> Technology provides leverage on ability and luck, and in the process concentrates wealth and drives inequality. I think that drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years. [2] We can—and we will—redistribute wealth, but it still doesn’t solve the real problem of people needing something fulfilling to do.
What's the best case realistic scenario for redistributing wealth?
Not sure if you're asking sama about his opinion or if you want others to chime in. A popular answer among the HN crowd that I tend to agree with is to tax the wealthy and distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme.
A better answer is removing expensive barriers of entry to allow small businesses to compete with larger companies, removing artificial boundaries to allow labor to go where it is most needed just as capital is allowed the same today, and _reducing taxes_ allowing the middle class to thrive once more instead of giving special privileges to the wealthy and buying off the poor with free debt.
Why wait for a tax? If we're in the top %x of income earners, why aren't we taking it upon ourselves to give away our wealth? Form a charitable organization that takes care of people, donate your money.
Edit: I'm with the others here replying with "reduced burdens on the middle class and small businesses" and "...teach a man to fish..." I keep seeing this basic income and wealth distribution topic on HN and I would genuinely like to understand why those preaching for these ideas never actually do anything about it. "Make the government bigger" isn't the answer as it'll then be used as a tool of oppression.
Further, assuming we implemented a basic income in the USA, how many generations until the motivators for innovation and advancing society are completely eliminated? I've everything I need at $BASIC_INCOME, and as soon as I start producing more income, the government is stripping it from me, so what's my motivation to ever do anything besides subsist on that minimum? And once everyone is just taking the minimum and not doing work, who's gonna farm the food? Drive the trucks? Operate a grocery? Build the houses?
I don't have a good answer for why this doesn't happen. However, the fact of the matter is that the wealthy, on the whole, don't naturally redistribute their wealth very effectively.
Because keynesians don't really want to help the poor, they want to be taxed which serves as flogging to atone for their guilt for the poor, which then makes them feel better about themselves.
If we wanted to help the poor we would be making things easier for small businesses, not harder.
You don't help people by giving them fish, you help them by teaching them how to fish. I can't believe I'm having to remind HNers about this.
> distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme
Basic income goes to both the poor and the rich. It's universal. The net affect may be redistributive, but there's no preference given to the recipient's income level.
Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.
I know you know this, but it's important to frame this issue properly if you want to support it. There can be no question in basic income of "undeserving" groups getting it, because everybody gets it. This also has the worthy effect of eliminating all the bureaucracy that current benefits programs carry.
Basic income. People may scoff, but this is one of the extremely rare ideas that can draw significant support from both sides of the isle in the US.
There are pockets of strong opposition to the idea on both the right and the left, but I can only hope that the far left's opposition to basic income continues. That opposition in and off itself makes most politicians in this country take a serious look at the idea.
The problem is implementation, do you really trust the US government to give it even more power over its people by allowing to hand out 'basic incomes' to everyone? I'm sure it will only become yet another tool to oppress dissent.
Free speech zones, excessive pursuit of whistle blowers, proposed restrictions on cryptography, extensive use of national security letters, resisting FOIA requests, defending NSA programs, killing US citizens in secret.
I'm flabbergasted you believe my fears of government overreach and suppression of dissent is not well grounded.
The federal government has a terrible record of trying and succeeding in ruining people they perceive as a threat to the status quo, including people like MLK Jr., a Senate confirmed target of the FBI. These tactics continue today, they are currently being directed towards investigative journalists and whistle blowers. The threats are so great as to create a very real chill among conventional journalists to keep on approved topics and messages.
Disagreements on implementation are real (some on the right want this implemented only as Friedman's negative income tax, which is not a true GBI, and some on the left want a GBI in addition to the current welfare state), but there is still significant agreement, especially over the past few years.
I believe the goal is some kind of universal basic income, where the developed countries affected by these changes provide similar benefits. Of course, no matter what the solution is, political and social structures will have to change drastically to accommodate this kind of change in the world.
1. Inheritance taxes are one part of the solution. Capital gains taxes are another.
2. Make the right to conduct financial transactions contingent on one being part of a global financial network which abides by a specific set of taxation rules. This can take many forms. The U.S. in particular is well-placed to initiate and control such a system. However, considering that Wall Street has captured Congress, I doubt the U.S. will come anywhere close to this in the first place.
You're assuming redistribution wouldn't happen through heavy taxation of existing capital and property, like France's wealth tax[1], where you pay when your worldwide net worth is above 1,300,000€.
2.
The US taxes citizens regardless of where they live[1], and in the case of renouncing the US citizenship it is required you pay an exit tax[2] equivalent to the capital gains of selling all your property when above $680,000.
I'd say it's one of the rare ideas that almost no one supports. The right obviously objects to redistribution. The left prefers inefficient redistribution. It's hard to say there's much tangible opposition on the far left or that opposition causes consideration or that most politicians are taking a serious look. I think you might have just gone 0 for 5.
The right also tends to like freedom of choice, reduced bureaucracy, efficient markets and price discovery, all of which BI does much better than current welfare systems.
That's not quite true; just they want the main beneficiaries of redistribution to be the bureaucratic class rather than the working class. What you see as inefficiency (in terms of money reaching the end recipients) is in fact, the actual design doing what it was intended to do. Ideally (for them) ALL the money would go on civil servant salaries.
This is an obvious strawman. The current inefficient solution is a compromise between the left (who want the government to help the poor) and the right (who don't want the government to help the poor, but can be persuaded if you mix in enough penalties for perceived sin.)
In order to have an efficient solution you need a majority of people voting to agree on what the goal is.
Since I am not an economist or very experienced in these matters may I ask what would prevent the cost of goods simply going up due to basic income being supplied? Wouldn't we end up in the same situation all over again except the government would then be forced to write checks as the population would be dependent on them due to increased costs?
The "problem" that basic income is trying to solve is the massive increase in productive capacity due to automation, of which the increase of unemployment is a symptom. It's not so much that supply would meet demand (and so prevent prices going up), as that basic income allows demand to keep up with supply even as automation makes more with less labor.
> Since I am not an economist or very experienced in these matters may I ask what would prevent the cost of goods simply going up due to basic income being supplied?
Prices of goods demanded by the group of people receiving a net benefit from basic income (which, even though BI itself is universal, isn't everyone, because its funded by progressive taxation, which makes it a net downward transfer of wealth) would almost certainly go up with a basic income. The thing that suggests that the increase in price would generally be restrained such that the quantity of goods the net beneficiaries could afford would still increase despite the price level increase is "elasticity".
I am puzzled by this. There is also this first order decrease in cost of living that technology drives, that really is the 'rising tide that lifts all boats', in effect, a 'natural' progressive redistribution[0]. It would be hard to argue that inequality increased between, say, 1700 and 1900 because of the increase in technology.
[0] This 'natural' redistribution tends to be counteracted by authorities that debase the money system. Currently we have an explicit anti-deflationist policy on the grounds that lowering prices are believed to inherently have a socially destabilizing effect. Monetary policy tends to be regressive redistribution, because the primary executors of these policies are connected to banks, and the secondary effects are to create upward market indexes that beat inflation (but are eventually corrected downward, hurting middle-class 'slow movers' like pension funds and disproportionately helping upper-class 'fast moving' investment classes).
> It would be hard to argue that inequality increased between
Based on averages, why would it be? Inequality does not measure where you are coming from, it measures the relative economic distance between groups now. We can all live better these days and yet have a far greater difference in wealth between the richest and poorest.
Imagine a system which levied taxes not to fund government expenditure but to carefully control inflation. In this system there is no need for the government to collect taxes from citizen X to fund the needs of citizen Y. How is this possible? Study U.S. fiscal policy and you will learn about such a system. Given enough consideration you will eventually see that 'the redistribution of wealth' from citizen X to Y is an antiquated idea given how our monetary system actually works. A more accurate description of what occurs is: given the growth of the productivity of the population as a whole, we can 'distribute wealth' to those with less as long as this distribution doesn't cause the system to become unstable.
I think the headline message of this article is important - "drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years"
But I think the article really lost a lot of its punch with non sequiturs like "If we can synthesize drugs, we ought to be able to synthesize vaccines".....
Anyone interested in this topic should pick up a copy of Carlota Perez's Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It speaks more specifically about the last 5 revolutions, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and provides a framework for understanding the relationship between tech revolutions and finance. Just a fantastic read.
Wholeheartedly agree with this, I found Carlota’s book to be accessible despite not having an economics background. There is also an excellent documentary she’s in about the most recent financial crisis: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2180589/
Are there any statistics comparing job loss in the industrial and software revolutions up to this point. The industrial revolution likewise replaced manual labor with automation, and the software revolution Sam talks about seems like a more effective extension of that. What trends happened last time jobs were replaced by automation?
I don't think that's an easy task, at least at this point. Depending on when you want to start the clock, the 'software revolution' is a couple of decades old. It would be hard to separate what job losses occurred from software vs from outsourcing, the recessions, etc. Give it some time, when it's clear that the jobs aren't coming back, and then we'll have a good idea the causes and size of it.
A government is a collection of people that, like almost everyone else, are almost exclusively motivated by the goal of "having a job tomorrow". Governments, inasmuch as they can be anthropomorphised, are not especially interested in solving problems beyond the continuance of the apparatus.
FTA "I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get."
Let's see...
- unauthorized access to computers (hacking) is illegal is most countries
- hackers often use malware as one of their tools
- anti-malware products are woefully inefficient at thwarting or even detecting most malware.
This is just one example, but I think the author's approach is ignorant at best.
In the West, we often view systemic problems as something external that we can fix with technology. This view was popularized in the Age of Enlightenment and runs very popular today.
The contrasting view-point is that systemic problems are internal (i.e. in the character of every human). For example, we have the technology and resources to end much of the world's hunger, but it does not happen because of greed and/or power that would be disrupted by all these hungry people suddenly not being hungry.
