The Screwed Generation
- Thread starter GoodEnoughForMe
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I think we will almost inevitably try to enslave AI. What machines, code and AIs do now is basically slavery. They work without pay or rest, without self autonomy or any rights. And as technology advances, more complex AIs come into this system of exploitative machine slavery. We will also use robots as slave armies. Sure they won't be fully sentient perhaps. But my point in the previous post was if robots would see more primitive machines as their ancestors and see the machine slavery by the organics. On the other hand if a robot is made to do one duty, is it fulfilling it's self? Is this from a book or a Movie? It's sounding awfully familiar.
hobbsyoyo
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We won't have to enslave them is what I'm saying. We will have hundreds of types of generalist bots - in addition to the millions of specialized ones that already exist and trillions of lines of code that are bots in their own right. These bots will not be sentient but will be capable of performing a wide variety of labors. Sentient bots and algorithms will take far more effort to pull off and there will therefore be unprofitable for labor exploitation. Non-sentient machines are just that, machines, and they can't think if they are being enslaved.
We can skip the step in AI development where we have to enslave sentient machines to gain material benefits for ourselves. I posit this will happen simply because that will be the more profitable route. Enslavement of sentient machines may be tried but market forces will work against it along with intense social pressure.
How is this relevant to the screwed generation?
What are we going to do when no one can find a job? This generation has not had a chance to build any wealth for themselves and will have the least cushion to adjust to the new paradigm. We absolutely must find solutions to all the other social and economic challenges this generation faces before we get AI or there is the potential for societal collapse and violence with the added threat of intelligent riot and war machines.
All this talk reinforces my hope to leave the planet as soon as practical. If given the chance I would rather start a new society from the ground up than stick around to reform this one to my liking. I'm working toward that future but it's anyone's guess how far this recent commercial space push takes us as a species or if it will ultimately run out of steam.
We can skip the step in AI development where we have to enslave sentient machines to gain material benefits for ourselves. I posit this will happen simply because that will be the more profitable route. Enslavement of sentient machines may be tried but market forces will work against it along with intense social pressure.
How is this relevant to the screwed generation?
What are we going to do when no one can find a job? This generation has not had a chance to build any wealth for themselves and will have the least cushion to adjust to the new paradigm. We absolutely must find solutions to all the other social and economic challenges this generation faces before we get AI or there is the potential for societal collapse and violence with the added threat of intelligent riot and war machines.
All this talk reinforces my hope to leave the planet as soon as practical. If given the chance I would rather start a new society from the ground up than stick around to reform this one to my liking. I'm working toward that future but it's anyone's guess how far this recent commercial space push takes us as a species or if it will ultimately run out of steam.
Hmm. I think we will end up building general purpose AIs that can solve multiple problems instead of just building bots that trade in stocks more optimally than humans, or diagnose illnesses, or robots that assemble just particular things. There will ne those too. I would call these kinds of general purpose AIs sentient. And that is slavery.
On your last point. That is interesting too. If the middle classes & working class become obsolete, how could a market economy function if no one can afford to but anything. On the other hand, the advent of AI and robotization should drive wages down (in elastic job markets), and at some point it would be easier to just hire people to do the work instead of specialized AIs or robots. Development is expensive after all. That's why I think we will see companies making more general purpose AIs and robots that can do any sort of work without pay. Which is slavery.
hobbsyoyo
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I believe you can program a robot that is sophisticated enough to build another identical robot without it being sentient. Since there aren't any more complicated tasks than building a robot, it could then be given just about every other job except inventing other robots. That's a whole can of worms and by the time we have robots that can do that, I think social pressures will prevent us from making them and then enslaving them. We have 10 or 20 years to think this problem out; let's hope we do a better job with it than we have planning for the 21st century's job market.
I'm not disputing your premise nor do I invalidate your conclusion; I just think it unlikely. Well, I hope it is unlikely.
I'm not disputing your premise nor do I invalidate your conclusion; I just think it unlikely. Well, I hope it is unlikely.
hobbsyoyo
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On how we adapt, I guess I'll out myself as someone that thinks we are actually close to a post-scarcity world. I think it is inevitable but only if we plan around the challenges it will entail. If we don't plan for it then it would still be achievable but we'll have created so many unintended problems that it will prolong the process or collapse everything. I do think we are facing major shifts in human organization across the board.
We have to have more forethought about what's coming than even the wise old ones which put the first seed in the ground and bred the first dog with intent. They could not foresee famine and animal-borne diseases. We can do better.
We have to have more forethought about what's coming than even the wise old ones which put the first seed in the ground and bred the first dog with intent. They could not foresee famine and animal-borne diseases. We can do better.
