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Neither Musk nor Hawking are predicting the super aggressive timeline that you did. I've said repeatedly that AI will happen one day, but it's a LONG way from happening.
Is 30-40 years a long time? Can you show me some place where Musk and Hawking believe it will take longer?
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When <1% of the human population is consuming, there is no economy for a an automatic market to exist. None. The economy you described is in collaspe mode - there is no commerce, no credit, no consumption, no economy at all in fact. Where is the money going to come from to built all this fancy automation?
You appear to have several fundamental misunderstandings about economics.
Consumer-capitalism is a fairly new invention that came about as a response to the industrial revolution and the threat of communism. Prior to that, the upper classes' wealth was dependent on securing a large portion of the low-productivity labor of serfs, peasants, and slaves.
In the future we will revert to the same sort of system, only the serfs, peasants, and slaves will be robots. The oligarchs will build whatever they want directly. Palaces, spaceships, whatever. They will be limited only by the technology and resources they own. Much more efficient than skimming profits from products and services sold to the masses.
Where does the money come from? Money is only a medium of exchange of value. Production is wealth. And productivity will be tremendous... in 100 years it will be many orders of magnitude greater than it is now.
So how will his project affect our lives within 20 years? "Science for sure will benefit -- within drug discovery, protein folding, anything where there's a huge amount of exploration," he says. "Of course we'll have self-driving cars -- but that's narrow AI. We'll have things that can start being creative in 20 years. A lot of things that look very complex, when you break them down it becomes clear how the apparatus works. I studied imagination. We did brain scans, found areas of the brain involved, built models. That made me think that most processes can be understood, including creativity." An AI making an entertaining movie? "I'm thinking more on a basic level -- putting disparate things together to make a new hypothesis. A novel or film is many decades away, though with music, a more limited domain, there are already passable projects that hint at what's possible."
Neither Musk nor Hawking are predicting the super aggressive timeline that you did. I've said repeatedly that AI will happen one day, but it's a LONG way from happening.
"The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most," he wrote, adding that "Please note that I am normally super pro technology, and have never raised this issue until recent months. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don't understand."
So he is actually much more aggressive on the timeline than I am. Which makes sense. Why would these guys be sounding the alarm now if they didn't believe risk was imminent?
Is 30-40 years a long time? Can you show me some place where Musk and Hawking believe it will take longer?
You appear to have several fundamental misunderstandings about economics.
Consumer-capitalism is a fairly new invention that came about as a response to the industrial revolution and the threat of communism. Prior to that, the upper classes' wealth was dependent on securing a large portion of the low-productivity labor of serfs, peasants, and slaves.
In the future we will revert to the same sort of system, only the serfs, peasants, and slaves will be robots. The oligarchs will build whatever they want directly. Palaces, spaceships, whatever. They will be limited only by the technology and resources they own. Much more efficient than skimming profits from products and services sold to the masses.
Where does the money come from? Money is only a medium of exchange of value. Production is wealth. And productivity will be tremendous... in 100 years it will be many orders of magnitude greater than it is now.
The aristocratic upper class economy and the robotic economy is NOT at all similar. I know why you'd think so but they're not.
The former is a great tool to keep the country in order - by giving the peasants work. Granted, it's low pay and hard labor, but at least they're working. Your robotic economy has 99% of the people unemployed, as in has nothing to do! Your robotic economy is simply impossible without a monumental collapse.
Also, your "upper class rules all" economy is a weakling compare to our Consumer-capitalism economy. Why would anybody wants to go back to "that"? And even if such an economy exists in the future, it will get overtaken quite easily by a Consumer-capitalism economy.
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Originally Posted by rruff
Where does the money come from? Money is only a medium of exchange of value. Production is wealth. And productivity will be tremendous... in 100 years it will be many orders of magnitude greater than it is now.
That's my question... Exactly what are they producing?? When 99% of the population is unemployed, what are being produced and for whom?
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"The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most," he wrote, adding that "Please note that I am normally super pro technology, and have never raised this issue until recent months. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don't understand."
So he is actually much more aggressive on the timeline than I am. Which makes sense. Why would these guys be sounding the alarm now if they didn't believe risk was imminent?
Do you know what exactly is Musk referring to?? Because if he was talking about the same thing you are, then he certainly DID NOT say so.
I was aware of this deleted email, in it, he warned of "preventing bad ones from escaping into the Internet"; so basically he was worried but a smart virus that is undetectable or is constantly shifting to outsmart the anti-virus software. That's how I take it.
