
What to do with billions of useless humans? - sergeant3
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160428000669
======
Sakes
I've honestly been curious about this for years. Currently, at least in
America, we have a culture where if you are not meeting your financial
expectations it is your fault. So if you find yourself in an industry that has
been outsourced or replaced by technology, you simply need to retool. Ignoring
specifics, this is typically sufficient to satisfy concerns of people that are
not directly affected.

So, what happens when retooling isn't even an option? Utopia for some, utopia
for all? I just can't seem to make any sense of it, but given the lack of
empathy in the current climate for people labeled as other, I would suspect
the former.

~~~
internaut
Looking at how the American working class got increasing marginalized to the
point where it is a popular trope on television to laugh at 'white trash' or
'hillbilly hicks' has always seemed ugly to me. That contempt has always been
suspect. That there isn't even a broad recognition of class warfare as an
extant reality in American society just makes it worse and further increases
feelings of alienation and marginalization. To be frank it is bullying of the
sort that is supposed to occur on playgrounds but on a group scale with
adults.

I once asked a question on Reddit indirectly asking about working class men
and what the Tiny House community (majority women) thought of them since many
working class men would have the skills to help construct houses.

After that I felt pretty sure large swathes of Americans utterly despise each
other. It wasn't a good feeling.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
TV has lots of formerly-white-trash consumers to sell to ( I mean _LOTS_ ) ,
and nothing excites us* like an appeal to our superiority.

*not really.... right next to it, though. Of course I grew up "middle class" like everyone else, right?

~~~
internaut
Yes that's right.

I think rich people are well aware of the problem (appeals to superiority) in
a way that most people aren't. They are constantly in contact with people
trying to butter them up. Gradually they develop a sense of detachment, not
really believing they're that awesome as they're being told but searching out
independent metrics since the human feedback has become unreliable. Or they go
batshit into fantasy land.

I may be biased myself but I honestly believe the middle class is responsible
for many of the problems we see. They have been constantly buttered up by
sycophant politicians and media sources.

I have even seen statements in the media to the effect that the middle class
can do no wrong. Recent complaints about the reduction in size of this class
often have this thrown in. It is never considered they might NOT actually be
God's gift to planet earth but part of the problem.

Is it so surprising that the government has elected officials in western
countries that are almost universally doctors and lawyers? Two groups of
people who famously have no time for understanding anything other than their
field of study because they spent the better part of their lives absorbed in
that intense study. Maybe we can't be saved by lawyers and doctors, no matter
that they have high IQ, because they are attracted to work on the wrong
problems for society.

Consider how different a Congress of computer geeks and scientists would be. I
also believe there would be substantial problems since our group also has
failure modes like any other. But to say the least it would be different to
what we have right now. To be frank I suspect the denizens of HN are more
aware of their failure modes than present day Congress. It is not about IQ, it
is about the problems you process.

There exist whole swathes of problem areas I see exactly nobody addressing!
But by all means let's cross our t's and dot our i's in trade agreements and
constitutional amendments.

I vote for the Brain In A Vat things I saw in Psycho-Pass. They had at least
some handle on the distributed nature of knowledge and understanding.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
The American middle class has been quite the overall force for positive change
- in the dimensions where it can change things. IMO, the "attack on the middle
class" narrative is the _other_ side of the advertising seduction dance - put
people off balance so you can butter 'em up again.

I think the attraction of medicine and law is status. And you can't do
anything about that. That's how hu-mans are wired.

~~~
internaut
> The American middle class has been quite the overall force for positive
> change - in the dimensions where it can change things.

Oh no! They got to you too! :-)

If you have an opportunity take a gander at "Ben's Mill" It's a short twenty
minute documentary on youtube. I think it is very revealing about the kind of
self confidence and respect the working class used to have in western
countries but which is now lost.

If nothing else it is a beautiful illustration of how things were, it's well
worth the watch.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s)

To render all those people unto 'trailer trash' 'white trash', is despicable.
You can tell a lot about people by how they treat others they consider their
inferiors.

Doctors are responsible for killing their patients by virtue of not being
efficient and by preventing technological adaptions. Even properly done
digital medical records are impossible in the present world. I'm sure you read
recently on HN that medical staff error is responsible for an incredible
number of deaths. When I think: heart disease and cancer, it seems incredible
that you should add 'Doctor' into the mix of things most likely to kill us,
yet it is so.

Lawyers are harming the economic progress of in the main. Don't even think
that is very controversial here. Niall Ferguson has outright accused them of
this, that's the establishment!

On balance saying doctors and lawyers are a positive force for good is a
crapshoot. Maybe so. Maybe there's objective evidence against the intuitive
position. Just maybe, they're parasites in a parasitical system that is
getting worse with their intransigeance.

------
gumby
They aren't "useless" they may simply not have job skills of value in the
future economy.

I look forward to a flourishing of terrible poetry, bad music, and sure, lots
of TV watching etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _They aren 't "useless" they may simply not have job skills of value in the
> future economy._

I.e. useless. Sure, not morally, but _economically_. This is what we're
talking about when discussing automation of jobs. It's important to be
precise, otherwise we risk miscommunication.