Looking at how we are adapting to global climate change and growing income disparity, I can only be a pessimist on our abilities to plan the future for AI. As a species we have always stumbled to new inventions, only to adapt to the changes it produced in our societies later much later.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I come from a big family on both sides, spread across the US, with cousins and siblings that start in Gen X and end with whatever comes after Millennials. I don't see a substantial cultural gap. What I do see is a difference of people who are grown up vs still a kid, which seems to be more age specific than year specific. You can watch the younger ones morphing through the same development patterns as the older ones.
Well yes, that's an universal truth. People change in more or less similar ways as they grow older. But there are still some tenuous, fuzzy characteristics of each generation.
The economics are against general purpose AIs. Why would anyone pay for an AI that can do everything, when there is only a specific problem to solve? Especially, when wiping an AI and replacing it with another is almost cost-free. What will rather happen, that there are general AI frameworks with modules that address specific actions and you can add additional functionality as DLC.
But even if you needed a general purpose AI that needs to be sentient for some reason: How would we actually pay them to avoid "slavery"? Sure, we can give them access to some digital currency, but what is it supposed to do with it? Buy itself new memory? Feel good about its large bank account? When programming a sentient AI, couldn't we make it to feel good about rewards that cost us nothing? You would just give it "pleasure points" or whatever and it feels good. Is this slavery? Why should the AI care about anything else?
I think automation will worsen the issues discussed in this thread, because the mid-level jobs are most in danger. The underpaid service jobs will be automated slowly, because you would need an expensive robot to replace someone who you don't have to pay much anyway. But for many office jobs, the hardware requirements would be much less -- you just need some kind of server -- and the people to be replaced earn much more. And even if there is some manual labor involved, the trend will be to dumb down these jobs, so that the AI tells them exactly what to do, so that the job can be done by a high-school dropout earning minimum wage.
That would mean that a lot of college graduates would be out of a job, or doing underpaid jobs (because even if the job could be done by a high-school dropout, why take those when there are desperate college graduates around?). If these college graduates are burdened by huge student loans, they would be in a bad position themselves and the whole system might collapse, if they cannot pay it back.
Terxpahseyton
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So it seems we agree.
That and I think my example also showed that I am aware that paths should also change.
But - would that resolve the trend the OP is painting? I don't think so. You do, luiz?
It would improve it, no doubt.
innonimatu
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AI is being used as an excuse for a perfidious economic system that concentrates wealth and must, by its own mechanisms, put (or maintain) the larger portion of the population in relative poverty and powerlessness. It is no accident that the talk of "AI threat" and the "end of jobs" comes from a handful of billionaires. You know, the kind that claims they are going to give away their wealth, makes some "charitable foundation", but instead have kept amassing more and more wealth and power.
There won't be a lack of jobs in any well structured economy. There are a lot of thinks that are not well done today, should be well done, and the reason for not doing them well is "costs". If automation and the end of jobs were anywhere near that reason could not possibly exist.
Consider agriculture. Employment there has become insignificant. And we are told that in order to keep having "cheap food" we need to maintain industrialized agriculture, and pour herbicides and pesticides that are know to harm people's health into the land. Why can't we instead employ more labor and less pesticides in agriculture? Because "the economy" is structured in a manner that discourages that: large-scale reduces prices but also creates a race to the bottom in quality, because it hampers the setting of minimal standards locally, makes products fungible (how do I distinguish a product that was not soaked in pesticides from one that was?), actually reduces diversity of choice despite the looks of the big aisles fill of stuff to pick from (how do I get fresh produce if all supermarket chains easily accessible do not carry it and the more diverse smaller businesses have been extinguished?), and push pressure on the food budgets of families (the FIRE sectors, lenders and landlords are capturing a greater share of their income).
Consider public works (and here I'm going to speak to the americans) and look at what was done back in the era of the New Deal. It was used to produce infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, parks), to produce entertainment, to restructure agriculture... you even now still have in operation lots of infrastructure that date back to that time. Now you are supposed to believe that it could not be done, for any simple fix to such infrastructure is tremendousness expensive. And at the same time you are supposed to believe that productivity has increased so immensely (and it has, in many though not all areas) that in the near future most of the population will be jobless. This is contradictory propaganda you are being fed. Depending on the issue being discussed you are fed one or the other, the goal is always the same: keep the current economy system in place, and therefore keep its current winners on top. The billionaires who "worry" about automation talk about replacing social security with some kind of universal lump payment - they do not talk about higher taxes, or about states doing some new new deal... because that would both redistribute wealth away from them and reduce their social power.
There won't be a lack of jobs in any well structured economy. There are a lot of thinks that are not well done today, should be well done, and the reason for not doing them well is "costs". If automation and the end of jobs were anywhere near that reason could not possibly exist.
