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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

That is a generic end-of-work question. Ideally, everyone would have jobs they liked, and all the dull stuff would be automated (Star Trek outcome). Pessimistically, the machines will become better than humans at everything and we will just become obsolete (Terminator outcome). If automation picks up, we will have to deal with these questions sooner rather than later, but it will happen eventually.

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I have a friend who is happy to do the dull work. Smart guy, just content. At first I encouraged him to move up, then I began to understand that not everyone views the world the same way that I do.

Let's be optimistic and hope for the Wall-E outcome instead of the Terminator outcome. The robots will keep us around and take care of us as pets.

There's a middle ground portrayed in the Culture Series novels. Everything is run by machines for the most part, and in some situations humans just tag along for the ride. At the same time though humans can basically get whatever they want whenever they want it, and do whatever.

Erm, if we create robots better than us, they are our legacy, our homo superious, why should Homo sapiens continue? You don't see Neanderthals running around today for a good reason.

It’s easy to look back fondly on genocides that have already happened. No one shed a tear for the long lost Neanderthals. The Estruscans were wiped out by the Romans with almost no recorded history left behind. Native Americans, First Nations, and Aborigines suffered horribly at European hands, but we never entertain the idea of moving back to the Old World.

Things are different for genocide that hasn’t happened yet. If people have left the UK and formed the United States which is far more successful currently, why not just kill all the citizens of the UK? Obviously the US is homo superious.

Would no one shed a tear?

It wasn’t necessarily genocide in the Neanderthal case, just basic species out competition. Yes, many people today are trying to “save the panda” even though it is quite non adaptable, but if the pandas go extinct because they cannot compete for the resources they once monopolized, that isn’t genocide.

At least in my mind, genocide is unnatural.

Playing devil's advocate: Is there actually a difference between genocide and survival of the fittest? If the Etruscan people were a superior culture with a superior fighting force, they would have defended themselves from the Romans and they'd still be around. Likewise if the panda was better adaptable, we wouldn't be struggling to save the species.

If the saber-toothed tiger died out because they were out-competed by the other species around them, we call that natural selection. If the Carthaginians died out because their neighbors had a better fighting force, we call that genocide. But the only difference is... what, exactly?

It's not a linear outcome space. There's also the outcome where automation enables tons of new dull (but in different ways) jobs, currently embodied by the so-called gig economy. I think this area is nacent and has a lot of potential[1].

Also, incidentally, this outcome is consistent with a couple of centuries of economic history.

1: No, these jobs aren't great compared to classic middle class jobs. But going from shelf stocker or check out clerk to Instacart shopper and/or Uber driver isn't obviously a step backwards on net.

I hope for the Culture outcome. The machine minds gets better at everything, and they choose to keep us around as pets. (Well tending to all of our Mashlow levels, as a point of pride between themselves.)

Skynet is just sloppy though. The easiest way to get a practical human extinction is to make entertainment so fun that people forget to have children, then just wait.

Its kind of ridiculous to paint the future as binary. Computer augmented humans, better than robots, are also a clear possibility.

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