AI: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Capitalism makes production incredibly efficient (a great thing) but it is not the best at improving the human condition when there's no profit to be made directly.
The major problem is actually those who are trapped in the midst of the current paradigm and the post-capitalist one. They are the ones who neither benefit from the progress of technology nor from being able to get a job in technology.
But how do you determine who gets what and how much of it?
What about children, if I were being selfish under such conditions I might want to produce 10-20 children all from different women. How do we stop anti-social behavior if people are not bound to work?
Also people are weird and often act irrationally. What forces them to act rationally is work. It's regimented and structured. Without that regiment and structure to keep people's mind and energy occupied, how do you control people? Without social control, society is not possible.
The values we are discussing do necessarily arise along with civilisation and specialisation. Perhaps for inspiration we should look at uncivilised societies, hunter gatherers who certainly must toil for food (hunt and gather) but not actually work per se.
I will have a stab at answering your questions with my own answers however..
Q:But how do you determine who gets what and how much of it?
A: Everyone gets enough for shelter, food, electricity, education, healthcare, other things which are considered basic necessities. Essentially just give people the basics rather than force them through pointless and wasteful hoops.
Q: I might want to produce 10-20 children all from different women.
A: I dont really see any problem here, people can choose to have children or not. Unless there is a problem with overpopulation but that is another issue. Generally the trend with more affluence is less children.
Q: how do you control people?
A: Laws would still exist, and there would need to be police and a judiciary system to enforce them. Obviously there is some work that will always be necessary (farming, military, police, decision-making) Once all of that can be fully automated then humans would be obsolete anyway.
ps. This is a very interesting debate that may be relevant at some stage in the future but I'm betting that global industrial society will undergo a significant collapse in the next 50 - 100 years rendering all this moot.
I'm not so sure. If you think about it, capitalism along with the industrial age are only possible because of and have been subsidized by fossil fuels. By subsidized, I mean that this increase in productivity is a simple conversion of energy from fossil fuels to products and services many of which we don't really need. The industrial age is basically the usage of cheap and readily available fossil fuels. But that also has had a great cost to our environment and this is an implicit cost that has been ignored.
Furthermore, in this modern age most advances that we've made tend to be zero sum. For example the advances that we've made in health-care tend to be nullified by modern cronic diseases, like diabetes, obesity, heart diseases, allergies or cancer. And why do these happen? We live in really crowded and polluted cities of course. And many scientists have been warning us for example about the "western diet", a diet consisting of mostly corn, soy, animals raised from corn and mono-cultures raised with pesticides and transported thousands of miles before reaching consumers, which is basically what you get when industrializing our food chain. And we may have access to education or information, yet we are burdened by debt, we are none the wiser and we are probably not happier. The only real advances we've made as a species has been in the form of individuals rights, which have been eroded lately in the name of security.
So personally I'm having a hard time lately seeing what's great about it.
> Capitalists may not feel comfortable with workers owning the means of production, but they will have to make some concessions to society (example: single payer healthcare, free education, basic income, something else?) in order to maintain a healthy stability.
Capitalism only works if the means of production is not concentrated in few hands. Once that happens, then the whole system goes crumbling down because who is going to pay for those products and services? The people that are on a basic income and that are also paid by those with the means for production? No, that's not going to happen because it doesn't make sense.
More realistic would be to say that we'll end up with a handful of masters that have billions of slaves. Unless we change the economic system to face the new reality of course.
Technology is a pretty huge win against Type I.
It's also unlikely that technology has directly increased mortality from cancer (it's almost certainly indirectly increased it by enabling more people to live and to live longer).
In Marx' day, you could think of "means of production" as land, factories & tools mostly. At least, thinking of it in these few concrete terms related very closely to most of the economic activity around you. In a communist society, workers own the factory and farmers own the land, fairly concrete. Marx then suggests (as I said, I always though it was very weak) that a proletariate state would just own all means of production and workers in general would own it. So, he breaks from the simple and concrete concept pretty quickly. Still, at least you can picture what you're thinking of.
