953 replies to this topic

[mag1]

One of the commonalities of socio-economic crises is that money becomes almost worthless. The experience of Greece seems fairly typical. People strangely develop this fervent misplaced belief in fiat currency. The problem is that a dollar has no absolute worth. It only has worth because government says so. And of course government can and does simply print more of it whenever it seems convenient.

 

It is very difficult to foresee a singularity type event not creating a truly massive financial catastrophe. Much of the wealth in most industrialized societies is locked up in real estate. Even the most conservative of bank will use 800% leverage. So, if the banks were to sustain losses on their real estate portfolios of 12.5% their entire capital base would evaporate. This was recently shown when the American real estate market collapsed. However, the financial firms involved were using 4000% leverage.

 

With tens of millions of people unemployed by transbotics it would not be unexpected that there would be a massive financial crisis. It is generally best when making predictions to not predict too near into the future (that way you won't be shown to be wrong). Though this prediction could be verified (or not) in less than 5 years.

 

Modern economies have made people, communities, nations and the whole world interconnected into a system in which it is simply not realistic to think that hundreds of millions of hungry unemployed people wandering the streets can just be dismissed as someone else's misfortune. We are all in this together. When the singularity arrives, we will all be in the eye of the maelstrom.

 

Edited by mag1, 06 July 2015 - 09:54 PM.

[niner]

Yes, we are all in this together.  We can pretend that we aren't, up to a point, but when society begins to crumble, then everyone is affected.  I don't agree that any socio-economic crisis will result in worthless currency.  That just isn't the case in the vast majority of crises.  Currency becomes worthless in a hyper-inflation, but that's rare, and is not happening in Greece.  A Euro is still worth a Euro in Greece.  If they revert to the Drachma, then it will have a new exchange value that is going to screw the financially unsophisticated citizens of Greece.  Those in the know (the wealthy, in general) have already moved their money out of Greek banks.  There is nothing wrong with fiat currencies as long as they are handled with a modicum of responsibility.  Hard currencies result in frequent boom-bust cycles that are very disruptive.  That's why virtually every country in the world uses fiat currency.  Frankly, you'd have to be crazy not to. 

[mag1]

Yes, I think the "we are all in this together" frame of mind would be good to develop as the singularity draws nearer. Human society has so greatly dispersed in terms of lifestyle etc... that I worry what will happen when we must confront one another in another crisis. Previous responses such as: "Let them eat cake" were clearly not helpful. Considering the substantial levels of dementing illness, pre-dementing illness, mild cognitive impairment and autistic behavior in our communities, similar insensitive behavior would be likely.

 

I thought the joke about it being darkest just before it becomes pitch black might cheer someone up confronted by some of the approaching challenges. However, as has been noted on this thread, what life will be like after the singularity event is unknown (unknowable). We are rapidly approaching a time when some of our brightest thinkers are unable to describe what will happen next.

 

On second sober reflection, a better response one could give someone in distress during the coming social upheavals is a sense of empathy. We should all work on our sense of empathy. There will soon be a lot of hurting people as a result of inevitable technological restructuring. Developing a sense of understanding and concern for those affected could help us all get through this.

 

Almost any social crisis will cause an enormous stress on the financial system. The overwhelming amounts of leverage used in all financial systems virtually guarantees an economic collapse if people all behave in an unexpected way at the same time.

 

Strangely, the very people who most crave security and stability contribute to this outcome by their typically rigidly predictable patterns of behavior. The financial system has realized that people often make highly foreseeable choices. Banks can then use this insight to make large amounts of money through leveraging their investments. Yet, by doing so, they often have not been able to maintain solvency when people most desperately need to access their money. To avoid such a trap, people could collectively add instability into the system by deregularizing their pattern of behavior. Oddly by adding this marginal risk into the system, the system would be more prepared to deal with real instabilities in the future.