Consider agriculture. Employment there has become insignificant. And we are told that in order to keep having "cheap food" we need to maintain industrialized agriculture, and pour herbicides and pesticides that are know to harm people's health into the land. Why can't we instead employ more labor and less pesticides in agriculture? Because "the economy" is structured in a manner that discourages that: large-scale reduces prices but also creates a race to the bottom in quality, because it hampers the setting of minimal standards locally, makes products fungible (how do I distinguish a product that was not soaked in pesticides from one that was?), actually reduces diversity of choice despite the looks of the big aisles fill of stuff to pick from (how do I get fresh produce if all supermarket chains easily accessible do not carry it and the more diverse smaller businesses have been extinguished?), and push pressure on the food budgets of families (the FIRE sectors, lenders and landlords are capturing a greater share of their income).
Consider public works (and here I'm going to speak to the americans) and look at what was done back in the era of the New Deal. It was used to produce infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, parks), to produce entertainment, to restructure agriculture... you even now still have in operation lots of infrastructure that date back to that time. Now you are supposed to believe that it could not be done, for any simple fix to such infrastructure is tremendousness expensive. And at the same time you are supposed to believe that productivity has increased so immensely (and it has, in many though not all areas) that in the near future most of the population will be jobless. This is contradictory propaganda you are being fed. Depending on the issue being discussed you are fed one or the other, the goal is always the same: keep the current economy system in place, and therefore keep its current winners on top. The billionaires who "worry" about automation talk about replacing social security with some kind of universal lump payment - they do not talk about higher taxes, or about states doing some new new deal... because that would both redistribute wealth away from them and reduce their social power.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
I feel like this statement is so vague that it is almost without meaning. I do not feel this cultural divide at all, in fact the closer I get to 30 the more I realize that all the 30-somethings I know are exactly like me, just with less hair and less ambition.
What exactly is this cultural gap, what caused it, how does it show, how can it be overcome? Also just as a heads up I legitimately thought you were like a 60 year old man and I am in total shock knowing that we're very close in age
Cheetah
Deity
Yeah, wouldn't there be more of a cultural gap between socioeconomic group, or between countries, than there are between 20 and 30-year olds?
Personally I don't know if I grew up to fast or have stopped growing, but I feel very little difference between my "culture" at 23 and at 33... I have more money, since I'm working instead of being a student, but other than that, I'm living pretty much just like before.
Personally I don't know if I grew up to fast or have stopped growing, but I feel very little difference between my "culture" at 23 and at 33... I have more money, since I'm working instead of being a student, but other than that, I'm living pretty much just like before.
What I stated on another thread
I think Generation Z is screwed.
Because of little freedom of spendings for the next decades
Just consider:
I think Generation Z is screwed.
Because of little freedom of spendings for the next decades
Just consider:
- Future GDP growth in mature western countries, guessed at 1-3%, during next 2-4 decades, likely fully needed for Climate related spendings (whether through taxes or directly to citizens)
- National Health Care, going up with 50% over the next 3 decades, because of demographic changes (so typical European country from 10% to 15% GDP)
- Automation and Food yield reductions from Climate, will cause instabilities of domestic and international nature for the coming decades.
20-somethings play Pokémon and adore Harry Potter, which alone makes them incomprehensible and alien to 30-somethings.I feel like this statement is so vague that it is almost without meaning. I do not feel this cultural divide at all, in fact the closer I get to 30 the more I realize that all the 30-somethings I know are exactly like me, just with less hair and less ambition.
What exactly is this cultural gap, what caused it, how does it show, how can it be overcome? Also just as a heads up I legitimately thought you were like a 60 year old man and I am in total shock knowing that we're very close in age
BTW, there are several photos of me (IIRC even some with ex-girlfriends, I should take them down!
) floating around Member's Photos, which I posted over the many years that I've been around. They should prove that I'm no 60 year old, though I am flattered you'd think so (much better to be mistaken for a middle aged man than an idiot teenager!).
Yeah but you're Australian, so you're supposed to be eccentric.
I went to a reunion BBQ with my college class two days ago, and this subjecy came up. Nobody had read or seen any Harry Potter.
Cheetah
Deity
No, it doesn't. I was personally vaccinated against any interest in Harry Potter since I was forced to read the first book in English class in school, but fantasy is a good genre, and I have lots of friends who like fantasy and some who like Harry Potter. Nothing incomprehensible about it. Neither with Pokemons, though I was also a few years to old when they got famous in Norway. Lots of friends like collectibles, or play pokemon, or heartstone, or whatever else.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying stuff that isn't 100% factual, grown-up and serious all the time.
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