Because it means existing at all longer than a little over a century, maximum. Most humans alive today like being alive, or they would have already committed suicide. They all would prefer to continue living. But they are trapped in biological bodies that have what appears to be a deliberate self destruct mechanism (aging is too consistent and independent of wear and tear on a particular system) that is doomed to kill them, ending their existence forever.
It would be better, yes, to find a way to turn off the self destruct. Given that it has genetic causes - there’s some kind of timer, using telomeres by the current theory, and there is the negative consequence if you make the telomeres not shorten of cancer being much easier to get started - a code edit to fix it is possible. But really difficult (though demonstrated maybe barely possible in recent experiments with CRISPR on primates) to deliver the code edits to enough cells in a human body to keep them alive. Plus kill all the legacy cells with senolytics.
And the next problem is the human brain is incredible fragile and a hundred different subtle mistakes - made by medical procedures, which would include this one - will break it permanently. Many drugs and common procedures and diseases and just aging will give people “dementia”, a catch all term for catastrophic failure from many poorly understood causes. It happens to about 40-60% of all elderly people.
So the idea of just dumping the human body, and scanning a now deceased person’s brain, or “downloading” their consciousness by invading their brain with nanoscale electrodes that become part of the neural network and thus can transfer information - seem more feasible. Not to mention that once someone’s mind is a digital file, it is much easier to protect.
It’s real immortality because of backup copies. None of these immortal robots would have all copies of their mind-file on one physical computer in one specific place in space. So accidents and deliberate attacks would not normally result in death.
Maybe these immortal robots wouldn’t be the same being as the human they were ripped from. Probably not. But they would be immortal and sentient.
And, I guess in a more practical sense, might makes right. Being an immortal robot gives you, inherently, access to a heck of a lot more might than a flesh and blood human. So once these immortal robots start to exist - whether they are made by ripping data from the brains of deceased humans or purely artificially - they would have vast competitive advantages over existing humans. Pretty much insurmountable advantages in terms of military and economic and even cultural power.
With stabilizing population, the kids we have will have more opportunities, and all the geniuses who now live in places where education and knowledge are difficult to obtain will have a better shot at making use of their intelligence. That more than makes up for the lack of growth in the raw number of geniuses.
Who knows, the next Einstein could have died at 3 due to lack of vaccination, or be stuck farming in the family farm. How many of the smart people who came to the US would have flourished at home?
Well the “job creator” class will have to do something with the masses they no longer need to generate profit margin growth to infinity won’t they now. The power structure seems to “get” that already. They know the ecosystem is deteriorating. We’re all under constant corporate state surveillance already, law enforcement has been militarized, we have the most expansive incarceration apparatus ever known to humankind, we have concentration camps and detainment centers up and running which can accept any and all of us once we’re no longer seen as useful to “progress”. The masses being so well armed, the system can just sit back and allow us to have a go at each other in militia warlord fashion for a while before they lock the thing down.
You do understand this is all paranoid ranting, right?
The things you mentioned regarding surveillance and mass imprisonment are factually true, yes. But there’s no central plan. These things are unrelated and are not part of some greater agenda.
NO ONE IS IN CONTROL. The world is turning into a distopia by a combination of many separate parties seeking their own perceived interest. If the world is headed off the cliff no ones at the wheel…
I used to think der trihs was just being pessimistic when he claimed that the capitalist class would just declare the bottom 90% of people useless breeders and have them exterminated in a post singularity society. But I honestly don’t know anymore.
I personally think mass automation will lead to a resurgence of both fascism and communism. Communism in the form of a UBI and socializing the means of production while distributing the benefits to the masses, while fascism in the form of blaming scary others for the job losses (immigrants, Chinese factories, engineers in silicon valley) combined with large scale military and infrastructure projects to create jobs, projects that will probably prohibit automation to save jobs. Knowing America, we will probably go fascist while Europe goes communist.
He wasn’t being pessimistic…it was crazy and shows that he doesn’t really even understand either the current dynamic, world wide, OR what a technological singularity even is…or who will control it or be making decisions. Or the actual implications of post scarcity even are. Or what a ‘job’ will even be. His is more a Hollywood dystonian view of things than any sort of realistic look.
What happens if a small number of billionaires and trillionaires use their wealth to obtain control of the media, politics, judiciary, police, military, etc?
Also the 90% who end up unemployed are going to start demanding socialism. They’ll want high taxes on the rich and UBI, if not outright socialization of the means of production where everyone gets UBI to buy what they want.
The handful of hundred billionaires and trillionaires who own the robotics companies that will eliminate 50%+ of the jobs aren’t going to put up with that easily. At the very least they will attempt to obtain control of politics and the media to brainwash people into supporting the oligarchy.