 

Yes, there are probably no easy answers to the problems in Greece. Financial bankruptcy is not unknown in Greece. The main difference this time around is that they are within the monetary framework of Europe. The real problem being confronted by Greece is that a euro is still worth a euro in Greece. There must now be a certain nostalgia in Greece thinking about the good ole days when you could just print and devalue your way out of such difficulties.  

 

It is disappointing that ordinary citizens are stuck with pieces of paper that in a crunch represent nothing. When the banks close up, their bank statements and financial certificates offer no particular sustenance. It would be perhaps misguided and ultimately impractical, though it would be reassuring if currency could be backed by some

physical value (For example. a dollar could be worth a loaf of bread, etc. This might provide some way of establishing a real value to a currency and protect against the

irresponsible creation of money.)

 

In past crises people could at least have currency that could not be exchanged for goods. In modern times people can be left without even the comfort of the physical presence of pieces of paper: Governments can now just shut down the banks.  

 

 

 

 

[TheSimulation]

Quote from post: "However, as has been noted on this thread, what life will be like after the singularity event is unknown (unknowable)."

 

 

I disagree with the whole "singularity" buzzword.  There is no single event that happens. It's several events. We already have Watson which can beat people at Jeopardy. We already have computers that can beat people at Chess. This is not one single event that happens all of a sudden. It slowly happens with multiple events. The singularity already started a long time ago when Ada Lovelace starting programming without having a computer (there was no such thing at the time), along with Leibniz who was also thinking about computer programming even though there was no computer at the time. It's not a singularity.. it's multiple events that happen over many years. Singularity is just a silly buzzword that buffoons like Ray K. promote.

Edited by TheSimulation, 11 July 2015 - 07:26 PM.

[mag1]

The singularity provides a framework to talk about the technological changes that we are all now grappling with. It would be best, though, not to dilute the meaning of the word. There will be no doubt when the singularity is truly reached: Humanity will be entirely overwhelmed by technological progress. Life will be essentially unlivable.

 

We have not quite reached that point... yet. Even the looming mass unemployment of much of our society over the next four years by transbotics really does not qualify for a true singularity-like event: the technology involved is fairly basic. Transbotics will merely eliminate most of the economic foundations of modern society. Life is still conceivable afterwards. Perhaps we could take up gardening to feed ourselves. Transbotics is only about economics, the singularity is about much more. The singularity will present an artificial technology challenge so powerful that the cognitive capacity of humanity would not be able to cope. The singularity event occurs when the rate of technological progress becomes infinite. 

 

I think that a tremendous opportunity has been lost. The singularity should be an idea on the front pages of our newspapers. This is an idea that is so powerful that we can shape the present by an event in the future that is now looming on the horizon. Why, for instance, have world leaders not yet assembled and declared a global moratorium on conflict due to the rapidly approaching wave of infinite progress? This should have been done not later than January 1st 2000. Why are powerful ideas seldom used in the socio-politico world to frame the discussion? Instead of creatively thinking about complexity, humanity has this disturbing tendency to invariably use primate strategy 1 (aka Plan A-- violence ...).  

 

There can be no doubt that the singularity event is approaching. It seems fairly obvious to even a casual observer that such an event will occur before we reach the 22nd century. We can reap all sorts of dividends now by mere conjurings.

 

Edited by mag1, 11 July 2015 - 08:06 PM.

[niner]

I disagree with the whole "singularity" buzzword.  There is no single event that happens. It's several events. We already have Watson which can beat people at Jeopardy. We already have computers that can beat people at Chess. This is not one single event that happens all of a sudden. It slowly happens with multiple events. The singularity already started a long time ago when Ada Lovelace starting programming without having a computer (there was no such thing at the time), along with Leibniz who was also thinking about computer programming even though there was no computer at the time. It's not a singularity.. it's multiple events that happen over many years. Singularity is just a silly buzzword that buffoons like Ray K. promote.

