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“Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

2012diaries.blogspot.com

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Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#41

Post by pygy_ »

narrator wrote: post #33

Machines can eat petroleum and electricity like cows can eat grass. That's why we have symbiotic coexistence with both of them. If machines could only eat human food, there would be a lot less of them. For example, it takes two acres worth of land to make enough biodiesel annually to fill up an suv gas tank. Properly cultivated, that could feed a significant number of people.

In the same vein...

Rich people are only rich because there are poorer people that are economically relevant. We all use dollars to buy food, money gives you the ability to have others do your bidding. It is just a social construct though, a convention.

Once humans are economically obsolete (Sam Altman plans to have OpenAI make super-human investment decisions, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Alpha Zero take an executive seat at Google in the coming years), human money becomes worthless to the industry, and even rich folks will be powerless.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#42

Post by shawnz »

indigochill wrote: post #10
Jedi72 wrote: post #9

"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self…

What he seems to have missed is that no matter how complex the machine, it always has a creator and a master. Even the most sophisticated AI was designed someone who, deliberately or not, encoded that AI with biases likely mirroring that of its creator (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition software). Even if we achieve the singularity and have software making other software ad infinitum, the biases are there in the…

Humans and other animals were created by a process of nature which encoded certain biases into them, too. Isn't this just a carry-over of that same effect?

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#43

Post by indigochill »

barrkel wrote: post #34
indigochill wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he seems to have missed is that no matter how complex the machine, it always has a creator and a master. Even the most sophisticated AI was designed someone who, deliberately or not, encoded that AI with biases likely mirroring that of its creator (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition software). Even if we achieve the singularity and have software making other software ad infinitum, the biases are there in the…

Who is the master of the Internet? Who created the capitalist economy? We're all in service to the machine already, and nobody is in charge.

The Internet and economy are both not machines, but networks of machines interacting by some agreed-upon protocol (Internet Protocol in the internet's case, lots of tangled multinational foreign legislation in the economy's case).

Break the networks down far enough and you'll find the individual component's owners/creators. Even the protocols were created by specific people (and for specific reasons! The design philosophy of the internet protocol is pretty interesting reading) even if those people are no longer involved in the operation of the networks.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#44

Post by barrkel »

indigochill wrote: post #43
barrkel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is the master of the Internet? Who created the capitalist economy? We're all in service to the machine already, and nobody is in charge.

The Internet and economy are both not machines, but networks of machines interacting by some agreed-upon protocol (Internet Protocol in the internet's case, lots of tangled multinational foreign legislation in the economy's case). Break the networks down far enough and you'll find the individual component's owners/creators. Even the protocols were created by specific people (and for specific reasons! The design philo…

Sure, things are composed out of smaller things, but composition doesn't mean that the higher level thing doesn't act like it is its own system. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#45

Post by ngvrnd »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #40
oaiey wrote: post #15

The Butlerian Jihad is coming

Happened before him, didn’t it? (Albeit, with a decidedly less philosophical bent) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Ludd

Everything happened earlier than you think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#47

Post by segfaultbuserr »

barrkel wrote: post #44
indigochill wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet and economy are both not machines, but networks of machines interacting by some agreed-upon protocol (Internet Protocol in the internet's case, lots of tangled multinational foreign legislation in the economy's case). Break the networks down far enough and you'll find the individual component's owners/creators. Even the protocols were created by specific people (and for specific reasons! The design philo…

Sure, things are composed out of smaller things, but composition doesn't mean that the higher level thing doesn't act like it is its own system. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Yes. As Sun's corporate slogan says, The Network is the Computer!

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#48

Post by PhasmaFelis »

indigochill wrote: post #10
Jedi72 wrote: post #9

"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self…

What he seems to have missed is that no matter how complex the machine, it always has a creator and a master. Even the most sophisticated AI was designed someone who, deliberately or not, encoded that AI with biases likely mirroring that of its creator (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition software). Even if we achieve the singularity and have software making other software ad infinitum, the biases are there in the…

> What he seems to have missed is that no matter how complex the machine, it always has a creator and a master.

This was written in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. I suspect he was aware.

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#49

Post by EGreg »

pygy_ wrote: post #41
narrator wrote: post #33

Machines can eat petroleum and electricity like cows can eat grass. That's why we have symbiotic coexistence with both of them. If machines could only eat human food, there would be a lot less of them. For example, it takes two acres worth of land to make enough biodiesel annually to fill up an suv gas tank. Properly cultivated, that could feed a significant number of people.

In the same vein... Rich people are only rich because there are poorer people that are economically relevant. We all use dollars to buy food, money gives you the ability to have others do your bidding. It is just a social construct though, a convention. Once humans are economically obsolete (Sam Altman plans to have OpenAI make super-human investment decisions, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Alpha Zero take an ex…

No, rich people are rich because money is fungible. It is a medium of exchange and readily convertible to other mediums of exchange. And the rich have a lot of it. So whatever medium of value exchange is used by computers, money can be exchanged for it. Now, it can be that computers (or those with computers) will be able to attract more and more money, as we have had with the speculation bubble in cryptocurrencies, and before that with the Web bubble, there may be new stuff with AI like that. It will attract tons of money and maybe make trillionaires.

Ultimately, though, we may have a new phenomenon: autonomous programs earning cryptocurrency endlessly, at all parts of society, for generating content / doing useful computation / facilitating tons of things. At that point they will have most of the money. What will the money the robots earn be used for then?

We need UBI to redistribute money back to people continuously, while the robots don’t have an AGI to spend the money on stuff they want :)

Re: “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)

#50

Post by EGreg »

pygy_ wrote: post #38
whatshisface wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do that, but why? There's no motivation.

Why divert food to machines? Growth, competitiveness. Why make inedible seeds? As a safeguard.

That’s the problem.

Horses and mules were necessary for plowing the fields. And no matter how they unionized, fields have been turned into parking lots for cars.

But those were animals. Will we value humans?

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