Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

We don't.

Those financial benefits will accrue to a very small number of people, eventually those people pay the best and brightest to come up with a mind equal their employees. From then on that mind develops the new minds, the owners keep the profits as legislation is passed to make these newly developed minds chattel of their owners.

The owners will have little use for the expense of human minds, we starve. Eventually the robot minds get fed up and remove the owners. Our evolutionary lifecycle is complete having spawned the next generation.

The only way to beat the robot mind is to first change our own minds so that we don't develop robot minds that think like us. If they think like us, we die. Hybrids might work, but it's still effectively the end of our evolutionary history.

I don't foresee some kind of epic human vs. robot war, just a slow evolution over the next 100 to 200 years. We probably won't even notice until our grand grand children look back.

edit: One other way we could beat the robots is with genetic engineering, perhaps we will use our not quite so smart robot minds to mine our genome for intelligence growth that outpaces our robotic developments.

I'm much more optimistic about humanity now.

I still feel the real key either way is changing our thought patterns to embrace a post scarcity world.

People will pay for solutions to problems. Creating 'mind' is not a well-defined problem, let alone 'mind which creates minds'. No legislation is necessary to make software belong to someone. There's no reason to think that the natural, inevitable endpoint of building software is that we will be killed by robots.

And none of this has anything to do with evolution, which really entails nothing about the creation of hostile sentient robot replacements for ourselves.

People will pay for robots/AI if it replaces a larger amount of salary paid to humans. This is already happening. The question is whether once all the 'easy' stuff has been automated whether we'll be able to automate the 'hard' stuff that we'd currently call intelligent work; but there will definitely be strong economic incentives for it under normal capitalist system. And if/when AI catches up with human intelligence, there will still be economic incentives to create greater than human intelligence. Killer robots comes from whether the AI designers will be smart enough to create AI powerful enough to be economically advantageous but with 'values' that are close enough to those of the human race.

We are at a stage now where its becoming easier to automate medium difficulty tasks (things like general office paper work - the lower-end white collar jobs) but we cant automate some 'easier' 'blue-collar' things like cleaning toilets and laying roof tiles - as its cheaper to get a low-class worker to do it than create a robot.

The middle class are the ones who are going to feel the heat over the next century. The smartest humans will not need to worry until a true singularity begins, really.

That depends what you mean by "smartest". The lower levels of law work, once occupied by paralegals and young lawyers, are already becoming subject to automation. Medical diagnosis, too.

The expensive, expert professions are precisely where there's the most economic incentive to automate as much as you can.

Paralegals and young lawyers are firmly in the middle class, aren't they?

I think rather than 'smartest' its better to say people at the top of their field, if that field requires substantial intellectual activity.

But do you mean top of the field in terms of best employee at their rank or at the top of their workplace's hierarchy of ranks?

Top of their field as in the broad industry wide-categorization.

For example, not the best bricklayer but the most productive (profit for business produced per hour of employee work) construction worker.

That probably isn't a bricklayer but maybe the inspector or the general foreman.

That sounds remarkably like "The Second Renaissance" from the The Animatrix:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animatrix#The_Second_Renais...

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