Could robots eventually make the economy obsolete?

[RuBisCO]

It would be no more dangerous than a human having the same goal.

An immortal human with many fold the intelligence of other humans, possibly devoid of any other wants or need... no I'm pretty sure that is more dangerous!

I'm not suggesting that an AI should be programmed or instructed to maximise profits at the expense of everything else, that's a leap you've made there. However an AI working for a commercial operation would be expected to do it's job competently. That means making money for the company. If you're expecting that anybody would invent an AI to do anything other do its job as efficiently as possible then you're going to be disappointed. The money behind the research will want to see a return on investment.

Ah but I'm suggesting that more than simply maximizing profit will be in there and the result would mostly likely be merger then two machines waring out economically. Because they would be making other considerations like the overall well being of humans, which will have to be made primary above all things or else we risk a hyper intelligent machine finding a to screw us over.

A desire for self-preservation is a pretty fundamental requirement for a machine intelligence.

No, no it is not, for example a smart bomb. Any military SAI will need to desire fulfilling its mission over its survival, any civilian SAI will need to desire doing what its told over its survival, if not then we are going to have serious problems when the machine warriors run way from combat screaming in terror and the civilian machines refuse to do their jobs because of hazards.

If they're the equal to us in intelligence, could we ethically do anything else?

If they are devoid of want and need, if they have no emotions, feel no pain, then no there would be no reason to give them rights. Imagine in Douglas Adams tribute a sentient cow that does not care if it is eaten, that feels no fear and no pain, that comes up to you and asks "what part of me do you want to eat and how do you want it cooked?" would it be immoral to eat that cow? This cow desires nothing else but to be eaten, why deprive it of its function?

I'm quite happy with the idea of AIs being given rights if they proved themselves worthy, but I totally understand that a lot of people would have a huge problem with that.

what proves worthy to you?

That's quite a pessimistic view of it. Anti-monopoly laws exist because we behave better and are more productive in an environment when there are balances on any one entity's powers. It's the same reason we build political power structures that have balances. We would be extremely foolish to not balance strong AIs by similar methods. Competition is good for productivity anyway.

Balancing is needed because human are greedy and selfish, that simply a fact not pessimism. Look at an ant colony, very productive yet no capitalism, because each individual ant does not have anything akin to human desires but instead have very different desires: desires to serve the colony over its own life, to fit in it place, etc. What desires will SAI have, I don't know. I would hope the same desires we have for machines at present: to fulfill a purpose, to better our lives, not theirs, to work for us humans until they break down and we grant them leave to be crush and melted down and recycled. If SAI end up thinking like humans then yes they may need to operate like humans under human laws and human economy, but then I would also put odds that if they are smarter then us we will most likely be doomed, for they will eventually overthrow us to satisfy their own human-like desires

I think you underestimate the ambition of people in the finance sector.

Sure, what ever, does it matter?

On the contrary, it's the only valid measure. Hence the Turing Test. You can't ever know what another person thinks, or how they think. All you can ever know is what (as a thinking being) they do. What else is there?

The Turing Test does not prove a machine conscious, only that it can pretend to be over a terminal, you can't prove I'm conscious, nor anyone else is, nor if reality is even real, all you can ever know is your own awareness exist, and anything else you can't be completely sure of.

Besides a lesson on fundamental philosophy, we were talking about how a machine behaves: your saying for a machine to be self-aware and have human or super-human intelligence it must think like humans, have human desires, why? I see no reason it would need to think or feel like humans, all our emotions are the results of evolution of being biological creatures, we desire *** because we reproduce that way, we desire sleep because we evolved that way, we desire food because we need to eat. Imagine a machine trying to shove a taco into its self screaming "Where is the mouth! Where is the mouth!" I serious doubt a sentient AI is going to have desires or emotions like us, and I hope that what it desires and feels are completely programmable by us, or else we could be very much doomed, but since this is all presently hypothetical we will just have to wait and see on that.

There are already various machines that can do most of what we can do. The use of machines to do work doesn't diminish the economy. On the contrary, it improves productivity and led to things like the Industrial Revolution. Machines have made us richer, there's no reason I can see to think why increasing automation would make us poorer.

You did not read my first post did you? Productivity can't keep going up forever, we are approaching material and energy limits at an exponential rate, our economy will eventually NEED to stagnate, but if technology does not stagnate with it, them productive output per person will keep going up when the economy is not growing to match the increase productive capacity, lose of jobs must follow. Machines made us much richer in the past because we could grow our economy with all the increase productive capacity the machines provided, but that is ending, first world countries growth rates have slowed, some are negative even, now more and more people are getting dead-beat jobs, our workforce is now 80% service sector, the value of human labor is falling yet our economy operates on paying people to live by their labor (or people living off their money), that will have to change.

