Just own the damn robots

My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have.

My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a tool for a Human overseer, and that might replace some workers.

I don't believe AI will effectively deal with:

1) Cultural concerns. e.g. Appropriate imagery in advertising.

2) Major strategic considerations when faced with an uncertain future. (Physical war, trade war, geopolitical events, natural disasters).

3) Legal frameworks, as they are not well defined.

4) Human relationships. e.g. Don't make Alice and Bob work together.

5) Intuitive leaps. e.g. Rubics cube.

6) Empathy.

The reason I believe this is not because I believe in a soul, or anything mystical, but because I believe that the nature of our brains, our senses, our learning experiences, and the evolutionary processes that got us here can not be matched by our technology.

I think this means Robots / AI will not independently create new businesses, new products, build factories, kit out factories, buy other robots, produce marketing, deal with customer services, returns, courts, investors, regulators, suppliers and so on.

I can imagine products that will exist forever, like, rope, or cutlery, or plates, and someone automating a factory to produce these commodities. But they will still use humans to manage product development, supplier and customer relations, advertising and security, and, probably, looking after the robots.

I think that Robots / AI will at best become a tool for people to use, but the power will remain with Human employees.

Earlier this year, I finished watching "Person of Interest" (maybe not ironically) on Netflix.

So far we've been applying ML/DL to problems like image recognition, which has produced quite useful products. But these things are still far away from Artificial General Intelligence.

And I've been studying AI / AGI research for decades as well. In the early years, there was an emphasis on formal systems, that could logically infer the sidewalk was wet because it rained last night. More recently, we've seen research like Hierarchical Temporal Memory which attempt to address how the human brain processes information.

Anyway... these approaches aren't the only ways forward.

When you think about it, one thing we might want for an AGI is really just a software system that can improve itself (gaining new abilities), with increasingly less and less human supervision.

I'm thinking of a giant codebase, not just a big library, but more on the order of the entirety of Python code in open-source projects. The entire ecosystem. And then adding methods for it to self-improve. For example, scanning through the codebase looking for bad style or other obvious bugs. And then automatically fixing them.

The next step would be to give it the ability to automatically process certain kinds of information. It would scan an input document (file), and try to figure out what it is (HTML, CSV, whatever), and then try to match that to the kind of output which is required. And then try to find transforms in its own codebase which can accomplish this for the sample input / output.

The next steps get more difficult where it is analyzing its own codebase not just for problems, but it understand the meaning. Maybe it can annotate it's own codebase with more meta-information. For example this function foobar() has a string argument, but it isn't just a string, it is supposed to be a street address.

And at some point, getting the system to write code to solve new problems.

I've looked at a bit of research in this particular direction, but didn't really find much.

What do they do?

This isn't a rhetorical question, I don't know the answer, and I'm kept up at night for the coming storm.

Computers can already infer sentiment, not to mention recognize patterns extremely well, and are likely trainable to provide example feedback to any given cultural current. Is culture really any more diffuse than something like conversation, which computers already do reasonably well?

Furthermore, it seems odd to suggest that computers would have trouble in numbers games like war/trade war/resource allocation. These are essentially reducible to games, and with Go out the way, it doesn't seem that figuring out the best tariffs to pass or best places to bomb would require much more logic.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I think your conceptions of the limitations of machines are founded on essentially nothing. There's little, philosophically or scientifically, in the way of physicalist/functionalist conceptions of the mind that supports your viewpoints!

There's little reason to doubt, in my eyes, that our brains are extremely complex machines, running on electrical impulses and neurotransmitters, to produce responses to stimuli. As such, I don't see why you would privilege our machines over another machine. Why is our learning experience different from that of a machine? Do we not learn from trial-and-error, from explicit (social) rule-programming, from inference? Is evolution really at odds with computers? Some ML algorithms already boast "evolutionary" traits. And are our 5 senses really so sharp? What about beings who "see" all EM radiation or feel rumblings deep in the earth, like a seismograph does?