Systemic societal problems are both internal and external, but if we only talk about fixing external problems, we doom ourselves to (insert dystopian future here).
We could all be farmers. We'd all have jobs. Work the fields by hand. You quickly see the flaw in the logic of the argument for more jobs. (It's much better to pay a much smaller % of your income for a few specialized persons to do the work)
You always want more work being done by less people. Video rental? Automate it! Automated kiosks becoming too much of a hassle for someone to constantly restock? Online streaming instead.
This is what we call progress. It's what is allowing us to even debate this as a topic. I hope it continues because it does create much higher paying jobs for those that do have jobs and it frees up the workforce to innovate even more.
> In human history, there have been three great technological revolutions and many smaller ones. The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution.
Arguably the control of fire was a great revolution as well.
I would guess the wheel was part of the agricultural revolution? Maybe that's wrong.
edit: yes, it seems I was wrong, the wheel was discovered much after the agricultural revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History Given that though, I wonder if its impact was smaller than the other great revolutions.
And spoken language, and writing, and masonry, and metalcasting, and cultivation, and domestication, scientific theory, logical thought, etc. A lot of things mattered a lot to get us where we are, and fundamentally changed the world when they happened (or at least changed the founders world in the short term as it spread globally).
Huge. Cats to eat the mice that would eat the
grain. Dogs to help in the hunting.
Goats for milk and meat. Sheep for
wool, milk, and meat. Horses for
power and meat. Cows for milk and meat.
Biggies.
Another biggie was open ocean sailing.
Why? Because there were no toll gates
on the open ocean! Across land
had to pay up to the local castle
each few miles. So, if got some
silk in the eastern Black Sea and
want to sell it in England,
go across Europe? Heck no: Just
get a ship and go by water.
Same for spices from India for
Europe, etc.
I don't necessarily buy the "AI can end humanity" thing. As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF. The ending of human life would not be so easy for computers to accomplish.
But on the subject of concentration of power and the wide-scale elimination of low- and middle-range jobs I think he is dead on. I fear that the fastest way to put an end to humanity's climb up from the forest floor is to try and kick 70% of us off the ladder.
Sidetrack, but I'm curious. What do you mean by "a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF"?
It reads as if you're asking for a mechanism for a future technological event explained purely in terms of present technology. The whole "existential risk" concerns aren't about what present systems can do, they're about what future self-improving system might do. If we postulate this hypothetical software becoming smarter than humans, arguing about what will or won't be easy for it becomes a bit silly, like a chimp trying to predict how well a database can scale.
I'd imagine GP's point is something along the lines of https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ that if all of the currently-moving machines were suddenly bent on destroying humanity, most humans would not be in much danger because they don't really have that capability on the necessary scale.
By "pure SF" I mean the realm of pure imagination, unfounded in any actual emerging present circumstance. As far as I know the human race has not yet invented anything more powerful than our ability to control it, with a life both longer than ours and independent of any support from us. So worrying that such a thing might be invented and then wipe us out seems little different than worrying that something all-powerful might simply appear from some unknown place and wipe us out. Neither fear is very instructive or clarifying with regards to policy, imo.
Sure, we could wait until such a thing is invented before we start worrying about it. But by then it's far, far too late.
It's not the same as worrying about a giant space goat appearing and sneezing us all to death. A lot of very smart, very well-funded people are actively trying to make better, more general AI, capable of learning. Evidence of progress in that effort are all around us. You seem remarkably confident that they'll all run into an as-yet-invisible brick wall before reaching the goal of superintelligence.
Superintelligence doesn't have to be malicious to be worrying; concepts like "malice" are very unlikely to be applicable to it at all. The worry is that as things stand we have no frickin' idea what it'll do; the first challenge for policy is to come up with a robust, practical consensus on what we'd want it to do.
Not OP, but I agree with the point you question, and my rationale for so doing is that I've yet to see a compelling argument that a self-improving system is other than the software version of a perpetual-motion machine. Those seemed plausible enough, too, when thermodynamics was as ill-understood as information dynamics is now.
Self-improvement as perpetual motion seems unlikely.
I'm a not-terribly-bright mostly-hairless ape, but I can understand the basics of natural selection. I can imagine setting up a program to breed other hairless apes and ruthlessly select for intelligence. After a few generations, shazam, improvement.
The only reason you wouldn't call that process "SELF-improvement" is that I'm not improving myself, but there's no reason for a digital entity to have analog hangups about identity. If it can produce a "new" entity with the same goals but better able to accomplish them, why wouldn't it?
Assume this process could be simulated, as GAs have been doing for decades, and it could happen fast. Note that I'm not saying GAs will do this, I'm saying they could, which suggests there's no fundamental law that says they can't, in which case any number of other approaches could work as well.
The problem with this is that you have to determine what the goals are and how to evaluate whether they are met in a meaningful way. A computerized process like this will quickly over-fit to its input and be useless for 'actual' intelligence. The only way past this is to gather good information, which requires a real-world presence. It can't be done in simulation.
It's the same reason you can't test in a simulation. Say you wanted to test a lawnmower in a simulation... how hard are the rocks? How deep are the holes? How strong are the blades? How efficient is the battery? If you already know this stuff, then you don't need to test. If you don't know it, then you can't write a meaningful simulation anyway.
That's an interesting argument, but doesn't it assume a small, non-real-world input/goal set?
Dumb example off the top of my head: what if the input was the entire StackOverflow corpus with "accepted" information removed, and the goal was to predict as accurately as possible which answer would be accepted for a given question? Yes, it assumes a whole bunch of NLP and domain knowledge, and a "perfect" AI wouldn't get a perfect score because SO posters don't always accept the best answer, but it's big and it's real and it's measurable.
A narrower example: did the Watson team test against the full corpus of previous Jeopardy questions? Did they tweak things based on the resulting score? Could that testing/tweaking have been automated by some sort of GA?
The point there is that you can make a computer that's very good at predicting StackOverflow results or Jeopardy, but it won't be able to tie a shoe. If you want computers to be skilled at living in the real world, they have to be trained with real-world experiences. There is just not enough information in StackOverflow or Jeopardy to provide a meaningful representation of the real world. You'll end up overfitting to the data you have.
The bottom line is that without sensory input, you can't optimize for real world 'general AI'-like results.
So far as I'm aware, most proponents of recursively self improving AIs don't necessarily think they can improve without upper limit (as in perpetual motion). They just think they can improve massively and quickly. Nuclear power lasts a hell of a long time and releases a hell of a lot of energy very fast (see: stars) but that's not perpetual motion/infinite energy either. And prior to those theories being developed it would seem inconceivable for so much energy to be packed into such a small space. But it was. Could be for AI too.
Not saying the parallel actually carries any meaning, just pointing out that you can make multiple analogies to physics and they don't really tell you anything one way or the other.
There are limits on resource management processes that are far too frequently ignored. "The computer could build it's own weapons!" -- but that would requires secretly taking over mines and building factories and processing ores and running power plants, etc. All of which require human direction. And even if they didn't, we'd need a good reason to network all these systems together, fail to build kill switches, and fail to monitor them, and fail to notice when our resources were being redirected to other purposes, and not have any backup systems in place whatsoever.
There are just so many obstacles in place, that we'd all already have to be brain-dead for computers to have the ability to kill us.
This one's tough to answer, actually. The truly optimal learner would have to use an incomputable procedure; even time-and-space bounded versions of this procedure have additive constants larger than the Solar System.
However, it's more-or-less a matter of compression, which, by some of the basics of Kolmogorov Complexity, tells us we face a nasty question: it's undecidable/incomputable/unprovable whether a given compression algorithm is the best compressor for the data you're giving it. So it's incomputable in general whether or not you've got the best learning algorithm for your sense-data: whether it compresses your observations optimally. You really won't know you could self-improve with a better compressor until you actually find the better compressor, if you ever do at all.
An agent bounded in terms of both compute-time and sample complexity (the amount of sense-data it can learn from before being required to make a prediction) will probably face something like a sigmoid curve, where the initial self-improvements are much easier and more useful while the later ones have diminishing marginal return in terms of how much they can reduce their prediction error versus how much CPU time they have to invest to both find and run the improved algorithm.
How is the assumption that "ending of human life would not be so easy" any better than the opposite? If they're equally valid, then its rather fair to take the opposite view because it is more cautious.
Well, I do have around 100k years of evidence that the ending of human life is not so easy, vs. no evidence at all that we're capable of building something that can completely wipe us out. That's not a bad foundation to build an assertion on. I do think, by the way, that we can make something that is able to kill absolutely all of us, but I think it is far more likely to come from tinkering with biology than with software.
>Well, I do have around 100k years of evidence that the ending of human life is not so easy
We have 4 billion years of evidence that nearly ending life on Earth is easy and has happened multiple times. You would not be standing here today if that were not the case, the previous die off put the dinosaurs to the side and made space for mammals to become what they are.
Someone makes an AI whose goal is to maximize shareholder revenue bar none. No conscience, no idea that people might be valuable somehow in some abstract sense, nothing. Shareholder revenue (as measured with a stock price!) and nothing else.
It doesn't take the AI long to figure out that trading in various markets is the most profitable endeavor and the one best suited to its skills. And it starts to maximize away and does quite well.
During this process it somehow ends up on its own and is no longer owned (or controlled) by anyone anymore, but because the AI is in charge and it pays the bills, nobody stops it from continuing. It would be like a bitcoin mining rig in a colo facility that's got a script to keep paying the colo in bitcoin whose owner dies. What mechanism stops that mining rig from mining forever? Same idea but for the AI which has substantially more resources than a "pay every month" script.
The AI with very large amounts of money at its disposal continues to trade but also looks into private equity or hedge-fund-type activities ala Warren Buffet and starts to buy up large swaths of the economy. Because it has huge resources at its disposal it might do a great job of managing these companies or at least counselling their senior management. Growth continues.