 

Consider the case of  y = 1/x.  This has a singularity at x = 0, and only there.  It's the point where the function blows up to +/- infinity.   When we consider the development of computing machinery, we see a curve that starts off at a low value, and gradually increases in power.  The development of technology feeds back on itself, enabling more rapid development of better technology, resulting in an accelerating increase in this hypothetical curve of computational power or machine intelligence.  When we eventually develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), at some point it may get smart enough to modify its own code, creating a more powerful AGI, which will again modify itself, resulting in a recursive series of modifications, and this might happen quite rapidly.  If you consider the graph of machine intelligence versus time, it is only the last point, where there is a recursively self-modifying AGI, that maps to the general shape of a mathematical singularity.  Of course, machine capability can't increase to infinity, not will the explosion of intelligence happen in a single instant, but the Singularity concept is a metaphor, not a mathematical entity.  Just as the mathematical singularity occurs at a point, the technological Singularity occurs in a brief span of time, specifically the period in which an AGI becomes recursively self-modifying.  All the historical events in computing, from the Difference Engine to USENET to now, were precursors to the Singularity, but they are not themselves the Singularity any more than y = 1/x is a singularity at x = 10.

 

The Singularity promises to be a disruptive event, such that predictions extending beyond it are much less likely to be correct than predictions within the pre-Singularity period.

[niner]

There will be no doubt when the singularity is truly reached: Humanity will be entirely overwhelmed by technological progress. Life will be essentially unlivable.

 

Why so glum, mag1?  That sounds like the worst-case scenario.  (Or maybe the worst-case scenario is that the AGI becomes evil and tortures us for all eternity..) But what about the best-case, or even the most likely case?  We should be able to ring-fence the AGI in various ways to keep it from getting too smart too fast, and to prevent it from being able to "do anything".  Of course, if it's really going to be that smart, it can probably fool us easily.  A god-like intelligence might decide that it's wrong to privilege humans above other animals, and come to the conclusion that it needs to kill 99% of us immediately.  Or 99.9.  Or 99.99...

[mpe]

Geez, thanks niner, I thought all of us loosing our jobs, homes and starving would be bad enough, now you want to fling us into the terminator universe as well. Maybe indefinite lifespans would not be such a good idea after all.

 

Mike

[mpe]

Actually, I don't see things being so bad.

But when I look at what could happen I am reminded of the beginning of the industrial revolution ( unemployment, poverty, misery and exploitation of the masses ).

 

People shouldn't think that their immune, that their education or skill set will set them apart or that that their wealth will insulate them from  the turmoil or that their governments will act in the best interests of the population, because that simply wont happen.

AI's will render your information based skill sets obsolete overnight ( office work will evaporate) universities and traditional schools will collapse shortly after as demand for redundant education ceases; money will loose meaning when the majority of the population looses the means of acquiring it (work), your degrees and PHD's will mean nothing (unfortunately so will mine); our politicians can only see as far as the next election, view and treat the populace with contempt when not facing an immediate election and only show fidelity to big business who pour tens of millions of dollars into their reelection campaigns.  

 

Our economic system  (western world) is built on short term planning and gains and has no demonstrated capacity for long term planning. Its worked well since the industrial revolution but only because the population was actively involved in the production of ever more valuable goods and services in ever greater quantities. Overall economic planning was not needed the economy largely took care of itself. You cant claim we have effective economic management in the western world, if we did we wouldn't have the rigging of the US stock market or banking system, nor would we have collapsing European and Japanese economies that we have today.

 

Of course the hardship will only be short term, 10 to 20 years or so and a new economic system will emerge, probably much faster with less pain with honest polies but we don't seem to have any of those.

 

Mike

 

That all changes with the widespread introduction of AI's. Welcome back

[Mind]

I have to agree with mpe here. The changes will happen in a "blink of an eye". Newspapers became insolvent in a "blink of an eye", when Craigslist went national. The same thing could happen to traditional doctoring, with AI analyzing diagnostic tests, xrays, biopsies, what-not. Every industry could go fast.