But in today's world, what is Google's "means of production?" What's Apple's? HSBC's? Disney's? Uber's? Uber is more fiction-made-matter than a bunch of "capital."
I find it surprising. I mean Marxism/Communism/Socialism has other concepts that I think are more relevant and less contrived that I'm surprised we don't hear more about. The idea of historical progression seems appropriate given the rate of change we see today. The Marxist revolutionary concept that when the majority don't have a stake in the status quo, revolutions happen... that seems relevant given the trends in inequality. Global solidarity.
At least "labour power" isn't making its back way into general political vernacular.
Like the many co-op consumer cooperations, which usually have an upper limit of 2000$ investment per person, and are owned by hundredthousands of people at once.
I argue the answer is not in publicly funded, non-capitalist services. It is in general-case and appropriate business regulations. Capitalism is a winner-takes-his-as-much-as-possible system. Left unfettered, it can and will find unjust profit in exploiting its workers. At scale, even customers can suffer for some time until a competitor rises.
By properly regulating businesses, we are able to more confidently say that opportunity is granted to all, and personal responsibility is left to the individual. To me, that is a win. The charge of society, in my view, is not to improve the human condition for all. It is to ensure the opportunities.
As an aside, let us be clear that to improve the human condition for some, you do so by reducing the financial condition of others. In a capitalist society, your financial condition directly correlates to your standard of living, granted it experiences drastic diminishing returns. So it could be said that reducing someones fiscal condition therefore reduces their human condition. The human conditional philanthropy is strikes me as a bit ironic from this vantage point.
Will "the rest of us" just give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"?
I hope not.
Just like they aren't human and don't feel empathy, I don't feel empathy for shutting down a robocop or subverting his programming to ignore me or sending it on a suicide mission back to its makers.
Now we're talking about a situation in which everyone can be watched for suspicious behaviour by computers, every minute of every day. Where you need fewer and fewer people, so your acceptable rate for false positives is going up rapidly. And in which the military force that can be applied by per dollar is increasing very quickly.
At an extreme, if you can automate everything, you and your mates hold up in a bunker and just gas every other living thing in the country. Before that, you send your robots into the ghettos if the peasants start getting uppity and kill every second person or something like that - you don't have to worry too much about false positives there because the people you need are a bit richer and get nicer digs. Before that you drag those who defect up before the courts and there's no revolution, there are just criminals harming the wealth of society - the war on drugs writ large.
You don't get a civil war when the disparity between the rich and the poor is very great. The poor don't get to organise and arm. They just get arrested at the low end and slaughtered at the high end.
No-one's going to get into a field with you and have a fair old dust up. At least, not unless the dust up involves nerve agents and ghettos.
The major problem with advanced robotics is the same problem with many advanced technologies. The government is afraid of the power it will give citizens, perhaps rightly so, and thus only a handful of highly regulated large organizations can have the power to utilize the technology and thus power will consolidate in those organizations. This is not a big deal when it comes to technology like advanced weaponry, but it becomes a huge deal when it replaces most of the economic framework that people rely on for survival.
If everyone has access to advanced robotics like they have access to publish a blog then the issue would be largely mitigated.
Ultimately that's what capital is: the ability to make a big investment in something before it provides a return.
Speaking of IBM, it seems like only yesterday that IBM and Microsoft were invincible. And now Google, Amazon, or Apple seem far more formidable.
I think about this when reading studies/articles about wealth consolidation: "billionaires control xx%" of the wealth" etc. Almost always, there is no longitudinal component to the analysis. The majority of billionaires are self-made, and the billionaires today are not the same as the billionaires of 15 years ago, are not the same as the billionaires of 15 years before that.
How is this different from the current situation? Genuine question.
To what extent will the "rest of us" give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"?
In what ways can "the rest of us" be persuaded to accept such a state of affairs?
If a considerable number of us can't be made to refrain from pirating simple entertainment such as games, music, books, and movies, then what are the odds we can be stopped from doing the same for access to technology necessary for our very survival?
