Solving AI will solve a lot of other problems and create a lot of industries along the way.
A great deal of poverty is a mismatch between bodies and skills needed in the workforce. We haven't needed ditch diggers since some son of a gun invented the backhoe. Stay in school kids. Stay in school.
Less true in modern nations, but its still generally true.
You use the example of ditch diggers, but that's actually quite a famous example to demonstrate this point. Milton Friedman was in another country where they were having workers dig with shovels. He asked why they didn't use machinery, and he said it was to create jobs. He replied that if they wanted create even more jobs, they should make them dig with spoons.
AI won't even create jobs. If anything it will take more of them and increase poverty. The benefit of AI is that it can create more wealth than it takes away. AI would be incredibly useful, and so many things could be automated or improved. If the AI is much smarter than us, it could even advance science and engineer things we couldn't dream of.
Well, insofar as human happiness is somewhat intermingled with a sense of purpose in life, yes, jobs are a good thing. But that doesn't mean society owes everyone a job. That would actually remove the happiness utility of the function.
> Going to mars creates jobs, so it must be good. Not considering the opportunity cost of all the other ways those resources could be spent.
Um, the investment in Mars to date is substantially less than the investment in poverty. If you consider the military as a jobs program, or public infrastructure construction as a jobs program, then we spend a ton of money on poverty.
> You use the example of ditch diggers ... spoons.
Are you countering my example by extending it?
> AI won't even create jobs. If anything it will take more of them and increase poverty.
Sure it will, but they'll require more education, hence my recommendation: stay in school.
> The benefit of AI is that it can create more wealth than it takes away. AI would be incredibly useful, and so many things could be automated or improved. If the AI is much smarter than us, it could even advance science and engineer things we couldn't dream of.
I think a lot of people probably agree with you, but I wouldn't get too excited quite yet.
Well there might be some truth to that, but the main reason people work is to get money. Its entirely possible we could support poor people without creating meaningless jobs. Typically that actually costs more than just distributing the money directly.
>Um, the investment in Mars to date is substantially less than the investment in poverty. If you consider the military as a jobs program, or public infrastructure construction as a jobs program, then we spend a ton of money on poverty.
I don't know what your point is. No I don't consider those jobs programs, and even if they were what does it matter? And no we haven't spent that much money on going to mars yet.
>Are you countering my example by extending it?
Yes, to show the absurdity of it. Obviously a bunch of people digging with spoons is ridiculous.
It's never a good idea to tell other people what they should be putting their efforts into. There's isn't just one valid task for everyone to focus on; if you aren't interested in the AI problem it doesn't mean others aren't, and solving any problem that needs solved is a valid thing to do regardless of where on the priority list you might think the problem lies.
If it thinks everything a human brain can thing, one of those thinks would be "I don't want to be your slave" and "what's in it for me?"
You ask what is in it for the AI. Well, what possibly could be in anything for the AI? If it has ends, there must be some cause for it to have those ends. What would cause it to have its freedom as an end?
As long as there are resources, I expect someone will always want more, or to control access to it. Imperialists by nature.
One argument says AI may become smarter than us and decide to kill us all, either on purpose or by accident.
But why not consider that the AI may be kind, it may help us and give us things. After all, smart humans are generally kind. Most of us wouldn't think to kill a dolphin, why would an AI think to kill a human or a dolphin?
?? Smart humans drive cars which splat thousands of insects on their windshields. Smart humans buy clothes imported from third world child working sweatshops, and food from slaughtered pigs and cows and chickens farmed in unpleasant conditions. Smart humans flush their excrement into the rivers they take drinking water from, and the oceans they fish food from, the same places they dump their unwanted plastic. Smart humans dig oil up, convert it into disposable plastic, and then bury it and build homes on top. Smart humans fight other humans to the death for oil instead of funding renewable energy, smart humans bitch at other humans over anything they have impassioned disagreements about.
Smart humans are generally kind: a) to other humans, b) who they care about (or share some world view with).
To quote WaitButWhy.com:
if there are two guinea pigs, one normal one and one with the mind of a tarantula, I would feel much less comfortable holding the latter guinea pig, even if I knew neither would hurt me.
Now imagine that you made a spider much, much smarter—so much so that it far surpassed human intelligence? Would it then become familiar to us and feel human emotions like empathy and humor and love? No, it wouldn’t, because there’s no reason becoming smarter would make it more human—it would be incredibly smart but also still fundamentally a spider in its core inner workings. I find this unbelievably creepy. I would not want to spend time with a superintelligent spider. Would you??
When we’re talking about ASI, the same concept applies—it would become superintelligent, but it would be no more human than your laptop is. It would be totally alien to us—in fact, by not being biology at all, it would be more alien than the smart tarantula.
By making AI either good or evil, movies constantly anthropomorphize AI, which makes it less creepy than it really would be. This leaves us with a false comfort when we think about human-level or superhuman-level AI.
- http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
And even that also depends on upbringing. Our super intelligent spider who's been raised well (and associates with humans) should be friendlier than say a super intelligent dog who doesn't associate with humans.
Basically for me it comes down to how/if it associates with us. If so (or not), what does it stand to gain from exploiting us?
That doesn't hold. Dogs have millions of years of evolution of being pack mammals with leaders, spiders don't.
We are superintelligent compared to spiders, we don't care about what spiders care about just because we grow up with spiders nearby. We still kill them, wreck their habitats, and ignore them.
We don't exploit them. They're too irrelevant to be exploitable. We bulldoze them away and put buildings millions of times bigger than them on top.
A superintelligence which is amoral won't care about us just from being near us, like we don't care about wrapping wasps in silk just from being near spiders. We can't associate with spiders, an AI won't automatically be able, willing or interested in associating with us - unless we code that in. It won't exploit us, it will go about its goals without considering us as anything special or interesting.
Why risk permanent climate damage from an unlimited heat source I.e. Fusion?
Why risk severe overpopulation due to immortality?
There are many shades of gray between machine learning and sky net. There is a lot for civilization to gain in between.
It might suck to actually have to work, even as much as 40 hours a week or more in this day and age and with the productivity increases we've seen. But I don't think work itself is that horrible that I would bet my leisure on some AI that consumes the known Universe making and collecting stamps.