 

The way forward is a mass consciousness (whether we like it or not). If we are more intimately connected, we are less likely to battle over resources and more likely to cooperate. This is a better future (IMO) than the "basic income" being promoted in some circles, which is just a different version of "The Matrix" - a system of control.

[mag1]

Not really glum, more a sense of projecting what has been happening into the future and not liking what could be.

 

I can see this in my own life experience and the life experience of family members. In a previous generation a social organization we have belonged to was a vibrant happening place. There was a real feeling that this community could meaningfully contribute to guiding people to making better life choices and achieving a higher standard of living as a result.

 

When my generation was about ready to participate, virtually the entire community seemed to disintegrate. The top end managerial skills and good naturedness of the people evaporated over only a few years. Everyone was working so hard that they no longer had any time for a community anymore. Mothers and fathers and children were working flat out. An important structure in our community was lost. Notably the last generation that enjoyed a positive experience in the community were what might be described as pre-moderns: many grew up on farms or away from what might be thought of the modern world. Almost immediately after the new generation of TV watching, computer game playing people entered the scene, the community folded almost right away.

 

Even at that time technology was powerful enough to easily displace a type social structure that had served the people well for centuries. Well established forms of social organization have now been replaced with a whole host of lifestyle experiments. Do people really want to trust the outcome of their life to an n=1 experiment? 

 

This should be understood as a cautionary tale as we move closer to the singularity. The communities and social structures that have developed out of necessity to help people through their lives could quite easily be lost forever. And then what? Will our problems be answered in a few minutes on a talk show?

 

What happens when people realize that developing expert skills will no longer be a strategically wise choice. For how could any learned skill withstand the force of the singularity. Fathers and mothers would have no job skills that could be passed down from one generation to another. It appears that many professions have already reached this point as the men reason there is no long term future in many occupations.

 

Consider for a moment how CRISPR technology would essentially eliminate the need for medicine.

[Elus]

Barclays set to cut 30,000 jobs as it looks to increase automation and reduce costs

 

"Barclays is set to introduce a “radical redundancy” programme that could see 30,000 staff lose their job within the next two years. This would see its global workforce reduced by approximately a quarter and fall below the 100,000 figure by the end of 2017."

[Kalliste]

You guys should read Accelerando

 

 

Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.

The solar system is thinking furiously at 10³³ MIPS – thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn's rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots.

The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter's turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic glowing figure-of-eight – a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of superconducting cable – traces incandescent trails through the gas giant's magnetosphere. It's trading momentum for electrical current, diverting it into a fly's eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai ⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴/_-56. As long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the Field Circus can continue its mission of discovery, but they're part of the posthuman civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system, part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of history.

Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto, supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core.

There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it's getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human – human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.

None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the Field Circus: The starwisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the Field Circus that some of the most important events remaining in humanity's future light cone take place.

 

 

Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of accelerating progress.

Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest of the star's output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost planets.

Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no bodies anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse.

The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun – concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll – are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 10⁴² MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent – Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come – but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have envisaged.

From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls.

Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium prospers, at least for a while.

But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will require an upgrade.

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don't mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude – some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth millennium.

While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router (itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴/_-56), while Amber and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes – while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase "smart money" has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species – fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no farther out than Mercury used to be.

Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one's brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines, and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that pool at the bottom of the gravity well that is Earth.

Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve – dumb matter is coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they're seeing: the death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that star – for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are intrinsically hostile environments for fleshy life.

 

 

Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale.

There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans anymore – their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).

The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it's not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and those of Saturn, although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn't enough to pump Jupiter's enormous mass to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar Matrioshka brain is finished.

It won't be long now ...

http://www.antipope....ccelerando.html

[aribadabar]

Driverless trucks could mean 'game over' for thousands of jobs:
http://www.theglobea...rticle25715184/

[mag1]

Post 217?

[aribadabar]

Yes, it seems that your prediction in post 217 is now a reality.

[mag1]

Post 217 was not a prediction.

 

It only mentioned what had already been reported.

