

In the long run, we are telepathic androids - nopinsight
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/05/robot-threat

======
fmstephe
There is a string of interesting articles linked inside. I have laid them out
here for quick access.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-
robo...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/)

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-m...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-
markets)

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-m...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-
markets-0)

[http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/robots-
artificial-i...](http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/robots-artificial-
intelligence-jobs-automation?page=2)

[http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21572741...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21572741-robots-are-getting-more-powerful-need-not-be-bad-news)

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Asimovian
Ignoring all of the text past the block quote:

These are not new ideas; this was all previously thought of by The Big 3 Sci-
fi writers (Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov), with Isaac
Asimov making most of the robotics predictions. Paul Krugman (one of the
articles linked to) chose economics because it was the closest available field
to Asimov's Psychohistory:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_krugman#Personal_life>

[Asimov spoilers after the quote, with non-spoiler links after]

" What’s going to happen is massive income transfers to flesh and blood human
beings. These income transfers will come to be seen as a right-of-birth. This
will make complete social sense once you realize that most of the beings on
earth will be robots and therefore not-of-birth.

    
    
        Birth is something that happens to a minority of beings who are special, flesh and blood humans.
    
        The concern, as I see it, is over accepting the dual truth that robots will in all likelihood be sentient beings with an inner life just as ourselves, and they will live in grinding inescapable poverty."
    

[Begin Asimov spoilers]

Asimov envisioned that 50 Spacer colonies would eventually leave the solar
system and colonize other systems. Their societies would develop according to
the group psychosis and phobias the original floating colonies possessed,
adjusted to fit their new environments. (The 50 colonies resembled a spectrum
of psychosis where the social phobia of the most extreme Spacer worlds
progressed to the point they only managed physical contact for sexual
reproduction, which they eventually phased out in favor of asexual
reproduction, I digress). Earthlings feared robots and relegated them to
agricultural and infrastructure tasks while shunning them from their
agoraphobic society.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria> is the last and most extreme of these
Spacer worlds. The decision to become social isolationists with a heavy
dependency on robotic labor resulted in the demise of their society, and was
the type of social decay that Asimov feared might occur in humanity following
the adoption of robots.

[End Asimov spoilers]

I highly recommend <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov> for anyone
interested in this topic. There are some online sources for his work, and
there is a large availability at <http://www.abebooks.com/>

Other Links:

<http://www.asimovonline.com/asimov_home_page.html>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov_bibliography>
<http://archive.org/details/IsaacAsimov-TheFoundationTrilogy>
<http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL34221A/Isaac_Asimov>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_series_%28Asimov%29>

------
edanm
After years of reading Yudkowsky/LessWrong, I find it hard to take these kinds
of articles seriously. They're talking about a future where AI actually
exists, and not letting their imagination get even _close_ to the true
repercussions.

When you suddenly have an intelligent species running around that's _vastly_
more intelligent than humans, it's hard to even imagine what it will mean, but
"there will be vast transfers of wealth" is not even close. More like "the
world will be unimaginably different", or more likely "the world will be
destroyed".

For more in-depth looks at these things: LessWrong.com and intelligence.org.

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kablamo
The title is better than the article.

Humans and robots are merging more than they are competing. Its a symbiotic
relationship.

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Egregore
I don't understand, why the AI should have sentience? Will it be required by
some AI laws, or will it be initially a convenient interface to communicate
with AI?

~~~
nlh
I think the implication is not that future AIs -should- have sentience, it's
that they -will- have sentience as a byproduct of their advancement. So the
issue is how we're going to deal with that byproduct.

~~~
Egregore
Why AIs should have sentience as a byproduct? For example let's say that I
want AI to make an accounting software, first the AI will look for accounting
laws, then will analyze my requirements and look for similar software already
developed, then it will generate the code and offer me the software, where in
these steps it will need sentience?

~~~
seiji
I'd argue your presupposition is false. Your bury sentience in your
definitions of "look for accounting laws," "analyze my requirements," "look
for similar software", "generate the code," "offer me the software."

Each of those steps require a feeling for what is right, wrong, appropriate,
inappropriate, and culturally acceptable. MakeAccountingSoftware() is a little
more involved than GraphPlan().

