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Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI and basic income in the same comment. I almost forgot I was on HN for a second there.
A Haskell mention would've completed the HN trifecta.
What people are worried about is artificial systems that are of higher capability than all or the vast majority of humans. If the principal agent problem is solved by those that create them and they can be cheaply reproduced, then the value of human wages goes below subsistence. This likely isn't a big problem as economic growth rates would be so unimaginably high in this scenario (with doubling times on the order of…
For your first scenario economic growth must be fueled by a proportional growth in energy consumption. Fossil and Nuclear fuels exist in finite quantities, and the rate of sunlight that hits earth is more or less constant. Most people would still starve as fields would be repurposed to produce fuel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For your first scenario economic growth must be fueled by a proportional growth in energy consumption. Fossil and Nuclear fuels exist in finite quantities, and the rate of sunlight that hits earth is more or less constant. Most people would still starve as fields would be repurposed to produce fuel.
Maybe it would only last a few years. But once we can convert capital directly into labour in a manner that scales, we will get insane amounts of economic growth.
While taking neuroscience it occurred to me that one could make an argument - depending on what one wants to show, the usefulness of a model is always limited by the intended use - to see a similarity between neurons and humans: The system outcome is not the sum of what each neuron "knows", and each neuron is really "ignorant" and "stupid". For example, why are people bothered that there are people who are into consp…
For a lot of people, conspiracy theories are the thing that lets them not just believe in their own personal boogeymen, but (in their view) can give them a moral obligation to go around making other people believe in their boogeymen as well. For example, 9-11 truthers generally don't just present a handful of odd facts and say "that's odd, I wonder if there's something more going on here". No, they will present a handful (at best) of odd facts and tell you that they are 100% certain about what really happened. They're not saying that the handful of odd facts supporting their argument is proof, rather they're saying that unless you can disprove their (unknowable and likely undebunkable) handful of odd facts, that they must be 100% correct about everything. There are a lot of parallels with religion, and IMO some of the same cognitive processes are at work.
Those sorts of conspiracy theorists aren't offering offbeat counterarguments to prevailing views- those sorts of conspiracy theorists are willfully injecting noise and superstition into the "humanity computer" (or the zeitgeist, or the collective unconscious, or civilization's ongoing internal monologue, or however we choose to think of it). That's my main issue with conspiracy theories (and a lot of religion, and a lot of political discourse...).
What people are worried about is artificial systems that are of higher capability than all or the vast majority of humans. If the principal agent problem is solved by those that create them and they can be cheaply reproduced, then the value of human wages goes below subsistence. This likely isn't a big problem as economic growth rates would be so unimaginably high in this scenario (with doubling times on the order of…
What? Most people in most Western countries are net-debtors. They literally own negative capital.
What people are worried about is artificial systems that are of higher capability than all or the vast majority of humans. If the principal agent problem is solved by those that create them and they can be cheaply reproduced, then the value of human wages goes below subsistence. This likely isn't a big problem as economic growth rates would be so unimaginably high in this scenario (with doubling times on the order of…
For your first scenario economic growth must be fueled by a proportional growth in energy consumption. Fossil and Nuclear fuels exist in finite quantities, and the rate of sunlight that hits earth is more or less constant. Most people would still starve as fields would be repurposed to produce fuel.
And this wealth effect could be due to massive reductions in labor costs by employing AI, leading to increases in standard of living as the price of good plummets.
I haven't looked at charts for the economy as a whole, but I bet certain kinds of technology provide nonlinear benefits for linear growth in energy consumption. Think about one computer replacing a roomful of workers doing hand calculations. (We don't moan about losing those jobs, by the way.) Yes, the computer was the results of decades of progress and investment, but looking at the marginal energy consumption of the finished good compared with that of a roomful of humans, there is no comparison.
Also, as long as we're talking sci-fi, why stop at harvesting energy from the earth. Until we capture 100% of the energy emanating from the sun, we have a long way to go as a race as far as energy consumption limitations.