Then it isn’t a technological singularity, nor is it post scarcity. This would be basically the world we live in, especially if you consider that many billionaires are members of the CCP or other totalitarian groups, though they are often not thought of that way or counted on the various lists.
Because socialist has worked out so well! Again, if we are talking about that then we aren’t talking about after a technological singularity, nor a post scarcity society. I actually DO think we’ll have something like a BLS or UBI or whatever you want to call it at some point, but that won’t mean we have gone socialist.
We already socialize about 30% of GDP and redistribute it in the form of pensions, health care, education, welfare, etc. In many industrialized nations you can count on having health care for life, free education, a pension when you’re old, a social safety net, infrastructure, etc. due to taxation.
In a post scarcity society that number may just jump to 50-60%.
I guess I’m more worried about the transition to a singularity society. Post singularity we may be fine, but in the decades between now and the singularity I could see mass unemployment and mass social unrest due to it, with the capital class trying to find ways to protect their wealth from the unwashed masses.
Side note: no such thing as a “post scarcity” society. People imagine in a world where technology can tear down entire planets for raw materials and robots can make all food, housing, medical care, and other essentials that scarcity wouldn’t be a thing.
This is untrue. Most of those robots would use valuable intellectual property to function. Even if the software and designs were open source, the land the robot operates on is owned by someone.
In extreme cases you could imagine a world where the wealthy own private space habitats with the interior surface area of a US state, for their exclusive use. While the proles barely survive in overcrowded space slums.
Well, it depends on who ‘we’ are. Assuming for a moment that you aren’t Chinese, North Korean, Cuban or one of the very small number of countries that ACTUALLY have socialism, the answer is no…you are confusing socialism with social programs. Health care for life isn’t socialism, despite what Republican’s and apparently you and others think.
Actually, people rightfully point out that human history has been about moving outward, finding new resources to exploit, and standards going up. And we haven’t even started…not even a tiny bit…to scratch the surface on our own solar system, or even resources in our own neighborhood. Yet, over the past 50 to 100 years, across the board and around the world, standards have risen. Sorry, but your assertion that ‘not such thing as a “post scarcity” society’ is, frankly, wrong. It might not happen, but it COULD happen…easily. Our population will peak in the next few decades. It will decline after that. So, fewer people, greater access to resources. Standards are already rising. Climate change might be a big bump in the road, no doubt…but a post scarcity society isn’t fantasy, depending on how you define that. And you don’t need to tear down the planet to do it…hell, we are probably half way there now, with just the resources we actually have, and what’s holding us back from most of it isn’t resources, it’s politics. We can’t feed the starving in, say, parts of Africa not because there isn’t food, but because there isn’t any real way to get the food to the folks who need it. Same goes for medicine. And even that is changing…hell, the Chinese are investing billions in the region. Not because they love the Africans, but because there are vast, mainly untapped resources in the region and they wants it…yes, they wants it. And even though it’s economic colonialism that probably won’t help the majority of folks in the region in the short term, it WILL eventually help them in the long term.
I feel like this thread is underestimating the impact climate change will have on the 21st century.
[ul]
There are cities in Southern Europe, the Southern US and South East Asia that will be become so hot as to be unlivable in the 2nd half of the century.[/ul]
[ul]Water, already a scarce resource in many areas of the world is going to become even less available and more in demand as weather patterns change (see India’s recent pattern of floods followed by drought) and the glacier’s that feed rivers disappear forever.[/ul]
[ul]Given arctic ice is melting faster than anyone predicited it’s likely that seas level estimates are also understated and could wipe out major cities much earlier than predicted.[/ul]
[ul]Acidification and warming is going to continue to have a massive impact on already over exploited fish stocks, a major source of food for many of the poorest people in the world.[/ul]
So we will be looking at massive water and food shortages, I predict around 2040 or maybe earlier. In the west this will mean higher prices, in the (formerly) developing world this will mean starvation and migration. The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe is a trickle that will become a torrent. Wars over water sources? Maybe, possibly over the small amount of fish left in the sea as well.
Massive political instability. Historically this is very common when the poorest start to go hungry and the Developed world will not be immune due to rising prices.
Complete societal collapse is absolutely possible under these conditions but I expect the developed nations to pull through, unless someone with a nuke gets tired of watching the US continuing to live the good life while they starve to death. There will be a lot of ugliness and keeping out millions of migrants is going to be an unpleasant business, particularly in Europe.
This sounds apocolyptic but it’s based on the predictions of climate scientists. Hoping it will all be ok without radical change very soon is just putting your head in the sand.
Technology will continue to advance, and given how far we’ve come in the last 30 years we could, perhaps with the help of AI, achieve the ability to mitigate a lot of this. Or maybe everyone will pull their heads out of their asses and keep temperatures below 1.5, but it’s already thought by many that the targets we missing are themselves very inadequate. I struggle to see an outcome that doesn’t include billions of deaths though, the pessimist that I am.