[Kalliste]

Yep that one is going to be interesting. In a decade or so we are going to have an autonomous version of Uber. Maybe a couple of flying things too if that is a possibility.

[niner]

Self driving vehicles are a done deal.  In 2017, Chevrolet will be selling cars with a "lane-keeping" feature.  As I understand it, this is self-steering within the context of a highway, but the car would lack the software (or maybe it's just turned off) to stop at a stop sign and execute a right turn, for example.  We've had dumb cruise control for half a century, and adaptive cruise control for over a decade.  Adaptive cruise will slow down and follow a car in front of it at a safe distance.  With all this hardware actually on the road, fully autonomous vehicles are little more than a software upgrade.  Google is working on an autonomous car that has no steering wheel.  Technologically, that's trivial; all you have to do is remove it.  The entirety of the problem with no steering wheel is public acceptance.  The car has a red "Stop" button, like an elevator might.  I guess I'd be ok with no steering wheel as long as I still had the ability to wildly exceed the speed limit in case I was being chased by narcoterrorists, girl scouts, and/or police.

[mag1]

I am silly worried about this.

 

No other technological development has ever been developed which could essentially overturn the entire labour economy.

I know we are supposed to use the word Singularity in a fairly precise way, though I do not think it is unreasonable to call

the approaching transbotic revolution an Economic Singularity event or The End of the Road. There will be a clear dividing

line before and after transbotics.

 

It is difficult to imagine that transbotics would not cause overwhelming displacement of the labour force. Yet, at the same time,

there is a real sense that we are sleepwalking to this End of the Road. Mainstream society does not appear engaged with this

issue.The End Time might now only be 4 years away. I wonder if this issue will shape the political discussion in the

next Presidential election. How couldn't such a massively disruptive technology not enter the political discourse? A turn to the

left would not be unexpected, as the initial wave of the disruption will be more destructive than constructive.

 

If it is going to happen we should now try to shape more how it will happen than if it will happen: A tactical retreat.

 

Specifically we should try and support the car version over the copter version of transbotics. The copter approach would be so

very easy to develop. The technological challenge is zero. Robotically flying swarms of copters should be easy and

there would be almost no safety issues. We should push against it because such a technology would be very intrusive.

With the volume of goods likely to be moved tranbotically a truly dystopian future could result in which the sun would become

permanently blocked from view as swarms of copterbots went about their business. They they might fly every day night and day.

 

It would be horrendous! Give me robocars any day.

 

A compromise could be that well-defined corridors for robocopters could be established: the last mile could then be done with robocars.

 

 

 

I suppose if everyone is going to be homeless and desperate for food, I might as well find the bright side of it all.

 

For example, my shipping charges, for one, will be greatly reduced. The one limiting factor that prevents me for stocking up on

all sorts of cool supplements and other goods is shipping expenses. I can pay over $20 on a shipment from California.

Oftentimes when I see how large the shipping charge I empty my online shopping cart and leave the online store.

 

With transbotics, I will be loading up to overflowing my online shopping cars and never emptying them because of the shipping

charges.With transbotics, the cost of a typical package sent between major North American cities should be no more than 1 dollar

(likely quite a bit less). Upon arrival at the destination city, waves of transbots could then transport it to your door.

 

This would completely change our economy. Uniform global pricing would quickly result. How could government then possibly check

each item as it moved through the transbotic distribution chain? Why even bother signing yet more free trade agreements when

transbotics will assure truly free trade in a way that centuries of trade negotiations has been unable to accomplish? An enormous stress

would be placed upon government finances under such a scenario. Taxing consumption might simply be impossible with transbotics.

 

 

The developers of this technology should reasonably be considered for a Nobel Prize in Medicine. For quite some time, a leading cause

of death and disability in developed nations results from transport accidents. (It would probably be a very wise career choice to now stay

away from trauma medicine. Without transport related injuries, most non-American nations  would likely have little demand for it.) For most

younger age groups, injuries related to transport accidents is by far the largest medical risk that they face. The large irony is that their largest

medical risk is no longer a true medical risk at all: more of a technological risk. Has a non-doctor /  scientist ever won a Nobel Prize in Medicine before?

