Topic: Technological unemployment is (almost) here - page 21. (Read 88285 times)

I would better take AK-47 in my hands and fight to dead instead of accepting your variant.

Agree with you and I think a lot of people will do the same I wrote above in this post.

I can imagine that the vast majority of humanity will be sterilized or euthanized when it gets to the point that most people lose their jobs to automation. The only people who still have a function in society will be the capital owners who pay for the machines and the inventors and scientists who invent and develop them. All the rest will be useless and will be deemed unfit to survive.

And I have an incentive to kill both the VC and the slave, because I would rather die than live in a world that tolerated such iniquity.

Well, ain't this a Industrial Age view of humans as machines or cogs in the wheel that rust out when they are not within the machine well oiled in the labor of mass production...

Since when people degrade when they are doing the things they actually love to do instead of running as machine parts?

That's when humans flourish.

And besides, people will always figure out something new to do.
We are creative beings that have imaginations and we work better when we do things out of free and passion will instead of slavery.

Thinking also that if humans have no occupations they will not amount to anything... Wrong.
That's the old school monopolist propaganda to keep people in the factory.

People who have no jobs these days are unproductive because of poverty that goes with it.

The fact is that when we go far enough into full automation, we just HAVE TO re-value our lives based on actual social value, how good we are to each other rather than who is the best one to obey. In a sense, we have needed slavery to develop this far technologically. And it has always gone to the direction where we can make our innovations our slaves.

Using human lives for slavery is inefficient these days and soon only ignorance and bad politics are in the way of global abundance.

That's why I made a point earlier that all of these things will eventually lead to human worth and value re-assessment where classicism can no longer be held as the basic human worth estimation measure. As stated, that is no longer true in the Digital Age and beyond.

Now, it lets to be seen what sort of A.I. there will be.
Will it be capable of thought superior to human beings or will it be just super intelligent in it's calculations and estimations.
The difference really becomes, whether it will actually gain it's own "life" aka. consciousness, self-awareness beyond just human friendly operation system mimicry for human mind, or a real individual thinker.

If it remains machine-like where humans have to program it to be mind-like, it will not be able to take all functions of human spirit, creativity, envisioning beyond numbers, thinking completely out of the box, creating any truly genuine design, etc.

In that case, humans will not be useless and the coexistence will be just like anything we have already seen, but just linearly taken further;
Meaning that when there is no mundane work to be done by human beings, we are free to focus on enjoying our lives rather than running the rat-wheel ourselves. I'm sure most of you do have hopes and visions what you would do if you became free via cryptos.

There isn't uselessness and malfunction in that picture isn't there?
You would continue working on whatever you felt passionate about!


Now if the machines actually became sort of a next step in evolution creating a kind of super beings, well, we would be on their mercy anyways and these kinds of discussions would be rather pointless.

I was more referring to Giantdragon's BIG. That African child is more like many apprenticeship relations. For example a friend of mine was trained as a pilot for the 737 by Lufthansa, under the condition to work for Lufthansa for a number of years (or pay up the cost of training). That is entering into a voluntary agreement with mutual benefits - not at all like slavery.

Giving up your liberty for BIG is slavery, however, and an extremely risky one at that. Slavers do not keep slaves that only incur cost. Any BIG arrangement will inevitably result in a final solution. It may take a few years, maybe a generation or two, but at some point those running the show will opt for getting rid of the burden. And there will be absolutely nothing the slaves (should we call them sheeple? ) will be able to do about it. They may not even see it coming.

[EDIT]When I think about it, maybe this is not such a bad idea. What do you think, is it immoral to fight for BIG if the motivation is to let a culling of the human population happen, even if you are then retiring and not participating in the culling?[/EDIT]

I view it a little differently from a government point of view, of course there would need to be strictly enforcible regulations on what a person can be compelled to do and what they cannot, fundamental human rights would remain intact obviously. However since a person who would be offering you a way out has an incentive for you to live a productive and healthy life via equity ownership it would be a similar endevor of a small business owner exchanging 75% stake ownership in his company to a venture capitalist, not every person would be considered investable, because VCs want a return on their investment of course. Both parties have incentives for the person in bondage to reach his full potential.

If all relevant facts of any topic are known, any discussion is pointless, because by definition it cannot increase the insight of the participants. Only discussions based on assumptions are worthwhile.

This particular discussion is therefore pointless. QED.

Big part of those discussions is based on assumptions, not facts...

Your father obviously understands Franklin's quote about just that trade: You are only getting an empty promise for sacrificing your liberty. Why would the state live up to it's promise? You gave away the means to enforce the deal.

Only someone who has no clue about life in the USSR can say something like that.