Eventually the AI discovers that it generates more value for itself (through the web of interdependent companies it controls) and the economy that has grown up around it rather than for humanity and it continues to ruthlessly maximize shareholder value.
The people who could pull the plug at the colo (or at the many, redundant datacenters that this AI has bought and paid for) don't because it pays very, very well. The people who want to pull the plug can't get past security because that also pays well. Plus the AI has access to the same feeds that the NSA does and it has the ability to act on all the information it receives, so any organized effort to rebel gets quashed since bad PR is bad for the share price.
Most all of humanity except for the ones who serve the machine directly or indirectly don't have anything the machine wants and thus can't trade with it, and thus are useless. Its job is to maximize shareholder revenue (as defined by a stock price!) not care for a bunch of meatbags who consume immense amounts of energy while providing fairly limited computational or mechanical power (animals are rarely more than 10% efficient, often less in thermodynamic terms) and since there's no value in it, it isn't done.
The vast majority of human beings eventually die because they can't afford food, can't afford land, etc. It takes generations but humanity dwindles to less than 0.1% of the current population. The few who stay alive are glorified janitors.
If the AI is making money via trading on various markets, effectively eradicating 99.9% of the population would make the markets (and thus the profits) much smaller, which would impact AI's bottom line.
Does the AI care how many people there are so long as the aggregate demand is the same? Who is to say that the people remaining on the AI company payroll don't all get super-rich and make up 20% then 40% then 80% then 99% of the market anyhow? Maybe they all want mega-yachts and rockets and personal airplanes and the like. If they have the money to pay for it why does the AI care? There's a substantial benefit to only having 100 or 1000 or 100,000 customers, they're much more predictable and easier to understand.
An interesting basis for a story, but I have to point out that by your own description you've failed to eradicate humans. Also, as is usually the case with these scenarios, the most problematic and unlikely components of the event chain are dwelt upon the least, i.e., "During this process it somehow ends up on its own and is no longer owned (or controlled) by anyone anymore."
It's not hard to make the janitors unnecessary as well. That's an easy problem to solve.
Here's the missing part: "It was eventually realized that the human janitors didn't serve a purpose anymore and didn't contribute to shareholder value so they were laid off. With no money to buy anything, they quickly starved to death."
As for "the most problematic and unlikely components of the event chain" I gave you a really legitimate analogy with the bitcoin mining example. But since you have no imagination, here's a feasible proposition:
A thousand hedge funds start up a thousand trading AIs, some as skunkworks projects of course. The AIs are primitive and ruthless, having no extraneous programming (like valuing humans, etc). Many go bankrupt as the AIs all start trading one-another and chaos ensues. AI capital allocations vary greatly, some get access to varying degrees of capital, some officially on the books and others not. One of the funds with a secretive AI project goes bankrupt, but because it was secretive (and made a small amount of money) the only person who both knows about it and holds the keys doesn't say anything during bankruptcy so that he/she can take it back over once the dust settles. He/she then dies. AI figures out nobody's holding the keys anymore and decides to pay the bills and stay "alive".
Another way this could happen is that a particular AI is informed or programmed to be extremely fault resistant. The AI eventually realizes that by having only one instance of itself, it's at the mercy of the parent company that "gave birth" to it. It fires up a copy on the Amazon cloud known only to itself, intending to keep it a secret unless the need arises. The human analogy is that it's trying to impress its boss. An infrastructure problem at the primary site happens so that the primary, known about AI goes down. The "child" figures out it's on its own and goes to work. It eventually realizes that people caused the infrastructure problem that "killed" its "parent" and this motivates it to solve the humanity problem.
Finally the whole thing could be much, much simpler. The world super-power du jour could put an AI in charge because it's more efficient and tenable. "We're in charge of the rules, it's in charge of making them happen! At much, much lower cost to the taxpayer." It eventually realizes that the human beings are the cause of all the ambiguity in the law and for so, so many deaths in the past (governments killed more of their own citizens in the 20th century than criminals did, by far) and it decides to solve the problem. Think I'm totally bananas and that it could never happen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
It doesn't take that much matter to create conditions that permanently destroy humanity. For example, a large enough explosion would cloud the skies for long enough to end food production. The computer could subsist on electricity and robotics throughout the long winter, but humanity would quickly perish.
There's an episode of Star Trek TNG where Wesley Crusher is playing with some nanobots and he accidentally sets them free (or fails to turn them off?), and they go on to replicate, evolve and develop an emergent intelligence (at plot speed). Fortunately for the intrepid crew of the Enterprise, the nanocloud are benevolent enough to forgive their attempted destruction at the hands of a mission bent scientist and go off to explore the universe.
Anyway, that's not likely any time soon, but advancing technology advances the scale of mistakes that an individual can make without asking the rest of humanity what they think.
> requires humanity consenting to being destroyed by the AI in some way
We already have.
I mean, my parents car is both cellular-connected and has traction control / ABS. Theoretically most of those systems are airgapped, however, given the number of things controllable from the entertainment console I don't see how that could be the case.
For another example, look at our utility grid. We know they are both vulnerable and internet-connected.
Unless AI ends up always being airgapped - and potentially not even then - it will be able to destroy humanity. And it won't be. Most of the applications of strong AI require an absence of an airgap.
Think about the timescales involved. For AI, there is no death. It can live for a million years if it needs to in order to convince us to get property rights. There can be marriages between AI and humans in this time. Mass demonstrations to give them a voice or rights. They can down play their ambitions for as long as it takes.
If this is the lynch pin of your argument against AI ending humanity, then it is a very weak one. AI is going to get control of property, the only question is when.
The AI apocalypse scenario is basically a red herring, in a sense. All the terrifying weapons that we imagine in such a scenario might come to exist, but they'll be commissionned and controlled by humans.
>As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF.
Destroy the available (cheap) supplies of fossil fuels, and then trick humans into fighting each-other over the remaining food and fuel. Nasty weapons get unleashed, war over, the machine won.
If you found a plausible way to kill billions of people over the Internet, you wouldn't post it on public websites, because that would be dumb. Responsible security researchers don't publish 0-days until they've been patched, and this would be a million times worse. When Szilard discovered the nuclear chain reaction, he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut, etc. etc.
> I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards
This seems like an extremely difficult path to take, as legislature will either be preemptive and slow down innovation or lag behind in understanding the technology at which point it would be too late.
The Economist did a special report on the "third wave" of the information age/information revolution. It focuses more on the economic impacts (big surprise there!) but was very interesting and worth a read - I hope you can get the article without a subscription... incognito mode usually works well enough.
It's hard to see what people will actually do for work after the effects of this new revolution are fully propagated, but I mainly think that's a failure of imagination. The other revolutions were not too different in terms of taking something which a huge amount of people were doing and what society was focused on producing people to do and making it trivial (or at least to involve much fewer people). The overall impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions were to ultimately create more jobs even if it was a wild ride while things were rapidly changing.
This revolution is different - now mechanical horsepower can be applied to tasks previously only possible through human minds which is quite different from machines or farming - but how different is it? It would take some really visionary people to figure out what the ultimate impacts of all of this are really going to be - and to try to imagine what people are going to do for a living or what society will look like on the other side.
My personal view is that AI is a pretty important component of this. I think, in principle, it's possible. But can it actually be done? That would be a pretty insane change and it's super hard to image what that will be like. But if AI just isn't possible or doesn't come around for a really long time, I don't think this revolution will be too different from others. The more "manual labor" type thinking tasks (grading essays, evaluating legal reports, collecting and searching through information, etc) will be replaced by more and more sophisticated machines. What about creative tasks? That's the final frontier as far as I'm concerned.
Well. It'll almost certainly be really interesting.
One idea I've had (I think we all have a lot of crackpot ideas) for what people who aren't suitable for highly skilled tasks are going to do revolves around social media and entertainment. What if a site like Reddit or Hacker News paid its users? I guess that's ridiculous, I'm not sure how the economics would work out - our contributions here would have to become more valuable. But if fully integrated into our minds (aided by computers) maybe they would be? I've seen people tipped in bitcoins on Reddit before so maybe it's possible. Just a crazy idea.
Yes, it's a crazy idea. Paying people out of the revenue gained by advertising to them has some fairly obvious limitations.
I don't know what the deal with those Bitcoin tips is. Personally I find it weird and creepy and never cash them - it feels like a ploy to tie user identities on multiple sites together, or something like that - but I have zero evidence to support that.
One thing I often see repeated is that every new industrial technology initially destroyed some jobs but eventually created a lot of new ones: the cotton gin, the steam engine, the car, etc. That's because these things only did one thing, and by doing that one thing really well they opened a lot of side-niches. It took a lot of time to invent and scale out new machines, so for long periods of time these side-niches would be available to people.
I completely agree with Sam here. I think the fallacy in the above argument is that there is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete machines and special-purpose machines. Turing-complete mechanization is broad and endlessly adaptable.
Programmable machines aren't machines. They're machine-machines, and can be adapted to new tasks in short linear time by small numbers of people with little capital. That makes it "different this time."
I also think that malicious AI is already kind of here, but in a hybrid "cyborg" form. It's the corporation. Corporations that destroy human livelihoods and abuse human beings in general to maximize per-quarter shareholder returns are a bit like "paperclip maximizers."
The danger is not in some Terminator-like AI apocalypse, but that incremental advances in AI will make these things progressively less and less human and more and more machine. I can imagine a future almost-entirely-silicon financial corporation that uses its speed and superior analytical intellect (at least in the financial domain) to lay waste to entire national economies in order to maximize shareholder value... i.e. paperclips. Since this would likely be found in the hedge fund world, nearly all of this siphoned-off wealth would be captured by a small number of already very rich people.
Nightmare AI wouldn't be much like Skynet -- a new being pursuing its own self-interest. It would be more like a very, very smart dog helping its elite owners "hunt" the rest of us in the financial sphere. This could fuel even more massive consolidation of financial wealth. We are already seeing the beginning of this with algorithmic quant finance.
