The Software Revolution

While I see legitimate reasons to reduce population, that won't solve this problem. In fact it might make it worse.

While the future economy will be heavily automated, it will still be an economy. Declining demand will still do ugly things to it. It's likely that a drop in demand will do more to squeeze out human labor than machine labor, since the former is more expensive and in a declining economy everyone tries to squeeze margin.

"If feudal hellhole is more efficient eventually only hellholes will remain."

Probably true. Evolution is amoral. If suffering has higher fitness, suffering wins. Just look at the ordeal that is human birth and infancy, for both mother and baby.

I like how Sweden is a third-world country according to that definition.

But seriously, I don't think that's how people use this term any more. It's just a synonym for developing country by now.

I also like this definition from Urban Dictionary: "Any country that owes rolls of money to the IMF and the World Bank."

> AI systems, if they can be said to "want" things

Honestly asking, why would they? I dont see the obvious answer

>Imagine that the AI system has a really bad addiction problem to that.

Again, i just don't get this. How would an AI get addicted? Why wouldn't it research addiction and fix itself to no longer be addicted? That is behavior i would expect from an intelligence greater than our own, rather than indulgence

>Take over human factories and turn them into cat picture manufacturing?

Why in the world would it do this? Why wouldn't it just generate digital images of cats on its own?

Really interesting post, thanks!

You may very well be right; I am looking at this from thousands of miles away, after all! And I'm sure everyone here would enjoy hearing your perspective on it, seeing as much of Hacker News (I'd reckon) is in a similar boat.

That said, it should be understandable why I'd take your comment with a skeptical grain of salt. Slave-owners in the Southern United States (something which I'm in much closer proximity to, though perhaps not temporally) typically had a lot of justifications for owning slaves, ranging from "We're helping them establish a modern culture!" to "We're introducing them to God and Jesus!" to "They like to work; they were bred for it!" to "We treat them pretty well, actually!" (this was a blatant lie in many cases, mind you) to "What else would they do if we were to not give them work to do?". Similar justifications persisted throughout the days of the Jim Crow laws and their ilk; even after slavery had been abolished once and for all, the now-free black populace was - in the South - rarely (if ever) encouraged to deviate from manual agrarian labor, since that was popularly believed to be their "place". The Civil War was indeed a pretty powerful wake-up call to the ways where the North's automated/streamlined manufacturing and agriculture - using machines instead of men - mopped the metaphorical floor with Southern slave-driven manual labor, but it took a long time for the South to fully realize that.

Today, the United States is still dealing with high unemployment rates of various minorities - including blacks. This is likely caused by automation in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. It sucks for those who don't have jobs in the short term, but - ultimately - it'll encourage those who were previously stuck with factory and farm jobs at best to seek educational financial assistance (which is available for low-income households) and work their way into better careers. I'll take that - along with the bit of ultimately-temporary unemployment caused by it - over blacks and Hispanics (among other minorities; Asian immigrants were victims of this as well, but a large-enough portion of the Asian-American population eventually managed to achieve white-collar jobs and top-tier academic performance that the public view has shifted in the other direction entirely) being treated as if manual labor is the only thing they're good for.

You can't blame me for seeing the parallels here. If India is willing to burn money on giving people menial busy-work for the sake of "employment", it should be more willing to instead burn money on giving those people subsidized education and placement into more modernized roles (like operating or maintaining the machines which replaced their old jobs, for example). The reluctance to do so indicates - to me at least, as someone who can relate his own experiences to this - a cultural or societal unwillingness to allow them to do so; the reasons for not doing so are certainly not ones grounded in rationality or economic common sense, which thus implies a more emotional line of thought.