Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 60. (Read 288376 times)

Nonsense.
An amoeba can adapt to its surroundings but i don't see it being 'creative'.
My computer can draw graphics autonomously (without me telling it what to do) and yet it never showed any creativity (unless you mean the artifacts from overheating )

You are projecting way too much human stuff onto life and other machinery.
We are not general examples of life. In fact, we are pretty amazingly specific examples of life. It's just silly to think humans are the default and to expect intelligence to be human-like in nature.

You're oversimplifying the problem.
An AI that would see humans as inefficient would never be introduced as it would not function in its role to regulate humans. It would fail from the beginning.
Or do you think we would invent an AI and hook it up to control the whole of humanity just to see if it would work?
Of course not, that would be useless.
We would engineer it to function in a certain way and so we would engineer it so it's task is to make humans survive.
Such an AI would just never consider damaging humans.
The only escape would be if such an AI would somehow acquire self-conciousness so that it can somehow sidestep it's designation and start acting in a way that cannot be stopped by humanity.
But if you see how AI works in practice you can see that this is not a real threat unless we specifically desing an AI that behaves in such a way.

Empirical evidence is not the appropriate tool for inferring the possibility of things that do not exist in the present.

Now I'm confused.  You posted a link to a state that existed from 930 to 1262 as evidence of the viability of a system invented by a guy born in 1819.  Did Gustave invent anarcho-capitalism, or the time machine?

At any rate, Iceland as a whole has never had more population than a small city, so it is hard to draw conclusions that would scale up to the size of the Roman, Venetian or American republics.

Yeah, well, there is a problem with that.
Emotions is what makes humans unpredictable.
Emotions is what makes humans evil.
Greed is an emotion.
And that is besides the point that emotion is even more specific than human intelligence.
So any emotion we build into an AI will be fake. If you want real emotion you would need to evolve it and so you would have to present the same kind of environment to the developing mechanism to make it develop these qualia we call emotions.
In other words, we have no such possibilities of creating emotional machines.

+1 I couldn't have put it better myself.

As far as I can tell, I'm the only consciousness in existence, and "everything else" is just a product of my imagination in my little universe. At least with people, there is empirical evidence suggesting that they are capable of mirroring my feelings, sense of mercy or justice and many other human concepts.


Well, for the purposes of a central authority to run 'our' lives, why toy around with machines that are far simpler than humans? Why not use the best there is, i.e.: actual humans? Some might argue that it's a complex, rewarding job.

And yet, you still desire AI...

If you're suicidal, there are hotlines for that. And there's no need to take the rest of us with you.

Terminator 2 is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been saying.


And why is that?

I think enlightenment is one of the primitive components of human existence. I think we naturally strive to find answers to metaphysical questions about our condition, which lead to all sorts of interesting constructs like science and religion. I think we destroy people's natural curiosity in order to create a more robust machine. Humans are born thinkers.

Having said that, the overall production output would drastically decrease, not because people go dumb. Quite the opposite. But then we'd be taken over by a society that train specialized, well-behaved professionals (that have probably produced a shitload of guns in the meantime).


I'll call this an argument out of lack of imagination. I learned to program C when I was 14 (around '91) without even having read a book about programming because I had friends who were also interested in it. This was not possible because I was somehow smarter or naturally more curious. It was possible because learning programming without support was possible. Most skills are out of reach of the uninitiated. You have to be oriented towards it, you have to prove to society that you are worthy of being in a privileged position to be introduced to a subject. You have to let yourself get indoctrinated with a specific school of thought that dominates a specific discipline.

I'm mostly imagining a society where there is no distinction between a teacher and a student, or a place of work and a place of study.

And "no one wants to do what needs to be done" doesn't prove much. If no one wants to be a janitor, you pay more to janitors. Done. Why is this even a problem? Having specialized man-machines is a useful thing of course, but a society formed by flexible individuals capable of thinking would have other advantages.

Creativity is necessary for autonomy (because autonomy means you can adapt to unexpected situations, and to do so you need creativity).

And autonomy is necessary if you want a system where no human labor is necessary (which is the main objective of RBE proponents, iirc).

What the ZG and Venus Project movements really need then is probably something like a new ruling class, that is made up of a new life form that is more powerful and intelligent and able in every way than humans (including emotionally -- they would be benevolent).  Of course, there will be archangels so to speak that will attempt to destroy the new civilization ...

Have I sufficiently caricatured this neo-communism yet?  

Really though, the transhumanists' ideas are most compelling...

Again a machine is by definition lifeless. Discussing a hypothetical scenario where we could enable life makes no sense since we have no idea how it could be accomplished.
Genetic algorithms and artificial networks are exactly what falls under computer science as the subject of "AI" they are exactly the mathematical processes I was referring to.

lol... Yeah, Pipe dream. Take another hit, man, 'cause that is never happening. Even assuming machines could develop consciousness, it would be an entirely alien consciousness that, at best, viewed us as ants. At worst, well... You've seen the Terminator movies, right?

That's exactly why I would prefer the new intelligence to be sentient and/or endowed with consciousness...
But wait... What do we mean when we say endowed with consciousness?  Do we mean merely self-aware, or also emotionally aware of other living things?
The latter is what I am calling for.

Yup. No kid I've ever asked "what do you want to be when you grow up?" has ever replied "I wanna be a janitor!" (Here, though, is where robots could potentially help... these menial and dirty or dangerous jobs could easily be handled by mechanical workers, and you yourself said that decision-making capability does not require consciousness.)


*ahem*... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth

What i'm trying to say is that most propably you would have to actually design the AI to have something like a conciousness for it to have one.
Our brains are pretty specific.
Unfortunately our conciousness feels so 'right' to us that we tend to think conciousness is a general thing. It is not. It's amazingly specific.

I'm no expert but it seems to me that you're talking about twentieth century style AI.   Nowadays computing engineers for AI use genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks and stuff like that.  They don't program the behavior of the machine.  Not with "if then else" lines anyway.   Moreover, your brain also has "parameters":  the maximum number of neurons, the physical laws they obey, and so on.   A computer might actually have more degrees of freedom than your brain can ever have.  At least because your brain is trapped in your skull and can't grow bigger than that.

Cybernetics is sooo 1930's...
If a system is designed along the cybernetic line of tought then sure, it will have the properties you mention.
If not then you're left with a much cleaner informational system.
I agree that these ideas of RBE reek of cybernetics, but by now cybernetics is not a limiting factor anymore. We understand a lot more about dynamical information systems.

Meh.  Untested conjecture.

I'm not opposed to the idea of anarcho-capitalism, and if it worked, I'd probably even prefer it.

But I do know that a Republic works, for as long as the people value it, generally at least a few hundred years, and it has a track record of not failing in the direction of apocalypse.

Except when something is impossible by definition.
Could it be possibly to enable mechanical life some day? Who knows, but that wouldn't be artificial nor a machine.