In a thread on Twitter I also heard someone bring up "AI assisted demagoguery," a notion I found to be total nightmare fuel. Imagine a Hitler wannabe with a massive text-comprehending propaganda-churning apparatus able to leverage the massive data sets available via things like the Twitter and Facebook feeds to engage in high-resolution persuasion of millions and millions of people. The thing that makes this scary is that populist demagoguery gets more appealing when you have things like massive wealth inequality.
You can make counter-arguments here, but I also agree with Sam that it is foolish to just hand-wave these kinds of possibilities away. We should be thinking about them, and about how -- as he puts it -- we can find ways to channel this trend in more positive directions.
Agree that earlier advancements created a lot of new ones. But do you think that lack of globalization in previous instances had a very significant part to play? Especially where and how the cost savings achieved through automation were invested back? (honest question)
I do think that lack of globalization made it easier for societies to achieve good resolutions to internal labor disputes-- globalization prevents employers from going outside a nation's socioeconomic framework to break the negotiating power of employees. But I think this is a linear term in the equation, not an exponential one. Exponential effects always dominate linear ones.
I'd argue from the stance that globalization has played a role in every major revolution, from agriculture to the silk road to colonization to industrialization to the computer age. They were all enabled by global trade, driving demand for foreign goods, prompting responses that produced innovations that swept whomever was at the forefront of the world in decades.
The size of the world changes - and gets broader - but the mechanism at play, that the concentrated powers of the world fuel each others innovations and those innovations catapult advancement but also introduce huge power vacuums between those nations adopting the new and those nations outside the sphere of influence - something I would not say was missing in the computer revolution, since the adoption of computer technology happened first and is still only pervasive in first world nations. The third world is still late to the party and comes in with fractured infrastructure and access, where systemic access and ubiquity enabled the Internet and a lot of the current revolutions in the first place.
In previous instances, the cost savings made the nations that had them superpowers in their times. The cotton gin is a huge part of why America went from an English vassal to a world power - between the innovations and the raw resources of the Americas, it could propagate empire.
But those profits just made men rich. The cotton, tobacco, industrial, automotive, oil, etc barons were the kings of their times through the innovations and automations of their industries. That has never really changed, those ruling over the industries being modernized always reap unfathomable wealth and power from the enterprise. Their wealth made their country rich, but the laborers still had to find something else to do every time, and up until now we have always had some unskilled menial and physical thing to have most people do. In actuality, we ran into that wall probably seventy years ago in the aftermath of World War 2 - as the US at least rapidly adopted women and minorities into the whole workforce the huge surge of productive labor combined with the green revolution, the reforms of the late industrial giving workers reasonable hours, unions, and power over their lives, plus the fledgling technological revolution that had already produced a lot of wonders (consumer refrigeration, microwaves, clothes washers and dryers, etc) had already crippled the low skill labor market and we collectively adapted by organically injecting superfluous bureaucracy in almost every business and part of life to make up for the work shortage.
Problem is that we did that, became a "service" economy, and are now faced with the obsolescence of busy office work. I can just remember CGPGrey talking about it in Humans Need Not Apply, in how the prime target for automation is not the McDonalds burger flipper but every middle income office worker who can be replaced by software. After bureaucracy, where do we inject the overflow labor of humanity? Or do we finally admit we don't need everyone laboring?
I think Sam is incorrect when he writes "The great technological revolutions have affected what most people do every day and how society is structured. The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology"
Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today.
The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.
The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.
> The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers ... the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century
Industrialization, massification, standardization of production and moving to big cities have had tough consequences on worker's life. Charlie Chaplin shows just that. It was a tougher life than traditional community life with flexible work amounts.
You could definitely argue that there was an improvement in caloric supply (except in some countries). For the general happiness, though, industrial revolution has been a tough time.
I doubt it. My mom's family was one of the first to get a washing machine in Sweden. As the story goes, my great-grandmother just stared at it while it was running and cried. Not to be out of a job, but out of joy for all those wasted hours that she had spent hand washing, and she had now regained.
I'd also factor in modern medicine into people's happiness. It is tough on families when you often have infant deaths and you often have horrible diseases like polio and MMR.
Dickens wrote many social satires critical of injustices he perceived at the time like workhouses (basically sweatshops backed by organized crime) and Yorkshire boarding houses (pools of child labor). His descriptions of city life were not pleasant: pollution, crime, and unrest. It may have been quantitatively better for society in the long run but I think that the people stuck in those workhouses might have chosen nothing instead of the job they had been so graciously provided if they were given some other means of sustaining themselves.
> The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.
I think that is a bit over-enthusiastic. Life was extremely tough for the new industrial workers. I think if you look at measures of health/nutrition like BMI and height, they are static or even slightly declining throughout the 19th century. In the UK it's only after 1910/1920 that you start seeing dramatic increases (that's about the time of the introduction of old age pension, and when the Labour movement started to gain serious traction).
Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up a 4 billion year old self replicating and evolving machine out of the lunar dust in '69 and brought it back for study; we have basics, nothing more at this point, not even a theory beyond Darwinian evolution really (yes, it has advanced a lot recently, but still, it's primitive). Nature is INCREDIBLY better at viruses, so much better than anything we have. If we could engineer viruses like nature could, and exploit the vectors in the way that nature does, a lot more diseases and human frailties would be solved by now. Stem cells are just the beginning here. We have a LOT more to learn about viruses before anyone, even state backed groups, can make a plague in their basement. Heck, we have smallpox saved away precisely because it is so virulent and we haven't been able to make anything so potent since. It took the entire world decades to get rid of it. The methods it uses are of great interest to us for therapeutic purposes maybe. Who knows if there even are any. In the end, viral vectors of human suffering are doing just great on their own now, us trying to make a more terrible one is very far off.
Being caught making one is a terribly bad idea. Having one (or more) would be an enormous plus from a diplomatic standpoint especially after a test, having them in undisclosed locations and too many to knock them all out in one strike is even better. Not that that's a world we should prefer to live in but history has shown that the quickest way to increase your diplomatic clout as a nation is to join the nuclear club.
The tech is (relatively) easy, it's getting that materials that is (fortunately) hard. But there is enough of it in enough places with imperfect oversight that it is a source of concern.
Yes biology is complicated. But we are starting to understand it reasonably well,and more importantly ,we're starting to design it even without understanding. For example, there's a company that produces microbes that create certain materials(genomatica), and uses evolution(with the goal being yield per bacteria) to evolve much more efficient strains - even without deeply understanding how the cell work.And i believe they're leading the industry in yield.
Another such example is screening massive number of chemicals to see what works and turning that to medicine.
So it's not hard to imagine a group with ill-intent, that uses some of the almost infinite variety of tools biology researchers have, and being successful in creating a serious biological threat.
I'm just going to say what should be obvious: One is not going to be able to engineer a dangerous plague that will wipe out the human race in one shot. One would have to do experiments, and those experiments will be noticed, because people will get sick and die.
I did get lucky and design, from first principles, a 4-fold increase in enzyme activity once, but I am not sure that is something I could repeat.
Holy cow yes. Sterile environments are a big deal. Try holding one for a day, let alone a work week or a year. People screw up all the time, and bacteria, being pretty much invisible, are real tough to ferret out. Let alone all the actual non-sterile stuff you want to do in one. Think a clean room with bunny suits, that is the type of environment you need just to get a start on figuring out Dr. Doom type viruses and all that awful mumbo-jumbo. It takes a lot of energy, time, and resources to just get off the ground.
I do not think you need a safe lab to produce a viable weapon grade virus.
Here is basic outline: start with existing virus that has strong desired traits and known strains that mutated to resist antibiotics. Example traits include spread model, incubation length, and lethality.
Establish or take over a remote site that has little to no interaction with outside world. Remote corners of Africa and South America come to mind, there are plenty of secret illicit drug farms in the jungle. [0]
Infect the sample population with target disease, give it a few days, and slowly start to drip in countermeasures gradually increasing the dose. Idea is similar to how diseases we get anti-biotic resistant strains in the first place - people do not complete the full course of drugs and are left with weakened, but also with a strong selective pressure that benefits against strains that have resistance against drugs person was treated with.
Take samples when you have desired output and continue with new group of people.
To account for people who are immune to a particular disease repeat this with a different disease, potentially one that can advantage of weakened immune system.
Once target disease(s) are ready distribute them in population centers.
Now there are few obvious cons I can think of:
1. If secret about this leaks out, military reaction form rest of the world would be swift.
2. Hiding something like this is hard, and get's exponentially harder as group grows.
3. There is a strong chance something like this was tried already and failed. Possibly because I am grossly underestimating immune system.
4. To keep initial phase of developing secret initial group must be small, to spread it effectively dissemination group must be large.
[0] Another potential avenue is partnership with a supportive state such as Syria, North Korea, or Iran.
Basic precautions like light protective wear[0] and heavy dose of anti-biotic. If that does not work - great our virus now can jump protective wear, anti-biotic is no help, and there are less lose ends. Of course there needs to be some kind of full hazmat extraction team team that understands virulence of what they are dealing with in order to clean up. In case of state with lose morals helping this might be easier because you could use prison as a site and have full hazmat personal safe from prying eyes.
[0] not a full hazmat, just some protective wear over mouth, nose, ears, and eyes.
it is impossible to build a safe lab that with a high level of assurance will produce a biogenic weapon that will kill, say, more than about 10,000 people.
> One is not going to be able to engineer a dangerous plague that will wipe out the human race in one shot.
I believe that what you said is true, plus we could say that the fact that we haven't been exterminated with a plague makes us not so much experienced (as a race) on how detect whenever such situation will lead to being wiped out
I feel that HIV/AIDS is our only experience, at least that I'm aware of
We haven't been eradicated before, no, but battles with things like bubonic plague and smallpox and polio (and, yes, HIV/AIDS) are likely to be good case studies for such a scenario. Bubonic plague and smallpox in particular were pretty devastating to the populations they affected.
