[ExI] Economics of SENS

[Aleksei Riikonen]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:07 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote:
>> You're limiting yourself to thinking only about relatively wealthy
>> people who have jobs that they like, even though they are a small
>> minority of humans in the world as it currently exists. For most jobs
>> that the economy currently relies on, one cannot find people who would
>> do them if they had a bit more choice in the matter.
>
> You don't need to speculate. Retirement has been much studied and
> society is changing.

What was I speculating about?

Also, these studies you are referring to tend to tell only of the
minority upper classes of our planetary society. My interest is not
limited to them. A lot of people that the global economy currently
relies on have probably not even heard of the concept of retirement.

> Machine/AIs to replace humans will be expensive.
> By the time they become cheap so much else will have changed in
> society that it doesn't even make much sense to talk about 'jobs'
> then.

Once at least some AIs are able to do jobs such as computer
programming and business analysis (in a wide sense of these job
descriptions) well enough to be hired/"hired", I doubt there will be a
longer than very short while where such AIs are expensive (unless
nasty monopolies on key cognitive technologies persist unfortunately
and surprisingly long).

Yeah, we might not be using the word "job" much once we've gotten to
such a point. But before we get to such a point, I expect most jobs
that the global economy relies on to be rather unpleasant for humans
to do, as is the situation currently.

-- 
Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei