Rise of the Machines - First step made

[Phrossack]

I haven't assumed anything whether you are against all technological progress. If you think sarcasm is below you, I can reiterate (It's all good):

Thanks. I wouldn't say it's beneath me, so much as I find it really counterproductive most of the time.

This is a normative statement whose normativity is only present because of the technological invention that is glasses. New technological developments naturally rework and reshape human normativities. For everyone should have decent eye. I agree with that. But the normativity is only present because of technological development. The same argument can be used for tools of effeciency from hammers to computers, lifepreserving technologies such as penicilline and faceless industrial ingenuities such as automated cashiers and roombas.

Also, this indirectly means that when a spoiled teenager asks for a phone and whines about it, he might not actually be spoiled, but rather attuned to a time of a new normativity.

I disagree here. I think human eyesight ought to be around 20/20 or not far off. People in hunter gatherer societies tend to have better eyesight than us; all this staring at screens, diabetes, and so on have led to pretty appalling rates of myopia. Modern life has ruined our eyesight. I know this is just some blog, but he has plenty of relevant links. It just seems like people are naturally supposed to have good enough eyesight not to need assistance. Likewise, if someone were born with a cleft lip or a lame leg or something, I think they shouldn't have to suffer from that and should have it fixed.

With a new technology people will resituate into a new level of technology and society will develop from there. While jobs are destroyed in the process of technological development (which is natural), jobs are also created. The new jobs are simply more complex than train driving; technological development simplifies things and allows for more complex tasks.

I'm just not sure how much longer this can keep up. In the past, wainwrights were put out of jobs by cars, but cars needed people to make them, too, as well as all sorts of resources in their production, so a lot of new jobs were created. Both were manufacturing jobs; the main difference was just the product. The sea of progress swallowed up one sector, but new land appeared in another, so it was all good.

Then auto assembly became more and more automated, and people with little or no education couldn't really work on a line anymore. The robots needed people to fix and design them, so although the sea flooded another job market, a new one emerged.

Now imagine that that new market of designing and repairing robots were to be automated, with AI-designed robots fixing robots. The sea has swallowed up the sector again, but this time, there's no new land. Humans in the auto assembly process would become obsolete. Sure, maybe you have a handful of idea people to come up with new features on cars, but they're nowhere near as numerous as the auto workers of the past.

In the distant past, most jobs were probably in the "goods" department. Farming, ranching, weaving, smithing, mining, fishing, etc. Gradually, those got taken up, but since the service labor market expanded as the goods labor market shrank, it was alright. Now we're seeing the service labor market start to get automated. For the time being new service jobs are opening up, just as when manufacturing started to be automated (looms, mills, factories), new manufacturing (mfg.) jobs opened up (cars, radios, phones, etc.). Eventually, though, the mfg. jobs kept getting automated, while fewer and fewer new ones appeared. Nowadays, very little if anything can only be made by people; machines can do it faster, more cheaply, and better. Likewise, if computing technology keeps improving (as it always has), service jobs will continue to be automated. We've only seen the beginning. The mfg. labor market is shrinking. The services market is just starting to be automated. What next? We've always divided jobs into goods and services. If both are automated, what will replace them?

Then what? Wir werden die Roboter of course.

I'm serious.

First off, not everyone wants to become some machine. I'd much rather be human. Could a machine feel the rush of adrenaline, the endorphins after a good exercise, a cool breeze off a lake, the warmth of a lover's skin? Could it enjoy the smell of a wood fire or a stable? And, even if technology could progress to make these sensations possible, would it even be possible to upload your consciousness? It's like a problem posed by teleportation, where if you're molecularly dissassembled, then reassembled somewhere else, right down to your thoughts and memories, is it really you? You were destroyed, after all. It could be just someone with your exact DNA, who happens to have the exact same memories as you, but they're just a particularly identical twin, while you were annihilated. Likewise, in the process of uploading, you might be destroyed forever, while a machine gets a consciousness identical to, but separate from, yours. It is no more you than one hydrogen atom is another, though they may be identical.

Of course, surgically installing your brain into a machine would neatly sidestep this whole issue, for a time. But brains are organic and can't last forever, and if you wanted to save yourself by uploading, you're back to the old problem of replicated identity.

What happens?

Civilization is succesful. We will chill out or die trying.