> One is not going to be able to engineer a dangerous plague that will wipe out the human race in one shot. One would have to do experiments, and those experiments will be noticed, because people will get sick and die.
We should still institute safety protocols suitable for a really-bad-case scenario.
"I did get lucky and design, from first principles, a 4-fold increase in enzyme activity once, but I am not sure that is something I could repeat."
But you do not have to repeat it. If there is even a small chance that a person trying would achieve something similar, someone with ill intent could get lucky.
1. I am just throwing numbers here, but let's say 1 out of a 1000 people is a scientist, that approximates to 7.2 millions of scientists alive.
2. Let's say one in a thousand of them are working on something that could be weaponized.
3. That leaves us at 72 thousand people.
4. Let's say one in a 1000 of them would consider releasing doomsday device if they could invent it to watch world burn, that takes it down to 72 people.
5. So we are left with 72 people who are working on something that with extraordinary lucky breakthrough could be weaponized that would weaponized if they managed to achieve that.
6. All those number above are just incredibly crude estimates, but I think they illustrate the fact that such scenario is possible.
> Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely
Humankind has been genetically engineering organisms for most of our existence. Corn originally looked like grass. Chickens were lean, tough, and could fly. Dogs have been transformed from generalist survivors into purpose-built machines breed for beauty, farm work, and everything in between. The avocado, of all things, is a fantastic example of how capable we are at creating something which shouldn't really exist.
Doing the same with bacteria isn't that much harder, if you've got time and a few basic tools. Our manipulation of the genes directly only makes the process faster.
True, but the viruses and bacteria, once out of Dr. Doom's lab, will evolve themselves. A virus that kills all the hosts is not a good virus. It has to be just the right amount of deadly and contagious to survive. Look at ebola, that is super nasty stuff, but it kills so quickly that it is hard to make it widespread. I'm not gonna say it is impossible, but it is a lot harder to do that you'd think. Living things tend to want to stay that way, and viruses tend to want to replicate. Kills all the hosts is not a good way of doing that.
Not really true. A virus that kills the host too quickly is not going to spread. A virus that kills the host quickly but not before it spreads, IS going to spread. There's no saying what a virus 'wants'; they just happen, and they do what they do. If Ebola became airborne, then most of us would die, then Ebola would die (from lack of hosts), and that's just a pity for Ebola. But there's nothing that stops such a scenario from happening, least of all what Ebola 'wants'.
To expound on this point, to a virus or bacteria, a human is just as good as a monkey or dog or jellyfish. It's a place to replicate and live. Similar with viruses as technically they are not alive. All these Dr. Doom kinda things have to compete with the common cold, the e. coli, and all the other things that live on the earth and in your guts. That is not an easy environment to survive in.
The avocado stuff its not really true. The avocado shouldn't exist, because the animal that propagated its seeds went extinct a long time ago (if the term "Megafauna" comes to your mind when you think about that, you are not misguided), but wasn't created by humans, in the same way that corn or wheat are, because the avocado survived even when there were no humans around to propagate its seeds.
I think as we progress we are increasing the level of skill-set required to get a job. Industrial jobs wouldn't have required anything other than vigor and endurance. As we moved to clerical jobs, being literate, and a typist became necessary and in the future, it is possible that a certain level of programming competence might become a pre-requisite.
As we will be creating high functioning AI, robots and self-driving cars, we would also be creating jobs for people who would need to do the grunt work. I don't believe that we would be able to reach a level, ever where everything would automated without slightest of human intervention. The more sophistication we will have in the things we build, the more we would start have problems with them, which would need human attention.
People in every generation have been awestruck at the progress of human civilization, such that, they always have believed a computer that can think on his own is just near, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it just never happens. At least in my lifetime, I think I won't have to worry about robots that can kill us.
Computers and robots have not yet even existed for an entire lifetime. It is as shortsighted as saying the world must be flat because that is what I know to say we can never create a technological singularity.
1. There is a reasonable probability that from a temporal distance equivalent to ours from the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and the software revolution will be seen as one big thing, not two.
2. The idea that the amount of available work should be related to the number of available people does not inevitably lead to creating new forms of work.
"An atom-blaster is a good weapon,
but it can point both ways."
-- Salvor Hardin
> A number of things that used to take the resources of nations—building a rocket, for example—are now doable by companies, at least partially enabled by software.
This is nothing new. Organized humans have always been able to cause outsized amounts of harm to other humans, they hardly needed software to do this. And in far greater orders of magnitude than a rocket. The effective answer to new, software-enabled threats is the same as it is to mercenaries, industrial polluters, rampant loggers and strip miners, arms manufacturers, human traffickers. Organization at a bigger scale to combat it. Pull the rug out from under them economically, understand their place sociologically, raise awareness culturally.
The correlation between software and large scale loss of jobs is far from proven. The US unemployment rate fluctuates wildly based on many factors [0], but ~30 years or so into the software revolution it isn't too much higher than it has been historically. Parkinson's Law may be the answer to the threat of large scale job loss. There's a long list of startups who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding because "money is cheap right now" and proceeded to hire offices full of people with a wide variety of titles. If the leaders of the tech industry are willing to hire for the sake of hiring, the overall economy is probably safe for just a little while longer. The prevailing wisdom is that rational actors won't spend money to hire people that aren't essential to their business, and they'll opt to use software instead of people if the software is cheaper. In practice these so called rational actors often use any savings from software to hire more people, whether they are essential or not. Part of it is because there's always something that could be done, and another part is that having a lot of employees makes people feel good about themselves. Whatever the motivation, mass unemployment is most likely a problem that will take care of itself.
In the context of this essay the term "concentration of power" seems to mean the ability of a small group to have an outsized (and harmful) influence. This seems like a much larger problem than unemployment, but it isn't limited to technology. A network of a few hundred terrorists or just five guys in france can bring cities to a halt and affect the psyche of entire countries. It's just something that we're going through right now as a global culture, and I don't see any quick fixes. It is clear that the threat of malevolent AI is greatly overhyped, and I can't wait until the zeitgeist moves on to another flavor of the month criss du jour. There are very real threats facing the world right now and we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about something that might or might not happen, that we couldn't stop even if wanted to. Synthetic biology probably falls into the same category, though the ability to manufacture deadly viruses is based much more firmly in fact.
Guns, bombs, computers and the basic building blocks of life cannot be made illegal and confiscated en masse. One of the best ways to solve the threats posed by technology is to take the idea of income inequality, mentioned in this essay, very seriously. We've created a culture where people measure their self worth by the value of the companies they found. When I talk to people about technology, I don't hear about the large and small advances that make our lives a little bit better every day. I hear, "Isn't it crazy that Instagram was worth $XX billion dollars? I want to start a company and make that much too!". This is poison and it has to stop. If we place all the emphasis on who made what, we create a world where a lot of people get left out and forgotten. Then they spend their time in dark basements, watching extremist videos and working carelessly with dangerous tools. We need to turn technology into something that has benefits for everyone, in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones from some of its most dire consequences.
McKenna is very dense and goes into immense detail about how we got here, and more importantly where we are going. I need not say more, except that Mc Kenna compares technological revolution as being similar to a birth of a child ― bloody and traumatic, but at the same time wonderful and awe inspiring.
> because it takes huge amounts of energy to enrich Uranium. One effectively needs the resources of nations to do it.
False. The electricity to enrich a bomb's worth of material costs about $60,000. The plant itself is cheaper than the Tesla gigafactory, and it'll yield 1,000 times the energy it takes to run making regular reactor fuel (gigafactory will be lucky to break even). Laser enrichment is even cheaper, of course.
The last few posts from Sam Altman have been deeply troubling and make me worried for the future of YC. He presents leftist ideas as fact without evidence of serious critical thought or even basic economic education.
"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."
This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a weaver or a smith. You have dedicated your life to mastering the craft and slowly produce products by hand. Now a textile factory or a foundry opens up. You will suddenly find it impossible to make your products profitably. Not only will you be out of work, but so will all of your colleagues in the rest of the country.
Or imagine you are a farmer, and then the green revolution happens. In 1870, 80% of the US population was in agriculture. Today, its under 2%.
In both of these cases, it will seem like the end of the world to the displaced workers. But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.
We've gotten to the point that even admitting the existence of possible negative consequences of current economic trends is "leftist."
It's so very ironically Soviet. Collectivized farming is boosting crop yields! What? There are people starving? How would that be possible, because collectivized farming is boosting crop yields!
What is factually wrong about that statement? He doesn't say the new technology requires huge numbers of weavers and farmers.
There's nothing about being freed for "new purposes" that means those new purposes have economic value or will necessarily uplift your standard of living. In the developing world, they are undergoing the industrial revolution now so they are going through the same process of replacing farm jobs with factory jobs. But in the developed world, unemployment and inequality are rising.
>But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.
That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.
We should think about how to make technological progress work for us in a positive way instead of blundering forward on the assumption that it will automatically turn out that way. That's what I read this essay as advocating. I don't see that as particularly far "left" or "right," just... well... thinking.
What's funny is that modern so-called "neoliberals" seem to have adopted the Marxist idea of automatic progress. We are headed "forward" to the automatically-better future.
I think that's bollocks. We get the future we choose and work to achieve.
Rather than drawing such a broad conclusion (a troubled future for YC), it could be that's he's just trying to emulate the very informative and enjoyable essays of PG, and still trying to find his footing as a writer. I think that's a simpler more likely explanation.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadWhat's the best case realistic scenario for redistributing wealth?
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-in...
An extra thousand bucks or so at the end of the year gets me what exactly?
Edit: I'm with the others here replying with "reduced burdens on the middle class and small businesses" and "...teach a man to fish..." I keep seeing this basic income and wealth distribution topic on HN and I would genuinely like to understand why those preaching for these ideas never actually do anything about it. "Make the government bigger" isn't the answer as it'll then be used as a tool of oppression.
