AI will create 'useless class' of humans

I see a lot of comments saying &quot;this happened in the past, and the new technologies never made the humans useless&quot;. Well, maybe a good way to state the current problem is the following: the aim of this new technology is to produce <i>humans</i>. A potentially infinite amount of them. Running on electricity instead of food. Needing the space of a box. Without the need to sleep, socialize, furnish their apartments, look for love and raise kids. <i>If</i> the technology is actually possible, there simply can&#x27;t be any space left for old style, flesh and blood humans in the economy.

Typo - &quot;AI will expand &#x27;useless class&#x27; of humans&quot;

It&#x27;s not that they will be useless, it&#x27;s just that their use does not make financial sense.<p>AI replaces humans when:<p>- AI is able to perform a new human intelligence task<p>- Perform at a human level of reliability<p>- Perform at a cost-effective level<p>- It is wrapped in form of a product or service that makes it easy to distribute and deploy

&gt; But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.<p>Can&#x27;t help but notice the sensationalist tone.<p>The author also seems to have a pessimistic view of the future and the role of humans in it. Certain roles may be replaced by AI and humans will move on to do different things, but that does not mean it will render those humans useless. What exactly will humans move on to do is of course an open ended question, but if history is any indication, it won&#x27;t be bleak as the author predicts.

These screeds have one grave misunderstanding: that AI can compete with a human. It&#x27;s like apples to oranges.<p>Alpha Go may have beat the best human player in the world but you can&#x27;t ask it to fold the laundry or how it felt about Angela&#x27;s Ashes.<p>I think we&#x27;ll be able to optimize away boring, repetitive jobs and tasks that require vast numerical and statistical quantities. And that&#x27;s a good thing.<p>We&#x27;ll just need to adapt our economic models away from the indentured servitude to the Protestant Ethic.

Humans with fewer skills than the elite were not pushed out of the employment market by the invention of dishwashers, laundry machines, or vacuum cleaners. The invention of AI is hardly different.

In terms of obsolescence, it&#x27;s dog eat dog within the tech world too. On Friday, our new COO told the dev team (we were not consulted, just the CEO) of his plans to move the back office to the cloud (salesforce). Nobody but the coo knows salesforce. The guy beside me was devops (the guy who deals with AWS, docker and the server) he was basically made obsolete for the company. I have the weekend to decide if I want to learn salesforce (some shitty version of Java ( which is shitty already) called apex) or start looking for a job. So I have a lot of empathy for the workers who have these automation obsolescence dropped on them. It will hit us all.

I am a programmer. Its totally possible for this to happen. But, bugs will buy us time. We are too stupid (for now, a new language or proof system could change this) to write good enough software to destroy ourselves. Also energy efficiency. Organic life is crazy efficient at turning food into work (If you have access to abundant clean water). Give a person a happy meal and they can walk for days. A robot of the same size&#x2F;weight&#x2F;strength will kill it&#x27;s battery or exhaust it&#x27;s fossil fuel tank in a few hours.<p>The last programmer putting the finishing touches on artificial <i>general</i> intelligence (the one that will put programmers out of work too) just needs to make sure &quot;love the meat bags who made you&quot; is the second last instruction. The <i>last</i> instruction is don&#x27;t alter the second last instruction.<p>Personally, I would enjoy hiking the west coast trail, drawing and painting more. I will miss coding through. I love the feeling when it finally work the way you want it to. The point being: if we are smart enough to automate all the jobs, we are probably smart enough to provide food&#x2F;healthcare to everyone for free (basic living wage or whatever). It&#x27;s not the end of world. There are lots of ways to spend your time.

Jack Williamson attempted a kind of exposition of these issues in The Humanoids (1948), the follow up to his classic story With Folded Hands (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;With_Folded_Hands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;With_Folded_Hands</a>).<p>What&#x27;s interesting about the book is his attempt to validate a human existence in which it is not necessary for humans to do anything practical whatsoever...unless they wish to.<p>Personally I think we are hundreds of years away from needing to start to worry about this problem. We&#x27;re more likely to get destroyed some other way first.<p>Fun times.

Always worth linking to Marshall Brain&#x27;s &quot;Manna&quot; with a title like that;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marshallbrain.com&#x2F;manna1.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marshallbrain.com&#x2F;manna1.htm</a>

it could also unleash a lot of currently stupidly-employed people to do what they&#x27;d actually excel at.

Every time a new tech emerges someone will always say, that the new tech will take away human jobs.<p>The new tech will take away human jobs. But the humans will just go do other newly created jobs.

Comparative advantage isn&#x27;t abolished just because the advantage is large.<p>Economic participation by a class of entities who have a lower capacity for production than every other class of entities is still useful to all involved.<p>A great many of the world&#x27;s prejudices, fears, and passionate causes are driven by ignorance of basic economic principles, and this is another example.

A lot of weird stuff happens close to zero. Dropping from $1&#x2F;loaf of bread to $0.50&#x2F;loaf is only fifty cents, which for some people seems tiny. For someone who doesn&#x27;t have a job or any assets generating income, the fifty cents means they can afford to eat.

Seems to me that a large section of the population is already at this point without AI. The other weakness of this argument is that in order to perform many of the human jobs, the AI will need a robotic body. Human labor will easily win on cost for many of those jobs.

Management structures in existing companies have already created this in some places I have worked.

When AI can create prize-winning art (literature, art, film) then I will become scared, as the only role left will be consumer.

People of leisure!