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Comment by forensic | Hacker News Reader

This debate isn't about jobs.

The question is this: will the powerful still value human life when robots are better than manual workers?

Wealth keeps concentrating in the hands of a small minority.

Unskilled workers increasingly look like nothing but a drain on resources, unable to produce anything valuable or afford education.

Many many billionaires have little respect for unskilled human life and libertarians do not believe in free education or social services.

When the bottom 50% of society finally ends up with no money, no marketable skills, and no military prowess, what is going to happen to them?

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> ...libertarians do not believe in free education or social services.

I'm an ex-libertarian and have moved to a more centrist position, but this is disingenuous. Libertarians generally want the right to make their own decisions and are anti-coercion. However, many of them are big believers in philanthropy and true voluntary social contracts - just not the kind enforced by the barrel of a gun.

They're not opposed to education or social services - just of funding them by force. It might seem like a small thing, but it's not - if a society could built that achieves high levels of education and prosperity without coercion, most people would think that's a good outcome.

Libertarians frequently believe this is possible. They might be wrong, but the attitude is not "let them eat cake" - it's "my life, my choice for what I do with it, take your hands off of me." But many or most believe in learning and prosperity.

It's unrealistic because the people with the money are not going to give it away unless you force them. In the industrial revolution the wealthy had a motivation to educate the masses: get better workers and fill the military.

What now though? Robots are better soldiers AND workers. Carnegie and Rockefeller were motivated by foreign competition to help people with education and social services. Rockefeller in particular focused his social services on birth control to reduce overpopulation because he saw little value in human life at the bottom of society.

Now that masses are simply not needed for anything, and the masses no longer are a military threat due to extreme military tech, the masses have no bargaining chips other than appealing to the humanity of the plutocrats.

And I fear that many of the plutocrats agree with Ayn Rand when she says, "I don't want your appeals to my better nature. Appeal to my self-interest."

How does someone with no money, no marketable skills, no way to afford education, no ability to exert physical power, continue to survive when the upper class only accepts appeals to their self-interest?

Rockefeller in particular focused his social services on birth control to reduce overpopulation because he saw little value in human life at the bottom of society.

That's pretty interesting. Being European, I don't know much about US industrialists and US population policy. I'd like to learn more about this. Do you have books / articles you'd advise on this subject?

Appeal to enlightened self-interest is more powerful than appeal to someone's "better nature". Find the sweet spot where those two meet. It does happen (that those two things meet) and that's the target if you want meaningful, effective change. Rome had a policy of "bread and circus" -- to keep the masses fed and passively entertained in order to avoid rioting in the streets. I follow a similar policy in my household when facing difficult situations. It's very effective.

You're not thinking this through.

Rome had to avoid rioting because Rome didn't have tear gas.

China does not have to avoid rioting. They are comfortable with using tanks to kill thousands of unarmed protestors.

The circumstances have changed since Rome. Technology has changed them.

I don't think it's as simple as that. Wealth is a product of society and population. Billionaires need people to have decent incomes to buy their products or there isn't any money to hoard. Best to keep those folks pacified so you are reasonably safe walking around in life as a billionaire or you become a prisoner of your wealth. It seems to me the masses don't need billionaires in order to exist but billionaires need the masses in order to exist. Henry Ford stated he wanted his factory workers to all be able to afford a car so there was a consumer market available. If billionaires are too draconian, it can come back to bite them. Even presidents get assassinated. Piss off enough people badly enough and it stops being safe to be you, no matter who you are.

PS -- There are riots in London currently going on:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861840

http://news.yahoo.com/london-rioters-battle-police-shooting-...

PPS -- I've seen a couple of comments on HN indicating the rioters are staying ahead of the police using Blackberries. I find this funny given your remarks about how technology has changed things.

Many many billionaires have little respect for unskilled human life

Which billionaires do not value unskilled human life? How many billionaires are their in the world? Are there really many, many of them that feel that way? Are they really all that selfish that they would happily destroy millions of lives? What does that benefit them?

Actions speak louder than words. Billionaires stand by while the miserable and hopeless suffer.

Billionaires fund FOX News to indoctrinate the middle class and push them toward self-destruction. Which billionaires are funding universal liberal educations or a culture of empowerment?

By their actions the upper class is saying that they don't want a middle class. They are saying: if the middle class is so stupid to fall for Rupert Murdoch propaganda and Evangelical Christianity, then they deserve to be enslaved.

The alternative would be to fund liberal educations, fund free mental health services, fund enlightening media like PBS rather than saying, "If the middle class won't fund it it doesn't deserve to exist."

So many of the elite put all the burden on others. It's true that people should take care of themselves, but they don't. Mental illness is epidemic. Are the wealthy going to stand by and watch as the middle class implodes? Not all plutocrats are malicious, but the majority are indifferent, and their actions speak this.

Which billionaires are funding universal liberal educations or a culture of empowerment?

I have no clue what a "culture of empowerment" is, but as to funding education:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/09/mark-zuckerberg-to-donat...

Another billionaire was recently in the news for donating $40k to a Republican governor. He also donated $7M to PBS, $35M to educating people about evolution and $78M to educating people about science in general didn't make the news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Koch#Philanthropy

These are just a few that I can think of.

Peter Thiel also funds education, though probably not the sort of education you wish he would fund.

Those numbers are a drop in the bucket and generally are not targeted at increasing the size of the middle class. Remember that the lower class is literate.

Conspicuously absent: - lowering cost of higher education - lowering cost of mental health services - lowering cost of land / rent

Literacy doesn't create a middle class. Higher education, mental health, and ownership of land does. These issues never seem to be touched by philanthropists because philanthropists are ambivalent about the middle class.

