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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to compete with AI. I want AI to create efficiency and wealth so I can relax and have a leisure lifestyle. This shows that work-a-holic CEO culture is only about margins and gains and not improving lifestyle and quality of life. Automation should be improving our lives not adding anxiety to compete with it, which we will ultimately lose.

We're probably in for another 1880's labor movement as automation keeps eating jobs. We either decide to benefit from it via strict regulation or we somehow try to compete with it which is greatly lower the value of our labor and only enrich the owners of automation.

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David Brin said something once that I found interesting: "as long as I'm still in charge of the desiring, let the damn AI take care of the execution!"

Sadly it's a quirk of human nature that we get more defensive over our things when work gets tough. It tends to push us to more neoliberal policies. If work gets hard to find; Gen Z and the baby boomer generation would rather keep millennials renting, as opposed to massive social spending. Unless there's a massive shift towards the left we'll only see widening inequality due to the insurgence of AI on the job market. This is more of a cynical outlook, but in the last three decades in politics across the globe there's been no progressive popular movements.

Yeah it's not like Ben Sanders almost beat Hillary Clinton, and did better with millennials than she did...

> I don't want to compete with AI. I want AI to create efficiency and wealth so I can relax and have a leisure lifestyle. This shows that work-a-holic CEO culture is only about margins and gains and not improving lifestyle and quality of life.

I suspect, though I'm not 100% sure, that when Musk speaks about AI "competition" there's an implication of existential danger. If true, then from his POV it would not so much about "I want to min-max my CEO experience" but "I'd rather we not go extinct within my children's lifetime"

And that's why he's talking about nuclear disarmament, right?

No?

Seems that Musk wants to be a superhero that saves humanity, but villains that actually exist aren't cool enough for him.

Nuclear weapons disarmament is a political problem, and Musk primarily works within the realm of engineering. Besides, game theoretic arguments can be made against nuclear weapons not being much of a threat at all.

Not everyone wants to be human for ever, some people take joy in their work and want to continue doing it and contributing in a meaningful way, etc, etc. Nothing to do with being a workaholic or the rest. I hate to say it, but 'leisure' gets boring awfully quickly.

You realize that leisure could be any kind of work you want.

The distinction is not leisure vs work. It's freedom vs. constraint.

I appreciate that, however I feel constraints give meaning to a task, you might argue that I can self impose them, I will argue that I wish those constraints to be imposed by society or by the conditions needed to advance science. To do that, eventually as AI's come online, I will have to stop being human.

So everyone should suffer, because you enjoy it?

That's not fair. The argument you seem to be advocating for is that we can make people happier by reducing scarcity, they are offering you a counter example.

'happy' is hard, it could very well be that suffering is an important part of happiness... who knows, but it's a valid line of argument.

> 'leisure' gets boring awfully quickly

Not for me, as long as I get to keep all the toys in my garage. The list of projects I want to complete is probably an order of magnitude too big to finish in one lifetime as long as I have a full time job.

Have you actually tested this recently? I used to be concerned about unconstrained leisure bottoming out, but I've recently had about 6 months of a break of sorts and I was never bored. As long as I kept physical, social, emotional needs met AND had some creative output (side projects), I was perfectly content. A real surprise actually.

I don't want to compete with AI.

You don't have an option.

Said another way, in the long run you either merge with AGI or go extinct.

Did 1880s people have to merge with assembly lines? I think you're being fairly dramatic and too "/r/futurology" here. The whole point of technology is to create tools to make our lives easier, not to become tools. People won't desire this and pushing this kind of pressure on people seems like a recipe for revolt against the capitalist system that has thus far provided so much wealth. The assembly line works for us, we don't want to become an assembly line ourselves and its ludicrous to think such reasoning will lead to extinction. This is a bit like saying that the Olympics will be nothing but a steroids showcase event because everyone will take steroids.

If anything, dissuading people from standing up for their liberty and basic humanity seems to be the best route toward extinction to me.

No, but like with any other performance enchanting utility it's going to be effectively peer pressure. If AI+human will be better than just AI people will "merge" with it at that point if it's a true AI you might as well be a different species to them as you'll likely won't be able to even communicate with them after a while.

Yes, having have to get a brain-machine connection implant before we've had a long time to observe safety and side effects has been a fear of mine for many years.

Mysterious superintelligent AIs, which are too smart to communicate with baseline humans. I think this is just a plot device for post singular fiction. You just can't write superAI explaining its own behavior, because you aren't smart enough. The best you can do is write about mysterious AI, which can't communicate with you or can't explain its own actions because they are too complex to explain.

Returning to your post, I think that human-AI hybrids will be perfectly able to communicate or explain their plans to baseline humans (merging with AI should enhance communication capabilities, not hamper them).

They could have problems explaining their feelings, thought processes, perceptions, as those things may not correspond to anything baseline human experiences. They could have no reasons to talk to baseline humans at all. But it is not inability to communicate.

He did specify "in the long run", which I think is probably true as the timescales get longer. I doubt anyone would argue that humanity would live lives relatively unchanged from the present say, 3000 years from now. So it's really just a matter of arguing about 'when' and not 'if'.

I'd also like to point out that although we didn't "become" the assembly line, employees certainly have become more replaceable in many of the jobs impacted by the assembly line. Depending on the job, some employees have become the metaphorical "cog in the machine", and can be replaced by other employees with minimal training, as compared to the artisan-based system that predated mass production.

I certainly see your point, however, and I truly hope that we can maintain our liberty and humanity as technology increases, instead of regressing into a kind of dystopian neo-feudalism.

We kind of do merge with our technology, though. People are fuzzy-bounded; we're part of our environment and it's part of us, especially in the mental domain. In the physical domain glasses, notebooks (offloaded brain memory), telephones (merged voice) are physically merged technologies. In the mental sphere I feel I can say that Wikipedia and the Internet are in some sense merged parts of my mind. They are part of my thought processes and they were an essential ingredient in forming my thought processes too. Take away all my writing and reading and I really would be a different entity, mentally.

So basically you want AI to enclose you in a simulation where you feel fulfilled and happy?

No, I want it to create value that will be given back to me via taxation.

First I read:

"No, I want it to create value that will be given back to me via television."

Could you be more clear on the economic mechanics of your scenario?

You said you want AI to provide wealth. But now you say you want to create value. It looks like you may need to compete after all.

Why would it consent to you leeching onto its productivity?

I wouldn't look to a workaholic to invent new ways to eliminate work. You might have to figure that one out on your own.

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