[ExI] self driving truck

Sun Oct 30 17:23:12 UTC 2016

On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 11:34 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 
> What capabilities do people of IQ 85 and below have?  That's about 16% of
> the population
>

It's not just those with low IQs whose jobs will be eliminated by AI, this
will effect everyone, and if the computer revolution has taught us anything
it's that our intuition about what tasks are easy and what tasks are
difficult is completely wrong. It turns out that it takes much more
brainpower to tell the difference between a picture of a dog and a picture
of a cat than it does to play a good game of chess. Hedge fund managers
will be replaced before car repair mechanics, and vice-presidents of
Fortune 500 corporations will be replaced before watchsmiths. One of the
last professions to be replaced will probably be care of the elderly, a job
few would want even if the pay were better.

> > 
> So what are we going to do with them in an AI world? Most crime that we
> hear about is blue collar - poor, unemployed, and perhaps unemployable.

Yes and it's only a matter of 
time before everybody is unemployable. Pure libertarian dogma has no
answer to this problem, at least none I've seen, that's why I dared to
utter the dreaded words "nanny state". If somebody has a better idea I'm
all ears.

John K Clark

> Perhaps there would be less of it if we gave everybody a guaranteed income
> (welfare feeds a lot of people but it doesn't pay most bills).
>
> Frankly we have more people at every level than we need, so the long term
> solution is to get them out of the gene pool without creating an evil,
> authoritarian state.
>
> There will be a lot of objections to paying people to stay home and watch
> TV, but what else are we going to do with them?
>
> bill w
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 9:46 AM, William Flynn Wallace <
> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm starting to think it may be time to consider some form of the nanny
>> state.  john
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 9:43 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 12:53 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> > 
>>>> Cool!  So now we have a demonstration using an 18 wheeler:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://www.foxnews.com/auto/2016/10/25/ottos-self-driving-se
>>>> mi-truck-made-beer-run.html
>>>>
>>>
>>> It is cool, but I got to thinking about the social implications of
>>> driver-less trucks and of AI in general. In the USA alone 4.1 million
>>> people make their living driving a vehicle, those jobs are likely to go
>>> away in the very near future. I think the next to go will likely be the 9.7
>>> million who work in restaurants. Traditionally the fast food industry was
>>> where somebody with no skills could still get a job, but not for long.
>>> After that its
>>>  bookkeepers, travel agents
>>>  and
>>> legal aids
>>> .
>>> And it's not just the unskilled that need to worry
>>>  about the increased power of AI
>>> ,  if I were a hedge fund manager I'd make as money now
>>> as I could 
>>> while I still
>>> had a job.
>>> 
>>>  
>>>
>>> From the start of the industrial revolution there has been a linear
>>> relationship between wages the average person received and the increased
>>> productivity cause by improved technology, but about 2002 that changed, the
>>> amount of wealth produced still increase but real wages plateaued, and
>>> since 2007 paychecks have actually declined. GDP has increased but median
>>> income has not because the increase in wealth went exclusively to the top,
>>> the richest 1% have as much money as the remaining 99%. And even among the
>>> 1% most of the increase in wealth went to the top 1% of the top 1% of the
>>> top 1%.
>>>
>>> As
>>>  recently as 2010 the richest 388 people in the world had as much
>>> money as the poorest 3.6 Billion people, by 2014 the richest 85 did, in
>>> 2015 it was 80, in the latest results made just this year the richest 62
>>> people had as much wealth as half of the entire human species, 3.6 Billion
>>> people.
>>>
>>>
>>> Unless something is pushing in the opposite direction the advances in AI
>>> are likely to accelerate this trend so before long fewer than 62 will be
>>> required. But does anybody on this list think
>>> 
>>> nothing will push back? Does anybody think
>>>  
>>> this trend can continue without grave social unrest?  I don't. And I
>>> think
>>> 
>>> that
>>> 
>>> is the root cause of the anger
>>> 
>>> in
>>> 
>>> the electorate and the reason some bizarre
>>> 
>>> illogical
>>> 
>>> dangerous people may be voted into office in democracies all over the
>>> world.
>>>
>>> So what is to be done? I hate to say it because it stands
>>> against everything I've believed since I was a teenager but unless somebody
>>> has a better idea I'm starting to think it may be time to consider some
>>> form of the nanny state. After all, no matter what you job is sooner or
>>> later a machine will be able to do it better than you can. And it will
>>> probably happen sooner than you expect, that's why it's called a
>>> singularity.
>>>
>>>  John K Clark
>>>
>>> .
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> extropy-chat mailing list
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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