But we will not know for sure until he elaborate on it. He could have been worried about low-pay, low wage jobs being taken (which I would agree), or he could have been worried about a super virus, or he could have been worried about the technology falling into a terrorist organization.....
We simply don't know for sure. He email is too broad and cryptic to say he is in agreement with you. His passage could also be interpreted to be in agreement with me!
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The former is a great tool to keep the country in order - by giving the peasants work. Granted, it's low pay and hard labor, but at least they're working.
They weren't working to "keep them busy". Their labor was absolutely necessary! Presently *our* labor is absolutely necessary.
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Your robotic economy has 99% of the people unemployed, as in has nothing to do! Your robotic economy is simply impossible without a monumental collapse.
The population decline will happen gradually and naturally as humans become unemployable, and supports and incentives for having children are removed, and incentives for not having them are enforced.
Keeping people busy will be very easy. We have a tremendous amount of entertainment and distraction already. As VR environments become more sophisticated there will be no reason to leave the computer.
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Also, your "upper class rules all" economy is a weakling compare to our Consumer-capitalism economy. Why would anybody wants to go back to "that"? And even if such an economy exists in the future, it will get overtaken quite easily by a Consumer-capitalism economy.
You have that exactly backwards. From the standpoint of the oligarchs, it is incredibly wasteful of resources to support consumers in a 1st world lifestyle. Cars, roads, houses, energy, pollution, etc. Just to get a few hours of work out of them a day, and skim a small percentage of profit.
When these people become naturally unemployable due to superior automation, consumer capitalism will no longer be viable, and the most efficient system will minimize resources spent on "useless" humans.
I certainly don't want it! But it's a natural progression that will easily out-compete consumer capitalism economically and militarily. Only a strong egalitarian democratic world-wide system will be able to prevent it, and based on what has been happening to our society the past few decades, it appears that the oligarchs are getting their way. More spying and surveillance, reduction of rights, consolidation and control of popular media, buying the political process, easy manipulation of voting, etc.
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That's my question... Exactly what are they producing?? When 99% of the population is unemployed, what are being produced and for whom?
Production will be according to the desires and benefit of the 100M or so that are left. They will live in incredible high-tech luxury on a garden planet. Life will be great for them, with the great wild card (as always) of power struggles and war, which could really mess things up.
As far back as the 50s, some people were complaining that people were going to be replaced by machines, and there would not be jobs.
Times have changed. Lets look at the telephone as an example.
If the telephone companies still worked as they did in 1950s, there are not enough working women (most telephone operators were women) to be able to fill all the operator positions that would be needed. This would have to be filled by more men operators and that would not leave enough men to fill the other job needs in the U.S.
The world has not stood still, and has had changes in many ways. It will continue to change. Experts tell us there will be jobs in the future, though not the same jobs of today. They tell us that over half the jobs that people will be working at in just 10 years, have not even been invented yet. They tell us that kids going into the first grade this year, will be working at jobs where 65% of them have not been invented yet.
Same type of predictions were happening in the 50s and later, and have been proven true. As the world has changed, jobs have changed, and new jobs are being invented on a steady basis.
One thing that has changed in the work force, is the attitude of millennials. Millennials are having a hard time accepting the work rules and conditions on the job. Example they think it is their right to take their cell phones to work, and spend quite a bit of work hours on their cell phones for personal reasons. They think it is O.K. for people in office type positions to be on the Internet for their own pleasure during office hours. The link below is about how they will quit, before they will give up talking on cell phones and using the Internet for personal use during work hours.
So many of millennials have no skills. They have not worked and developed work habits, as the young people did in the past. They think I have a degree, so I should be paid $50,000 to $100,000 from day one and are almost worthless as far as an employer is concerned. Of course it is worse than that, as so many millennials have more or less worthless degrees. Degrees they took, as they only took classes that they liked, not the hard ones that get them jobs. A lot of those degrees are for jobs that pay $30,000 per year, but when offered a job at the prevailing wages for the job, they say they were low balled and refused the job, and do it time after time. They say they will not take a job that will not allow them to live well, and pay off student loans, even if it is their own fault they took a degree that is almost worthless.
There will be jobs in the future, just a lot of them are going to be different than those in the past, and will be invented to fit the times as things change.
Consumer-capitalism is a fairly new invention that came about as a response to the industrial revolution and the threat of communism. Prior to that, the upper classes' wealth was dependent on securing a large portion of the low-productivity labor of serfs, peasants, and slaves.