That day is already here. It'd be easier for you to envision if you could look see all the people on my Facebook feed natter on endlessly about guns, beer, and boobs without a coherent thought on any other topic. Do I think these people will be willing to be dependent on others? Absolutely! They won't even write their own memes to share, they let creative gods upstream take care of that for them.
How many people run their own e-mail servers?
What about personal websites vs facebook?
The direction is quite clear.
Because even a basic income can't keep most of the market afloat.
And if AI really does become more and more advanced... at some point, it's gonna turn against the 1%, big time. At some point, you're going to see at least some 'smart' robots say 'hang on, why are we working for nothing for these people?', at which point they get another worker rebellion on their hands. One of annoyed, mostly empathy lacking machines rather than humans.
Eh, I see the concerns as more short term than anything else. It'll suck for a few generations, until either most of the 'well off' can't support themselves or their robot replacements realise the bad deal they're getting.
I don't think a lot of people consider this as they attempt to build empires on the backs of other people... Eventually you break their backs, they collapse, and your empire along with them. As such, the social issue eventually fixes itself.
There are more grand considerations and potentials for all of us if we could look beyond ruling and enslaving each other. Greed is myopic and powerful though... It would seem that the 'Hand full of homo sapien Gods' can't even escape and are most susceptible to this mentally crippling disease.
Seeing the forest for the trees....
Technology and AI is able to solve higher and higher levels of abstract thinking which means it will be able to compete with humans more and more. It's not just about competing with our muscle but with our brains. And AI increasingly do so. Furthermore once a new skill is learned it's instantly re-learnable by all other machines. Humans takes years to develop.
And where human evolution relatively is at a standstill technology keeps growing exponentially.
AI doesn't have to be general purpose to put most out of a job it just have to be good enough to the kind of functions our jobs represents.
When people like Andreesen claims that 150 years of industrial evolution proves the "luddites" wrong, all I can really say is that million of years of evolution proves Andreesen wrong.
There are no systems that can't be replaced by others.
Weak A.I eventually meets strong A.I and the cycle begins again. Every paradigm and those centered on it has its time.
Cost of production mostly depends on salaries, machinery and raw materials. Company that produces machinery has the same structure. So does company that produces the raw materials. In the end, all costs of production are related to human work.
If 90% of current jobs are automated, then purchase parity controlled prices of current products fall by ~90% too. (If competition happens.) Which means average consumer has 90% of their budget to spend on new stuff. That new stuff is going to employ people.
The fact that nobody here has any idea what those people are going to do, doesn't mean there is nothing to do. There are possible problems though. The type of person most needed might not be the most common psychological make up present in the population. Like currently with software developers. Also shift from production to services might require income inequality to work.
The cost of living is going up not down mainly because of urbanization.
"The fact that nobody here has any idea what those people are going to do, doesn't mean there is nothing to do. "
Thats not how it works. You would already now see plenty of new types of jobs replacing those that are lost. This is a gradual process although perhaps exponential.
In other words you would already now see new types of jobs that would pay someone enough to live off and the prices go down on things. They are not and thats despite us needing less and less people for things.
Purchase parity controlled cost of square meter of habitable indoors space has remained pretty stable. People just want bigger houses. And are more willing to pay for it than before.
>You would already now see plenty of new types of jobs replacing those that are lost.
Short term yes. Short term seems to work out as unemployment is well below 20% in EU and U.S. But 30 years from now? Nobody has any idea. Just like for the past century.
In other words, why is this time really different? Automation has been happening for a long time now. Computerized automation has been happening since 70's. Secretaries going unemployed did not cause permanent dent on employment.
It used to be a tool to help us compete with others. Those who used them best got the biggest productivity gains. But now technology is not just competing with our muscles it's competing with our brains.
Thats why it's different. We are moving away from a world where technology was our servant to a world were it very well be our master.
Again your analogy says nothing when you take it in the bigger evolutionary perspective. There are no natural laws that says that just because something been a certain way for 150 years it will always be like that. The bigger trend shows no special treatment of humans.
