This is fantastic news! If I can buy a house for so little, I can spend my money on so many other things that will generate more jobs, and every single person who needs a home - which is everyone - will be better off for having a cheap house!
Porn drove the Internet. I bet sex-bots are going to drive the development of sentient-ish appearing realistic looking robots (The Uncanny Lover) I wonder what will happen to realitionships when every man can have his own Scarlett Johansson doll at home.
Great point, Rune. Many jobs don’t require super-sophisticated AI, but while some guys will be satisfied with a glorified sex doll, anyone who can make a sex robot that is more “realistic” than its competitors will have a huge advantage. (He said “huge”, heh heh.) Which could then inadvertently move the general state of AI tech forward. I had not thought of this at all, but it’s spot on.
RickJay, I agree that the super cheap houses have to be seen as a good deal overall, although it could be hard on construction workers.
Well I did think about this a long time ago and there are may examples in Japanese animation, but I do think that at first it will not be because of sex but because of medical reasons.
The replication of human intelligence will be seen as a very useful thing to develop because experiments that are now deemed unethical will then be possible. A lot of human mental issues will then be analyzed in ways that are impossible right now.
And then yes, once you get it right then you can F*** it, just not the mental cases. 
I think robots that can convincingly simulate sex that are also attractive to look at are not far down the line … the Real Dolls are a hint at how far along that is. But robots that can walk and talk like a real woman are farther down the line, and that’s what it will take to replace real women as companions for men. I’m not sure if women will be as easily fooled by an expert system or AI that mimics human speech as men will be. Say, there will be a lag there.
Then there is the matter of the whole baby-making enterprise. Robots are not going to be able to do that. I suspect that if robots were to become so attractive that real human beings were seen as secondarily attractive sex partners, then society and the government would start looking at rewarding couples who have children a lot more lavishly. There might even be penalties for adults who can conceive children who don’t choose to (Handmaid’s Tale, but with a twist!).
But long before that happens, the robot job holocaust will have occurred and been dealt with one way or another, and we’ll be living in a post-scarcity society. Basically, we’re looking at the other side of the Singularity at this point.
Japan develops middle management AI to run warehouses. So far, seems to have improved productivity by eight percent.
If your boss is a machine, what does that make you?
I don’t know, but that’s a pretty good argument that we need to outlaw machines.
I’ve seen this idea mentioned elsewhere and it always makes me uncomfortable. If an AI is sophesticated enough to replicate human conciousness then wouldn’t it in itself be concious? So although you wouldn’t be doing unethical experiments on a human you would still be doing it on an intelligent and self-aware being…or more accurately one that may be self aware, and surely that’s unethical in itself?
I don’t really understand what you’re saying there?
I think women have higher standards for sex partners and are also more skilled conversationalists than men, generally. So it will take longer for the software to develop to a degree that allows them to be comfortable. Just having vibrator that says “I Looooove Youuuuuuuuu” won’t do the trick for them.
I don’t think so for the purely technical reason that we will make a backup before one of those experiments, also this is forgetting that the original version is likely to be part of the control group.
I have been thinking about making a tale about this for a longtime and IMHO it will be the AIs the ones that will propose even more gruesome experiments as they will be also aware of their ability to press the redo button.
But that brings up a whole host of ethical issues. The idea of having a ‘backup’ implies that such AIs are not considered as individuals and that any number of them may be expendable.
If I clone an animal, is it okay to perform unethical experiments on the clones as long as we keep the original safe? Is it okay to perform unethical experiments on a person if they have an identical twin who isn’t harmed?
What if we had the technology to save a perfect ‘copy’ of you, including your memories and personality traits, so that you could be recreated? Would it then be okay to perform harmful–possibly torturous–experiments on you? If anything goes wrong, we could just kill you and recreate “you” from your backup. The new “you” wouldn’t have undergone the experiments, but that does not actually erase the pain and suffering experienced by the original.
Characterizing inventory management software as your “boss” is, to be quite honest, really goddamned stupid.
You have never seen Ghost in the Shell huh?
It does not follow, because of its nature, we are not talking clones here but almost perfect copies and/or a shared artificial consciousness. (Do we then assume that network technology will be forgotten in the future?)
Not talking about uploading human brains either, as experts like Jeff Hawkins tell us we are not going to see mind uploads anytime soon, but getting artificial brains? That is almost certain.
Could be good, could be bad.
If the money that once was paid in wages to workers who build houses is now concentrated into the hands of the person who owns the house making machine and he or she then leverages this wealth into buying large swaths of real estate and decides that it is better to monopolize land and renters are more profitable than buyers - then its not so good,or cheap.
There is an episode of Black Mirror (available on Netflix) called “Be Right Back” that explores this in an awesome and surprisingly plausible way. Read the plot summary at the link (if you don’t mind spoilers) to see what I mean–although I highly recommend just watching it if you have Netflix. That whole show is fantastic BTW.
I absolutely believe this to be true. But there are a lot of people who don’t accept it. Have you heard of the concept of “philosophical zombies”? I believe it’s an inherently contradictory premise, but a lot of people take it seriously. And many people (including prominent critics like the late Roger Ebert) watch movies like A.I. or *Her *and interpret the whole film on the basis of their conviction that the protagonists only “simulate” human emotions and personality, even though it’s pretty clear that the premise of the film is that they possess sentience. Many people just can’t accept that a “machine”, no matter how sophisticated, could be conscious.
That’s actually a very, very interesting philosophical quandary, one I’ve pondered for many years. I am sympathetic to your position, but I’m not sure it’s clear cut. What if this is what happens in surgery: people experience the pain, but forget it?
Somewhere early in this thread, someone posted a link to a story that was poorly written in a literary sense, but which posited a very clever and highly plausible scenario of a computer program that maximized the efficiency of retail employees by directing them via headphones. The workers remained human, but while “on the clock” they were essentially worker drones. I can absolutely see that coming to pass, sooner rather than later.
I’ll have to give it a look.
That would be Manna by Marshall Brain. Yeah, this is coming. What’s more worker bots for trash pickup are being designed already by Volvo. Just a matter of time before the worker bots are everywhere.
I do like however that Marshall Brain spotlights the big problem that’s keeping robotics from taking over the workplace completely: lack of a visual imaging system that can match the hand-eye corporations. It’s not the same kind of challenge as AI, but it has still proven very tough. Inroads are being made, and as soon as a computer equivalent of hand-eye coordination that matches human ability is reached, billions of jobs will disappear worldwide.
This idea isn’t much different than the way many places already work today.
Gas stations back in the 1950’s and 60’s had a bell that rang when a car drove in, and the pump jockey was required to run to the car within 20 seconds.
Drivers for UPS are given very precise commands by computers on where to drive, in the most efficient way (No left turns, etc )
Retail workers already wear headphones, and are ordered around by the manager.
And for over a century, all assembly-line workers in factories have been “drones”.
:smack:that’s hand-eye coordination.
True. But in this story, the Wal-Mart employees were not just told “go over and stack some inventory on aisle nine”, they were told “walk forward eight steps…now turn right” etc. and everything was coordinated so they never ran into any other employees.
I thought hand-eye corporations were just some really cool new thing I just hadn’t heard about; oh well.