What will happen to the 95% of have-nots by 2050. Yes, by 2050 the highly educated 5% will control the robots, and the robots will reproduce themselves.  And by 2050, many of those robots will run a 24/365 surveillance and protect the 5% of haves from the 95% of starving and desperate have-nots. If the 95% of starving and desperate have-nots are not working, then what will they live on? And who will consume the products produced by the robots that are built and controlled by the 5% of highly educated haves?

Will the haves eliminate the monetary system altogether? Perhaps wealth will be measured on how many and what kind of robots a person designs, builds,  owns, and controls. Will the haves program their robots to enslave the 95% of have-nots, to minimally feed, clothe, and house them, and then to gradually exterminate them like rats? Life can never again be as it was, where the have-nots eked out a meagre subsistence while supporting themselves and the haves. By 2050 there will be no more meaningful jobs for the have-nots, because robots will have taken over all those jobs, robots that require no food, no clothing, and minimal shelter.

Without a doubt, the ever-burgeoning population of have-nots must consume ever-increasing amounts of precious food, clothing, and shelter, whereas the ever-burgeoning population of robots can get along nicely without them. By 2050, robots will be fully capable of reproducing, caring for themselves, and supplying all their and their masters’ needs. Thus it seems more and more likely that the haves would feel less and less compelled to prolong the existence and suffering of the have-nots.

So the phrase “Engineering will get you through times of no Music better than Music will get you through times of no Engineering” will take on more and more significance in the coming decades. One must become highly educated and skilled to reduce the risk of falling by the wayside and becoming trampled under the stampede of robots.

So, “It is a safer bet that the surviving professions in the year 2050 will control the automations and machines that will insure their very survival.”

Forgot to mention that I didn’t even know I’m apparently a “Kurzweilian.”  I looked him up and will have to read his books on AI.  From the blurbs and reviews of them, I’ll say that I’m _definitely not_ as optimistic about the time-frames involved as he is.

I’ll go with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

“We don’t know what consciousness is.”

I’ll go with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

“I just think we’re farther off than you Kurzweilians are willing to admit.”

I have no idea how far off we are. Not within my lifetime for certain and I’d make a wild guess that it will be over 100 years from now. I just believe that, based upon the rapid level of improvements in their computing power and the prospects of quantum computing, computers will surpass us in intelligence and at some point WE will enable an ability in them to self-replicate and self-improve for OUR own benefit.

The human brain is a massively parallel computer of a volume fixed by the size of the human birth canal (unless we come up with “test tube babies” that can be grown outside the womb and know how to enhance their brain size and capability) and I have no problem imagining that a quantum computer with atomic-scale components would far surpass it in raw computational capability.  The critical factor in the resulting intelligence of that hardware is the software driving it, of course.  I’d guess that that software is far more difficult to foresee than the extremely powerful hardware it would be running on.

Right now, I’m living large. This time two years ago, I was unemployed. I want there to be a system such that I and the people I love can survive and be happy during periods when they can’t find work. Am I willing to go without a few luxury items to ensure that that system exists? Of course I am! What’s wrong with you that you aren’t? Stop pretending that grasping selfishness is a virtue!

I too have fallen into the mindset of buying machinery in place of hiring workers and giving little thought for those I displace. I can only hope that most of the good readers here are more responsible people than I and understand their responsibility to hire others instead of substituting capital.

Mea culpa

We can’t even define intelligence yet.  We don’t know what consciousness is.  There is simply no justification for these sorts of extrapolations. 

And this is the opinion of a materialist atheist sci fi nerd who thinks real artificial intelligence and mind uploading are possible in principle.  I just think we’re farther off than you Kurzweilians are willing to admit.

BTW, do you see how you’re loading your language? I pointed out that machines aren’t really evolving so you switch to “improving” — but it’s still “the machines are improving”! No, the machines are not improving, WE are improving the machines. That little change in wording makes a huge difference to your argument.

Not now, of course.  We have invented our _eventual_ successors for the reasons I mentioned earlier – computers are improving _vastly_ faster than we are evolving.  Quantum computing will accelerate that further by many orders of magnitude.

If you desire to argue further, email this guy:

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Or these guys:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847

or any of the large number of other scholars who believe that artificial intelligence will in a blink of biological evolutionary time outshine biological forms.

Please, if you want socialism, vote for it. Otherwise don’t complain about the system you love only when it stings.

You seem to be making a few unjustified assumptions here.

I mean, technically the industrial economy is the result of direct government intervention in the market (AKA “socialism”) rather than this mythical “capitalism” stuff I hear so much about.  Walmart, UPS, and FedEx can all thank Ike Eisenhower’s interstate system for their success; Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. can thank Bell Labs and their cushy government-sponsored monopoly that allowed the basic research into electronics and computing in the mid-20th century — and the federal government’s moves to turn the packet-switching technology developed through DoD grants over to private industry, another huge direct US government subsidy of tech business.

