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San Francisco, 6:18 AM
Sun Nov 8
10 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/30/09
Although one upside I can see is that instead of exporting all our manufacturing jobs to other countries for their cheap labor, we just have robots do it on our soil. And if we have this free manufacturing labor on our soil, we can make our own American robots. And even if this isn't as optimal as having abundant human manufacturing jobs like we used to, at least we can be more self sufficient, and not reliant on a human slave class? And there would be human overseers, although not many, thus keeping costs down.
08/29/09
08/29/09
Granted, robots may take people's jobs. But sooner or later the companies that replace their people with robots will realize that if all the people are unemployed, nobody is going to be able to afford what the robots are making.
08/29/09
The Culture was one of the few space operatic civilizations that I would care to live in. Sure, you run the risk of dying along with hundreds of billions of other sentient beings when your orbital was hit by an anti-proton beam in an x-ray containment laser. But other than that, life seemed to me to be pretty good.
The panelist thought, I believe, that the Minds, those super-powerful AIs, would tackle all the hard problems. But I'm not likely to be smart enough to tackle any of those kinds of problems anyway. I might, however, have time to become a theremin virtuoso, or maybe speak French, or any of the other things I don't have time now to learn.
Or maybe I'd just be a member of Special Circumstance and topple galactic dictatorships with my trusty knife missile sidekick.
Your second paragraph makes me wonder if you've stumbled onto the reason that a civilization might not transcend into the Singularity... no economic motive to achieve that "last mile".
08/29/09
08/29/09
I think the panelist was forgetting that any member of the Culture can have their consciousness transferred and thus become a Mind at any time, if they're not satisfied with being merely human. I'm not sure if it's easy for Minds to go the other way though, and become mere humans.
Your last point is a lot to think about, and I think you're on to something. The main thing that will hold us back from the singularity is our already limited patterns of thinking.
Transhumanism suggests the singularity will happen more or less by magic and lift us out of our current difficulties. But I think to achieve any kind of transcendence we're going to have to work hard together; learn to live with each other's differences of race, religion / worldview, etc.
And the system itself will have to change--we need to get over the idea that economic agents are only in the game for their own monetary self-interest. When people are only interested in their own goals, everybody is working at cross-purposes, and real progress is impossible. Instead, we're sliding back into feudalism.
Self-interest is so much easier, but it keeps the people at the top of the heap trying to maintain their wealth and position no matter the cost, and everybody at the bottom of the heap too desperate to look beyond their own circumstances.
Until that cycle is broken, we're going to stay stuck, grinding our gears--no matter what kind of technology we have.
08/29/09
08/29/09
Recently there have been some economic writing about how, contrary to classic economic theory, humans aren't "rational actors". This came to light in part because of the recent meltdown in which people were making money decisions that could be almost trivially shown not to be in their own best interests.
Mostly people were just panicing. But it gives me some hope that your vision of (if I can put words in your fingers) a more empathic economic human actor might have some chance of coming to pass.
08/29/09
I don't follow economic theory much, but when I was in school (in a class on AI, of all things, back in 1998-99), we talked about a series of psychology experiments by Daniel Kahneman (& friends) which showed that human reasoning is highly dependent on context.
The solution a person comes up with to a certain problem changes wildly, depending how that problem is presented to them--which makes us appear to be less than rational, when in fact nature has blessed us with a functional, but imperfect way of dealing with limited information.
I guess that's why "spin" is so important in politics, and also why people can make really bad decisions even when they seem to have most of the facts. If those facts were assimilated the wrong way, our reasoning can be way off the mark.
08/29/09
This is only going to get more visible as technological progress progresses. :)
Within this century we will be seeing a major social change, like a tax-financed living allowance for everybody. You do not want to work, you don't have to. Wanna be an artist, you're not gonna starve. Looks like the robot scenario goes in that direction.
There's always the possibility of big wars and depletion of the workforce, but that would only postpone this.
Robots will make rich us rich and unhappy (the ennui of not having to work, it's gonna be terrible!!).
08/29/09
08/29/09
08/29/09
06/24/09
06/24/09
Just because there is an ever increasing amount of knowledge ever more available to ever more people, thanks to the internet and the technologies that make it possible, it doesn't mean at all that people are getting smarter.
My experience has been that, on the contrary, people are getting intellectually lazier by the minute. With so much information available so easily and so quickly, people are being pressured into thinking less and googling more. Why make the effort to reason critically when it's so much easier just to grab on to the first link returned by a google search?
Moreover, even the statement that knowledge is widespread is not quite accurate. Yes, technically, it's true that more and more knowledge is becoming accessible to more and more people but so is the amount of garbage, and the signal-to-noise ratio may be decreasing (I don't know if that's true, so I'm speculating here now).
06/24/09
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06/24/09
06/24/09
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06/24/09