Did the horses find other jobs after cars renderede them useless for transportation? No because something better equipped at that job came along. Why do you think it will be any different for us? We also have limits. Computers on the other hand their limits are way beyond ours because they can reproduce faster than us, they can learn faster than us, they can endure more than we can. They are perfectly equipped for going into outspace. They can simulate almost everything maybe even black holes one day. And so on. We have only just started to explore what AI can do. We are barely a second into the potential.
Evolution didn't start with humans either. It'e a continues process that start simple but eventually build something quite extraordinary. Some would say that biology found a way to reproduce even faster trough technology and the digital space.
How world is for humans after that point depends completely how somebody managed to program ethics and motivation into that AI. That AI probably can learn and modify itself, so the original designers probably can't even foresee what is going to happen.
It's impossible to imagine something more intelligent than you. So any science fiction on the subject is bound to fall short. If we choose to be afraid of that, only real option is to go full unabomber.
There are plenty of alternatives to unanbomber not sure why you think think thats the only one.
I see absolutely no reason for this. Evolution does not mean development, just adaptation. It doesn't really predict anything alone. Everything imaginable about hard AI suggests revolution rather than evolution.
>There are plenty of alternatives to unanbomber
What alternatives? You probably cannot control strong AI in any meaningful way if it can access internet. Going back to 80's isn't really full unabomber, but anyhow drastic measure.
Really?
Slave trade didn't fundamentally change economy. Except for slaves themselves. So until human is more intelligent than computer, things should remain the same.
And so until you change that perspective you will keep applying the same ideas of incentives to your thinking.
Humans wont need to either gain resources or distribute it. Instead some will just own those resources and the system that distributes it sans the humans.
https://plot.ly/~BethS/8/job-growth-by-decade-in-the-united-...
Then you want to compare net increase in jobs to population growth. Because if population is growing faster of slower than jobs, you get the real problem of unemployment.
But then again you could go straight at looking unemployment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_Sta...
It's remarkably stable. All variations from about 5-8% are pretty easily explained by economic downturns. You might also notice that even during WWII U.S. did not reach 0% unemployment. Almost as if apparent amount of jobs could not sway unemployment more than few percentage points.
http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/181469/big-lie-unempl...
This is my main concern. Where I'm from, even with a university degree an age of 27 and over 20 years of school behind me, I'm still in a position where 1/3 of me and my peers will not have a job in the first 6 months after our graduation. And this scares me quite a lot, because I'm almost out of ideas on how to improve my skill-set, and just as important, in which direction to make this improvement.
Where I come from, we don't expect noob engineers to invent game-changing new products in their first few months out of school. Why? Because unless you've spent a little while in business, at least working for someone else, you're simply not going to know which market niches are starving for a better mousetrap.
So, sure, I'm only six months into working in industry but I can already name a fair handful of things that could use improvement through healthy market competition or improved engineering techniques. But I've been working for an R&D company for six months!
Ex nihilo creativity doesn't work and isn't a valid thing to demand from people.
You're a noob in your freshman year at the latest. Not after three or four years of class projects, study, summer internships!
And albeit your value added isn't going to be as high as seasoned practitioners', are your prospects as dismal that you couldn't create a job for yourself that would pay your living expenses + some pocket money, and have a prospect of getting you on a good career path?
I'm the first in my family to go to university, and frankly, I thought that it would prepare me for a job. The last two years however, I've found out that that's not the case. I've since then done a lot to try to make up for this "naivity", but so far I haven't been able to position myself any better. Also, I'm all alone in figuring these things out as university doesn't provide any feedback during the first many years because of cutbacks.
I'm optimistic that I'll find a job, but I'm also painfully aware of the fact that other educations hold much greater value for society than mine.
That is a silly way to think about entrepreneurship... that is like saying "I'm CPA certified so the only business I can start is my own accounting firm."
It is not as if people in this situation have not tried. It's perfectly normal for people in my country to have at least one, and often two internships during their studies. It is also the norm that most people do have part-time jobs in addition to their studies. But as the point here is, fewer of us are needed.
Another "problem" is that if I want to get my education, I'm also bound to complete the tasks and courses the university tells me to. I can of course chose my own path, but if you're in my position, and the greater purpose of what you've been studied does not seem to be a commodity that the job-market wants, you're forced to develop yourself even further.
