[cousin_it]

Nah, it's not as bad as the article says. It's much worse.

1) If you don't lose your job to a robot, you'll lose it to an emulated human. An em requires only a tiny chip and a little electricity, and is every bit as capable of doing empathy and creativity as you are.

2) If you don't lose your job to an em, you'll lose it (and your life) to unfriendly self-improving AI that has a use for your atoms. If you think there's a law of nature against such awful things happening, think again.

3) Even if you learn about that bleak future with 99% certainty, you'll keep living life as usual and hoping for the 1%, instead of trying to change things.

4) And even if everyone on Earth sees that the bleak future is coming, we won't coordinate with each other to stop it! Look at poor people today, they are already suffering but don't coordinate to improve their lot.

[ch4s3]

> an emulated human

I don't buy it at all. Where is your evidence that convincing emulation of human emotion and empathy will exist any time in the next 100 years. Based on current technology and the pace of technological advancement that proposition just seems ridiculous.

[Houshalter]

The median result of polling AI researchers is we will have human level AI by is the 2040's.

The last century we went from no computers at all, to people carrying around supercomputers in their pocket. We went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon in 66 years. AI in a century is by no means impossible or unlikely.

[pjc50]

The feasibility and cost of "emulated humans" is not settled; it may well be physically impossible.

[cousin_it]

Wouldn't it be nice if all the things that threaten us turned out to be physically impossible?

"At the same time, the parts we do understand, such as that human intelligence is almost certainly running on top of neurons firing, suggest very strongly that human intelligence is not the limit of the possible. Neurons fire at, say, 200 hertz top speed; transmit signals at 150 meters/second top speed; and even in the realm of heat dissipation (where neurons still have transistors beat cold) a synaptic firing still dissipates around a million times as much heat as the thermodynamic limit for a one-bit irreversible operation at 300 Kelvin. So without shrinking the brain, cooling the brain, or invoking things like reversible computing, it ought to be physically possible to build a mind that works at least a million times faster than a human one, at which rate a subjective year would pass for every 31 sidereal seconds, and all the time from Ancient Greece up until now would pass in less than a day. This is talking about hardware because the hardware of the brain is a lot easier to understand, but software is probably a lot more important; and in the area of software, we have no reason to believe that evolution came up with the optimal design for a general intelligence, starting from incremental modification of chimpanzees, on its first try."

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week311.html

[Houshalter]

A very relevant short essay: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/2011/plenty-of-room-above-u...

Thinking human brains are the pinnacle of intelligence is ridiculous. We are just the very first intelligent thing to evolve. On top of which, biology is severely constrained in many ways and stuck in local optimas.

[arethuza]

Out of interest, why do you think that emulating or uploading a human mind might be physically impossible?

I guess my argument would be - if a relatively small amount of mush in a head can do all that clever stuff - why can't something else?

[NB I think we are a long way (> 100 years) from actually even getting close to mind uploads]