[ExI] chatbots and marketing: was RE: India and the periodic table

Fri Jun 9 17:56:07 UTC 2023

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Sent: Friday, 9 June, 2023 10:29 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] chatbots and marketing: was RE: India and the periodic table

>…I am so jealous of you.  You will get to see a lot of these changes and I won't.  Oh well.  I once told Mama that she lived through the times from horse and buggy to the Moon landing and ten years more, and those were probably the greatest changes that have occurred in human history in that short a time.  But maybe not.  Maybe I have.  Maybe you will.  Can positive acceleration just keep on keeping on?   bill w

Can positive acceleration keep on?  Goooooood question Billw.  I once firmly believed it can, and the concept of extropy is based on that belief.  Now it isn’t nearly as clear.  I do hope it works that way, but I will confess to vague doubts at times.  We don’t know what machines will want to do with us, but we can pretty much guess what we will want to do with us, given the machines to do it with: kill each other.

China would really really like to convert North America and Europe into a food-supplying raw-materials supplying slave labor continents, much the way the west uses Africa now.  If China Inc controls the ability to automate nearly everything currently done in offices today, that scenario is realistic.

spike

On Fri, Jun 9, 2023 at 12:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Sent: Friday, 9 June, 2023 9:39 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> >
Cc: William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com <mailto:foozler83 at gmail.com> >
Subject: Re: [ExI] chatbots and marketing: was RE: India and the periodic table

Taiwan has the best, eh Spike?  Well, what the Hell happened to industrial espionage?  Enormous dollars are at stake and there are still secrets?  Get a spy.  Pay him 50 million dollars - cheap at that price.  Why take over a country?   (also, a tetrabyte would be part of a fish)  

bill w

Industrial espionage steals the intellectual property in the factory, but does not steal the actual factory.  Taiwan has the best and most electronic manufacturing on the scale necessary to have the best and fastest GPUs.  America knows *how* to design those GPUs and how to build the factories, but the right combination of tax structure and talent base came together in Taiwan, which made that country ground zero for the manufacture of the most advanced computer chips in the world.

But since you ask, I propose a thought experiment sir.

Picture in your mind a working person in the USA, or Europe.  OK, do you have your mental image?  Did you picture a guy in an office, perhaps in front of a computer most of the day?  Plenty of us made our living or still make our living that way.

That was part 1, now part 2, consider a worker on the continent of Africa, working.  Did you picture a guy grubbing around collecting lithium ore in horrific conditions to satisfy the insatiable appetite in foreign lands for the stuff? 

If you did, then, good for you.  You are aware of where we are in human history: the west is charging ahead with clean and green technologies, by compelling people in less fortunate parts of the world to grub around, dig up their land, gather the lithium and other minerals we need to purr around in our clean green cars.

OK then, part 3 of the experiment if you are still reading down this far.

Picture specialized chatbots which are trained on something very specific, such as the complete US tax code.  Printed out and bound into books, that tax code on a shelf spans the left elbow to the right wing tip on a typical tall man, so can estimate about 1 to 1.5 meters of book, perhaps two billion words.  A chatbot could read all that, and become a soft accountant.  It could be a five dollar alternative to hiring an accounting form.  It might be able to train the soft accountant to read all your receipts, figure out what is deductible, fill out your tax return.  If so, the tax accounting business is headed out the door, and if that can be done with specialized chatbots, so can nearly everything done currently in an office in front of a computer in part 1 of your thought experiment.

Conclusion: the guy who owns the capacity to manufacture the hardware to make those bots owns the planet.

spike 

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