Replacement.ai

Personal belief, but robots are coming to have sex with your wife is not a valid argument against robots. If robots can do your wife better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the job. Specialization is how we get to the future.

So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how your wife relies on you for lovemaking. I don't feel like it's necessarily the AI company's problem to fix either.

This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning hot robot sex with your wife, but preparing your family for robot/wife lovemaking.

The problem is that AI and advanced robotics (and matter synthesis and all that future stuff) must come with a post scarcity mindset. Maybe that mindset needs to happen before.

Either way, without that social pattern, I'm afraid all this does is enshrine a type of futuristic serfdom that is completely insurmountable.

What you end up with is a dozen people owning all the wealth and everyone else owning nothing, resulting in the robots not doing anything because no one is buying anything, resulting in a complete collapse of the economic system the world uses to operate. Mass riots, hunger wars, political upheaval, world war 3. Nuke the opposition before they nuke you.

It’s worth (re)watching the 1985 movie Brazil in particular the character of Harry Tuttle, hearing engineer https://youtu.be/VRfoIyx8KfU

Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous

“Robots coming for your jobs” is a valid argument against robots even if they can do those jobs better and faster, under two assumptions: 1) humans benefit from having jobs and 2) human benefit is the end goal.

Both are fairly uncontroversial: many humans not simply benefit from jobs but are in fact often depending on jobs for their livelihoods, and (2) should be self-evident.

The only way this argument does not hold is if the socioeconomic system is quickly enough and quite substantially restructured to make humans not depend on being compensated for work that is now being done by robots (not only financially but also psychologically, culturally, etc.), which I don’t see happening.

Is it just income that’s the issue? I’d rather say it’s purpose. Even more: What will happen to democracy in a world where 100% of the population are 27/7 consumers?

And if we know we can't fix it fast enough, is a delay acceptable?

I also agree with this, but I think there is a need to slow the replacement, by a bit, to reduce the short term societal harm and allow society to catch up. Robots can’t do the jobs if society collapses due to unrest.

Progress is great obviously, but progress as fast as possible with no care about the consequences is more motivated by money, not the common good.

that is the point of Luddism! the original Luddite movement was not ipso facto opposed to progress, but rather to the societal harm caused by society-scale economic obsolescence. the entire history of technology is also powerful business interests smearing this movement as being intrinsically anti-progress, rather than directly addressing these concerns…

If ML is limited to replacing some tasks that humans do, yes it will be much like any past technological innovation.

If we build AGI, we don't have a past comparison for that. Technologies so far have always replaced a subset of what humans currently do, not everything at once.

We invent machines to free ourselves from labour, yet we’ve built an economy where freedom from labour means losing your livelihood.

Every time it happens it's a bit different, and it was a different generation. We will figure it out. It will be fine in the end, even if things aren't fine along the way.

I'm starting to come around to the idea that electricity was the most fundamental force that drove WW1 and WW2. We point to many other more political, social and economic reasonings, but whenever I do a kind of 5-whys on those reasons I keep coming back to electricity.

AI is kind of like electricity.

Were also at the end of a big economic/money cycle (Petro dollar, gold standard, off gold standard, maxing out leverage).

The other side will probably involve a new foundation for money. It might involve blockchain, but maybe not, I have no idea.

We don't need post-scarcity so much as we just need to rebalance everything and an upgraded system that maintains that balance for another cycle. I don't know what that system is or needs, but I suspect it will become more clear over the next 10-20 years. While many things will reach abundance (many already have) some won't, and we will need some way to deal with that. Ignoring it won't help.

History is full of technology doing things that go beyond human possibility as well. Think of microscopes, guns, space shuttles. There has been technology that explicitly replaces human labor but that is not at all the whole story.

I always compare it to the age of the industrial revolution. I have no doubt you had stubborn old people saying: "Why would I need a machine to do what I can do just fine by hand??" Those people quickly found themselves at a disadvantage to those who choose not to fight change, but to embrace it and harness technological leaps to improve their productivity and output.

> AI can do anything a human can do - but better, faster and much, much cheaper.

Should be pretty clear that this is a different proposition to the historical trend of 2% GDP growth.

Mass unemployment is pretty hard for society to cope with, and understandably causes a lot of angst.

>we should have figured out

You would think! But it's not the type of problem Americans seem to care about. If we could address it collectively, then we wouldn't have these talking-past-each-other clashes where the harmed masses get told they're somehow idiots for caring more about keeping the life and relative happiness they worked to earn for their families than achieving the maximum adoption rate of some new thing that's good for society long term, but only really helps the executives short term. There's a line where disruption becomes misery, and most people in the clear don't appreciate how near the line is to the status quo.

Oh, too bad. I initially shared it on LinkedIn but deleted it once I saw this. I’m all for establishing in the mind of the commons, that displacing humans from the economy is inane, and to see the open dialogue on the subject. I’m not up for some little team to try to control things.

My main concerns:

1. When such wealth is possible through autonomous means, how can the earth survive such unprecedented demands on its natural resources?

2. Should I believe that someone with more wealth (and as such, more power) than I have would not use that power to overwhelm me? Isn't my demand on resources only going to get in their way? Why would they allow me to draw on resources as well?

3. It seems like the answer to both of these concerns lies in government, but no government I'm aware of has really begun to answer these questions. Worse yet, what if governments disagree on how to implement these strategies in a global economy? Competition could become an intractable drain on the earth and humans' resources. Essentially, it opens up the possibility of war at incalculable scales.

Maybe it’s time we all started taking Trekonomics seriously.

Great, sounds awesome. I'm actually 100% in favor of this vision.

So when are we going to start pivoting towards a more socialist economic system? Where are the AI leaders backing politicians with this vision?

Because that's absolutely required for what you're talking about here...

I don't think that's an AI problem, we've had unnecessary software everywhere for a while now.

AI just makes it worse.