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AI will create 'useless class' of humans

theguardian.com

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Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#51

Post by danieltillett »

Figs wrote: post #44
danieltillett wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been the general trend over time, but AI breaks this trend. The basic problem is there is minimum wage below which humans can't survive. No such lower limit exists with AI. At some point every job can be performed for less by an AI.

> No such lower limit exists with AI. Not true. The price of materials and the energy needed to run it determines the lower limit on cost for AI. The cost of energy to run computers is pretty low -- low enough that a lot of people don't really think about it until you get up to clusters of the size found in computer labs and data centers -- but it's not nothing either. I will agree though that the minimum cost to run…

I should have been more precise - no such lower limit is known. Given how inherently inefficient the human brain is in turning energy into output then I would not want to bet that AIs will cost more than humans indefinantly.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#53

Post by new_hackers »

vinceguidry wrote: post #39
crdoconnor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A dishwasher or a laundry machine can do one thing. For every task, you need to create a very particular machine. AI is different It's absolutely not. Siri's never driven a car or beaten a human at Go.

Even if it was, unless you're saying robots are going to buy and sell things to each other, all economic activity is oriented around humans. There's no point to AI without us. As well put a dishwasher in the jungle. The monkeys might like it, but they sure won't use it to wash clothes.

To be fair, I don't use my dishwasher to wash clothes either

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#54

Post by vinceguidry »

new_hackers wrote: post #53
vinceguidry wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it was, unless you're saying robots are going to buy and sell things to each other, all economic activity is oriented around humans. There's no point to AI without us. As well put a dishwasher in the jungle. The monkeys might like it, but they sure won't use it to wash clothes.

To be fair, I don't use my dishwasher to wash clothes either

Hah, whoops. Well played, sir, now I can't change it.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#55

Post by Udik »

bsbechtel wrote: post #49
Udik wrote: post #38

I see a lot of comments saying "this happened in the past, and the new technologies never made the humans useless". Well, maybe a good way to state the current problem is the following: the aim of this new technology is to produce humans . A potentially infinite amount of them. Running on electricity instead of food. Needing the space of a box. Without the need to sleep, socialize, furnish their apartments, look for…

When this happens, costs for virtually everything will more or less go to zero, because we can make humans to make more humans to make everything else in our society that costs money. Try to imagine a society where virtually everything is free...visualize walking around and getting free coffee from Starbucks, free rides from Uber, free meals three times a day, free healthcare, free housing, etc. If everything is free…

It is possible, in theory. That however assumes that the property of all those machines and product is public - that they are owned by the collectivity. And that this allows to run them efficiently. But even if this is possibke, it's the transition period between the current private property system and a completely collectivist one that's scary. Because at the moment almost all means of production are privately owned and run for profit. AIs will both skyrocket the profits while creating vast amounts of people completely unable to survive with their wages - and therefore to buy any products. At some point the system has to collapse and become a sort of communism, but I don't think it will be a painless transition at all.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#57

Post by monort »

Udik wrote: post #55
bsbechtel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When this happens, costs for virtually everything will more or less go to zero, because we can make humans to make more humans to make everything else in our society that costs money. Try to imagine a society where virtually everything is free...visualize walking around and getting free coffee from Starbucks, free rides from Uber, free meals three times a day, free healthcare, free housing, etc. If everything is free…

It is possible, in theory. That however assumes that the property of all those machines and product is public - that they are owned by the collectivity. And that this allows to run them efficiently. But even if this is possibke, it's the transition period between the current private property system and a completely collectivist one that's scary. Because at the moment almost all means of production are privately owned…

The price will go to zero gradually. It's already doing it - it used to be that you had to work for a several months to buy a shirt. Today you can do it with a several hours of a minimum wage, and in a "scary" future you will need to work for a several minutes.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#58

Post by agentultra »

terhechte wrote: post #33
agentultra wrote: post #25

These screeds have one grave misunderstanding: that AI can compete with a human. It's like apples to oranges. Alpha Go may have beat the best human player in the world but you can't ask it to fold the laundry or how it felt about Angela's Ashes. I think we'll be able to optimize away boring, repetitive jobs and tasks that require vast numerical and statistical quantities. And that's a good thing. We'll just need to a…

Something I never see answered in these discussions: What are the previous workers to do, those whose jobs were so simple that a properly configured AI can perform it faster and better. Every other job that they would be capable of is just as likely to be replaced by another properly configured machine. If every possible tasks a person would be capable of handling can be solved by a specific machine in a better way t…

First there's a slippery slope there. You presume that all menial tasks will be taken over by AI or robots. You also assume that some or all people who presently perform these menial tasks are not smart enough or capable of performing tasks beyond the menial ones.

The problem I have with that is that economic and political forces often keep people, intelligent people, in menial jobs for no better reason than circumstance. There are plenty of smart, capable people with real passions for music or mathematics who are stuck filling forms in an office because they need to a job to pay the rent and bills. There are many ways they could have ended up at that job.

But if they were given the opportunity to be free from that circumstance, what do you think they would do? If the economic output of the region is the same regardless, does it matter if they do nothing?

I have a belief that people will find more productive things to do that they previously never could.

> I, personally, think that we have to accept that there'll be a world where not everybody will be able to have a job. And we should prepare for it.

That's what I meant when I suggested we would need to shift our economic models away from the ideals set out by Max Weber. Criticisms about the formation of capitalism aside it traded serfdom for indentured servitude. It allowed us to transform our world and build great things... but I think it's time is nearing an end.

But yet the greatest opponents to change are those with the most to lose. And they have quite a lot of money and power.

update grammar.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#59

Post by Tistel »

In terms of obsolescence, it's dog eat dog within the tech world too. On Friday, our new COO told the dev team (we were not consulted, just the CEO) of his plans to move the back office to the cloud (salesforce). Nobody but the coo knows salesforce. The guy beside me was devops (the guy who deals with AWS, docker and the server) he was basically made obsolete for the company. I have the weekend to decide if I want to learn salesforce (some shitty version of Java ( which is shitty already) called apex) or start looking for a job. So I have a lot of empathy for the workers who have these automation obsolescence dropped on them. It will hit us all.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#60

Post by agentultra »

Houshalter wrote: post #29
agentultra wrote: post #25

These screeds have one grave misunderstanding: that AI can compete with a human. It's like apples to oranges. Alpha Go may have beat the best human player in the world but you can't ask it to fold the laundry or how it felt about Angela's Ashes. I think we'll be able to optimize away boring, repetitive jobs and tasks that require vast numerical and statistical quantities. And that's a good thing. We'll just need to a…

AlphaGo is only the beginning. The same tech in alphaGo has recently caused massive improvements in speech recognition, machine vision, translation, NLP, etc. It won't be long before you can have a robot that will understand "fold the laundry", and be able to control a robot body to do it. We've had robotic tech for a long time. But only right now is the AI catching up to make use of it.

These are all highly specialized tasks. Useful, but not general enough to replace a conscious human being.

> It won't be long before you can have a robot that will understand "fold the laundry"

Who the hell wants to spend their life folding laundry anyway? Some people do only because that is what their circumstances dictate. There's no reason they should if we have the means to alleviate them of such trivial "work."

It's my understanding that we already have these devices. They're slow as molasses but the efficiency of not having a human do it is great. Good. We're all better off.

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