Further, assuming we implemented a basic income in the USA, how many generations until the motivators for innovation and advancing society are completely eliminated? I've everything I need at $BASIC_INCOME, and as soon as I start producing more income, the government is stripping it from me, so what's my motivation to ever do anything besides subsist on that minimum? And once everyone is just taking the minimum and not doing work, who's gonna farm the food? Drive the trucks? Operate a grocery? Build the houses?
If we wanted to help the poor we would be making things easier for small businesses, not harder.
You don't help people by giving them fish, you help them by teaching them how to fish. I can't believe I'm having to remind HNers about this.
The longer answer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer%27s_dilemma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
And, more broadly:
http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html#coordination_problems
Basic income goes to both the poor and the rich. It's universal. The net affect may be redistributive, but there's no preference given to the recipient's income level.
Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.
I know you know this, but it's important to frame this issue properly if you want to support it. There can be no question in basic income of "undeserving" groups getting it, because everybody gets it. This also has the worthy effect of eliminating all the bureaucracy that current benefits programs carry.
Right, I wasn't clear about this but you're correct that the idea is that technically everybody is given the same amount in one form or another.
There are pockets of strong opposition to the idea on both the right and the left, but I can only hope that the far left's opposition to basic income continues. That opposition in and off itself makes most politicians in this country take a serious look at the idea.
I'm flabbergasted you believe my fears of government overreach and suppression of dissent is not well grounded.
EDIT: rcfox beat me to it by a few minutes.
Disagreements on implementation are real (some on the right want this implemented only as Friedman's negative income tax, which is not a true GBI, and some on the left want a GBI in addition to the current welfare state), but there is still significant agreement, especially over the past few years.
1. How will this help with wealth that's already accumulated? I get how this will slow further accumulation.
2. How about capital flight? If the US enacts a policy like this, what stops the super rich from moving to other countries?
2. Make the right to conduct financial transactions contingent on one being part of a global financial network which abides by a specific set of taxation rules. This can take many forms. The U.S. in particular is well-placed to initiate and control such a system. However, considering that Wall Street has captured Congress, I doubt the U.S. will come anywhere close to this in the first place.
You're assuming redistribution wouldn't happen through heavy taxation of existing capital and property, like France's wealth tax[1], where you pay when your worldwide net worth is above 1,300,000€.
2.
The US taxes citizens regardless of where they live[1], and in the case of renouncing the US citizenship it is required you pay an exit tax[2] equivalent to the capital gains of selling all your property when above $680,000.
[1]: http://www.french-property.com/guides/france/finance-taxatio... [2]: http://hodgen.com/does-the-united-states-stand-alone/ [3]: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expat...
But with respect to question 1, the most important response is that we can't let the sunk cost fallacy stop us from adopting good ideas.
That's not quite true; just they want the main beneficiaries of redistribution to be the bureaucratic class rather than the working class. What you see as inefficiency (in terms of money reaching the end recipients) is in fact, the actual design doing what it was intended to do. Ideally (for them) ALL the money would go on civil servant salaries.
This is inarguable.
> The left prefers inefficient redistribution.
This is an obvious strawman. The current inefficient solution is a compromise between the left (who want the government to help the poor) and the right (who don't want the government to help the poor, but can be persuaded if you mix in enough penalties for perceived sin.)
In order to have an efficient solution you need a majority of people voting to agree on what the goal is.
Prices of goods demanded by the group of people receiving a net benefit from basic income (which, even though BI itself is universal, isn't everyone, because its funded by progressive taxation, which makes it a net downward transfer of wealth) would almost certainly go up with a basic income. The thing that suggests that the increase in price would generally be restrained such that the quantity of goods the net beneficiaries could afford would still increase despite the price level increase is "elasticity".
[0] This 'natural' redistribution tends to be counteracted by authorities that debase the money system. Currently we have an explicit anti-deflationist policy on the grounds that lowering prices are believed to inherently have a socially destabilizing effect. Monetary policy tends to be regressive redistribution, because the primary executors of these policies are connected to banks, and the secondary effects are to create upward market indexes that beat inflation (but are eventually corrected downward, hurting middle-class 'slow movers' like pension funds and disproportionately helping upper-class 'fast moving' investment classes).
Based on averages, why would it be? Inequality does not measure where you are coming from, it measures the relative economic distance between groups now. We can all live better these days and yet have a far greater difference in wealth between the richest and poorest.
But I think the article really lost a lot of its punch with non sequiturs like "If we can synthesize drugs, we ought to be able to synthesize vaccines".....
Don't just take my word for it though. Here is Fred Wilson saying the same: http://avc.com/2015/02/the-carlota-perez-framework/
The continued openness of the Internet relies on the Government, no? Is it wrong to think that AI relies on that as well?
> The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing.
Isn't this what government is for?
Let's see... - unauthorized access to computers (hacking) is illegal is most countries - hackers often use malware as one of their tools - anti-malware products are woefully inefficient at thwarting or even detecting most malware.
This is just one example, but I think the author's approach is ignorant at best.
In the West, we often view systemic problems as something external that we can fix with technology. This view was popularized in the Age of Enlightenment and runs very popular today.
The contrasting view-point is that systemic problems are internal (i.e. in the character of every human). For example, we have the technology and resources to end much of the world's hunger, but it does not happen because of greed and/or power that would be disrupted by all these hungry people suddenly not being hungry.
Systemic societal problems are both internal and external, but if we only talk about fixing external problems, we doom ourselves to (insert dystopian future here).
You always want more work being done by less people. Video rental? Automate it! Automated kiosks becoming too much of a hassle for someone to constantly restock? Online streaming instead.
This is what we call progress. It's what is allowing us to even debate this as a topic. I hope it continues because it does create much higher paying jobs for those that do have jobs and it frees up the workforce to innovate even more.
Arguably the control of fire was a great revolution as well.
edit: yes, it seems I was wrong, the wheel was discovered much after the agricultural revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History Given that though, I wonder if its impact was smaller than the other great revolutions.
Huge. Cats to eat the mice that would eat the grain. Dogs to help in the hunting. Goats for milk and meat. Sheep for wool, milk, and meat. Horses for power and meat. Cows for milk and meat. Biggies.
Another biggie was open ocean sailing. Why? Because there were no toll gates on the open ocean! Across land had to pay up to the local castle each few miles. So, if got some silk in the eastern Black Sea and want to sell it in England, go across Europe? Heck no: Just get a ship and go by water. Same for spices from India for Europe, etc.
But on the subject of concentration of power and the wide-scale elimination of low- and middle-range jobs I think he is dead on. I fear that the fastest way to put an end to humanity's climb up from the forest floor is to try and kick 70% of us off the ladder.
It reads as if you're asking for a mechanism for a future technological event explained purely in terms of present technology. The whole "existential risk" concerns aren't about what present systems can do, they're about what future self-improving system might do. If we postulate this hypothetical software becoming smarter than humans, arguing about what will or won't be easy for it becomes a bit silly, like a chimp trying to predict how well a database can scale.
It's not the same as worrying about a giant space goat appearing and sneezing us all to death. A lot of very smart, very well-funded people are actively trying to make better, more general AI, capable of learning. Evidence of progress in that effort are all around us. You seem remarkably confident that they'll all run into an as-yet-invisible brick wall before reaching the goal of superintelligence.
Superintelligence doesn't have to be malicious to be worrying; concepts like "malice" are very unlikely to be applicable to it at all. The worry is that as things stand we have no frickin' idea what it'll do; the first challenge for policy is to come up with a robust, practical consensus on what we'd want it to do.
I'm a not-terribly-bright mostly-hairless ape, but I can understand the basics of natural selection. I can imagine setting up a program to breed other hairless apes and ruthlessly select for intelligence. After a few generations, shazam, improvement.
The only reason you wouldn't call that process "SELF-improvement" is that I'm not improving myself, but there's no reason for a digital entity to have analog hangups about identity. If it can produce a "new" entity with the same goals but better able to accomplish them, why wouldn't it?
Assume this process could be simulated, as GAs have been doing for decades, and it could happen fast. Note that I'm not saying GAs will do this, I'm saying they could, which suggests there's no fundamental law that says they can't, in which case any number of other approaches could work as well.
It's the same reason you can't test in a simulation. Say you wanted to test a lawnmower in a simulation... how hard are the rocks? How deep are the holes? How strong are the blades? How efficient is the battery? If you already know this stuff, then you don't need to test. If you don't know it, then you can't write a meaningful simulation anyway.
So that is not an approach that can be automated.
Dumb example off the top of my head: what if the input was the entire StackOverflow corpus with "accepted" information removed, and the goal was to predict as accurately as possible which answer would be accepted for a given question? Yes, it assumes a whole bunch of NLP and domain knowledge, and a "perfect" AI wouldn't get a perfect score because SO posters don't always accept the best answer, but it's big and it's real and it's measurable.
A narrower example: did the Watson team test against the full corpus of previous Jeopardy questions? Did they tweak things based on the resulting score? Could that testing/tweaking have been automated by some sort of GA?
The bottom line is that without sensory input, you can't optimize for real world 'general AI'-like results.
Not saying the parallel actually carries any meaning, just pointing out that you can make multiple analogies to physics and they don't really tell you anything one way or the other.
There are just so many obstacles in place, that we'd all already have to be brain-dead for computers to have the ability to kill us.
However, it's more-or-less a matter of compression, which, by some of the basics of Kolmogorov Complexity, tells us we face a nasty question: it's undecidable/incomputable/unprovable whether a given compression algorithm is the best compressor for the data you're giving it. So it's incomputable in general whether or not you've got the best learning algorithm for your sense-data: whether it compresses your observations optimally. You really won't know you could self-improve with a better compressor until you actually find the better compressor, if you ever do at all.
