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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

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

This is entangled, so both. And "serve" has connotations of power, which isn't necessary.

When politicians say we must do X or Y to get everyone jobs to "boost the economy", they lose sight of the point of jobs, enact policies which destroy well paying middle class jobs to produce a large quantity of jobs no one really wants to do, thinking quantity can substitute for quality. In this case, they voluntarily give up our power so we can "serve" the economy or GDP, even though no such power relationship ought to exist.

But all they have is quantity. The only thing actually quantifiable in quality is the Likert (1-5) scale stuff marketers use. If it's not quantifiable, how can you even talk seriously about it? Isn't this the flaw in the thing?

Politicians need GDP growth because of how government is financed. This isn't foolish nor power-hungry. It's just more or less a fact.

And turn this on it's head - somewhere, a guy/gal is making something you don't even know you'll need yet, who you have never met. That's the thing least about power I ever did hear.

Specifically, jobs-as-political-fodder is ensconced into law in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1979, which lays on the Fed the dual mandate of currency stability and employment. If it is oppressive, it certainly wasn't anticipated to be that; quite the opposite.

I agree with everything, and I do think it has turned out to be oppressive. Inflation is forced onto people to erode their wealth, to ensure they all work, and prevent their ability to accrue savings. The low interest rate ceiling is an asset transfer from labor to capital, removing the ladder that lets people with low wealth climb up in financial status. There is more oppression with the Fed in control of the financial markets, than without.

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.

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.

There is some small value in reviewing and voting on content, and I have a feeling that as long as that content is made for other humans, AI will at best be additive to the reviewing and voting by other people. if we see an increase of content produced, we'll need an increase consumed content to make it worthwhile.

Yes, and "useless" is not exactly a precise term - it's obviously being used for the inflammatory clickbait-y title, not for the sake of "precision".

So..... many... DJs....

I often wonder if AI will be able to write good TV shows.

My facebook feed is really interesting, the AI that curates it is doing a good job, it seems to know what I like to see and recommends more interesting things to get sucked into.

I think humans and machines will blend, so there won't be an AI vs human 'war'... we will integrate AI tools into ourselves thus becoming more than human. A hyper connected being.

We've been retelling the Monomyth for generations and it still works. With all the reboots, prequels and sequels we really need some fresh content.

I don't know about good TV shows, but I can easily imagine an AI that could spit out a passable soap opera.

Have you seen the "TV Tropes" website?

Its funny, a couple of months ago I wanted to programmatically generate videos from any body of text and have people guess as to what story it was telling so using nltk/some statistical threasholding/ and some random vine api/endpoint I was able to whip up[0] something to play around with my friends. It was pretty cool to see how accurate (or not) it was, but mostly amusing since I haven't seen anything like that in the wild. I had in mind that maybe it could be useful for screen writers to generate prototypes to test out quickly, but moved on with other stuff.

I also agree with the blending, reality thus far seems to be one big mixing matrix of mass energy, and our classification of what is AI vs what is human seems pretty moot in comparison.

[0]: http://infinite-dusk-4495.herokuapp.com/stories/1-1427256350...

I think eventually poetry and music would be created by AI. The question is what happens when AI is better than humans at everything.

music already is.

Where?

Except that they will all be generated procedurally, and will be more entertaining than human-created versions!

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