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Peco's avatar

“Via a combination of machine intelligence and humanoid robots, are we humans set to be crowded out of the workforce altogether? If there’s little work for people to do, how do they earn a living? What new purpose will they find?”

Important questions. Here is another one: Who will own the operating systems on which the humanoids run--operating systems which will surely be managed centrally?

Meaning, for instance, a government might be able to remotely gain control of locally owned humanoids in order to put down a local protest or manage civil unrest.

Political and economic elites will continue to exist in the future, just as they do now, and a massive population of centrally controlled AI-bots can create some unpleasant and unintended consequences for a democracy.

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Swag Valance's avatar

I don't buy we need humanoid robots anymore than I buy that the future of aeronautics is planes with flapping wings.

"But their thinking is often marked by the same species of mistake" is exactly that point. Emphasis on species. We have AI scientists talking about artificial superhuman intelligence as if it has to exactly mimic and pass through humans - even with all our flaws, violence, irrational fears, fragile egos. Is it built for purpose or for the flattery of imitation and all the limitations that brings? Less time taking selfies, more time looking forward, please.

And while I am no degrowther, I'm not seeing robot armies as saviors for GDP standards. As if that's what's most worth saving for humanity.

No pearl clutching to "God Save the GDP" here. Ever-increasing GDP as a purpose unto itself remains a Ponzi scheme, an old utopian capitalist promise of infinite exponential growth free from undesirable side-effects or trade-offs. It's arguably making our world less inhabitable by the day.

Grossly ignoring the systemic limits of all that growth, and the crutch of power-sucking robots made from boundless mineral extraction from the earth, pretends like none of that is actually happening in our hermetically sealed vacuum. We need to challenge ourselves more on our out-of-date models and ideas.

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