Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Thursday, December 8, 2016

150 Years From Now

I'll be surprised if there are even a billion people on Earth. Probably a lot less.
In all previous technological revolutions, people who lost their jobs mostly moved to new ones, but that will be less likely when the robots take over. A.I. that can learn from experience will replace many accountants, lawyers, bankers, insurance adjusters, doctors, scientific researchers and some creative professionals. Intelligence and advanced training will no longer mean job stability.

Gradually the A.I. era will transform the essence of human culture. When we’re no longer more intelligent than our machines, when they can easily outthink and outperform us, making the sort of intuitive leaps in research and other areas that we currently associate with genius, a sort of learned helplessness is likely to set in for us, and the idea of work itself may cease to hold meaning.
What will happen to humanity where there is very little productive work for people to do?

8 comments:

Joe said...

At the rate we're using up soil, we have only 60-100 harvests left. Antibiotics will only work for a few more decades. And what's happening with the polar ice right now is so weird I can't even interpret it yet.

The definition of "productive work" is going to change pretty soon. One way or the other.

Paul W said...

we've past the point of overpopulation numbers, and yet we're still growing on a global scale.

we're wiping out species not out of malice but just sheer overwhelming the environment.

in terms of robotics taking over the workforce, this is why governments are starting to look into guaranteed incomes as a means of keeping money circulating as the threat of unemployment looms.

Stewart Dean said...

This guy wrote a book on this future
http://ieet.org/archive/LIGHTSTUNNEL.PDF

Read at least the first third.........

Anonymous said...

We can hope it turns out as Asimov postulated in a later "Robot" story. It predicated AI before the term existed. The Advanced AI's luckily were controlled by the Three Laws of Robotics. So they basically developed a placid society for humans to live in, unknowingly manipulated into an advanced Nirvana by their benign robot overlords. For their own good.

Nah... It's much more likely that we will get SKYNET and Terminators culling the herd into just enough slaves to maintain the AI's...

Jack the Cold Warrior

Comrade Misfit said...

Jack, I tend to agree. No mater how the initial designers try to engineer the AI to be benevolent, it'll become advanced enough to rewrite its own source cod. I suspect that from awakening to a form of SkyNet will happen at stunning speed.

Or they can try to do it slowly, like the Aschen did (SG-1).

Anonymous said...

Magnus will save us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fyHU0Z4Iw

Borepatch said...

Or it will play out like in Dune, with mobs tearing computers (and computer programmers) apart. I somehow don't see 5 Billion people going quiet into that dark night.

Comrade Misfit said...

Borepatch, I expect that the eventual SkyNet AI will be very subtle about it. I doubt if there will be a realization of what is happening until it is far too late, and then, what is the alternative? March into the wilderness (what's left of it, like the idiots of Battlestar Galactica?

One point: How will information about what is happening circulate?