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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

If a machine can do something a human can, a human should no longer do it.

That's not necessarily true. There is something to be said for hand crafted goods. A machine can make me a TV dinner, but it's not the same as what mom used to make. Besides food, furniture, art, leather goods, hand blown glass, and custom made suits also come to mind as things that are possible to be made by machines, but are nicer when humans make them.

We are also at the point where autonomous AI-powered drones can conduct warfare. I'm not quite sure that completely removing humans from war is a good thing either.

You are welcome to buy hand-crafted goods if you want to. You can still buy handmade pottery even though perfectly serviceable factory pottery is widely available.

But it should be up to the consumer; the artisan shouldn't be able to ban machine-made goods to protect their livelihood.

Where do you base your argument that the consumer should be the one to choose? For many generations, you didn’t have a dozen choices for what bowl to buy, you just bought the bowls available. Why today do we defer to the consumer, whose only role is to give money to use something another has made? Why aren’t we caring more about the workers and artisans who rely on their product sales to survive? Instead we allow large capital holders to build methods to undercut the artisans and in the process they usually make a worse product and ruin the environment somehow.

I think we have this backwards.

Because we are all the consumer. The point of doing work is to be able to consume other people's work.

The total amount of things that can be done is desperately finite, but the amount that could be done is infinite. If a worker is making pottery by hand, they aren't doing something more valuable with their time.

The point of work is to survive a bit longer not to consume cheap crap.

Production is not valuable in itself unless someone consumes it. As YC would say, "Make something people want."

Why would we encourage society to make things no one wants?

Make less stuff

If that results in a net decrease in wellbeing, then no.

The problem isn't the machine, it's the economic system that allows some dude to capture and hoard the surplus produced by replacing the human with the machine.

The machine and the operator are a superorganism system. Looking to place blame on one or a nebulous external cause is intellectually and morally dishonest because it denies culpability for specific instances of harm.

Humans that want to do something impractical / useless can still do it. People do that all the time. See, boats in bottles, digging tunnels, etc.

A machine can exist.

You should read Dune.

'Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.'

Hence... 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.'

For most things I think we can agree. The problem is when machines can 'think'. How much should we offload thinking to the machines.

What I think might happen is people will say "wow ML is just like the human mind", and extrapolate from there that people who aren't special boys like them are just NPCs and don't have as many human rights.

There have always been people who have thought themselves better or more worthy than those they felt were beneath them, and there always will be. The solution is not allowing any one person to collect more resources or power than the rest. We’re failing there.

> The solution is not allowing any one person to collect more resources or power than the rest.

How are you going to "not allow" them? By being more powerful. "No it'll be a committee of shared power all the way up." You'll end up with Stalin, one of the most powerful single humans the world has ever seen.

i want everyone to have buttons to fire officials. Enough clicks and you're gone.

It's not an AI thing. It's an organization thing.

Two big breakthroughs were needed to create organizations bigger than one person could own and run - the corporation, and the org chart.

Daniel McCallum invented modern business organization in 1854. [1] He ran a railroad. The railroad became big enough that one person couldn't keep track of everything that was going on. A railroad has to have tight coordination, or it won't work. There are many things happening at different locations which depend on things happening at other locations. Some things had to coordinated on a scale of minutes, some on a scale of hours, days, or weeks. A railroad needed a distributed system which could, in a sense, think.

This was a new problem. Before that, there were few inter-city organizations, and the ones that existed, such as post offices, governments, and shipping lines, were very loosely coupled. Each location had a boss, who was mostly autonomous. That didn't work for railroads. Unlike ships, the moving trains are totally dependent on a fixed infrastructure. Different people deal with the rolling stock, the track, the freight, and the passengers.

McCallum figured out how to make that work. McCallum came up with daily, weekly, and monthly reports, exception reporting, and line and staff management. This made it possible for ordinary people to do something no one person could comprehend in totality. Most organizations still follow his general approach.

That was the point at which the organization became bigger than any one person.

We're not there yet with AI. Coordinating large numbers of AIs is an unsolved problem.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...

Banks existed for centuries?

Tonedeaf "logic". Destroying incomes harms most people while disproportionately benefiting only a few. This decreases wages and increases competition for an ever shrinking pool of jobs. Eventually, there will only be shit jobs paying peanuts that are too expensive to automate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

There is no ever shrinking pool of jobs, and real wages today are 10x higher than prior to automation.

Instead, we do more with the same number of people, and invent new jobs that didn't exist prior to automation. Like Youtube star or computer programmer.

I was persuaded by this argument for most tech, but AI researchers really, really want to make humans obsolete.

I'm reminded of the God of the Gaps argument - if you prove a supreme being exists by the existence of phenomena we can't explain, then that supreme being's space to exist is ever-shrinking as we explain more and more natural phenomena.

I think your argument is a kind of employment-of-the-gaps, but AI doesn't have to stop short of human capability, so there's no reason to think the gap won't completely close.

The only situation where there would be no jobs is if all of your needs are met by machine. If the machines are not doing everything for us - then there will still be things for people to do.

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