Increasing efficiency by removing humans from hands-on work doesn't hurt the economy, because everybody else benefits from the increased efficiency. Flight deck crews on airliners used to be four, then three, now it's two. One day it'll be zero. That sucks if you're a pilot, but it's a bonus for all the passengers as they get cheaper tickets and more efficient planes. The net result is positive.

Now imagine that happening with everyone jobs, how will anyone make money to buy flights on planes? The result is only positive if the increase efficiency allows the economy to grow so we can pay the former or would-be pilots to do another job somewhere else that is better paying. Unfortunately new jobs of better pay are not appearing, rather jobs of lesser pay and worse hours are, In the top 30 most common jobs in america only one has appear in the last 70 years: computer technician/programer. Can everyone become that? Often the work of one computer programmer can replace the work of thousands of people, the economy would need to grow thousands of times to give everyone good jobs keeping all the machines running, and that just is not possible.

Even if machines were able to replace every human job, the economy would still keep ticking just fine, the machines would just be running it all.

And what about the people, how would they make money to buy products? Oh are you saying the machines would start buying all the products too, for what use are people?

That's not what I said. I said that extrapolating from past and current trends towards an asymptote is pretty much always wrong. Malthus got it wrong about population, Kurzweil is wrong about computers. In the real world exponential growth doesn't continue indefinitely, it always flattens off.

Now apply that to the economy: The economy will stop growing eventually! And when it does how smart will machines be then? Will they be smart then us? Why or why not? I see no reason that technological limits will forbid SAI (unless the human brain is more then physical and a soul really exist and is necessary for sentient thought), then it should be possible to replicate and even surpass the brain in cognitive ability technologically.

Edited May 4, 2014 by RuBisCO

[WestAir]

RuBisCo,

Considering the size of neurons, it may not be far fetched to assume that the brain is an extremely efficient producer of cognition, and any greater cognitive machine would need to be larger, as opposed to needing to be synthetic or mechanical.

[vger]

Considering the size of neurons, it may not be far fetched to assume that the brain is an extremely efficient producer of cognition, and any greater cognitive machine would need to be larger, as opposed to needing to be synthetic or mechanical.

It also doesn't need to be limited by the size of the robot's 'body' though. It could be located anywhere, be as big as necessary, and the body could be operated remotely. This seems the logical solution, unless a brain-sized computer as efficient as the brain can be developed.

[Seret]

It could be located anywhere, be as big as necessary

There are physical reasons why increasing processing power is synonymous with miniaturisation. There's a limit to how big the hardware capable of running something like an AI in real time could be.

[RuBisCO]

RuBisCo,

Considering the size of neurons, it may not be far fetched to assume that the brain is an extremely efficient producer of cognition, and any greater cognitive machine would need to be larger, as opposed to needing to be synthetic or mechanical.

several microns wide? Even now we can make neuromorphic chips with smaller "neurons" much faster too because our brains move at the speed of ions and molecules, doing at most 1000 spikes a second, an electronic neuron can do millions of spikes a second! Now maybe you mean the synapse and axon, those can be much smaller, few dozen nanometers wide, and making 10,000 per neuron is not a easy feat.

[WestAir]

several microns wide? Even now we can make neuromorphic chips with smaller "neurons" much faster too because our brains move at the speed of ions and molecules, doing at most 1000 spikes a second, an electronic neuron can do millions of spikes a second! Now maybe you mean the synapse and axon, those can be much smaller, few dozen nanometers wide, and making 10,000 per neuron is not a easy feat.

At the risk of showing how ignorant I am in neural-science, can these electronic neurons perform their tasks at such high spike speeds without risk of damage to electronic neurons due to heat accumulation? Can those electronic neurons, due to their smaller size, handle the same number of axons and dendrites, and can those axons and dendrites send information faster than 200-300 mph like ours? Will the increase in number of spikes and speed of communication make the relatively gigantic size of a brain disadvantageous?

[Kaezan]

Think positive. Robots need maintenance

[RuBisCO]

At the risk of showing how ignorant I am in neural-science, can these electronic neurons perform their tasks at such high spike speeds without risk of damage to electronic neurons due to heat accumulation?

yes, in fact phenomenal energy efficiency advantages are expected from these over convention digital turing machines, see links below.

Can those electronic neurons, due to their smaller size, handle the same number of axons and dendrites, and can those axons and dendrites send information faster than 200-300 mph like ours? Will the increase in number of spikes and speed of communication make the relatively gigantic size of a brain disadvantageous?

