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Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

"Massive transfers of income to flesh and blood human beings."

There are so many conflating forces in action at once here. The One True Sentient AI appearance will probably be followed by The End of Practical Scarcity (food, clothing, material goods) which will require a cultural upheaval.

People extend current society metaphors to post-TOTSAI and immediately assume you'll have Google CEOs getting trillions of dollars from TOTSAI while everybody else lives in hovels. That's not a tenable world outcome.

(There are clever book-length writings to be done on these topics.)

Current technology is already growing towards establishing a fast-twich ambient psychic network amongst ourselves anyway. It'll be used both for greatness and the utterly most trivial drivel imaginable (a real time conference of a million one direction fans? imagine twitter, but worse.)

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There are many, many jobs that you could eliminate without inventing sentient AI. Anything that requires implementing a plan, rather than coming up with the knowledge, should be fair game. Doctors, most of contract law, teaching, lots of logistical jobs. I imagine we're going to get there awhile before we get to strong AI.

Let's break it down:

Medical — Diagnosticians (Gregory House, M.D.) should absolutely be replaced by non-sentient decision/aggregation/clustering systems. Most medical things don't require talented surgeons. We can have PAs do almost all of the hands-on stuff. For the foreseeable future, we'll need actual doctors, nurses, and surgeons for emergency procedures.

For routine medical procedures, general purpose robots with enough dexterity to do autonomous medical operations don't exist yet. What we could have is a cluster of talented medical robot operators (in india? somewhere cheap) doing a dozen operations a day by telepresence with hospitals outfitted with standard medical robot equipment.

Law — Yes, they can be gone.

Teaching — Tricky. We don't have ractives or illustrated primers yet. Teaching is everything from helping a 5 year old write the letter S to yelling at undergrads who almost blow up a chemistry lab due to inattention.

Logistical jobs — automated cars, automated busses, automated truck driving. Yes, let's do that. I trust your 500 sensors evaluated 100 times per second are safer and more accurate than any human.

Right. My larger point though is that there are lots and lots and lots of jobs that can be eliminated without strong AI. We may succeed in destroying the demand side of the economy long before we solve the problem of making the supply side pointless.

"For routine medical procedures, general purpose robots with enough dexterity to do autonomous medical operations don't exist yet. What we could have is a cluster of talented medical robot operators (in india? somewhere cheap) doing a dozen operations a day by telepresence with hospitals outfitted with standard medical robot equipment."

Not per se, but we're coming damned close in this area. Surgical robots are becoming quite dexterous, and even though most of them require remote operation, it's not because of limitations in the dexterity or precision of the machines -- it's because of limitations in the AI.

Also, as with most things in medicine, the elephant in the room is liability. Who's liable if a fully autonomous machine malfunctions in a surgery, or is improperly maintained, etc? The hospital? The manufacturer? The machinist/programmer? The doctors who were present in the same room as the machine? Nobody wants to be stuck holding the bag on that one.

There is something about our community that makes for a population of presumably smart people at programming but very impractically minded about many, many other things. Law requires much more creativity and gray area sort of thinking than you suggest with replacing it with some "non-sentient" AI. Medicine? Are you serious? I'm a great fan of science fiction but it's almost like when you combine a little bit of technical knowledge with an over indulgent diet of science fiction, you get a, in my view, very naive, strange sort of thinking.

A great deal of being a good teacher is being able to excite and motivate students. This goes from kindergarten through at least undergrad. And it applies across the socioeconomic spectrum.

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