[jfalcon]

>someone raised the question of “what would be the role of humans in an AI-first society”.

Norbert Wiener, considered to be the father of Cybernetics, wrote a book back in the 1950's entitled "The Human Use of Human Beings" that brings up these questions in the early days of digital electronics and control systems. In it, he brings up things like:

- 'Robots enslaving humans for doing jobs better suited by robots due to a lack of humans in the feedback loop which leads to facist machines.'

- 'An economy without human interaction could lead to entropic decay as machines lack biological drive for anti-entropic organization.'

- 'Automation will lead to immediate devaluation of human labor that is routine. Society needs to decouple a person's "worth" from their "utility as a tool".'

The human purpose is not to compete but to safeguard the telology (purpose) of the system.

[9wzYQbTYsAIc]

Seems like a good time to enshrine human rights and the social safety net by ratifying the ICESCR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Econ...) and giving human rights the teeth they need.

I used Anthropic to analyze the situation, it did halfway decent:

https://unratified.org/why/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263664

[WarmWash]

>- 'Automation will lead to immediate devaluation of human labor that is routine. Society needs to decouple a person's "worth" from their "utility as a tool".'

I have this vision that in absence of the ability for people to form social hierarchies on the back of their economic value to society, there will be this AI fueled class hierarchy of people's general social ability. So rather than money determining your neighborhood, your ability to not be violent or crazy does.

[energy123]

If we have post scarcity due to AI, everything becomes so uncertain. Why would we still have violent and crazy people? Surely the ASI could figure it out and fix whatever is going on in their brains. It's so fuzzy after that event horizon I have no confidence in any predictions.

[storus]

Why are some people able to bear suffering whereas others go bonkers? Or what if the only source of happiness of some of those crazy people is domination of other people and exclusivity of social hierarchies? How would AI fix that?

[bryanrasmussen]

>Why some people are able to bear suffering whereas others go bonkers?

Well at least in some cases the scale of suffering between the bonkers and the ones bearing it might be significantly different.

[jononor]

There are easy fixes to get rid of violent and crazy people. Why would a powerful ASI bother with fixing them? A rabid dog just gets put down by humans. Why would we expect anything better of our overlords?

[energy123]

This is also a plausible sounding outcome. That's why it's so uncertain.

[erikerikson]

This seems to suggest a single dimensional evaluation. The complexity of social compatibility is high and the potential capacity to evaluate could also be greater.

[jfalcon]

Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock" describes what's going on within this thread.

Toffler predicted that as change accelerated, we'd face the paradox of too many options (like a Cheesecake Factory menu) or, conversely, feeling like we have no options due to the framerate of change. He argued that we would enter a state of transience where our relationships, jobs and values would become "temporary". And thus when the rate of change turns everything "temporary", all the old institutions - religion, family, nation, profession - can no longer provide a frame of reference.

In short, the "simulation" of our existence may be starting to drop keyframes - causing pixelization in our society which we obviously see as glitches.

The machine is just going to do whatever we tell it - it is a horse with blinders on or a steam engine going round and round. It doesn't know it needs to work within the human framework. Physics and society only intersect where it's needed for safety - this seems like one of those cases where we need to make sure we define the conditions how both the dog and tail can wag each other.

There was a court ruling earlier that I think starts to set this up: "AI generated images cannot be copyrighted". The same could be said about the rest of the 3 M's. Then expand upon that. AI generated content not being eligible for copyright would go a long way to put value back into people's work efforts.

Let machines deal with improving the framerate of life. Let humans decide what life should be. Hopefully it will finally have more than 50% humanity in it instead of amoral capitalism.

[ithkuil]

I'm terrified at the idea that society will select the crazies and the violent instead. I wonder why I think that

[WarmWash]

My real personal "doom" theory is that AI will, err, remove 99.99% of humans, pretty much everyone except for the top 100,000 based whatever fractally complex metric scheme it deems important.

Then those 100,000 get a utopia, the AI gets everything else, and ultimately the humans are just nice pets.

[argee]

> 'An economy without human interaction could lead to entropic decay as machines lack biological drive for anti-entropic organization.'

Not quite the point the quote makes, but it reminded me of the short SF story "Exhalation".

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

[jay_kyburz]

I think its important to remember that humans are not that far removed from the native animals that we share the earth with. Civilization is just a thin layer of rules we use to try and keep the peace between us.

Just being born doesn't entitle somebody to food and shelter, you have to go out and find it. You have to work.

A magpie is not provided food and shelter, it has to hunt, fight for territory, and build its nest.

Humans don't have some inalienable "worth". But if you can work, you might choose to trade it for some food and shelter.

AI is not going change that. We might think the AI owners have a moral obligation to feed people who can't find work, but there is no guarantee this will happen.

Also, for the short term at least, we need to stop talking about AI like its a thing, and talk about the companies that build and own the AI. Why would Google build an AI that can do everyone's job, then turn around and start building farms to feed us for free?

Do we perhaps imagine our Governments are going to start building super automated farms to feed us. How are they going to pay Google for the AI with no tax income?

[jfalcon]

>A magpie is not provided food and shelter, it has to hunt, fight for territory, and build its nest.

>Humans don't have some inalienable "worth". But if you can work, you might choose to trade it for some food and shelter.

A magpie is a slave to its environment (high entropy). Humans are capable of building systems that alter the environment (low entropy).

If we are apathetical to AI, we choose to ignore the benefits and improvements from technology. And ever since the plow, bows and arrows and sharpened rocks, we have always depended on technology to improve our condition. Which is why naturalists find it amazing when we find other species of life on this planet use tools to give them advantages that nature and evolution didn't supplement them with through genetics.

There is a difference between "survival" and "purpose". We have developed our ape-selves to become more than meat in the circle of life. With purpose, we can be more than the magpie.

AI is not an environment - it's a technology as much as the hammer or plow. If it is built to concentrate wealth or kill more people, that's an architectural choice and not a law of physics.

Human labor is more than product outputs. If we cannot change the social contract that defines worth to shift towards human participation and stewardship, then it's a death sentence for the majority of the world's human population.

While companies are not charities, they do depend on consumers. If you take away the income of consumers, do you have a market? If anything, AI should be treated like the telephone or electricity - a public utility - where it can be used to re-engineer how systems, like agriculture, can be done.

At some point we will reach a point of post-scarcity. Where energy is effectively little cost if not free and is able to create all our needs. What happens when things are no longer scarce?

We (humans) need to work on ourselves to overcome our base natures like greed.