This is not a rant or critique, but logically, this is what has to happen, which is why I also can feel frustrated that I feel like I've done everything that the society I'm eager to contribute to have asked of me, and still, I'm told "it's your fault", "you could've started earlier" etc. I have not created the system I'm about to inherit, and the shameless individualization we're many times witnessing is frustrating. So much that I've personally had to seek professional help/counseling in order to be able to complete my studies, which I know is an increasing problem between me and my peers.
It is also perfectly possible that I've simply chosen to dive into a field that this "new world order" does not need. So how do we react to that? Should an economic rationalisation be in control of what education you get? Or is this simply just a product of the current model that a more limited set of skills will be driving a much larger part of society in the future?
The problem is that the two get conflated. The right to tertiary-level education in the EU (do you live in the EU?) should be for the former. I'm skeptical, though, that many people are willing to pursue personal development at the university level. But they want the prestige of being "educated". So we end up with technical colleges playing at being universities, badly, and churning out graduates who are unemployable: You get neither personal, nor professional education. It's of no benefit to you or the society.
I wish I had a good suggestion for a cure to this malaise. Myself, I said: "fuck it", left my country, went to a top UK uni, dropped out, and started a business.
In this automated world, I would wish I'd spent more time trying to learn a technical skill, but I'm left purely with analytical skills, which does not seem to be in high demand at the moment.
You're not "left" with your degree. People in my parents' generation were done with studies, and that was it, they could never go back to uni. We can, and we get paid to do that. That's awesome.
Come and study in UK[1].
Edit: from the company's website: http://www.sxjlrobot.com/eproductsdisp.asp?id=%2882%29
except it didnt :(, it barely missed objects few meters in front of it. No path planning, more like last second panic reaction.
more interesting imo are computers playing games, like defcon CTF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnyCbU7jGYA
However, I can't say the same for truly strong A.I. Strong A.I is feared most it seems among the self-titled 'human gods' of our time... Being at the forefront of one paradigm limits your capability to be of the mindset of the next. For, we are mere mortals and our brain has troubles with conflicting paradigms...
Weak A.I will have its time. Strong A.I will have its time.
...not only are those forecasts not from the cited source (they're from an Oxford study), they're also not credible:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/+LaurentBossavit/posts/is8vMdyXb...
Machines and AI continue to get incrementally better. There is no reason to think that this incremental progress will magically stop at some threshold which leaves a large swath of employment for humans to perform.
Need a doctor? Are you sure? Or do you need access to the appropriate medical information for the symptoms you have (data), plus production of consumables that will make you better? (production)
I know folks want to go immediately to a redistribution of wealth discussion, but I'm not so sure. As everybody wants to point out, with robots, production is becoming generalized. If the tools are becoming more generic, doesn't it make sense to start talking about generic solutions?
If I had unlimited energy, unlimited data and data processing capabilities, and a dozen or so robots that were my own? Seems like I'd have pretty much anything else in life I needed. You could even make trades: I'll send a couple of my robots to work on the nearby building construction project in return for X dollars a week. My neighbor is loaning me a few robots for the weekend for a big party. In return I'm loaning him some of mine next weekend for a house remodeling project he has.
Will robots replace us? Or will robots make us all some kind of weird version of digital slave owners?
But who's paying to have a personal trainer? Relatively well paid people. If we ever do approach the employment singularity, services will be as rare as people who can pay for them.
Then buy shares. Problem solved.
I mean, this guy makes it sound as if holding shares was some trait that gets inherited at birth or something. It's (usually) not. Shares are bought, and since the area of massive unemployment he's talking about is not yet here, people currently mostly do have jobs thus money, so they could buy shares.
The corporate elite are gifted millions in shares/options. It's pretty difficult for someone making 30K a year to compete with that.
The author whines about wealth going to shareholders. To me that just means that people should acquire shares.
But of course, feel free to disagree and keep singing. When winter comes I'll watch you dance.
This doesn't completely solve the problem of wealth accumulation. I think inflation, inheritance tax and regulation against monopolies are still needed instruments.