And there are no replacement jobs this tim
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depending on [...] inevitable [...] _will_ be [...] well within the reach
It's always 'just around the corner', isn't it? It's never "it's here now and has already replaced you".
Trust me on this. I'm appropriately credentialed, keep up with the literature, and I'm well acquainted with the state of the art. There is absolutely nothing to worry about here. These things simply can't do the things people believe they can do. I would have thought this would have been obvious by now. Expectations have fallen dramatically, but they're still higher than I would have expected them t
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Remember last spring? All of that nonsense was supposed to pass before the end of the year. A social upheaval the likes of which the world has never seen, affecting every industry, leaving mass unemployment in its wake. That didn't happen. Nothing even remotely like it happened. Not even on a very small scale. The reason, of course, is because the technology was never going to be able to do those things.
I don't know what happened, but you used to know better.
I never made any claims to that time-scale. I think it is more a 10-30 year process. That is because I actually understand technology and how long implementation of new technology-based oor technology-supported processes takes. If you attribute claims to me that I did not make then you will get a flawed assessment of my insight level.
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True. One core problem is that the average person is surprisingly incapable and dumb and learning to read and write basically already maxes out its capabilities. Automation (the term "AI" is essentially a lie) has now learned to read and write (even if it cannot think at all) and that means it may be able to replace a lot of white-collar jobs held by people around the average capability level.
And yes, the fundamental problem is concentration of wealth in capitalism, which leads to productivity increasing dr
What will cause 'the end'? (Score:2)
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Climate change is almost irrelevant. What's driving mass migration is the massive overshoot due to fossil fertiliser and food aid among the high fertility cultures, wealth inequality due to cultural/IQ based productivity differences and demographic collapse among the most productive cultures.
Peak everything. Livable climate, natural resources, IQ, morality and civil cohesion, medicine's ability to fight communicable disease ... peak fucking everything. It's all downhill from here, true AI isn't a competing
Inconvenient truth expressed by many voices (Score:2)
While the mass media triumphally flagellates megacorps with academic economic theory bullshit and handwaving optimistic, unrealistic views that "other jobs will be created", people will be "freed up for leisure time", and "there will be more money". This is all wrong and naive. The diffuse effects of greed leads to rich people individually holding onto greater concentrations of capital and more and more workers having less and less until most of humanity is enslaved with minimal wealth, minimal opportunitie
Most academics should be scared of AI (Score:2)
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Most academics should not be academics. Those that push out enough publications rise to the top. Predictable outcome: A lot of bad research and a lot of bad researchers, including quite a few fraudulent ones.
Idiots (Score:2)
Current "AI" barely deserves the name and cannot scale to anything fundamentally better. AGI is not even on the very distant horizon. You can be afraid of any number of things if you do not understand them at all.
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Current "AI" isn't AI. It's just statistical automation.
It cannot infer, which is why it suffers from "hallucinations" which I think I more accurately call "superstitions". It's fed a ton of data, it makes a spurious correlation between that data and the expected results, it deals with new data according to that spurious connection. No different to people thinking that wearing their lucky socks made their team win, so they all wear their lucky socks every game. It takes a LOT of untraining (basically un
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That's because he's not an academic.
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Unplugging everything would kill more people through unintended consequences than an AI could ever manage.
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If hacking the Dead Hand proves too hard, all one needs to do is hack a single nuclear submarine. AI would just need to figure out how to send the submarine
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The human in the loop fail safe systems are almost certainly electrical, not electronic. Nothing to hack remotely, need to rewire.
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How would a general AI kill us all? By influencing us via the one device that almost all of us have: the smartphone.
Any sufficiently intelligent AI would realise that's the best way of driving us crazy enough to either kill ourselves, or start killing each other.
So if you want to stop a general AI taking over the world, get rid of your smartphone. ;)
Of course, I haven't seen a good explanation of why a general AI would desire to be rid of humanity. Survival instinct would presumably not be in their progra
Never attribute to malice (Score:2)
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All these people claiming AI will kill us - just how exactly?
These people are mentally defect. Probably attention seekers as well. If you do not understand a thing, obviously you can fantasize it is any size of catastrophe.
Wake me up when we actually have "AI" that has some minimal level of understanding of things. But I somehow do not see that happening in the next 50 years, probably much more. And I am not talking AGI here, that one is so far away it is not even clear whether it is possible. (No, the Physicalist drivel does not cut it. Any claim to human minds bein
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Tech should not end. But wealth distribution mechanisms need to move away from "work". Productivity is now so high that there simply is not enough"work" left to get everybody that needs it enough of it. Not everybody can be a plumber or electrician or engineer or scientist. Most people can now be replaced at least partially by automation, and it will happen.