~~~
Egregore
Does the feeling of right and wrong means sentience?

~~~
seiji
You can have codified right and wrong, but that's widely different. Sharia
right and wrong varies from US Constitutional right and wrong varies from US-
in-practice right and wrong.

I'd argue you need sentience for any meaningful right and wrong. There are a
few universal rights we can't even agree on as a society, so having Evil Corp
Government Agglomerated strictly defining right and wrong is, well, wrong.

The downside is a perversion of sentient AI could end up with Evil Sentient
Sharia AI that shoots non-burka wearing females or an Evil Sentient Hasidic AI
that shoots any non-beard-n-curls-n-hat wearing dudes or Evil Sentient
Spaghetti Monster AI who force feeds carbs to everybody not wearing a strainer
on their heads.

In short: determining what is right and wrong requires sentience. Just
following what you are told is right and wrong does not.

------
jaibot
Now might be a good time to point out <http://intelligence.org/?r=1>

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dinkumthinkum
I'm at a loss. This is the dumbest thing I have read in a long time and I kept
re-checking the address bar in amazement to see that this is really on The
Economist. I'm sort of shocked to see such obscene detritus published by them.
This was such a garbled mess. We're using Moore's Law as a predictor of strong
AI? Really? Does anyone there have an education in just basic CS, let alone
AI? We're just totally skirting over very serious issues as to whether strong
AI is even realistic, especially by 2040. The Moore's Law stuff is just
laughable. And before we can even get our head of the boring technical stuff,
away we go, crafting these predictions.

~~~
doctoboggan
Ignoring the timeframes laid out in the article, if you accept the proposal
that AI will surpass human level cognition at some point in the future (big
IF, I know...) then issues put forth here are something we _will_ have to deal
with.

------
seiji
"Massive transfers of income to flesh and blood human beings."

There are so many conflating forces in action at once here. The One True
Sentient AI appearance will probably be followed by The End of Practical
Scarcity (food, clothing, material goods) which will require a cultural
upheaval.

People extend current society metaphors to post-TOTSAI and immediately assume
you'll have Google CEOs getting trillions of dollars from TOTSAI while
everybody else lives in hovels. That's not a tenable world outcome.

(There are clever book-length writings to be done on these topics.)

Current technology is already growing towards establishing a fast-twich
ambient psychic network amongst ourselves anyway. It'll be used both for
greatness and the utterly most trivial drivel imaginable (a real time
conference of a million one direction fans? imagine twitter, but worse.)

~~~
mshron
There are many, many jobs that you could eliminate without inventing sentient
AI. Anything that requires implementing a plan, rather than coming up with the
knowledge, should be fair game. Doctors, most of contract law, teaching, lots
of logistical jobs. I imagine we're going to get there awhile before we get to
strong AI.

~~~
seiji
Let's break it down:

Medical — Diagnosticians (Gregory House, M.D.) should absolutely be replaced
by non-sentient decision/aggregation/clustering systems. Most medical things
don't require talented surgeons. We can have PAs do almost all of the hands-on
stuff. For the foreseeable future, we'll need actual doctors, nurses, and
surgeons for emergency procedures.

For routine medical procedures, general purpose robots with enough dexterity
to do autonomous medical operations don't exist yet. What we _could_ have is a
cluster of talented medical robot operators (in india? somewhere cheap) doing
a dozen operations a day by telepresence with hospitals outfitted with
standard medical robot equipment.

Law — Yes, they can be gone.

Teaching — Tricky. We don't have ractives or illustrated primers yet. Teaching
is everything from helping a 5 year old write the letter S to yelling at
undergrads who almost blow up a chemistry lab due to inattention.

Logistical jobs — automated cars, automated busses, automated truck driving.
Yes, let's do that. I trust your 500 sensors evaluated 100 times per second
are safer and more accurate than any human.

~~~
mshron
Right. My larger point though is that there are lots and lots and lots of jobs
that can be eliminated without strong AI. We may succeed in destroying the
demand side of the economy long before we solve the problem of making the
supply side pointless.

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pasquinelli
"Assuming Moore's Law keeps churning away at its normal exponential pace"

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ttrreeww
In the long run, you are all dead, as in, ceased to exist.

