It will take time, more then 30 years, but it is coming, natural evolution of humanity. We use to have walls around cities, then later created countries and borders, but those are slowly crumbling away, to give way to continents, then one world. Europe’s example, although still shaky, will be followed by many others.

We are but one race, on one planet. In full evolution.

What happens if the AI’s are competing with each other for work?
What happens if the AI’s want to own the AI’s?

Agreed, artificial intelligence doesn’t mean artificial greed, artificial anger, artificial ambition, etc.

>it just may put you a little behind the times. The story does change a bit with cybernetics, especially as neural implants are concerned, but the general analogy should hold.

I think the only change would be the word “little” – I’m sure Kurzweil foresees an eventual future where unaugmented humans are as relevant to the genuine needs of the cutting edge of earth-based-intelligence as apes now are, and it could be argued that the current widespread unemployment of non-high-tech-CAPABLE folks is just the start of an irreversible process.

I take your point about some types of human values maybe being irreplaceable from scratch, but that wouldn’t apply if we just end up extending certain types of human mental abilities with machines (brain nanobots, cloud thinking, etc).

The focus on “education” for people who should really have stuck to plowing fields and/or tightening bolts (and I don’t exempt myself here) just seems to give them student debt for their philosophy/english/psychology major: we could already be seeing a largely “unusable” generation of humans, scattered in the fringes of our highly advanced civilisation like stray dogs in alleys.

As far as those who remain unaugmented, they may find themselves in a similar position to those who don’t have Internet access now, let alone a smartphone, laptop, etc. These tools for productivity are a massive economic force; choosing not to use them is completely legitimate and is a right, it just may put you a little behind the times.

The story does change a bit with cybernetics, especially as neural implants are concerned, but the general analogy should hold.

The best possible outcome for these technologies (augmentations, robotics, etc.) is that humans find themselves in a position where their abilities are unique and complimentary to that of others, including machines and other humans. This is the best possible outcome, and relies on an assumption the human element cannot be replicated, and that some aspects value in the organic species cannot be overridden.

Without this assumption, the most likely outcome is actually rather surprising. Assume for moment there is a machine revolution, they become smarter than us, etc. Most people think that by this time, they’ll just enslave all of us. Wrong. That’s what a human would do, driven by our animal needs for power, dominance, and evolutionary superiority. Machines have no such needs; they will be able to propagate almost endlessly, will have nearly unlimited resources available to them via outer space, and so on. The most likely outcome is actually the machine part of civilization will simply leave. This is counterintuitive to a lot of people who expect the worst. It’s not a particularly bright outcome either; much of our civilization would come to a grinding halt, and our mindchildren would set sail for their own domain, taking steps to become type II or type III civilizations well before we do.

That’s assuming a machine revolution, which is a worst-case scenario itself.

As for augmentations, well, it may become uneconomical to remain purely organic. That saddens me, actually, but progress doesn’t stop for purists. :(

I’m not sure what you could mean by “employment changing beyond what we can imagine”: I can easily imagine (unaugmented) people being kept around as either revered obsolete ancestors, pampered and well cared for – or monkeys dancing in front of donation jars, or, of course, exterminated. What other options did you have in mind? And if these other options can’t even be hinted at, why not?

Again, I’m here describing UNAUGMENTED humans: of course transformed/transhuman/posthuman entities can do all sorts of crazy stuff – but I take it you won’t require everybody to convert to stay alive in the new world?

Allow me to point out that everybody who thinks that machines will be these obsessive overlords is mistaken. Present formulations of rational agents are not complete; the true solution can be shown that cooperation and mutual benefit is the best long-term strategy. If you don’t believe me, well, go do the math yourself. Retrace Von Neumann’s work, and spot the flaws: he was a great scientist, but many of the assumptions of that day were based on cultural bias, as is anything.

It astounds me how much people cling to this doom and gloom of “the machines will take us all over!” As someone who programs such machines, I can say that this is not a likely outcome. People should stop projecting their own power obsession into these new entities, and focus more on adapting to the world changing around them.

For every person who’s willing to see the opportunity and good things that can come from advanced AIs, there are five hundred who pull their hair out screaming the end of the world. I don’t know when it was we humans became so paranoid and shortsighted.

It’s not about “finding other things”, it’s about “competitiveness in doing ANY ONE of those things” – because anything humans can do, human-machine hybrids or just strong AIs hooked up to hyperadvanced robots can, eventually, do BETTER.

You could say this is the “employment singularity”, or just the advance shock of “the” singularity related to employment: the point at which (unaugmented) humans become just as incapable of meaningfully competing for pay against “post/transhuman” entities as a child or animal would be of competing against adult humans, now.

However, note that I do not quote or cite any source. I do not have time to really look at a lot of data to prove my point. But you could probably scare up the tech rev. reference.

The logical extension of automation is to make money and markets redundant.

As automation gets to the point that all essential things can be produced entirely automatically, then there is no reason for there to be any scarcity of those essentials.
Without scarcity, there is no need of money or markets, no need for employment.

We do need to start seriously thinking about how we are going to organise ourselves, and create conditions that enhance peaceful coexistence in a world where money has lost its power, and individuals are empowered as never before.

Managing the transition to a “post scarcity” social system is going to present some interesting challenges, and I am getting ever more confident that we have the tools to do it.

There is a new competition in town called A.I. that is gaining our precious only to be thought human skills at an increasing rate, it isnt just hitting lower skills jobs, it will hit every job sector, new industries will be created yes, the real question is how many jobs will be needed in these industies?

I recommend that you inform yourself a little better before pulling out some luddite fallacy. Race against the machines is a good book to start with among with Andrew McAfee Ted/Techonomyy talk.

That is precisely not the free market and you know it yourself by putting free market in quotation marks. The answer than is to deregulate. To remove the regulatory barriers to entry that favor incumbents and to reform intellectual property laws along free market lines as was proposed by the recent Republican Study Committee policy brief (the one that was pulled) titled “Three Myths About Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It.”

Furthermore, the free market doesn’t prescribe what organisational structures might come to dominate. The free market is based on the bottom up emergence of order analogous to biological evolution. If in the future these networks you talk of are more efficient and favored by individuals than they will come to dominate.

“Since corporations own the government, it’s impossible to reform the government. It makes more sense to think of the corporations and the government not Separately, but as one unit – one corporate-republic. Again I ask, how might we work around this problem?”

Corporations do not own the government. That is a patently absurd statement. There is no monolithic entity called corporations. There are a number of competing entities with often divergent interests. Regulations or other interventions passed by government may favor some corporations, but harm others. For instance, the bailout of GM obviously helped GM’s shareholders, but it harmed Toyota, Ford and others who would have moved in to fill the gap had GM been allowed to fail. More generally in society there are many competing interests fighting to use the state’s monopoly on violence to their own ends not one class or ruling elite.

The corporativist or corporatist view of one body (the root word is corpus which it shares with corporate, corporate is not the root word as many people seem to think) of unified state-corporate-labor interests over the anarchy of the free market capitalism is antithetical to the free market. It was the view behind the New Deal and Mussolini’s economic policies. The answer is then to support the anarchical bottom up emergent order of the free market over the top down order imposed by the institution of mass coercion that is the state.

That’s an interesting idea – but how would you break it down? I mean, one person is one taxable entity, and if each gets replaced by one humanoid-shelled strong AI, then we’re set, but I doubt that would happen – what if you have one central robot brain with multiple arms, or just one robot that works as fast as 50 people, or even a swarm of nanobots that replaces one person?

Also, would you have had, say, horses pay the tax of the plow-pulling-humans they displaced, or trains pay wagon-service taxes?