Comment by timcobb
18 hours ago
I can't stop wondering myself.... I'm writing some software with AI and wondering, why am I doing this? Will anyone need this? Will anyone have money to buy this?
Best I've come up with is we'll need to be adopted by technofeudlaist overlords to be our patrons like in the roman days
> Best I've come up with is we'll need to be adopted by technofeudlaist overlords to be our patrons like in the roman days
Continually progressing AI (combined with our current socioeconomic systems) throws a lot of uncertainty into our mid to long term future, but I don't think this is going to be what happens.
There are billions more of "us" than of "them", people don't respond well en masse to a drastic worsening of their societal status and "they" are lagging very far behind on building their robot armies.
If we poorly navigate this transition the outcome should be worrying them more than it worries us.
> There are billions more of "us" than of "them", people don't respond well en masse to a drastic worsening of their societal status and "they" are lagging very far behind on building their robot armies.
Fortunately, yes, those robot armies do seem to be rather behind schedule*.
However, even if Musk dies of old age before anything like the Optimus can be connected to useful artificial intelligence, it can still be driven by the common joke a few years back that "AI" really stood for "Actually Indians".
When all the people currently upset about "immigrants coming here taking our jobs" discover those same people are now staying home and remote-working those same jobs over a VR headset and a Starlink connection... my guess is that by this point, Musk will have no political allies left.
> If we poorly navigate this transition the outcome should be worrying them more than it worries us.
It can screw everyone over. Literal communism was invented in response to Laissez-faire capitalism, and while Laissez-faire died with the Great Depression, the form of capitalism which succeeded it in the USA came into conflict with the USSR and gave us the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.
* 2022 "next year": https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/elon-musk-says-tesla-is-aimi...
Humans aren't sheep but in the broad average it seems like we have a strong tendency to fall inline.
Fwiw I was mostly joking. I agree that the techno overlords have no reason to keep us, unlike in Roman times.
I don't know how you would translate the strength of a robot army to a human one; they haven't fought yet.
[flagged]