Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyronite | Hacker News Reader

> But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?

I've already started to feel this.

One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?

View on HN

We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.

Perhaps. But are humans going to get what they deserve?

Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.

I'm curious where you are drawing the line. Why is a human different from a ape/dog/chicken now? I wonder: do they not deserve to live with dignity?

Depends on who you ask. Some people might put it at opposable thumbs. Others might ask how many legs one has. Or language, or ability to count (crows can count up to 30). Memory (elephants have memories that go back over a decade).

We should, but to date anyone that wanted to be treated as though they were valuable and deserved dignity needed some way to apply pressure to ensure that.

I'm not optimistic that this will change in the future -- but, I am watching automation erode the amount of pressure that humans can apply.

I have some bad news for you about how our society actually functions...

Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.

But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?

We're currently at the part of the story where chess AI can beat amateurs and is rapidly improving. Kasparov's not worried, he's an expert. He's more creative and skilled than an AI.

Why would these machines stop improving at average this time?

I didn't say they weren't improving. My point is that if our justification is comparing the top 10% of performers to AI to justify human performance, that speaks poorly for the replacement of the bottom 10% of humans.

And why not the top 1% or the top 0.1% or the top 0.001%? Either AI stops improving, or we're in for a grim future for people.

I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com