In the future we will revert to the same sort of system, only the serfs, peasants, and slaves will be robots. The oligarchs will build whatever they want directly. Palaces, spaceships, whatever. They will be limited only by the technology and resources they own. Much more efficient than skimming profits from products and services sold to the masses.
Where does the money come from? Money is only a medium of exchange of value. Production is wealth. And productivity will be tremendous... in 100 years it will be many orders of magnitude greater than it is now.
This is the future I want. This is how way I envision this future:
Robots will be smarter than us but we still control them. They will replace most human workers. Human population will shrink drastically because there won't a need for many of us. Less people means less competition for resources and thus less conflicts. People will live in utopia. Future humans will realize that biology has too many flaws -- aging, sickness, hunger, thirst, etc. They will transfer human consciousness to robotic bodies. They will enter the next step in human evolution from biology to robotic.
Human population will shrink drastically because there won't a need for many of us.
Question is, which ones will make it and why? How will the transition take place? A natural decline in which human rights and freedom are respected could take a long time. A decline fast enough to match the progression of human uselessness would require extermination. I suspect we will have something a little less pessimistic, a totalitarian system where the useless are deprived of many rights, but are maintained in reasonable comfort and distraction.
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They will transfer human consciousness to robotic bodies. They will enter the next step in human evolution from biology to robotic.
Probably not. Rather virtual worlds will be constructed that consciousnesses can inhabit. All of society will be in one simulation or another. Options would exist for inhabiting hardware that interacts with the "real" world, but I don't see why many would choose that.
They weren't working to "keep them busy". Their labor was absolutely necessary! Presently *our* labor is absolutely necessary.
The point is they were working. As opposed to your automation economy where they won't be.
Hence, they are very different economy.
On that note, some ancient societies did used labor to "keep the peasants busy".
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Originally Posted by rruff
The population decline will happen gradually and naturally as humans become unemployable, and supports and incentives for having children are removed, and incentives for not having them are enforced.
Keeping people busy will be very easy. We have a tremendous amount of entertainment and distraction already. As VR environments become more sophisticated there will be no reason to leave the computer.
Even with the population decline, you're still having about A LOT of unemployed people. Even if it is cut by half, the unemployment merely "improves" from 99% to 98%. The population decline doesn't solve anything, you still have the same problems.
And how are these 99% unemployed being able to afford the entertainment distraction?
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Originally Posted by rruff
You have that exactly backwards. From the standpoint of the oligarchs, it is incredibly wasteful of resources to support consumers in a 1st world lifestyle. Cars, roads, houses, energy, pollution, etc. Just to get a few hours of work out of them a day, and skim a small percentage of profit.
When these people become naturally unemployable due to superior automation, consumer capitalism will no longer be viable, and the most efficient system will minimize resources spent on "useless" humans.
"Supporting consumers" is how the oligarchs and non-oligarchs make money. How do these people make money in your economy?
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Originally Posted by rruff
I certainly don't want it! But it's a natural progression that will easily out-compete consumer capitalism economically and militarily. Only a strong egalitarian democratic world-wide system will be able to prevent it, and based on what has been happening to our society the past few decades, it appears that the oligarchs are getting their way. More spying and surveillance, reduction of rights, consolidation and control of popular media, buying the political process, easy manipulation of voting, etc.
I'd say the world is going the opposite of what you've observed. The world is getting more and more democratic and transparent, and with it - free capitalism. Witnessed the two biggest authoritarian regimes (China and Russia) have evolved into more similar to our economy than ever before. Some small nations are still clinging to tradition but as a whole, this planet is moving towards consumer capitalism.
I don't get why you say natural progression makes feudalism/authoritarianism easily out-compete consumer capitalism. It should be the other way around - a keen observation of our present confirms that.
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Originally Posted by rruff
Production will be according to the desires and benefit of the 100M or so that are left. They will live in incredible high-tech luxury on a garden planet. Life will be great for them, with the great wild card (as always) of power struggles and war, which could really mess things up.
So these 100M or so ultra-rich will basically sell to themselves and only make money off each other? This is not a sustainable economy. It will have stagnant growth, zero to little inflation, low tax revenue, broke government, no innovation, where the only way to make more money is to take it from the 100M - with each oligarch scheming to take from other oligarchs. I don't see how this society can afford a top notch military when the government is constantly broke. Maybe a private military? But it will just make things worse. This economy creates a hostile environment at the top and unrest at the bottom. It will eventually just crumble.
There are many reasons why even if this society is possible, it will soon collapse and is nothing but a blip in history.
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