I dunno about that. As automation progresses, a shrinking number of capitalists (those who own the machines and companies) will get richer and richer as their costs drop and profits rise, while a growing number of poor get poorer and poorer, since there's a scarce and shrinking supply of jobs. Of course, robots don't buy the products or services they produce, and neither can the unemployed. If most, if not all, jobs were automated, nobody's making any money anymore, perhaps not even the capitalists, whose profits have plummeted because nobody can buy their stuff anymore. I don't think people would be making or spending money anymore.

I will add to this.

Define 'good' music. 'Good' modes of expression. As in; a definition with universal implications: How to make perfect music.

It's very difficult to do. Perhaps the humanities are able to define something someday. But I doubt it.

What? I didn't bring up music in that paragraph. How is this related?

 

[El_Machinae]

Transhuman upgrading (which I'm a big fan of) seems to be a separate issue from automation-induced unemployment. I mean, they're related under the aegis of "technological growth", but they're separate outcomes.

 

[Kozmos]

Poverty will be solved one way (post-scarcity) or another (drone suppressions and/or nerve stapling). I'm more curious to see what will happen with the human mind. If you have everything you need, every pleasure experienced, all joys of discovery and possible artistic expressions computed ahead of time...boredom will set in. Mass suicides? Catatonic states? Enlightenment? Who can measure?

 

[Kyriakos]

Since my high-brow posts here were in vain, here is a german sideshow instead :/


Link to video.

 

[Takhisis]

And still most of that Human Traffic comes from Kosovo

Vote Strong Party.

I liken them to the NSA. Invading your site without your permission, gathering information on you without your permission, etc...

Well, we should get rid of both the US government and Google, as well as the paparazzi.

Since my high-brow posts here were in vain, here is a german sideshow instead :/

Domo arigato, Mr. Kyriako.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Poverty will be solved one way (post-scarcity) or another (drone suppressions and/or nerve stapling).

That's quite a difference to be lumped into "one way or another"

Transhuman upgrading (which I'm a big fan of) seems to be a separate issue from automation-induced unemployment. I mean, they're related under the aegis of "technological growth", but they're separate outcomes.

I'm seeing a lot more "related" and a lot less "separate" than you apparently do.

A big reason why many will be attracted to "upgrading" (scare quotes explained below) is precisely because of the increasing speed and versatility of computers. When computers think faster and better than brains do about work, financial planning, or even about the likely outcomes of actions on your relationships, who wouldn't want one in direct-to-brain communication? But when the meat between your ears becomes the slowest, weakest link in the thinking team, how many people will resist the urge to "become" all-silicon? And I'd suggest - referring back to Kozmos's quote above and my reply - that many of the machine-owners will "become" machines themselves. A few technological innovations later, they might look upon mere brains with disdain.

But what the brain does - including generate experience as we know it - is not an algorithm. The brain is not a digital computer. Neurons are, if anything, an analog computer, and often operate at or near critical points where random events can take things in interesting directions. This emphatically does not mean that humans can think better, or create better music. Feeling love or pleasure or excitement as we know it is not the only way to be energized toward something, and feeling pain or sadness as we know it is not the only way to driven away from something. Digital programming can work just fine.

In other words, I am saying that it is possible in principle to exude a virtuoso performance as a "person" even though nobody is home. Or at least, nobody we could relate to. And that is why I put scare quotes around "becoming machines" or "uploading yourself" etc etc. It is a very scary thought - that some day you might have to look "under the hood" to figure out if a person is (in any sense you can empathize with) a person.

 

[Angst]

Phrossack, I'm sorry for not replying. I admit it is because of laziness; I'm not that invested into the thread. About people talking about inhumanity in technology (because yes, you are touching upon it). Most don't realize or don't appreciate the beauty that arises from the very collision of humanity and technology. If this collision ever was. I claim; it isn't a collision.

Messily put. You have three issues; you acknowledge that manual labour being replaced allows for more complex service sector jobs, but from there on (when human labor is unnecessary) I don't see the issue. Similarly, the romantic approach to the human body ("The warm softness of the skin!") is an approach to humanism I don't acknowledge as universally good. Blade Runner had a point there. Do not take the soul away from the machine bound in romantic ideals of an innate 'humanness' or 'soulfulness' in the flesh; something that you, even if you do not use the exact terms, take inspiration from.

Since my high-brow posts here were in vain, here is a german sideshow instead :/


Link to video.

I just did an article comparing Kraftwerk and Gorillaz and fwiw their relation to technology was complex. It was not merely a dystopian reflection.