Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

weforum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 267 posts

Re: It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

#61

Post by aboringusername »

ryaniscool wrote: post #33

Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening. It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies. I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have n…

Who watches the watchers? ;)

AI is all nice and rosy but how do we know it's "right"? How can a machine be indifferent to human influences? How do we know it's not biased? Does it discriminate? It's a not a human, it can't "think" like one, it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument. It's a dumb machine feeding off data, unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point.

AI is given too much credit for a little bit of intelligence (if you can call it that, I think that's how we perceive it), however as society changes so the AI has to. Does AI understand brexit yet? Does it influence policy decisions? Can it understand how people will react? Can it help during a pandemic? Can it talk and negotiate?

Brexit was dumb and so is the UK.

Re: It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

#62

Post by cnity »

lbrito wrote: post #51

>Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them. The main point of owning things is that you get to use them when you want to use them. People keep those things in cupboards because when they decide on a whim to make pasta they do just that. The same goes for all the rest - having cars, houses and so on. Unless there's some kind of Philip K Dick-style ma…

For the most part, I agree. Some things really do work better in a "borrow" type system. For instance, I'm fixing up my old bike and the sheer number of tools necessary for basic tasks is astounding. I wish there were some local "bike maintenance tools" library where like-minded folks could go to fix up their bikes and use tools. You could probably serve an entire city with a handful of chain tools, and yet it's interesting to consider how many millions of them must be manufactured so that everyone has one for the one time a year they need to replace a bike chain.

Re: It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

#64

Post by sokoloff »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #16

I actually don't mind the idea of renting a large number of products that are only used occasionally. A drone dropping off a mixmaster or hair straightener only when you need it actually makes sense in an economy where energy is cheap and space is at a premium. I can't see why this necessitates me not owning clothes, or allowing random strangers to use my living room while I'm out, though. I don't even really see the…

I only use my toothbrush a few minutes each morning and evening as well. So inefficient.

Re: It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

#67

Post by woko »

tim333 wrote: post #55
ryaniscool wrote: post #33

Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening. It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies. I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have n…

We went through a comparable transition from most people working in agriculture and farming to that being automated away and people doing stuff that hadn't been much worried about before. Given human nature hasn't changed I imagine it will be similar.

Automation did not make all of humanity transition. Manual labour is still used nowadays, even for works which could be automated in some way.

Actually, there is a larger and larger gap between educated people with office jobs who earn a good salary to do "stuff that hadn't been worried about before"... and the rest of the barely educated people who barely earn anything and get to do all the manual work (taking care of the children, cleaning homes, offices, cooking food, delivering food, harvesting delicate fruit, etc.). The gap is bigger and bigger, despite or thanks to the progress of humanity.

In a world where less of the manual people are asked to do manual work for some reason, these uneducated people won't transition to other jobs. Best case scenario is they get a minimal universal income to stay calm at home and generate clicks on social media to feed AI some new data. Worst case scenario is they will want to work, and be angry at society for making them feel useless.

Re: It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

#68

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tim333 wrote: post #55
ryaniscool wrote: post #33

Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening. It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies. I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have n…

We went through a comparable transition from most people working in agriculture and farming to that being automated away and people doing stuff that hadn't been much worried about before. Given human nature hasn't changed I imagine it will be similar.

And then again during the industrial revolution and consequent automation, where the work previously done by 10 people is now done by 1.

It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much.

On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and livelihood, and have to settle for a lower paying, dumber job.

That said, a lot of jobs replaced by automation are already low-paying, dumb jobs. Why stand 8 hours / day doing a repetitive manual job if a thing can do it just as well? Why expose yourself to the worst the internet comes up with when you can train an AI to detect CP?

I don't believe we'll see jobs becoming largely obsolete in our lifetime, but I would like to fantasize about a future where work is a choice and everybody can live comfortably (quality housing, food and spending money) even without a job. Not going to happen as long as capitalism and the never ending pursuit of profit and profit increase are still a thing though. But, we're seeing some hopeful developments in that regard, with things like UBI and the like.

(Aside: I don't believe UBI will work in the end, if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does. UBI only works if it's coupled with assurances of housing and that it's enough to cover all basic needs, which right now depend largely on the area you live in. I couldn't get an affordable rental place on my own income some years ago, because first there was a 15+ year waiting list, and later I was earning too much so I was thrown out to the 'free market', and there's a pretty big gap between the most expensive social housing and the cheapest free market housing. That gap is filled up with 'student' houses, think houses split up into multiple units / rooms. But nobody should be forced to live like that if they're out of college and have a paid full-time job.

Re: It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

#69

Post by efitz »

The author can’t help but drag ownership back in al the time - “my bicycle’ “my living room”. Also the author ignores the tragedy of the commons - what if the last person broke the pasta maker or didn’t clean it. Where is the labor coming from to keep up all this stuff? How much supply is available? How much does it cost to get a pasta maker delivered? Does it come today or a month from now because I have to reserve one of my city’s 3 pasta makers and that was the soonest available? What if I don’t return it?

Re: It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

#70

Post by ragnese »

znpy wrote: post #2

> One by one all these things became free Science fiction, right there.

Not really, depending on the thing. There (maybe) comes a point where the accounting of who owes what becomes more expensive than the thing you're tracking.

It can also go the opposite direction. Air is free right now, but then see the movies Total Recall and The Lorax (not joking).

Post reply on HN