 

 

[Kalliste]

The mistake you and others make when looking into the future is that you use a set of mental binoculars which gives you good view of a few things at a time. It may well be the case that we will be richer than anything we can believe. I like Vernor Vinges writings. In the end of the next century a single person may well hold the same wealth and military power as a nationstate does today.

[mag1]

Yes, that is what I am afraid of.

 

There are a whole bunch of people I can think of who should, for the best of humanity, never have the military power of a nation state.

Edited by mag1, 01 August 2015 - 08:44 PM.

[mag1]

The real problem with these technological revolutions is that the counter-balancing benefits might not emerge for decades (or ever) for the people who will be displaced.

There is no obvious blue sky outcome for transbotics and this is predicted to happen in only 4 YEARS!

 

Many of the people displaced by the coming wave of technological displacement likely buy into the "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it" camp. A surprising number of our population would have no viable means to support themselves if they were laid off tomorrow. They truly live paycheck to paycheck. How will the hundreds of million of such people feed themselves the day after they are pink slipped in 4 years? Our communities would descend into complete collapse in even a few days if it came down to desperate hungry people roaming the streets searching for some food to steal for survival.

 

Those people who have behaved responsibly and saved their money over generations to allow their families forever more to escape wage slavery have often been the first to be targeted by socialistically minded societies. Acquiring wealth by simply investing has always been seen to be somewhat fraudulent. Socialists have always glorified the heroism of people who never saved for tomorrow and at all times needed an adult day care center (job) to keep themselves amused and fed.

 

We would be in a much more positive position now if more people had embraced the life long goal of wealth accumulation as their central life purpose. We would now only be facing the elimination of one of the factors of production-- labor. That would have been no great tragedy. People could then have celebrated the end of the drudgery of the work world and enjoyed the enormous wealth that will be created.

 

The problem is that wage slaves do not want their shackles to be removed. They do not understand the chains of enslavement as slavery at all, but instead consider employment to somehow be a worthy and noble way to occupy their lives. No matter how meaningless, often dangerous, and financially unsustainable the make-work fantasy world can be, it is still somehow seen as sacred by some. As has been noted before on this thread upwards of a majority of workers in some nations could be rightfully diagnosed with Worker Productivity Delusional Syndrome: Being Present does not equate to being Productive.

 

However, employment creates a community of necessity and poverty which has always been very appealing to the Weltanschauung of socialists. For consider the first thing that lottery winners do, they quit their jobs! What would be the chances of survival for socialism if we were all lottery winners?   

 

 

I am so worried that there are whole furniture emporiums full of arm chair experts who believe that what their 18th Century economic heroes deduced was true for a pre-Singularity world must ceteris paribus be true for a rapidly changing world filled with technology. We are quickly reaching a point where the logic that was true centuries ago applied to the changed context of today will simply create massive social destruction.

 

It is no longer clear that we will have any coherent and rational strategy to effectively move through the coming storm. Once the people realize that our leaders and experts have essentially no idea whatsoever what should be done, then complete anarchy would not be totally unexpected.  The answers of the 17th and 18th Century are very likely to be more counter-productive than productive in the 21st Century.

Edited by mag1, 01 August 2015 - 09:37 PM.

[mag1]

At the peak in 1979 America had almost 20 million manufacturing jobs. Over the last 15 years America has lost 5 million factory jobs and now has 12 million (and falling).

Those lost jobs were probably replaced with lower paying service jobs.

 

Am I the only person who was unaware of this?   

Edited by mag1, 06 August 2015 - 04:06 PM.

[Mind]

The driverless car aspect is a good one to focus on because it is familiar to most people. What will the truckers do when they suddenly lose their jobs. It is not like farmers of the 1800s moving into the factories of the 1900s. The skills and knowledge needed to work in a manufacturing plant were were not that much different than those needed to operate or fix farm equipment.