And I’m actually fairly sceptical about automation. Widespread automation will come but I think many people have an unrealistic timescale. I think it will be a lot more gradual that the scare stories suggest and therefor the social issue slightly easier to deal with, at least for a while.
Most people feel this way. What they don’t perceive is the machine learning infrastructure that makes this new form of automation possible is more like nuclear fission. Unimpressive until you get a critical mass of fuel together, then immensely powerful. Machine intelligence robotics requires a large set of interconnected software systems, where each component has been worked on sufficiently such that it is reliable ($$$) and then you get immensely better capabilities than anything seen so far. In vast swarms of these robots, not just 1 at a time.
I’m a software developer and SF reader so I feel I have the perspective, I’m just unconvinced by the timeframe. Self-driving cars for example, they have been almost there for sometime that last 1% of progress is proving more difficult than expected. Self-driving trucks are rolling out in a few years but they will be confined to long interstate routes while the end points are covered by drivers both for customer service and because cities are hard.
I don’t dispute it will happen, I just don’t agree that it will be as soon or as sudden as people seem to believe. And a true singularity is a way off IMO.
I guess it depends on what your definition of ‘widespread automation’ really is. Basically, we are there already. A large percentage of manufacturing in the US and most European countries uses automation, along with expert systems and even (weak) AI. So, that’s already happened, and continues to progress. If you mean ‘widespread automation’ to mean no humans in the loop at all, then that’s different. I don’t see that happening any time soon, and, frankly, it might actually be sub-optimal. Instead, what I see is more a fusion of human with AI and automation as being the best of both worlds. Humans do some things better than machines, and that’s probably not going to change. Machines and AI do other things better than humans, and that’s probably not going to change either.
As for autonomous driving, I think that’s also coming sooner than folks seem to realize. Tesla has logged over a billion (yeah, with a ‘b’) miles of driving data and it grows every day. All that big data is exactly what an AI needs to learn, to see all the permutations of driving, including the weird one offs and unique situations. Some of that data collected was from folks screwing up and, in some cases dying. It’s all data that the AI needs to go through. And Tesla is far from the only company looking into this. In 20 years or so I fully expect to see fully autonomous cars really starting to hit the market…similar to what we are seeing from electric cars today. You see them come in as a niche that doesn’t really work that great (yet) and that regular consumers don’t really see the appeal, and gradually, that shifts until there is a tipping point and you see a flood of innovation and offerings. That’s, IMHO, what we’ll see with self driving vehicles. Really, the sticking points are the sensors at this point…one option is REALLY costly but works well, another is cheaper and doesn’t work as well. Solve that one issue and find something that works really well but doesn’t cost as much and you will have solved one of the big problems. There are others, but none of them are insoluble…just difficult.
ETA: Oh, and fusion…I actually think we’ve made a lot of progress on that. It might not be the technology that’s always 50 years out anymore. In this decade there are several projects testing various methods to do fusion, and I think when they go on stream it will show us a lot about what would be required to make an actual production plant. We’ve actually moved into the stage where that’s what they are working towards…testing concepts that could be used in a real power plant. Oh, it’s STILL going to be a decade or 2 (or even 3) before you actually start to see those plants come on stream, but I think this is one we are going to solve. We shall see how it goes in the 20’s, which is when at least 4 projects I know of should be doing their testing, including the big one at ITER.
I’ve travelled to cities in Arizona and Texas, with booming populations, despite regular temps well into the 100s. I’m in no hurry to move there, but “unlivable?”
Re: water - I’d imagine additional resources will get directed to desalination, and recycling of grey water.
How about you? Me, I think a general intelligence (strong) AI is probably going to happen by mid-century at the latest. It’s possible it will happen in the 30’s, and slightly possible we’ll see one in the next decade). Whether it will be a super intelligence and it will bring about the technological singularity is another matter. I actually think the singularity, IF it happens will be from a lot of converging technologies happening at the same time, which will include strong AI but not just that.
Not sure I buy into the whole singularity thingy, but I definitely feel we are set for the next big paradigm shift after the information age. Myself, I think once we start really tapping into the resources from this solar system and become a fully K-1 civilization we will be at the next level…and at that point, I expect that resources will no longer be a big factor, that most if not all humans will have a good standard of living and we’ll have access to vast energy as well as general resources that today we couldn’t even dream of them…just like our ancestors 2000 or 20000 years ago couldn’t dream of what was next in their own progression.
Again, if we are talking about that then we aren’t talking about after a technological singularity, nor a post scarcity society. I actually DO think we’ll have something like a BLS or UBI or whatever you want to call it at some point, but that won’t mean we have gone socialist.