381–390 of 613 posts
If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy. If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
Did anyone ever keep track of how often economists turn out to be right about anything? I didn't, but have the feeling that it isn't much better than flipping a coin.
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>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment. You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on. You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters. You then realize, you still have all the part…
It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value. Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arr…
You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual.
But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.
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Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.
By free, I mean "free of human effort"
The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.
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Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights. If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easi…
Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past. But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be ent…
That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners first.
If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy. If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
> listen to economists Did anyone ever keep track of how often economists turn out to be right about anything? I didn't, but have the feeling that it isn't much better than flipping a coin.
It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high. A leap of faith is req…
Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if that was a smart or dumb move. The current generation face huge land values (but have better medicine and moderate interest rates). Who would you trade places with, without the benefit of hindsight?
It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high. A leap of faith is req…
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By free, I mean "free of human effort"
If you own a factory, what you see is a big box with input and output, human labor is just an annoying variable, removing it won't turn the entire thing "free". The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.
Government will, among other things, oversee that the needs of the people are well served by these robots.
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Bruh. This has nothing to do with like Elon coming and taking the house away. This is just plain old reality. Without income or savings, people can't afford houses. How would they pay the property taxes? Can't maintain the house. The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes. This happens all the time. Nobody swoops in and saves those people. Also, hang on. Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall p…
> The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes Sold to whom? Isn’t the argument that no one will have money? There are approximately as many houses in the US as there are households. We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless. Maybe the people who are currently buying at a time when home values are historically high will be shafted. But those houses will not end up empty. > Will we b…
... do you remember 2008? Or no? That was a tiny blip.