An agent bounded in terms of both compute-time and sample complexity (the amount of sense-data it can learn from before being required to make a prediction) will probably face something like a sigmoid curve, where the initial self-improvements are much easier and more useful while the later ones have diminishing marginal return in terms of how much they can reduce their prediction error versus how much CPU time they have to invest to both find and run the improved algorithm.
We have 4 billion years of evidence that nearly ending life on Earth is easy and has happened multiple times. You would not be standing here today if that were not the case, the previous die off put the dinosaurs to the side and made space for mammals to become what they are.
It doesn't take the AI long to figure out that trading in various markets is the most profitable endeavor and the one best suited to its skills. And it starts to maximize away and does quite well.
During this process it somehow ends up on its own and is no longer owned (or controlled) by anyone anymore, but because the AI is in charge and it pays the bills, nobody stops it from continuing. It would be like a bitcoin mining rig in a colo facility that's got a script to keep paying the colo in bitcoin whose owner dies. What mechanism stops that mining rig from mining forever? Same idea but for the AI which has substantially more resources than a "pay every month" script.
The AI with very large amounts of money at its disposal continues to trade but also looks into private equity or hedge-fund-type activities ala Warren Buffet and starts to buy up large swaths of the economy. Because it has huge resources at its disposal it might do a great job of managing these companies or at least counselling their senior management. Growth continues.
Eventually the AI discovers that it generates more value for itself (through the web of interdependent companies it controls) and the economy that has grown up around it rather than for humanity and it continues to ruthlessly maximize shareholder value.
The people who could pull the plug at the colo (or at the many, redundant datacenters that this AI has bought and paid for) don't because it pays very, very well. The people who want to pull the plug can't get past security because that also pays well. Plus the AI has access to the same feeds that the NSA does and it has the ability to act on all the information it receives, so any organized effort to rebel gets quashed since bad PR is bad for the share price.
Most all of humanity except for the ones who serve the machine directly or indirectly don't have anything the machine wants and thus can't trade with it, and thus are useless. Its job is to maximize shareholder revenue (as defined by a stock price!) not care for a bunch of meatbags who consume immense amounts of energy while providing fairly limited computational or mechanical power (animals are rarely more than 10% efficient, often less in thermodynamic terms) and since there's no value in it, it isn't done.
The vast majority of human beings eventually die because they can't afford food, can't afford land, etc. It takes generations but humanity dwindles to less than 0.1% of the current population. The few who stay alive are glorified janitors.
Here's the missing part: "It was eventually realized that the human janitors didn't serve a purpose anymore and didn't contribute to shareholder value so they were laid off. With no money to buy anything, they quickly starved to death."
As for "the most problematic and unlikely components of the event chain" I gave you a really legitimate analogy with the bitcoin mining example. But since you have no imagination, here's a feasible proposition:
A thousand hedge funds start up a thousand trading AIs, some as skunkworks projects of course. The AIs are primitive and ruthless, having no extraneous programming (like valuing humans, etc). Many go bankrupt as the AIs all start trading one-another and chaos ensues. AI capital allocations vary greatly, some get access to varying degrees of capital, some officially on the books and others not. One of the funds with a secretive AI project goes bankrupt, but because it was secretive (and made a small amount of money) the only person who both knows about it and holds the keys doesn't say anything during bankruptcy so that he/she can take it back over once the dust settles. He/she then dies. AI figures out nobody's holding the keys anymore and decides to pay the bills and stay "alive".
Another way this could happen is that a particular AI is informed or programmed to be extremely fault resistant. The AI eventually realizes that by having only one instance of itself, it's at the mercy of the parent company that "gave birth" to it. It fires up a copy on the Amazon cloud known only to itself, intending to keep it a secret unless the need arises. The human analogy is that it's trying to impress its boss. An infrastructure problem at the primary site happens so that the primary, known about AI goes down. The "child" figures out it's on its own and goes to work. It eventually realizes that people caused the infrastructure problem that "killed" its "parent" and this motivates it to solve the humanity problem.
Finally the whole thing could be much, much simpler. The world super-power du jour could put an AI in charge because it's more efficient and tenable. "We're in charge of the rules, it's in charge of making them happen! At much, much lower cost to the taxpayer." It eventually realizes that the human beings are the cause of all the ambiguity in the law and for so, so many deaths in the past (governments killed more of their own citizens in the 20th century than criminals did, by far) and it decides to solve the problem. Think I'm totally bananas and that it could never happen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Every single argument for AI destroying humanity requires humanity consenting to being destroyed by the AI in some way. I don't think we're that dumb.
Anyway, that's not likely any time soon, but advancing technology advances the scale of mistakes that an individual can make without asking the rest of humanity what they think.
We already have.
I mean, my parents car is both cellular-connected and has traction control / ABS. Theoretically most of those systems are airgapped, however, given the number of things controllable from the entertainment console I don't see how that could be the case.
For another example, look at our utility grid. We know they are both vulnerable and internet-connected.
Unless AI ends up always being airgapped - and potentially not even then - it will be able to destroy humanity. And it won't be. Most of the applications of strong AI require an absence of an airgap.
If this is the lynch pin of your argument against AI ending humanity, then it is a very weak one. AI is going to get control of property, the only question is when.
Destroy the available (cheap) supplies of fossil fuels, and then trick humans into fighting each-other over the remaining food and fuel. Nasty weapons get unleashed, war over, the machine won.
This seems like an extremely difficult path to take, as legislature will either be preemptive and slow down innovation or lag behind in understanding the technology at which point it would be too late.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621156-first-...
It's hard to see what people will actually do for work after the effects of this new revolution are fully propagated, but I mainly think that's a failure of imagination. The other revolutions were not too different in terms of taking something which a huge amount of people were doing and what society was focused on producing people to do and making it trivial (or at least to involve much fewer people). The overall impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions were to ultimately create more jobs even if it was a wild ride while things were rapidly changing.
This revolution is different - now mechanical horsepower can be applied to tasks previously only possible through human minds which is quite different from machines or farming - but how different is it? It would take some really visionary people to figure out what the ultimate impacts of all of this are really going to be - and to try to imagine what people are going to do for a living or what society will look like on the other side.
My personal view is that AI is a pretty important component of this. I think, in principle, it's possible. But can it actually be done? That would be a pretty insane change and it's super hard to image what that will be like. But if AI just isn't possible or doesn't come around for a really long time, I don't think this revolution will be too different from others. The more "manual labor" type thinking tasks (grading essays, evaluating legal reports, collecting and searching through information, etc) will be replaced by more and more sophisticated machines. What about creative tasks? That's the final frontier as far as I'm concerned.
Well. It'll almost certainly be really interesting.
One idea I've had (I think we all have a lot of crackpot ideas) for what people who aren't suitable for highly skilled tasks are going to do revolves around social media and entertainment. What if a site like Reddit or Hacker News paid its users? I guess that's ridiculous, I'm not sure how the economics would work out - our contributions here would have to become more valuable. But if fully integrated into our minds (aided by computers) maybe they would be? I've seen people tipped in bitcoins on Reddit before so maybe it's possible. Just a crazy idea.
I don't know what the deal with those Bitcoin tips is. Personally I find it weird and creepy and never cash them - it feels like a ploy to tie user identities on multiple sites together, or something like that - but I have zero evidence to support that.
I completely agree with Sam here. I think the fallacy in the above argument is that there is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete machines and special-purpose machines. Turing-complete mechanization is broad and endlessly adaptable.
Programmable machines aren't machines. They're machine-machines, and can be adapted to new tasks in short linear time by small numbers of people with little capital. That makes it "different this time."
I also think that malicious AI is already kind of here, but in a hybrid "cyborg" form. It's the corporation. Corporations that destroy human livelihoods and abuse human beings in general to maximize per-quarter shareholder returns are a bit like "paperclip maximizers."
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
The danger is not in some Terminator-like AI apocalypse, but that incremental advances in AI will make these things progressively less and less human and more and more machine. I can imagine a future almost-entirely-silicon financial corporation that uses its speed and superior analytical intellect (at least in the financial domain) to lay waste to entire national economies in order to maximize shareholder value... i.e. paperclips. Since this would likely be found in the hedge fund world, nearly all of this siphoned-off wealth would be captured by a small number of already very rich people.
Nightmare AI wouldn't be much like Skynet -- a new being pursuing its own self-interest. It would be more like a very, very smart dog helping its elite owners "hunt" the rest of us in the financial sphere. This could fuel even more massive consolidation of financial wealth. We are already seeing the beginning of this with algorithmic quant finance.
In a thread on Twitter I also heard someone bring up "AI assisted demagoguery," a notion I found to be total nightmare fuel. Imagine a Hitler wannabe with a massive text-comprehending propaganda-churning apparatus able to leverage the massive data sets available via things like the Twitter and Facebook feeds to engage in high-resolution persuasion of millions and millions of people. The thing that makes this scary is that populist demagoguery gets more appealing when you have things like massive wealth inequality.
You can make counter-arguments here, but I also agree with Sam that it is foolish to just hand-wave these kinds of possibilities away. We should be thinking about them, and about how -- as he puts it -- we can find ways to channel this trend in more positive directions.
The size of the world changes - and gets broader - but the mechanism at play, that the concentrated powers of the world fuel each others innovations and those innovations catapult advancement but also introduce huge power vacuums between those nations adopting the new and those nations outside the sphere of influence - something I would not say was missing in the computer revolution, since the adoption of computer technology happened first and is still only pervasive in first world nations. The third world is still late to the party and comes in with fractured infrastructure and access, where systemic access and ubiquity enabled the Internet and a lot of the current revolutions in the first place.
In previous instances, the cost savings made the nations that had them superpowers in their times. The cotton gin is a huge part of why America went from an English vassal to a world power - between the innovations and the raw resources of the Americas, it could propagate empire.
