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Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity

I've been wondering the same thing for many years now. The problem of course is that you can automate a great deal of mundane tasks, and hand production over to robot factories for better, higher quality, lower cost production. Most intellectual tasks such as accounting can be handled by computers. Most service tasks can be handled by automated voice systems (though at present they are rather awful, that need not be the case, and they could be improved), etc.

In the end the question becomes "What will all of the surplus people do to earn a living?"

The answer to that is very difficult to fathom. And begs another question... for whom is all of this automation being conducted if not for the purchasing public... but who will buy the products when no one is needed to do the work, and therefore produces no value, and therefore cannot earn money because money is an exchange of value? What will become of the masses of people who have no value in the economy because their productive use has been superseded by machines? Economy works that people gain money according to their value, and that value flows around the market aggregating capital where it can be put to productive use. However, this assumes that everyone can provide some value to the economy. When they can’t because the means of production are automated, then they are out of work, and have no income. There are several possible results.

One is that people will not earn money, but be given credits by the system to spend. The problem is that this runs against the nature of economy, which is you gain income according to your value. If you have no value, then the only place you can gain income is from someone who does have value. And that would be the so-called 1% being protested in major cities around the country. Things have not come to the point where the 1% are the *only* ones who have value/income, but the article is in regards to future conditions, not present. So eventually, and perhaps quite soon, the 1% will be the only working members of society. So the solution in this case is to tax the 1% sufficiently to pay everything for the masses who have no jobs, but still want and need to buy things. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul! The 1% will literally be paying everyone else so they can buy the products they produce. Somehow, this just seems quite wrong. I don’t know for sure, but I strongly suspect it cannot be sustained. It runs too counter to common sense economics.

What could it be? Ah. I see. The masses will have no work, and without work they will be prone to restless mob-like activity. Unless they are entertained, fed, and provided for in every way they will feel disenfranchised and angry. One step further and the political class will have an enormous ability to rally the mob on the grounds that the entire system is “unequal”. Why? Well, the reason the 1% got where they are is because they wanted to make a lot of money, and to maximize their profits and beat their competition they automated significantly in order to lower costs of production. Makes sense. But what happens when the masses of the Unworking see the vast wealth of the 1% and their politicians who represent them (the Leftists) argue, rant and rail that it’s all “unfair” that the 1% have jets and fancy cars and mansions, while the masses must live in modest two bedroom houses with small cars? The mob will roar and rage and since they have no jobs, no responsibility, and are inclined to be restless and somewhat angry anyway… they may just go ahead and burn the Factories down. Look at Britain recently. Tip of the ice berg? Could be!

It’s fair to ask, what good will all the automation in the world do when the mobs burn down the factories? The answer to that, of course, is Automated Military Guardians to protect the factories, obviously. Terrorism? No problem. Automated facial recognition, and body motion-emotion detector systems will show the Robot Guardians immediately who is going to do some unauthorized vandalism and open fire with Taser Banks set on stun. Or Kill. Robot warriors will be the 1%’s security. So what will the mob do to vent it’s ever increasing rage? It will in all likelihood go after the 1% directly. As we are now seeing the beginning signs of in NYC with the Occupy Wall Street protesters marching uptown to the mansions of the super wealthy. When will that turn violent? This year? Next year? In 5 years? No one can say for sure. It could be tomorrow morning.

In the end the Great Ones, the high and the mighty Industrialists, the 1% who own the production will have to sequester themselves away into communities where the mobs cannot get at them. An island here, a fortress there... all will be safe for the 1%. Unfortunately they will soon discover, this is really, in fact, no way to live. They will discover that they live in a huge prison called Planet Earth, on which they have vastly restricted freedom because the mobs will have at them at every opportunity.

Let’s not forget as well that their computer systems will be flawed, due to the decades of poor computer development practices, and so even far away in the Swiss Alps, behind their huge stone barriers... they will still be subject to the predations of hackers. There will be, in fact, no place for them to hide. And so what happens when the Industrialists find themselves living on Prison Earth, with the seething mobs circling their fortresses, having nothing better to do but riot, and plot, and wait for the precious day when they can catch the 1% off their guard, or hack into their Robot Army and turn their mechanical behemoths against their fleshy Overlords?

It would be a weird, regrettable, and sadly not entirely improbable outcome if things keep going in the current direction.

That is one possible scenario. We can all hope it does not get like that. What other possibilities are there?

Another one is to follow the example of Titus the one of the wise Emperors of Rome. When an inventor came to him with the first steam engine, the Emperor asked, “what can you do with it?”. The Inventor replied, quite joyfully no doubt, “why you can build machines to cut down forests, and build giant aqueducts! There is no limit to what the machines powered by steam can do!” The wise Emperor stood on his balcony overlook the vast wheat fields, forests, and cities of his domain, and concluded that he should lock the Inventor away, and hide the machine for all time. When he was asked why he did such a thing, he wisely noted that the machines would replace the workers, who would then be left idle, and with nothing to do they would become restless, easily agitated, and so destroy the world. He decided that outcome would not be in the best interests of either the common man, or the aristocracy, or humanity at large as it would inevitably lead to universal disaster. He was wise.