But ignoring the lack of historical basis for the libertarian view of the world, you’re assuming that those who want socialism aren’t voting for it.  Why assume this?  They usually are voting for it — or would if voting for socialism was an option in the USA.  Somewhere around half of USians like the idea of a single-payer healthcare system; those people voted for a president who didn’t even consider single-payer to be an option during the process of reforming the healthcare system.  (Incidentally, health care is a great example of a system that is not optimized when it is profit-driven as demonstrated by the superior performance of socialized healthcare systems.)

Finally, you’re assuming people complaining about the system love it.  Maybe some people don’t think a boring, meaningless, and alienating existence is adequately repayed by little plastic pieces of junk that let you play “Angry Birds” on your morning commute.

BTW, when you say what you believe that’s called offering an opinion.  When you provide some evidence and reasoning that suggest that what you believe is actually true that’s called an argument.  Try the latter.

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

-J Robert Oppenheimer

It was to point out that we have invented our successors in robots and AI which are evolving at a rate far faster that are we and which may quickly evolve to levels of capability far beyond that which can pass through a human birth canal.

There is at this point in history no reason to believe robots are our successors.  The term “artificial intelligence” is essentially meaningless except in the loosest sense — computers can perform some interesting tasks very well but what human beings think of as “intelligence” or even merely “competence” is still far, far beyond the understanding of any human engineers.  Robots and AI are not “evolving” except again in the loosest sense of the word.  Since they cannot self-replicate they cannot evolve in any true sense.

A thought experiment: If humans went extinct tomorrow would robots and AI continue to get better and faster?  Of course not.  This simple thought experiment demonstrates it’s not the robots or AI that are living or succeeding or evolving — so far that’s been us.

From watching this happen, I have concluded that our government is not interested in taking action to protect jobs.  In a government that prioritized  citizens over corporate profits, there would have been, I don’t know, task forces and debates.  But it was radio silence on this issue.  You don’t have to have socialism to make policies that protect people’s livelihoods.  There are government subsidies for all sorts of things (including sending jobs overseas, I believe).

I am very grateful to see this issue being discussed now.  It’s not abstract for me because I saw what happened to my family and also because I am now a lecturer.  Online instruction poses a real threat to teachers’ jobs.  It’s time to have a serious discussion about technology vs jobs. 

http://thequestionconcerningtechnology.blogspot.com/2013/01/hello-robots-goodbye-fry-cooks.html

Not sure what’s going on in Shanghai, but I for one prioritize indoor plumbing over a tiny slab that allows me to talk to faraway friends. 

Maybe I’m over-thinking it, but it seems like us tool-users have always been afraid that our tools will overpower us, but just can’t help ourselves, from Prometheus and friends onwards.

The Kurzweil-flavor “singularity” is boring– a simple extrapolation that demeans the wonder that is human intelligence and the natural systems that created and sustain it.

But a real singularity of sorts is upon us:  the real connectedness of all human beings through communication technologies.  Humans have been cybernetic beings since machines became integral parts of our lives– even simple tools and clothing make humans more capable creatures.  Now we have so much technology to reach out and be more human than ever, and frankly I’m sick of hearing about how powerful the robots are becoming: it’s about how powerful we’re making OURSELVES!

Technology moves in all directions– sometimes backwards– in generally small steps, and people will adjust and find things to do.  But when people talk of the “singularity,” it’s like saying suddenly we’ll jump 50 years ahead, be surrounded by smart robots, and have no idea what to do.

Robots are just machines.  How incredibly arrogant of humans to think that we could design machines smarter than us, or to think that we can even completely comprehend what “human intelligence” really is!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1448659817

It is all about the impact of robots/automation on jobs and the economy. It makes the basic point that machines do not drive consumer spending. As more jobs are eliminated, could a smaller and smaller percentage of the population sustain consumer spending and the economy?  Would we want that? 

Whether you agree with the book’s conclusions or not, it raises many important and fascinating questions. Questions that are are really not being addressed elsewhere. Check out the reviews on Amazon (over 100 with many strongly opposed views).

On the other hand, the Internet-age’s sweetest dividend is the creative possibilities: the chance to sit in your little grass shack or organic farm or urban crackerbox and use the tubes to carry on debate; to contribute to software and Wikipedia; to crowdsource capital for your creativity; to find makers who have solved 90% of the problem that’s nagging you and who will help you solve the remaining ten percent

Though I agree with some of what’s implied here, this is a top-down fantasy of life at the lower end of the income spectrum.

Not only do those of us at the bottom have to deal with the corporate shuffle, we also have to deal with those who think every little creative idea thought up in someone’s basement, “wants to be free”ly crowdsourced to someone else who is in the process of climbing the economic ladder.

For some abject reason the problem of collective income creation, itself, is part of the mythical 10% here. You can’t save an organized group if you don’t believe in “organization” in the first place.

a world where the means of information is owned by no one and yet tended by all

whether we get that or not is going to be largely irrelevant if the means of production – of food, of water, of energy – is inaccessible or inadequate for large numbers of people.

information may enrich our lives hugely, but we are living systems first, and that means we need to eat, drink and be (sort of) safe. the current trends are not looking too good as far as providing access to such basic needs.

And see:
http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-are-people-good-for.html