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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Never mind right to repair, of all the advancements, maintaining the new machines has always been the obvious new job that gets created. We created the loom and fired everybody? Well now there's a loom engineer job waiting for (some) of you. What happens to society when, instead of having a robot-fixing job, the robots can fix themselves? AGI is a distraction; much like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong test. It's not the problem of how can I fix the one robot I've taken out a second mortgage to buy that I'm worried about, it's when can I buy two robots and they can fix each other that I'm worried about. Because then there is no new job being created.

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Seeing "no more jobs" in the "worry" list is surprising. State pensions exist, and the only reason the pension ages are rising is not enough workers to pay for them; having so many robot workers that there is no demand for human labour* would lower the "pension" age down to zero, AKA "UBI".

* which definitely requires human level general AI at fairly low electrical power demand

> having so many robot workers that there is no demand for human labour* would lower the "pension" age down to zero, AKA "UBI"

Why would the super villains operating these armies of human-capable robots bother paying into an upside down pension system?

At the very least they can defend themselves from the torch wield masses with even more robots.

The standard answer is taxes, backed the existing monopoly on use of force by government.

If we've gone so far that governments cannot stand up against private robot armies then that's not an option anymore, but the point is not to get there.

> Why would the super villains operating these armies of human-capable robots bother paying into an upside down pension system?

Because the governments will, in order of effort needed for compliance, fine them, eminent domain their robots, arrest them, shoot them for resisting arrest, or fire a cruise missile into their secret volcano lair.

Also because if you have a self replicating robot army, you can give every man, woman, and child their own personal O'Neill cylinder and still have 99% of Venus left over, let alone the remainder of the solar system's resources.

Except pension age is already going up around the world.

I had to stop myself from laughing when I heard an old lady in a restaurant complain about not getting enough money from her pension. Sure, I wish she had more money too but at this rate I'll be retiring 15 years older than she was when she retired.

Respect this opinion, but concerned that it's a limiting one.

In my opinion, repair and maintenance is the most commonly overlooked aspect of an automated system deployment. Scaling is impossible without efficient tools to fix problems when they occur, especially if the number of authorized service people is limited.

The more serviceability can be automated and standardized, the greater the number of areas that will benefit from widespread robotics.

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