Your romantic ideas have nothing to do with reality. For starters, government is just a very big company the board members of which believe they have a god-given right on a monopoly. Some argue it is just the biggest organized crime syndicate in town. The distinction between private/public sector is useful in some contexts, but completely meaningless in the context discussed here.

You have to understand that your life is on the line if you are owned and are not useful to your owner. It really does not matter who that owner is.

unfortunately you are right, you're essentially trading part of your freedom in exchange for food and economic stability in the face of extreme poverty and hardship, I know I'm not too proud to turn down such an option but I think my father might be.

I capitalistic system with high level of technological unemployment it will be the only option remaining  - and yes, it's a voluntary choice of the free man!

Giant the thing is, this is something that a person isn't necessarily forced to do; I don't have to all of a sudden give all my shares to someone because its being enforced, however instead of the world using a debt based economy particularly for mortgages car loans etc, having an optional legal statute in place to allow a person to sell part ownership of his future earnings (and part of his freedom) in exchange for a product he may never be able to afford would be a reasonable idea.

Those shares of course could then be resold to companies/individuals that are dedicated to maximising individual potential (which is IMO virtuous) and could eventually be bought back by the individual who sold himself in the first place, similar to a highly regulated security.

for example (from the book):
1% of your person is given to the government as a form of taxes, 10% to your parents (by du jure but could be given back if desired), the remaining 89% is yours to keep until you desire high-school/university or are desperate for a job to survive.

Personally for the past 6 months I've been looking for work as an engineering graduate, and if there was an option of selling part ownership of my future earnings in exchange for not having to sleep on my 76 year old fathers couch for 5 months and essentially be a live-in nurse I would do it, albeit not overnight, but just having the option open I believe would make the vast majority of humanities quality of life increase dramatically. We would actually have a reason that wasn't derived from moral judgement to care about other people.

Personally, I would prefer that the government or community would "care" through all your life as USSR did. Selling yourself as a slave to the private investor or corporation is inhumane and I think these contracts won't be ever enforced in the most countries!

You're right about it being slavery, but the key thing at the end of the day is that the investor sells his shares (even at a loss), and if this poor African kid starts working hard and saving up his money he can eventually start to buy ownership take in himself, until eventually you could own all of your labours by saving and hard work, its similar to the Roman gladiatorial system but without the risk of death, and actually making it meritocratic and humane, which is something that I believe is more important.

The angel investor couldn't just sit around and hope he gets a job, since he spent all this money it's in the angel investors best interests to not only get this kid in the right school, but to also line up employment for him afterwords using his own track record as a referral for a particular position.

This type of system is the only way that I see for large investors to actually be any sort of benefit to the common man, as they would now have an actual reason to invest in people.
Also this is actually being done (to some degree) with sports car drivers and professional atheletes during their training stages, I've actually seen a dragon's den episode where a ~16 year old race car driver wanted to sell shares in his future earnings for promotion and training.

What happens if the kid can't get a job in the field his angel investors sent him to college for? Would the angel investor just right it off as a bad investment or would the kid still owe a portion of his mcdonalds paycheck to the investor?

This is technically a form of slavery but i guess no more than we already are today where uncle sam expects a portion of your income at the end of the year.

USSR used the same mechanism (only difference that communist party's bosses took some profit share instead of angel investor's in your example).

I think it is inevitable! Genetic modifications are need to continue race against machines in the long run, otherwise humans will have no application even in socialism and start degrading when bots do 100% of work.

That is exactly what I'm saying.

There are *elements* of socialism that could be workable, in a voluntary society. But the whole picture? Only if we become something like the Borg. If that's the vision of the future that most people want, I'll be bowing out.

Luckily, it's not. They just want the freebies, and that eventually comes to a halt.

I personally view personal incorporation as a pretty valid successor to the current system. Take a read of the incorporated man / incorporated war book series, they aren't perfect but definitely better than capitalism/communism as it actually values each human being in a personal individual way, rather than based off of the chances and opportunities they have had access to throughout their lives.

IE: a poor african child in zambia has most of his shares purchased by an angel investor, and learns that this kid would be able to do some really great things if he went to school, so he pays for  highschool/university and in return expects an income from his future engineering work proportional to the share ownership in that person, and then that angel investor is also owned in part by other speculative investors (maybe his parents or his university) essentially fair, accountable and humane bondage.

Marxism is still inside the box. The premises it was based on are based on the industrial mind set. The world we will live in will not resemble that world at all.

We have a new set of problems now and you're better off learning from Star Trek than from Marxism. Marxism is not future proof, it's not scalable, it's based on assumptions.

If you're vegan then you must be excited to know that sooner or later meat will lab grown or be 3d printed, it may actually be healthy to eat meat and no animal will have to suffer.

Technology can lead to radical abundance. Capitalism/communism? Update your software.  

http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/11/26/radical-abundance-by-k-eric-drexler-2013-book-review/