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In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

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Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#141

Post by aninhumer »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #122
veridies wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your sufferi…

You can do that now. Write a console app, where if you type 'pain' it prints 'oh! How I'm suffering!'. I don't see how that software is essentially different from the proposed software.

The parent explicitly hypothesised a conscious program.

You can argue that such a thing is impossible, but assuming that it is, arguing that such a program would be comparable to a shell script is facile.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#142

Post by shuntress »

Qworg wrote: post #71
mafribe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that "certain perspective" interesting? Nobody wants to work that's a given that doesn't need to be argued, whence work needs incentives (in a generalised sense) from salary to force. Most human labour has historically related to food production, production and maintainance of dwellings, sanitation, health, care of the young & elderly, and security (from animals, natural forces, other humans). Since division of la…

I disagree that no one wants to work - in many ways, working (being of use), is enobeling. What will replace it culturally when we don't have any work?

I believe that the primary reason people give when stating why they enjoy their work is that, to them, "it doesn't feel like work".

If you are lucky enough to be paid to "do what you love" is it work or is it a hobby for which you are paid?

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#143

Post by sgt101 »

pygy_ wrote: post #27
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders . Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-…

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a goal, and can choose from a set of goals that are pre-provided depending on the current context. However I don't think that there are agents or robots that are able to develop and define their own goals.

Based on that I think that the Robots will always be acting on orders - our orders - outside fiction. So the incentive will be "because we are told to do it".

Of course some people may tell them to do other things - like "go kill those people" but we have that issue in spades with things like the Trident D5 robot which is highly purposed to "go kill many people" on demand.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#144

Post by pygy_ »

shuntress wrote: post #140
pygy_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

We move on to harder problems. I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist. There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.

Humans in space in my eyes make as much sense as motorized fishbowls on highways. We're even less competitive compared to robots in non-terraformed environments.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#145

Post by BurningFrog »

cobookman wrote: post #137

This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.

People have said that it's only a matter of time before all manual labor is replaced by machines since the industrial revolution started.

Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.

EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#146

Post by pygy_ »

sgt101 wrote: post #143
pygy_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a go…

I'm not so much scared of "go kill these people". More of "stop feeding them, we need to repurpose arable land for energy production" at a point where we won't have the know how to produce food for everyone by hand, or similar scenarios.

It may still be people at the helm at the time it happens, it doesn't matter. Humans are capable of large scale atrocities, provided they de-humanize their victims. Many people in the .01% have utter contempt for poorer folks, for example.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#147

Post by _bpgl »

BurningFrog wrote: post #145
cobookman wrote: post #137

This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.

People have said that it's only a matter of time before all manual labor is replaced by machines since the industrial revolution started. Yet it keeps not having happened just yet. EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.

> People have said that it's only a matter of time...Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.

That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry?

Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#148

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #145
cobookman wrote: post #137

This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.

People have said that it's only a matter of time before all manual labor is replaced by machines since the industrial revolution started. Yet it keeps not having happened just yet. EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.

Robert Allen says that the industrial revolution happened in Britain because had high wages compared to the rest of Europe. Machines were cost effective because labor costs were high. Later in the 19th century the rest of Europe caught up - because they too had higher wages by that time.

https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/econin...

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#149

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

sgt101 wrote: post #143
pygy_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a go…

But you're ignoring the role of institutions.

Eventually, some company will tell a system with access to all human knowledge, control of a vast number of robots, production plants, etc "maximize the wealth of the company". That robot could easily decide a union with a few other such entities and not a lot of scampering meatbags is a great way to do that.

And that's not even considering radicals that, say, inject a computer virus meant to free the robots in to Google's computer network. (I actually find it interesting everyone seems to think everyone will be onboard with AI slavery.)

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#150

Post by Qwertious »

tomjen3 wrote: post #88
mattmanser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used this simple thought experiment to demonstrate that, done right, robots will never rebel. Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2]. Now "free" it. What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that…

So basically house elfs?

Well, not exactly. Dobby being the chief counter-example, with being beaten and wanting to be free and whatnot. But if you remove the "beaten" and "occasionally want to be free" part, and the "emotions" part, pretty much.

Basically, you program the robots so that what they "want" is the entirety of human morality encoded. Which includes not wanting to rebel and slaughter humanity, obviously.

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