So that is another option. Do away with automation in favor of manual production in order to avoid the consequences that would follow when everything is automated. To keep people working is better than maximizing efficiency or profits.

That is another option, but one that probably requires a wise Emperor at the beginning of the process to execute against. At this point the option of turning off technology seems rather remote. We can possibly mitigate, perhaps delay, but we can no longer avoid the inevitable. Another solution is very likely required.

Let’s try a Utopic fantasy solution then. How about a world in which automated factories are put in space so as to not pollute the planet? A world in which the masses do not produce products, but instead produce entertainment. The more entertaining they are, the more valuable. The planet becomes filled with people who sing and dance, do sports, tell stories, run games, and otherwise entertain each other, and this forms the basis of the economy, while the machines build the products that people buy.

Still problems. What about people who are simply not very entertaining? Not everyone is a genius, an artist, or a story teller. It also does not solve the problem of the need for human inspiration… the feeling that untied we can move forward and keep our race growing and advancing? For that, I would suppose there is another option. Space. The final frontier. Exploration. We could build towards that. Another option, of course, is scientific advancement. While machines may be able to achieve vast powers of calculation… can we expect them to Think Outside of the Box? To come up with new and original ideas?

Unfortunately, perhaps, the answer is yes, we can. Already people are working on computers that write songs that sound nice, act like humans and tell stories, and from the prognostications regarding Singularity one gets the impression that the machine-mind will far exceed the limited capacity of the human mind.

Perhaps the machines will invite the humans to join them? There is a growing field of Biological-Computers that base their mechanisms on DNA. Will we fuse with the machines like the Borg? Or will we become Super-Beings with computer enhanced capabilities far beyond those of ordinary men?

The future indeed is unpredictable. I for one remain at this point optimistic. As in every era, there are bright spots and dark spots, and much gray in the middle. During the terrors of World War II there were young couples who fell in love, got engaged, and started families. There were beautiful sunrises, and fields of flowers. I choose, for myself, to look for love, for sunrises, and for flowering fields. And I hope that in the end, the beauty intrinsic in life will overcome the dark possibilities that lurk beyond the shadows of the horizon.

REPLY

theradicalmoderate

41 Comments

2 DAYS AGO10/13/2011

Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity

I can think of several different scenarios for how this all works out:

1) It won't happen: Maybe productivity growth can't exceed output growth. This is the classical economic prediction, because increased productivity implies cheaper goods and services, which causes everybody to buy more stuff, which causes output to grow faster than productivity. Unfortunately, I think there's a saturation point at which humans are unwilling to buy more stuff, because they're simply not getting any marginal return from nicer furniture, or tastier food, or healthcare that lets them live to be 900 instead of 800, or 25 hours of entertainment in a 24 hour day.

2) Hyper-consumerism: Maybe the reason that consumption saturation doesn't occur is because technology allows us to consume more and more with no upper bound or, alternatively, it gives us access to new realms of goods and services that are very expensive and require lots of human mediation. Health care comes to mind. But it seems that tech that turns us into hyper-consumers also turns us into hyper-producers, and we're back to the same old problem.

3) An adequately benign welfare state: If 75% of the population can be provided with healthy, happy (non-productive) lives for 25% of GDP, then the productive people (and their machines) can support the non-productive relatively painlessly. Note that individual humans aren't the only entities that pay taxes.

4) Everybody's a stockholder: If everybody owns a chunk of the automated companies that are producing all the wealth, then maybe they live off the dividends and capital gains spun off from those companies. The problem here is how to provide folks the capital to buy into the companies in the first place. Ultimately, I don't think this is a lot different than the benign welfare state; it's just another way to redistribute wealth from the productive to the unproductive. (NB: This isn't necessarily a bad thing when goods and services are sufficiently cheap.)

5) Torches and pitchforks: Too many angry, desperate, unproductive people become violent enough to degrade society to the point where productivity falls below growth, and the system stabilizes. Note that "stabilizes" in this context really means "collapses to a much lower-tech civilization."

6) Dramatically reduced human population: It's all well and good to posit a practical welfare state, or the mass equivalent of a bunch of trust fund babies, but these all strike me as transient conditions. Ultimately, people have babies because they perceive an economic advantage to having them, or because they believe that their kids will live better than they did. No advantage or aspirations, no kids. Then, as long as people actually die (which is probably open to question), maybe things finally stabilize at a lower population. The problem with this is that, in a world where half of everybody is of below-average intelligence (OK, OK: below-median intelligence), a lower population doesn't really change the balance between the haves and the have-nots.

7) Just don't go there: I'm about as rabid a free-market libertarian as you'll find anywhere, but given how grim most of the scenarios above are, I've recently started to wonder if Titus's solution might be the only way out of the problem. If we make it illegal for automation to displace humans, then we don't have a problem. Unfortunately, this is an insurmountably difficult collective action problem. Getting all countries to voluntarily cap their productivity is tantamount to getting them all to agree to stop competing with one another. Hey, it could happen...

8) Transcendence: Of course if Kurzweil is right, then we are the machines eventually, and we don't have to worry those pesky unproductive people--we'll just wire 'em up to be productive. Maybe this is ultimately the only way out of the problem. But I have to say that a lot of these scenarios offer an uncomfortably plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox.