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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> Humans will be a novelty, like a hand-carved chair or a horse-drawn carriage.

This is the good outcome.

In a post-intelligence world, humans will be cute zoo animals. We might have freedom, but I can't imagine us having any measure of real control. Even if modern society continues, it will be a cordoned off bubble, a "human preserve".

If we're unruly and give the robots too much trouble, they could just dispense with us. Or dumb us down and make us tame--domesticate us, like animals.

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Since around 2004, seemingly all additional compute the human race had developed for itself has been put towards gathering and processing telemetry for the purposes of marketing and control. AI as a technology is simply more horsepower and automation for surveillance.

I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon. Not like this is news, but the end of world has always been right around the corner - most everything is broken here and death is everywhere.

The strangest thing to me about comments like this is the assumption that a nefarious super-intelligence would stop at subjugating us. If a super-intelligence was evil and had power to act, it would just kill us all and sterilize the planet, given the chance.

I just don't believe we have the ability to make a standalone computer super-intelligence - we universally suck at coding at-scale. Don't get me wrong, the AI and machine learning algorithms we have are amazing, but we're not going to get a being out of those experiments.

What I'm worried about is humans: humans continuing to turn tech against other humans for surveillance and telemetry in support of totalitarianism. And, I'm worried about humans augmenting their brains with compute. If there ever will be an evil super-intelligence, I wager it will be a (meta-)man.

> I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon.

There's a very large and vocal group on HN that believes in the advent of AI and regularly comments as is it was a done deal. Almost every robot/AI/ML thread gets hijacked with this idea/meme.

In the meantime Google can't get my first language right, the windows 7/8/10 search is a joke and Facebook wants me to be friends with my SO's exes. And 2017's revolution ? Dial menus in messenger.

I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Yeah, I think it's human nature to blow mysterious things all out of proportion. And then when we get together and tell ghost stories about the mysterious thing, and it starts to take on a life of its own.

I was so convinced Y2K was going to crash society. I was all looted up, ready to bug out when the city started burning. Turns out, there was enough preparation (and money dumped on the problem), and like only one power station that didn't get the upgrades on the east coast went down for 15 minutes.

I'm just as guilty of telling ghost stories and contributing to the disinformation. I remember writing a frantic, doomsday prediction email to my house rep in the lead up to Y2K and I swear based on some of his public comments that I was responsible for him quitting the house and heading for early retirement. I have no proof that was the case, but I'm still not proud of what I wrote.

I think it's more likely we will evolve by enhancing our bodies with machine parts and characteristics.

After all we are building machines in our own image. From how AI thinks to building sex robots.

I think the transition will be more nuanced and peaceful.

The surprising truth for a public weened on sci-fi is that human body is far more difficult to reproduce than the human mind. And indeed, with the exception of big, dumb, but very powerful weaponized bodies (tanks, fighters, drones) our bodies are far superior to any robot body.

I predict that humans will always be vitally important for our dexterity at the 1m scale. We can (and do) use tools for smaller scales and larger scales, but we are truly excellent entities at this scale.

How can you say that when we haven't done either?

Intuition informed by the truth that it's far easier to program a chess-playing computer than to make a hand that can gently move the pieces of the chess-board.

Haven't we started using remote-controlled surgery machines?

I would love to see options for body enchantment. Becoming a cyborg is a very attractive thing, and no virtual worlds required. Can be real humans on real planets

Yes, I would expect distinctions between human and machine to weaken. I mean, why would one stay stupid and weak?

My humanity is a virtue. At least, that's what the Ghost in the Shell remake told me.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - that's kind of the point of GitS, thinking about the philosophical implications of merging human and machine.

Yes, that's what I meant.

In a world with strong AI, old-school humans would be pathetic. Hybrids, however, could build synergistically on the strengths of all components.

Yes, of course it is. But you obviously use computers, for example. Maybe even a smartphone. And use remote services to communicate, obtain information, and so on. Probably use vehicles to move faster and carry more stuff.

So why not just integrate all those machines better?

You're hilarious

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