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The thing with the steam engine is that human labor was still needed to design, operate, and maintain the equipment. With what is being automated now, human labor is needed for far fewer things.
And humans will be freed up to do other things not imagined yet. Just like it was with the steam engine, which was originally invented to do nothing more than pump water out of a coal mine. At that time nobody imagined how it would change the world.
200 years later a person could travel across the USA in 3 days, due to the steam engine, instead of 3 months. i.e. 100s of 1000s if not millions were employed by the rail roads in jobs not imagined when a practical steam engine was first invented. And this was just in one country.
No one will be able to survive. Those that are ostracized are going to burn the whole damn world down, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it.
I can't imagine a life where perhaps my mind has been so mechanized that my only semblance of self is as a witness of an artificial process, as if I'm stuck in a never ending nightmare, where I have no control over my functions.
Doesn't sound great to me. I'd rather we go in the opposite direction and try to design a sustainable society where nature flourishes. Even you with your skills will be deemed redundant when there is true technological singularity. Your leadership won't necessarily have your skills, they will just have control over resources which gives them power, but you won't be necessary when you're no longer necessary.
When does that day come? Nobody knows, but probably sooner than anyone thinks.
It doesn't sound great to me either. I'm just adapting to the world I was born into, as all organisms do.
Designing a "sustainable society where nature flourishes" is happy talk. There will always be a faction of humanity or robots that is striving to improve, and yes, gain an advantage. Shutting that down globally is impossible.
And who is to say that robots are not part of nature? That's very bioconservative. The singularity will come, but the idea that humanity will disappear is misfounded. There won't be a hard distinction between humans and robots at that time.
Now would be a good time to learn about classic economics and why all this automation has little to do with the actual problem. If robots become so cheap, so will everything else. The problem is, and always will be , things of value that are not products of human (or robotic) labor. Such things increase in supply. Gold is not a product of human labor so it remains expensive and perpetually scarce. . Anything manufactured by robots will not be scarce. It will be abundant. So the problem will not be not having a job. The problem with be the rentiers.
Now would be a good time to learn about classic economics and why all this automation has little to do with the actual problem. If robots become so cheap, so will everything else. The problem is, and always will be , things of value that are not products of human (or robotic) labor. Such things increase in supply. Gold is not a product of human labor so it remains expensive and perpetually scarce. . Anything manufactured by robots will not be scarce. It will be abundant. So the problem will not be not having a job. The problem with be the rentiers.
What if the robots decide they want to be rentiers?
The rise of robots will eventually create more jobs for everyone. The type of jobs that will exist will change, but more jobs will be created.
I believe on a long enough timeline if there is wide-scale human employment it will be as a result of a kind of broad affirmative action for humans -- a conscious decision that we or the central authority makes to put the weak meat bodies with the slow chemical brains to work despite their obvious inferiority to the robot bodies and AI "brains."
Also......I know I can do my job from home. Hence, the concept of commuting and needing office buildings and needing to burn/waste fossil fuel getting back and forth to work could radically change things at this moment. You could collapse the office market and all the things that go into maintaining and staffing an office.
I totally agree with the analysis. What will be the need of billions of people? My fear is that before we switch over to an AI dominated world, there has to be major global upheaval, a mass loss of human population, the blurring of the meaning of nations and borders......before the restart.
Right now the paradox is that AI is good for a companies productivity, by eliminating workers, but if adopted in mass by companies and industries.....the elimination of workers will also eliminate consumers and profit as human workers are the market for the goods and services produced by corporations. If people do not have jobs they will not have money to buy the products from companies. What....robots are going to by the goods and services other robots produce? Not.
I think the population of humans will become restless....and without purpose....which is dangerous to any kind of order. If not war.....some plague will be engineered to wipe out billions....or....child bearing will be restricted. Once there is a correction in the human population, then the cure for many diseases will finally be revealed.
You still have to deal with waste, regulations and other things that give us clean air and water that the third and fourth world don't care about. So no, even if robots do the job, they still aren't coming back here.
In addition, cost to transport is actually really low on this large container ships or air craft. Container costs around $1.33 per mile on average for a 20ft container. Any idea how many boxes of Iphone fit in a container? Any idea how much the average drops when you have an entire ship or plane loaded with these things for one company?
The idea that shipping is expensive relative to opening a factory in the USA is ludicrous.
When do robots become self aware? In Terminator II I believe it was 1997.
Who cares? Did you read the article at all?
Consciousness may be instantiated in computing hardware and software at some point. Or that might never happen in 1000 years. It's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
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