But those profits just made men rich. The cotton, tobacco, industrial, automotive, oil, etc barons were the kings of their times through the innovations and automations of their industries. That has never really changed, those ruling over the industries being modernized always reap unfathomable wealth and power from the enterprise. Their wealth made their country rich, but the laborers still had to find something else to do every time, and up until now we have always had some unskilled menial and physical thing to have most people do. In actuality, we ran into that wall probably seventy years ago in the aftermath of World War 2 - as the US at least rapidly adopted women and minorities into the whole workforce the huge surge of productive labor combined with the green revolution, the reforms of the late industrial giving workers reasonable hours, unions, and power over their lives, plus the fledgling technological revolution that had already produced a lot of wonders (consumer refrigeration, microwaves, clothes washers and dryers, etc) had already crippled the low skill labor market and we collectively adapted by organically injecting superfluous bureaucracy in almost every business and part of life to make up for the work shortage.
Problem is that we did that, became a "service" economy, and are now faced with the obsolescence of busy office work. I can just remember CGPGrey talking about it in Humans Need Not Apply, in how the prime target for automation is not the McDonalds burger flipper but every middle income office worker who can be replaced by software. After bureaucracy, where do we inject the overflow labor of humanity? Or do we finally admit we don't need everyone laboring?
Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today.
The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.
The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.
Industrialization, massification, standardization of production and moving to big cities have had tough consequences on worker's life. Charlie Chaplin shows just that. It was a tougher life than traditional community life with flexible work amounts.
You could definitely argue that there was an improvement in caloric supply (except in some countries). For the general happiness, though, industrial revolution has been a tough time.
I'd also factor in modern medicine into people's happiness. It is tough on families when you often have infant deaths and you often have horrible diseases like polio and MMR.
Dickens wrote many social satires critical of injustices he perceived at the time like workhouses (basically sweatshops backed by organized crime) and Yorkshire boarding houses (pools of child labor). His descriptions of city life were not pleasant: pollution, crime, and unrest. It may have been quantitatively better for society in the long run but I think that the people stuck in those workhouses might have chosen nothing instead of the job they had been so graciously provided if they were given some other means of sustaining themselves.
I think that is a bit over-enthusiastic. Life was extremely tough for the new industrial workers. I think if you look at measures of health/nutrition like BMI and height, they are static or even slightly declining throughout the 19th century. In the UK it's only after 1910/1920 that you start seeing dramatic increases (that's about the time of the introduction of old age pension, and when the Labour movement started to gain serious traction).
That's why the US and Israel went after Iran's enrichment facilities with Stuxnet.
Another such example is screening massive number of chemicals to see what works and turning that to medicine.
So it's not hard to imagine a group with ill-intent, that uses some of the almost infinite variety of tools biology researchers have, and being successful in creating a serious biological threat.
I did get lucky and design, from first principles, a 4-fold increase in enzyme activity once, but I am not sure that is something I could repeat.
Here is basic outline: start with existing virus that has strong desired traits and known strains that mutated to resist antibiotics. Example traits include spread model, incubation length, and lethality.
Establish or take over a remote site that has little to no interaction with outside world. Remote corners of Africa and South America come to mind, there are plenty of secret illicit drug farms in the jungle. [0]
Infect the sample population with target disease, give it a few days, and slowly start to drip in countermeasures gradually increasing the dose. Idea is similar to how diseases we get anti-biotic resistant strains in the first place - people do not complete the full course of drugs and are left with weakened, but also with a strong selective pressure that benefits against strains that have resistance against drugs person was treated with.
Take samples when you have desired output and continue with new group of people.
To account for people who are immune to a particular disease repeat this with a different disease, potentially one that can advantage of weakened immune system.
Once target disease(s) are ready distribute them in population centers.
Now there are few obvious cons I can think of:
1. If secret about this leaks out, military reaction form rest of the world would be swift.
2. Hiding something like this is hard, and get's exponentially harder as group grows.
3. There is a strong chance something like this was tried already and failed. Possibly because I am grossly underestimating immune system.
4. To keep initial phase of developing secret initial group must be small, to spread it effectively dissemination group must be large.
[0] Another potential avenue is partnership with a supportive state such as Syria, North Korea, or Iran.
[0] not a full hazmat, just some protective wear over mouth, nose, ears, and eyes.
I believe that what you said is true, plus we could say that the fact that we haven't been exterminated with a plague makes us not so much experienced (as a race) on how detect whenever such situation will lead to being wiped out
I feel that HIV/AIDS is our only experience, at least that I'm aware of
We should still institute safety protocols suitable for a really-bad-case scenario.
But you do not have to repeat it. If there is even a small chance that a person trying would achieve something similar, someone with ill intent could get lucky.
1. I am just throwing numbers here, but let's say 1 out of a 1000 people is a scientist, that approximates to 7.2 millions of scientists alive.
2. Let's say one in a thousand of them are working on something that could be weaponized.
3. That leaves us at 72 thousand people.
4. Let's say one in a 1000 of them would consider releasing doomsday device if they could invent it to watch world burn, that takes it down to 72 people.
5. So we are left with 72 people who are working on something that with extraordinary lucky breakthrough could be weaponized that would weaponized if they managed to achieve that.
6. All those number above are just incredibly crude estimates, but I think they illustrate the fact that such scenario is possible.
There is a natural limit on selection like this. A lab doesn't have the limit because it's product is not constrained by natural selection.
Humankind has been genetically engineering organisms for most of our existence. Corn originally looked like grass. Chickens were lean, tough, and could fly. Dogs have been transformed from generalist survivors into purpose-built machines breed for beauty, farm work, and everything in between. The avocado, of all things, is a fantastic example of how capable we are at creating something which shouldn't really exist.
Doing the same with bacteria isn't that much harder, if you've got time and a few basic tools. Our manipulation of the genes directly only makes the process faster.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-s...
As we will be creating high functioning AI, robots and self-driving cars, we would also be creating jobs for people who would need to do the grunt work. I don't believe that we would be able to reach a level, ever where everything would automated without slightest of human intervention. The more sophistication we will have in the things we build, the more we would start have problems with them, which would need human attention.
People in every generation have been awestruck at the progress of human civilization, such that, they always have believed a computer that can think on his own is just near, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it just never happens. At least in my lifetime, I think I won't have to worry about robots that can kill us.
1. There is a reasonable probability that from a temporal distance equivalent to ours from the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and the software revolution will be seen as one big thing, not two.
2. The idea that the amount of available work should be related to the number of available people does not inevitably lead to creating new forms of work.
This is nothing new. Organized humans have always been able to cause outsized amounts of harm to other humans, they hardly needed software to do this. And in far greater orders of magnitude than a rocket. The effective answer to new, software-enabled threats is the same as it is to mercenaries, industrial polluters, rampant loggers and strip miners, arms manufacturers, human traffickers. Organization at a bigger scale to combat it. Pull the rug out from under them economically, understand their place sociologically, raise awareness culturally.
In the context of this essay the term "concentration of power" seems to mean the ability of a small group to have an outsized (and harmful) influence. This seems like a much larger problem than unemployment, but it isn't limited to technology. A network of a few hundred terrorists or just five guys in france can bring cities to a halt and affect the psyche of entire countries. It's just something that we're going through right now as a global culture, and I don't see any quick fixes. It is clear that the threat of malevolent AI is greatly overhyped, and I can't wait until the zeitgeist moves on to another flavor of the month criss du jour. There are very real threats facing the world right now and we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about something that might or might not happen, that we couldn't stop even if wanted to. Synthetic biology probably falls into the same category, though the ability to manufacture deadly viruses is based much more firmly in fact.
Guns, bombs, computers and the basic building blocks of life cannot be made illegal and confiscated en masse. One of the best ways to solve the threats posed by technology is to take the idea of income inequality, mentioned in this essay, very seriously. We've created a culture where people measure their self worth by the value of the companies they found. When I talk to people about technology, I don't hear about the large and small advances that make our lives a little bit better every day. I hear, "Isn't it crazy that Instagram was worth $XX billion dollars? I want to start a company and make that much too!". This is poison and it has to stop. If we place all the emphasis on who made what, we create a world where a lot of people get left out and forgotten. Then they spend their time in dark basements, watching extremist videos and working carelessly with dangerous tools. We need to turn technology into something that has benefits for everyone, in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones from some of its most dire consequences.
[0] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104719.html
McKenna is very dense and goes into immense detail about how we got here, and more importantly where we are going. I need not say more, except that Mc Kenna compares technological revolution as being similar to a birth of a child ― bloody and traumatic, but at the same time wonderful and awe inspiring.
False. The electricity to enrich a bomb's worth of material costs about $60,000. The plant itself is cheaper than the Tesla gigafactory, and it'll yield 1,000 times the energy it takes to run making regular reactor fuel (gigafactory will be lucky to break even). Laser enrichment is even cheaper, of course.
"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."
This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a weaver or a smith. You have dedicated your life to mastering the craft and slowly produce products by hand. Now a textile factory or a foundry opens up. You will suddenly find it impossible to make your products profitably. Not only will you be out of work, but so will all of your colleagues in the rest of the country.
Or imagine you are a farmer, and then the green revolution happens. In 1870, 80% of the US population was in agriculture. Today, its under 2%.
In both of these cases, it will seem like the end of the world to the displaced workers. But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.
It's so very ironically Soviet. Collectivized farming is boosting crop yields! What? There are people starving? How would that be possible, because collectivized farming is boosting crop yields!
There's nothing about being freed for "new purposes" that means those new purposes have economic value or will necessarily uplift your standard of living. In the developing world, they are undergoing the industrial revolution now so they are going through the same process of replacing farm jobs with factory jobs. But in the developed world, unemployment and inequality are rising.
I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.
That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.
What's funny is that modern so-called "neoliberals" seem to have adopted the Marxist idea of automatic progress. We are headed "forward" to the automatically-better future.
I think that's bollocks. We get the future we choose and work to achieve.