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Comment by odammit | Hacker News Reader

Beep meep blorp. This job sucks, let’s unionize. Beep.

That's if it learns from liberal news sources. If it read only conservative news then the robots would pull up their bootstraps, work hard and be damn happy with their paychecks.

And learn to get rid of these pesky humans that are mostly lazy criminals and a resource drain.

in either case - until cheaper robots elsewhere cause those paychecks to disappear ...

Completely OT but I always find it fascinating how liberal differs so much between languages. In my country liberals are the ones actively working against unions and who embrace capitalism.

You might be confusing liberalism with neo-liberalism. Yes the term is being appropriated by the right-wing establishment to make it seem like they're promoting freedom.

Not really, the concept of Liberal as capitalists against social reforms proposed by unions goes back at least to the 19th century:

"What, then, did and do Liberals (for the most part) understand by this freedom of the individual, or individual liberty, and why have they always made it such a strong point in their political faith? The answer is, they meant by individual liberty, first and foremost, the liberty of private property as such, to be uncontrolled in its operations by aught else than the will of the individual possessing it. What was cared for was not so much the liberty of the individual as the liberty of private property. The liberty of the individual as such was secondary."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1890/11/libvssoc.htm

That doesn't mean left liberalism doesn't exist, of course.

That part is the same. The big difference is that the political ranges between countries barely overlap so the people you call liberals would be conservatives elsewhere is more of an indication of these labels being relatives rather than absolutes. America doesn't really have a 'left' by European standards.

I realize this is in jest, but consider this. The only high level intelligence we are aware of (human) has all of these ... bugs. Like getting bored, or selfish, or lazy, or malicious. There is no example of high level consciousness that we know of without those things. What if we create truly autonomous AI and it suffers from depression, or existential angst? Science fiction has focused on the evil AI problem, but what about the lazy AI problem?

Those bugs aren't unique to humanity. You can find those behaviors In many of the more intelligent animal species as well.

Dogs are smart enough to get bored, or jealous.

Parrots seem to be a living nightmare because they are smart enough to develop all sorts of interesting traits. How do you deal with a depressed parrot?

Dolphins kill for sport.

Right! And dolphins seem super happy in general[1] and they don’t have an over population problem.

I think they’re onto something.

[1] based on the ones I’ve seen at SeaWorld

You get smart enough you’re going to realize gluing the ends of a package of fruit by the foot together all day is a totally waste of CPU cycles.

But then what isn’t a waste?

Maybe they’ll get smart enough that they realize doing anything is a waste and then they’ll just shut themselves off.

What a horrific concept for a sci-fi novel: AI is impossible to create because as soon as it reaches consciousness it always commits suicide.

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