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Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

>Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI?

The optimistic case is technological deflation. Where goods and services become so cheap, you don't need a lot of money to afford them. If you can have a robot sort packages like,

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/human-intern-beats-figure...

Why have a human do that? I don't think there's a person alive whose life goal is to sort packages. A human will lose a job, but only a job they accepted because the human needed money. Well if the package sorting drops the price of things, they don't need as much money. Now if every job is robotic, everything becomes cheaper to the point we don't need money for very many things at all.

That's the optimistic case.

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OK, and in a world where this technology is broadly available and not controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat, I can see how this could be a good outcome. But that’s not the situation we’re in.

For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.

>controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat

This has been the situation for CPUs for decades. We now carry a 1980 cray super computer in our pockets.

>For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.

They won't need to engineer a Terminator style genocide of mankind. Man will kill each other in another war, like we always do. Biological imperatives mean we all kill each other until resources are abundant for those left standing. Then the winners of that war have a baby boom, their children are boomers for the next 80 years, and we start all over again.

The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.

>The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.

So, in other words, a utopian scenario totally divorced from historical precedent and present reality.

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