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Comment by indiecore | Hacker News Reader

>There is no profit in reaching the stars.

There's no profit in the singularity either.

There's stupendous profit in every small incremental step towards it. AI research in general has proven to be unbelievably profitable -- even when you fail in your goals (like most AI research to date), every minor partial result can probably be turned into a multimillion business.

Before the AI winter, there was a lot of criticism of how the US govt spent a lot of money on a lot of projects which fizzled out. One of the results built from the ashes of those DARPA projects was the Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, used to optimize and schedule transportation of supplies and personnel.

From wikipedia: Introduced in 1991, DART had by 1995 offset the monetary equivalent of all funds DARPA had channeled into AI research for the previous 30 years combined.

Imagine having a computer that would have the same level of cognition as a human. I think most people would disagree with you on that not being valuable.

You might not want to pay to have your brain preserved to perpetuity, but I'm pretty sure that some would.

Strong AI would could potentially dwarf all past profits, you're simply not correct.

Are you kidding? Because I don't want to be a jerk, but you cannot have possibly thought that through.

Actually he is correct, if everything is virtualized (and therefore abundant) , then the price of everything drops to zero.

True if everybody has access to strong AI. I doubt that is the way it will play out. At least at the beginning. Whomever invents it first will probably hoard it for themselves as an advantage against everybody else. The technology will eventually spread to everybody else but by that time our economy will probably have adapted.

You're a little unclear as to why it's called the singularity. It means a point so drastically different that we cannot predict what the world will look like after it happens. However, should a planet still exist on the day after this occurs, you can pretty much guarantee that the company that controls this technology will make Apple, Google, and Microsoft look like technological infants. Well, unless it is Google, which seems to be the play they are making by hiring RK.

Also, World of Warcraft is virtualized, and everything in that game is potentially infinitely abundant. And yet, it still seems to pull in billions. So...

Yes, but my point is essentially that talking about profits in a post singularity world is probably as sensible as talking about Mao as CEO of China. After the singularity we will likely have a different socio-economic system and profits will probably be something like a noble rank is today.

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