~~~
meric
Do we live to serve the economy, or does the economy work to serve human
beings?

~~~
TeMPOraL
It should be the latter, but what mostly happens is the former.

Whenever you go to work to earn money for your bread; whenever you adjust your
price to equalize supply and demand; whenever you change a product to make it
more profitable - you're serving the economy. Single humans and single
companies (hell, even most countries) are too weak to dictate how the market
works.

~~~
meric
That's why we have taxes so people who do not receive enough compensation for
working have enough to live too.

I think it's important to keep in mind money isn't the end goal when we go to
work. We work to live. And if we can live without working, it is a choice we
can take.

------
ilaksh
What do the supposedly useful humans usefully accomplish today? If we measure
'useful' by money earned then the most useful are supposed to be hedge fund
managers that don't actually solve any problems.

The truth is that what really makes people 'useful' is there interactions with
other humans. No matter how sophisticated the technology or what level of
super-human super-intelligent or even as he speculates super-empathetic type
of AI, human relationships will still be the true measure of value for people.

This concept of 'useless human beings' only makes sense if you have a
primitive elitist Malthusian view in the first place. Which unfortunately many
people do have that.

We should expect unenhanced human 1.0 to become the next chimpanzee analog in
the hierarchy. We should hope he is right that the AIs are more empathetic
towards their inferiors than we have been.

~~~
TeMPOraL
For better or worse, economic "usefulness" is directly tied to you having food
in your belly. We can talk all we want about how "primitive elitist
Malthusian" it is, but it doesn't change the fact that economically useless
people go hungry, and we're all about to become economically useless. Fully
automated economy can run fine without us.

~~~
davidivadavid
Please explain how that works.

So you've got a completely independent "fully automated" economy of robots
creating "goods" (as defined by humans) and exchanging them with one another
while humans starve to death watching that?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Exactly. When robots do the manufacturing and delivery, algorithms do the
orders and stock trading, you can imagine the moment when increasing
automation will eventually remove humans from the loop.

The market can and does get stuck in weird stupid-ass loops. Consider, for
instance, the advertising industry. Most of its output is aimed at cancelling
itself out (e.g. when you and I compete for the same group of customers, my
advertising expenditure goes mostly to cancel out yours, and vice versa). Also
in on-line advertising, a lot of money is being moved over nothing - consider,
for instance, analytics. Many people in Internet marketing are clueless about
statistics, but so are their clients - so as long as they can bullshit the
customers that their service is helping (graph is going up!), they get paid,
and customers are happy, because they're clueless too and can't verify the
effectiveness of the service they paid for.

And now for a funny twist - people _making_ those analytics tools know this
too, and guess what - they're starting to offer statistically invalid measures
that are likely to look like the changes marketing people introduced are
working. So those marketing people are being bulshitted by their tools now.

It's not a circle per se, but it shows another example of money moving around
over no value created.

~~~
davidivadavid
Actually, no, I can't imagine that moment, and that's why I'm asking for
someone to come up with a sensical narrative that takes us from here to there.

Humans dictate what the "loop" is. They define what gets manufactured, and who
it gets delivered to. How do they get out of the loop?

I believe the whole idea of humans becoming "useless" or "obsolete" is the
biggest piece of nonsense I've come across in the last few years.

------
nostrebored
AI is going to displace workers, just like the agricultural revolution and
industrial revolution! Oh wait, they figured out other things to do then
too...

~~~
TeMPOraL
The article addresses your point. Industrial revolution forced people to move
from physical work to mental work. AI revolution will take over mental work,
and there's _no other kind of work_ left for us.

Also, I find it weird to put agricultural and industrial revolution together
in this context.

Agricultural revolution was when people shifted from doing less physical work
(hunting) to doing more physical work (building a civilization). It probably
wasn't even by choice, but simply because agricultural societies were more
efficient and would conquer those which didn't settle down. About the only
thing I see here in common with industrial revolution is the forced change of
lifestyle.

~~~
mordocai
My thought when I read that in the article was "Physical Work -> Cognitive
Work -> Creative work". So I think the third kind of work humans will move to
is creative(Since AI are so far incapable of being actually creative). After
that though, I don't know of another.