Peter Thiel is a total elitist by the way. He has no interest or love for uneducated, mentally ill masses and is just the kind of guy who would probably quote Ayn Rand when people are starving to death.

Any system that relies on people's (especially powerful people's) good will and voluntary charity is doomed to failure.

When they have no marketable skills, they'd better learn some. In the absence of mental or physical handicaps, I don't see any reason why people would be incapable of doing this.

It seems like the mental/physical floor required to get a job is getting higher.

The physical floor has crashed, actually. Today a man in a wheelchair can contribute meaningful work.

Only above a certain mental floor. Calling it a floor in general is oversimplifying, it's a curve (Stephen Hawking, football player).

i would say "education floor" is getting higher. very few jobs fully utilize human mental capacity.

Education is expensive and hard. If the people at the top don't reach down with a helping hand, few from the bottom will be able to stand. Is this the world we want to live in? Social Darwinism?

Why marketable skills? Why not useful skills. I find the focus on marketing as much as a problem as everything else.

When it eventually happens, society will have to change.

viva la revolution baby!

This. You do not want to have too many poor people or somebody will take advantage of this and use them to overthrow whomever is in power and put himself in power.

Tanks make this a difficult proposition.

Only if you have brainwashed the tank crews (which admittedly does happen in the military).

In this scenario, I'd imagine the tank crews to be automated too.

Yes, this would be a big problem if warfare was to become fully automated.

I guess we have to hope that when the ability to completely automate warfare that the people in power aren't genocidal sociopaths.

In this situation a tank crew would be attacking their fellow country men, so one would hope hope they would be questioning their orders to fire on civilians.

If they didn't question the orders you would have to question whether they were brainwashed into thinking the fellow country men were deserving of attack.

A lot of militaries train their soldiers to not question the orders of their superiors. I believe the US military does allow a solider to question orders, but I would expect that it is not encouraged.

Police fire on and kill civilians every day in the USA, why would someone in the military behave any differently if ordered to do so? They've already agreed to obey to kill at someone else's request.

ck2 wrote: Police fire on and kill civilians every day in the USA, why would someone in the military behave any differently if ordered to do so? They've already agreed to obey to kill at someone else's request.

I think we are in agreement. I was just trying to clarify my comment above because I was confused as to why my previous comment had been down voted. +1 for you :-)

US law in this area is largely illusory. It makes reference to "lawful orders", but provides little guidance on what would constitute an "unlawful order". Getting it wrong means prison, and getting it right can still mean prison -- the last case I heard about, the military court basically said "the order is lawful unless you are told otherwise by a superior officer", making the entire question moot.

You don't have to look too hard for a real-life example of this scenario. Just look at what happened in Libya and other countries affected by the Arab Uprising - how military behaved in different countries. They're facing this dilemma right now.

The precedent has already been set in the biggest country in the world.

The Tiananmen square massacre was committed by the current Chinese government. Do you think they've grown a conscience in the last 20 years? Or does killing over a thousand (1,000) civilians agitating for Democracy just make it that much easier to kill a hundred thousand (100,000) civilians later on?

This is the classic view, but things have changed.

Robots do not just make better workers, they are also better warriors. How many Chinese peasants does it take to kill a single UAV? How many protestors can modern riot police crowd control using sophisticated psychological warfare combined with advanced nonlethal weaponry?

Once the violent, unskilled, uneducated, unmoneyed lawbreakers are rounded up by the riot police and thrown in jail... then what? The Chinese are not shy about executions. How about humane lethal injections for everyone?

I guess it could happen gradually (as these things usually do). But the original poster was talking about 50% of the population (500 million people in China alone). I have a hard time believing anyone could think that killing off half a billion people would be the way to go (rather than trying to work change into your social structure). It just sounds too James Bond villanesque.

Also, if 50% of people are unemployed there will be a lot of people who are employed who sympathise with them, so we are really talking about 80% plus.

I have a hard time believing anyone could think that killing off half a billion people would be the way to go ... It just sounds too James Bond villanesque.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Number_of_deaths

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

And those are just the groups who actually achieved it. Many more thought about it or tried it.

The OP said he "can't even believe that anyone could think of [mass murder]."

Think!

Lack of imagination, lack of historical awareness, or just plain willful ignorance?

Lack of imagination, lack of historical awareness, or just plain willful ignorance?

Or perhaps I was just chose the wrong turn of phrase? No need to go on a pedantic nerd rage.

Of course people could think about it. Of course people have killed millions of people in the past.

What I was trying to say is that any sensible leader in a industrialised nation would not choose exterminating 50% of their population instead of than trying to affect social change.

Of course we could have another Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot who tries for genocide again. But killing 50% of your population is much different to killing 5%. Those 50% are going to have friends so you'd be up against 80-90% of the population. It would just be more sensible to try to redistribute wealth at that stage.

But yes, I'm sure whack jobs can think about these things and with modern weapons you could probably do it etc.

It will take just 1 good hacker with ideals

They are not "better warriors." UAVs are not completely robots. They need someone to control them. There is not a single military in the world where robots have surpassed human beings in most capacities. Perhaps the only one being bomb control, and even then, they aren't autonomous.

The "rich" people need the poor people. Without other classes, there is no rich. If everyone is in jail, who buys the goods?

What is money worth if there is no one to compare it to? If everyone is poor or in jail...why do you want money? For what? To do what? To drive a nice car that no one cares about because they can't afford food?

People are too quick to overestimate robotics and artificial intelligence. 100 years ago we were supposed to have flying cars, laser guns and teleportation. These were exaggerated views, just as ours are now.

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