 

Truck drivers of today are not going to suddenly become artists, coders, data-scientists, or biotech engineers. There are probably not enough service jobs to absorb them all, and those service jobs will only pay a fraction of what they make now. 

[mag1]

Yes, that is a great point.

 

Anyone want to step up for the job of directing these truck drivers who earn 200K plus benefits to their new jobs at the same pay scale? Wouldn't reality training be more helpful?

 

Something that I read that I found truly disheartening is that when a factory closes, most of the workers are never able to make the transition to another similar job.

For many high end workers it really will be about going from 200K truck driving to $10 per hour "Would you like fries with that?".

 

I had also been unaware of the widespread use of automated checkout in American retail stores. We might not even need transbotics to overturn the labor economy: we

could already have stores without workers. Apparently there are already a quarter million of these self-serve machines in stores. Younger people appear to enjoy the

convenience of this technology, while older people want more human contact. 

[niner]

Very VERY few truckers make $200K a year.  From "truckingtruth.com":

 

The average yearly income for truck drivers is $35,000 to $45,000 for company drivers, and $95,000 to $130,000 for owner operators, depending on where you live. Currently, as a local driver, working five days per week and home every night, I enjoy a driving job grossing $50,200 per year.

 

 

Ironically, this site called trucking one of the "top 30 jobs of the future"...  That's probably not wrong, if your time horizon is less than ten years.   A new long haul tractor/trailer combo would cost in the neighborhood of $200-300K.  A robo-truck would probably be a lot more, so there are a lot of trucks on the road that aren't ready to be replaced and are going to need drivers for some time to come.    I think the replacement of truck drivers with robo-trucks is a long term problem, but it's not going to be an economic cataclysm in the very near term. 

[mag1]

The really ominous part of this for me is that a market has now been found that will use robotrucking. So many great technologies have a real tough time landing their first

market / application. Anyone out there remember sitting in front of a several thousand dollar computer 20 or 30 years ago and thinking "What can I do with this?". After all

these years the computer industry is still working through this problem. With 200K resource trucking, a market has been found and the technology will have a safe place to incubate

and will probably be able to earn its pay check almost from day one.

 

Something else that has me worried is that the trucking life is such a different way to live. More broadly, "transporters" have made a valuable contribution to the economic development 

of human civilization for thousands of years. We might now be just on the cusp of the end of this entire way of life. It is not entirely unreasonable to expect that truckers have evolved a somewhat

different genetic pattern. Perhaps there might be some ADHD, or other such behavioral traits that push one in the direction of a trucking life. It is a concern when thinking what might happen if

this way of life of thousands of years standing with genetic modifications might simply end over possibly the next decade or so. What would become of these people? Are they expected to simply

change their genomes? Would working in an office really suit people with such wander lust?

 

We are about to recklessly change the way of life of hundreds of millions of people without in any way considering the personal consequences.

The truckers that will lose their jobs will likely simply not find another job with the same qualities.

Most of these people could essentially become permanently displaced persons. 

 

Taking away the economic livlihood of specific groups in the community with possibly unique geno-behavioral characteristics could be a recipe for social catastrophe.

 

 

 

[Kalliste]

They wont be flipping burgers for long Mag, not with automated fast food machinery in the making.

 

http://www.salon.com...ist_disruption/

 

I re-read Manna by Marshall Brain the other week. It is one of the best near future sci-fi's ever IMHO.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

 

He is also publishing a new book with the optimistic name

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches

http://marshallbrain...ent-species.htm

[Mind]

They wont be flipping burgers for long Mag, not with automated fast food machinery in the making.

 

http://www.salon.com...ist_disruption/

 

I re-read Manna by Marshall Brain the other week. It is one of the best near future sci-fi's ever IMHO.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

 

He is also publishing a new book with the optimistic name

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches

http://marshallbrain...ent-species.htm

 

Agreed, Manna was a gem.

 

"The Second Intelligent Species", I didn't like as much, but it was still interesting.