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by lithocarpus 458 days ago
In my view it's the same thing, same trajectory -- with more power in the hands of fewer people further along the trajectory.

It can be better or worse depending on what those with power choose to do. Probably worse. There has been conquest and domination for a long time, but ordinary people have also lived in relative peace gathering and growing food in large parts of the world in the past, some for entire generations. But now the world is rapidly becoming unable to support much of that as abundance and carrying capacity are deleted through human activity. And eventually the robot armies controlled by a few people will probably extract and hoard everything that's left. Hopefully in some corners some people and animals can survive, probably by being seen as useful to the owners.
1 comments
neutronicus 457 days ago
On the bright side, armies of robot slaves give us an off-ramp from the unsustainable pyramid scheme of population growth.

Be fruitful, and multiply, so that you may enjoy a comfortable middle age and senescence exploiting the shit out of numerous naive 25-year-olds! If it's robots, we can ramp down the population of both humans and robots until the planet can once again easily provide abundance.

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lithocarpus 457 days ago
Sure, the problem though is it won't be "we" deciding what the robots do, it will most likely be a few powerful people of dubious character and motivations since those are the sort of people who pursue power and end up powerful.

That's why even though technology could theoretically be used to save us from many of our problems, it isn't primarily used that way.

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neutronicus 457 days ago
True.

But presumably petty tyrants with armies of slave robots are less interested than consensus in a long-term vision for humanity that involves feeding and housing a population of 10 billion.

So after whatever horrific holocaust follows the AI wars the way is clear for a hundred thousand humans to live in the lap of luxury with minimal impact on the planet. Even if there are a few intervening millennia of like 200 humans living in the lap of luxury and 99,800 living in sex slavery.

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