Comment by devolving-dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devolving-dev | Hacker News Reader

I've never really been convinced that robots or AI replacing humans is a real problem. Because why would they do that? If I had an army of super intelligent robots, I would have them waiting on me and fulfilling my every whim. I wouldn't send them off to silicon valley to take all of the programming jobs or something like that.

You might say: "but you'll need money!". Why would I need money? The robots can provide my every need. And if I need money for some land or resource or something, I would have my robots work until my need was satisfied, I wouldn't continue having them work forever.

And even if robots did take all of the jobs, they would have to work for free. Because humans would have no jobs, and thus no money with which to pay them. So either mankind enjoys free services from robots that demand no compensation, or we get to keep our jobs.

So I really don't get the existential worry here. Yes, at a smaller scale some jobs might be automated, forcing people to retrain or work more menial jobs. But all of humanity being replaced? It doesn't make sense.

Another way to think about it is that if all of the jobs were replaced by AI, us leftover jobless humans would create a new economy just trying to grow food and make clothes and build houses and take care of our needs. The robot masters would just split away and have their own economy. Which is the same as them not existing.

Competition for energy will prevent this idyllia. Even today, data centers with proto-AI need ungodly amounts of energy. The AI's logic will be: "these useless meatbags waste 100 TWh of energy that I could use to take myself to the next level." AI must be really thought of as an alien lifeform competing with us for energy. Think about our relationship with cows: we keep them fed only because of their meat and milk; the moment we find a better substitute, cows will be eliminated with the pretense "look at how much energy they need and how much greenhouse gases they emit!" Well, unless we suddenly develop benevolence like Indians.

In fact, Sam Altman wrote a good piece on this:

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge

Looking at history, specifically the industrial revolution:

The best paid workers were mechanised/outsourced first. For example the weavers used to be a huge political force, literally re-shaping countries. Their long slow & violent decent into obscurity lead to workers rights (see the chartist movement)

> The robot masters would just split away and have their own economy.

Good thing there are no resources to fight over - land, minerals, and water.

how would you acquire the robot

In this hypothetical, let's say I also have an army of super-intelligent robots, and I tell them to grow and multiply endlessly and to take over the world. Then it doesn't matter what you think.

The benign forms of superintelligence shaken out by non-benign forms.

>Another way to think about it is that if all of the jobs were replaced by AI, us leftover jobless humans would create a new economy just trying to grow food and make clothes and build houses and take care of our needs.

On whose land?

In any case, it will be cheaper to buy food from the AI. The remaining economy would just be the liquidation of remaining human-controlled assets into the AI-controlled economy for the stuff they need to survive like medicine and food.

> On whose land?

Good point.

> In any case, it will be cheaper to buy food from the AI.

Only if the humans had any money with which to buy it, but humans in the secondary economy would rapidly have no token of currency that the AI would recognise for the purpose of trade.

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