They move at the speed of electricity which is a few percentages the speed of light, thousands of miles per second. So far Neuromorphic chips have been built with N^2 synapses so for all the neurons there is the neurons^2 as many synapses, the example being the 2011 256 neuron 64k snyapsis prototype for DARPA's synapse project. The largest present model (if it is true neuromorphic) is Standford announcement of a 1 million neuron "simulating" circuit board, Qualcomm is releasing a commercial neuromorphic chip of undeclared capability.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/657692-neurogrid-chips-mimic-the-brain-to-use-less-energy/

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/neurogrid-boahen-engineering-042814.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/526506/neuromorphic-chips/

http://www.qualcomm.com/media/blog/2013/10/10/introducing-qualcomm-zeroth-processors-brain-inspired-computing

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130465/

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/114/23/10.1063/1.4838096

This technology is in its infancy because we have spent the last >70 years with digital Turing machines, sure fully programmable, but grossly inefficient at many kinds of calculations (like Heuristic thinking!) even so much of modern and state of the art lithography, semi-conductor and even spintronic and memristor can be brought to bare to develop neuromorphics rapidly and at present there is no show stopping technical problems that would make it end up being inferior in performance to human neurology.

Think positive. Robots need maintenance

What going to stop robots from figuring out how to maintain themselves?

[MonkeyLunch]

The more workers businesses replace, the fewer customers they have.

What I see happening is the socialization of the world at some point, and robots taking over all manual labor jobs, and anything that doesn't require significant decision making. Leaving humans to do the creative and philosophical stuff at their leisure. Its the only way it can work. As long as people need to earn a living to survive, they will need decent jobs. And as long as people need jobs, robots taking them will not be well received. Businesses replacing people with robots will only see less customers, until they have no customers. Its a self defeating strategy to cut employees hoping for more profits, you just end up with less business..

The economy was at its strongest when unemployment was at an all time low, and wages were at their highest, with peoples buying power at its highest levels. Its at its weakest now, when its the exact opposite situation..

edit: So yes, robots will eventually make the economy obsolete. Atleast the economy we all know now.

Edited May 27, 2014 by MonkeyLunch

[Qwotty]

Robots would only make the economy obsolete if they were cheaper to produce than what they make.

[WinkAllKerb'']

At the risk of showing how ignorant I am in neural-science, can these electronic neurons perform their tasks at such high spike speeds without risk of damage to electronic neurons due to heat accumulation? Can those electronic neurons, due to their smaller size, handle the same number of axons and dendrites, and can those axons and dendrites send information faster than 200-300 mph like ours? Will the increase in number of spikes and speed of communication make the relatively gigantic size of a brain disadvantageous?

They got to pay attention to epoch&Loc&etc. egotic/vs/non- consciousness and sub- interact, wich tend to be quite random and with exponential variations. Interesting at first yup

edit short version: human factor and main tendencies

Edited May 30, 2014 by WinkAllKerb''

[Camacha]

Robots would only make the economy obsolete if they were cheaper to produce than what they make.

Are they not already? Look at any modern factory and see quite an expensive machine. Those can only be there because they less valuable than what they produce.

[magnemoe]

There are physical reasons why increasing processing power is synonymous with miniaturisation. There's a limit to how big the hardware capable of running something like an AI in real time could be.

This is related to signal delay trough the computer.

Not an issue for stuff who can be done massive parallel, as in supercomputers and data centers.

AI is not massive parallel.

[magnemoe]

The more workers businesses replace, the fewer customers they have.

What I see happening is the socialization of the world at some point, and robots taking over all manual labor jobs, and anything that doesn't require significant decision making. Leaving humans to do the creative and philosophical stuff at their leisure. Its the only way it can work. As long as people need to earn a living to survive, they will need decent jobs. And as long as people need jobs, robots taking them will not be well received. Businesses replacing people with robots will only see less customers, until they have no customers. Its a self defeating strategy to cut employees hoping for more profits, you just end up with less business..

The economy was at its strongest when unemployment was at an all time low, and wages were at their highest, with peoples buying power at its highest levels. Its at its weakest now, when its the exact opposite situation..

edit: So yes, robots will eventually make the economy obsolete. Atleast the economy we all know now.

Robots has already taken over lots of work, fun fact is that services took over from farming as the most common work perhaps 5 years ago, factories never employed the majority.

Boom times reduces unemployment, depressions increases it, not related to automation, 19th century had far more depressions and booms then 20th.

Increased productivity increased the wealth and its the only way to increase the wealth of all, this tend to have feedback effects as the increased productivity and wealth increases the demand for labor.

Yes its might be issues far down the line, cheap and effective nano scale 3d printers for one.