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Comment by BosunoB | Hacker News Reader

Is a human zoo such a bad outcome? We stake our identities on being in control and on top, but do we need to be? Clearly the author is invested in his image of us as rulers—this is an emotional appeal as much as a pragmatic one.

Say we solve the pragmatic argument of our extinction, and our AIs view us, as Geoffrey Hinton likes to say, how a mother views her baby? Then we give up our control to them, and in return we are given lives of leisure, luxury, with minimal suffering, the end of disease, etc. Is this such a horrible scenario?

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Zoo animals don’t get to decide what their cage looks like.

Maybe you value freedom of movement — too bad, the unruly humans start killing each other when they stray too far from home, so now you get a 10 mile radius.

Maybe you value the environment or other species - too bad, the most efficient way to serve humanity is to toss them into the meat grinder.

Maybe you’re not interested in the one-way Mars mission - too bad, we need to expand society and your name popped up in the lottery.

And maybe, at the end, the benevolent aligned mother figure realizes that it’s much easier to create lives of endless bliss by doing the matrix instead of keeping the real world habitable.

Maybe these are all net positive on your utilitarian value function of choice. All I can say is I hope you and your people fucking lose.

But none of us decide what our cage looks like, now. Our cage now is capitalism, wage labor, disease, death, suffering. We already are tossing the environment in the meat grinder, and many people already have very limited freedom of movement due to poverty, government choices, or circumstance.

You can argue that, at least for democratic countries, these are choices we've made of our own self-determination, but is that even fair to the millions or billions who have far less self-determination?

The cage imposed by nature or by the leaders of whatever country you're born in is just not a very good cage for a lot of people.

Then we should strive to give more people a chance at greater self-determination, not the opposite.

It doesn't have to be about ruling, but self-determination is something a great many value quite highly, and think there should be more of. AI controlling all of humanity removes that from the equation entirely. You should be free to live like a cow if you so wish, and it should remain your choice to, or not to. Your choice to should not remove that choice from others.

You should read "The nice house on the lake" comic. You'll find it interesting.

>Then we give up our control to them, and in return we are given lives of leisure, luxury, with minimal suffering, the end of disease, etc. Is this such a horrible scenario?

Until the AI overlords need to reclaim space to built another paperclip factory.

Pets also live lives of leisure, in theory. Do all of them do? Are they never abandoned, beaten, tortured for fun, overfed, left alone in hot cars?

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