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The rise of the useless class

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Re: The rise of the useless class

#61

Post by TezlaKoil »

shas3 wrote: post #53
sebringj wrote: post #45

This is short-term pessimism, inline with the common dystopian future of sci-fi. It is really difficult to predict human behaviors and technology in the long term. Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen. Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekine…

I think this is already happening. In fact most AI pessimists don't consider that "man + machine >> machine." Consider chess. Kasparov's defeat happened in mid-1990s. Machine is considered > man. Yet, in freestyle chess, where players are allowed to consult machines, we have achieved ever greater heights of performance. In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engin…

> In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better.

This worked between about 2008 and 2013; but those days are long one. Engines such as Stockfish 8 surpass both humans and human+engine "centaurs". That is, incorporating a human into the loop only makes things worse.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#62

Post by Houshalter »

shas3 wrote: post #53
sebringj wrote: post #45

This is short-term pessimism, inline with the common dystopian future of sci-fi. It is really difficult to predict human behaviors and technology in the long term. Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen. Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekine…

I think this is already happening. In fact most AI pessimists don't consider that "man + machine >> machine." Consider chess. Kasparov's defeat happened in mid-1990s. Machine is considered > man. Yet, in freestyle chess, where players are allowed to consult machines, we have achieved ever greater heights of performance. In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engin…

This is just an artifact of how chess engines work. They are really dumb and just search a huge number of moves into the future. Combined with human pattern recognition, they can be improved. Humans can see patterns that the chess engine doesn't.

However Go was beaten by a neural network trained on millions of games. It already has pattern recognition. At least on par with humans, and probably superior to them. In the famous AlphaGo match, it considered and made moves that looked stupid to humans... at first.

I really doubt human + machine will do any better than just machine at Go. Or anything NNs take over. Human brains can't possibly compete with a machine that can iterate over billions of training examples in a few hours.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#63

Post by pasquinelli »

ideonexus wrote: post #58

This is the most fascinating quote for me. If corporations and nations are entities capable of owning things, could we give such power to software/algorithms? How would that work? As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the alg…

Algorithms require hardware to run on, so they'll have all their assets drained away from them in the former of rent to the landlord, that is, the person who owns the hardware they run on.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#64

Post by Houshalter »

ryandvm wrote: post #28
binarymax wrote: post #16

I want to be like my dog, but smarter and with more freedom. Every day I look at the lazy beast and wonder at the simplicity of its existence. Give me that life and an allowance for supplies to create, eat, socialize, and travel and let me loose.

This is the missing component of the Drake equation. The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death cycle...

But if they have superior AI, what stops the AI from expanding outward instead? Such an advanced civilization has nothing to lose by sending a few robot colonists out through the galaxy.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#65

Post by return0 »

charles-salvia wrote: post #30

I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full "general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite recent advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e. adding more columns to a matrix), we don't really have anything that even approaches an artificial general intelligence…

I can think of cooking as an example of a surprisingly complicated job. OTOH i can think of many supposedly "creative" jobs that are already ripe for disruption. Anything that has to do with visual arts for example, architecture, industrial design, medical, law etc. These jobs may not be fully automated, but the human supervisor will be relegated to a secondary role.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#66

Post by markvdb »

If you want to see what technology and automation do, and early ideas of how to support the "useless" class, don't look at California. Look at places like Switzerland, Scandinavia and Belgium.

The wage cost pressure is just pricing low productivity work out of the market there more quickly than elsewhere. A taxi in the valley is cheap. A taxi in any of these? Rather more expensive...

Jobs being replaced with technology? Government policy trying to do something about it? Keep an eye on what happens in these countries...

Re: The rise of the useless class

#67

Post by unityByFreedom »

> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40."

I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education.

Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existence here and should continue to be passed on to as many people as we can.

I find the excitement for UBI concerning. People seem to have already tossed up their hands and said, "well, I'll be useless in the future, I guess I can't work now!".

Meanwhile, Mike Rowe has been saying for years that there are unfulfilled blue collar jobs. Our culture's problem is not that machines will take over or that schools are failing to educate students. It's that we don't find enough value in the contributions that we do make. It's okay to not be a successful tech founder. Everyone is useful in some way or another.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#68

Post by pasquinelli »

sebringj wrote: post #45

This is short-term pessimism, inline with the common dystopian future of sci-fi. It is really difficult to predict human behaviors and technology in the long term. Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen. Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekine…

"I'm sure it would be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case..."

No offense but I literally laughed out loud when I got to that part. Reminds me of what people said about the internet. Doesn't that comparison lend credence to the notion that greater access to information might often lead to a retreat into comforting echo chambers? That greater ease of communication might often increase the vectors for infection for unreason?

Re: The rise of the useless class

#69

Post by dantheman »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #67

> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40." I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education. Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existenc…

I think you'd find very few republicans favoring UBI...

Re: The rise of the useless class

#70

Post by pasquinelli »

Houshalter wrote: post #64
ryandvm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the missing component of the Drake equation. The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death cycle...

But if they have superior AI, what stops the AI from expanding outward instead? Such an advanced civilization has nothing to lose by sending a few robot colonists out through the galaxy.

Maybe if we were smarter we'd see that they might in fact have a lot to lose.
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