~~~
_nalply
I think AI are already creative. See this for neural networks creating
psychedelic images: [http://gizmodo.com/these-are-the-incredible-day-dreams-
of-ar...](http://gizmodo.com/these-are-the-incredible-day-dreams-of-
artificial-neura-1712226908).

Perhaps you mean the initial spark of an invention, the idea which strikes
like a lightning, and so on? But many inventions happen by accident (like the
post-it note invention, [http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-
it-note...](http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-notes-
were-invented-by-accident/)). And then you could argument that only human are
crazy enough to find novel usage for useless things.

I don't know.

------
internaut
I read Yuval Harari's book.

It's a good book but he chickens out of saying difficult to hear things about
us humans. It was extremely obvious to me that he skates figure eights around
controversial topics because he made contradictory statements several times.
In the first half of the book he'll say one thing, and then in the second half
he'll kowtow to prevailing orthodoxies about humans.

During my reading I began to think he might be writing it in a Straussian
style i.e. one version of reality for intellectuals, another for the plebs. My
copy of his books is sprinkled with exclamation marks.

Given how popular witch hunts are these days perhaps that what it takes to get
a message out there.

We are biological animals! We are flawed beings! Let's accept this and move
on!

------
partisan
Why don't we offer the masses an opportunity to create a new world? Humans are
becoming useless at roughly the same time, the cost of space travel is
reaching a cost some 10 - 20% of the traditional cost.

The problem is that we value human life and would never subject people to the
dangers of space even if they willingly accept the risk. Life is too valuable!

But what happens when a human life is worth nothing? What happens when a
human's contribution to humanity is net negative and every person is, by
default, a waste of resources? What happens when a person is cheaper than a
machine for some tasks?

It wasn't too long ago that people threw themselves to the ocean in the hope
of establishing a better life somewhere unknown. People died, but no one found
the cost too high to bear. Life wasn't too valuable then.

We have an opportunity here, but we have to devalue life to take advantage of
it. And btw, I don't delude myself. I am sure that my children or
grandchildren, no matter how successful I may come to be, will be part of that
generation, Generation Zero, the one without value. But I hope they have a
purpose, at least.

------
maerF0x0
>"AI ... based on its immense emotional statistical database, will know that
the best thing to do is x and y and z and act accordingly."

of course the AI will be designed not to help the caller get to their ends, it
will be designed to maximize shareholder value. ie, say just the right things
to get you quit, and to upgrade, ie manipulate you.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
In the limit you get one shareholder who owns the entire planet, a compliant
AI consort, self-replicating production machines that are the AI's hands and
eyes - and everyone else is disposable.

And probably dead. Except for some tiny proportion of slaves who are
entertaining and/or useful.

The one shareholder will be the most aggressive, narcissistic and psychopathic
son of a bitch, because those are the qualities competition selects for.

I thought this election cycle was bad. It's almost reassuring that much worse
horrors are possible.

~~~
jschwartzi
In the limit, the sole shareholder may simply be the AI.

------
petra
So humans will be useless, AI will be better. Let's say this happend. Would
you want your child's first girlfriend/boyfriend to be a robot ? Would you
want some robot to comfort you at the hospice while you die of cancer, or
would you prefer a good caring nurse ? Or a side question - would you want a
psychopath, who don't care even a little bit, with great acting abilities to
comfort you at that hospice ?

Maybe for some things we will prefer caring humans, because they're not just
faking it, and this has value. And maybe we could create an economy built
around deep human relationships.

------
cousin_it
If AI takeoff is fast? We're fucked.

If AI takeoff is slow? Basic income -> intelligence amplification -> mind
merging. With the option to stop at any point and have a comfortable life.

------
Cozumel
This article makes the (obvious) assumption that a humans purpose is to work
so AI taking our jobs will be a bad thing. Realistically it most likely will
be a really bad thing, but optimistically it will free man up to reach his
full potential. If we don't need to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day we'll
be free to contemplate existence, philosophize etc or play video games and get
drunk! AI should bring about utopia.

------
dclowd9901
I don't like the assumption that the only faculties humans have are cognitive
or physical. There's another: the ability to desire. It's what's driven all of
our achievement, and it's not something even a highly sophisticated AI could
manage: it has to have a sense of its own mortality or need for perpetuation,
which are not things I can imagine us finding a valuable purpose for in giving
them.

------
gkya
It hijacked my back button in Firefox for Android and took me to their home
page. I had to press back two times in rapid succession to come back here.

------
arethuza
As long as the AIs don't find themselves asking the same question about _all_
of humanity!

------
antisthenes
I was really hoping the article would provide at least some semblance of an
answer to the posed question.

Instead it postulated the already known givens.

------
Pica_soO
They could board ships to escape from the space goat that is about to eat
earth.

