[ExI] AI and its implications for socialism

[William Flynn Wallace]

It seems to me that there are two kinds of socialism:  one where the
government runs the economy (which seems to be disastrous in every case),
and one where they don't (which is what all first world countries have).

Correct me if I am wrong. The second kind is where people tax themselves so
they can have streets paved, police and fire protection, a military, and so
on.  No harm here, it seems.

If AI pushes some radiologists out of work, just how is that socialism?  We
have unemployment benefits now, though not of the kind we will need when
millions are out of work.

bill w

On Thu, Jan 2, 2020 at 6:50 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> It's not just truck drivers and other low paid low skill workers that will
> have to face unemployment in the immediate future,  physicians will too.
> Yesterday in the journal Nature Google announced that they had a new
> computer program for reading X-ray mammograms. Google's program was better
> than human radiologists at finding breast cancer,  it had 9.4% fewer false
> positives and 5.7% fewer false negatives, and this is just an early version
> of the program. Until very recently image recognition was one of the few
> areas where humans could still beat machines but no more, the next step is
> manual dexterity and surgeons should be looking over their shoulders. And
> after that its nurses and Orderlies.
>
> It's stuff like this that made me think that I need to reevaluate my
> previous very negative opinion of socialism because I think it would be
> rather nice if human society didn't completely disintegrate and I sorta
> like the fact that my head is connected to my shoulders. One thing I know
> for sure, millions of unemployed starving people will not go gentle into
> that good night, they will rage against the dying of the light, and I don't
> want to be there when they do.
>
> Evaluation of an AI system for breast cancer screening
> <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1799-6>
>
> John K Clark
>
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