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Comment by Udik | Hacker News Reader

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 love and raise kids. If the technology is actually possible, there simply can't be any space left for old style, flesh and blood humans in the economy.

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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, there isn't really a need for work and income at all. We're much further off from what you are suggesting than I think many proponents of AI realize, but this would be the other side of that coin.

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.

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.

Cheap shirts can be had for under 5 € in Germany, with minimum wage at 8.50 €. (The fine print: These cheap shirts likely contain more chemicals than cotton.)

So they are made with other organic compounds. Do they function as shirts? What is the problem with nylon?

I don't mean the fabric. I mean all the chemicals applied to it. I have a Vietnamese-owned minimart down the street and whenever I walk past it during opening hours, it smells like a chemicals factory.

This just sounds like speculation on your part based on the smell.

Looks like I should have put "/s" after that initial hyperbolic statement.

You're assuming that human brains and bodies are grossly inefficient. I would argue that while humans are bad at some tasks, the brain is a fairly efficient _low-order_ general probabalistic computer, and the body is a fairly efficient as a highly general object manipulation system. I doubt for highly varied, extremely low value tasks that robots backed by AI will be significantly cheaper than humans for a long time, if ever. We're too close to the end of Moore's law, and energy efficiency is such a survival advantage that life has almost certainly optimized this variable fairly well.

Don't forget that natural evolution is a very slow and inefficient process, essentially driven by randomness, and that there is no such "optimization" that you describe, only selection. Moore's law may come to an end, but we have many great things coming such as quantum computing or nuclear fusion.

The natural selection process, when paired with random variation, is a functional optimization algorithm for things that impact survival. Energy efficiency very directly impacts survival. Ergo, life has "optimized" energy efficiency to some degree.

With regards to quantum computing and nuclear fusion, I prefer not to count my chickens before they've hatched. We may get both (and more!) or we may find that they are only functional under specific contexts that limit their utility.

Even if every is free, it doesn't mean it's unlimited. I doubt we have the capacity to produce everything that everyone on the planet might want. That will of necessity give rise to some sort of prioritization or right to have what you want when you want it. Money of some for or another will return.

Exactly my thoughts.

Another way of looking at it is, when the cars came, the carriages were obsolete. Sure, the drivers may have reskilled to some other vocation but what about the horse? In this situation, we are the horses, and the AI is the car.

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