work on other things, like (self) education, science, and even automating further work.
Most people don't have the cognitive horsepower or personality type to do any of this. In any case doing science seems like a great candidate for automation.
reduce, maybe stop the exploitation of the South by Western countries.
"Western exploitation" seems to simply amount to investing money into third world countries and providing them with opportunities that are a vast improvement over what they would otherwise have. Arguably it has done them far more good than any international aid program attempted to date.
Cheap labour plus industrialization and capitalism mean societies grind their way to wealth as Taiwan, Korea, Japan and 19th century Europe did. And as China and Vietnam are doing now.
Make regular humans obsolete and we (as in our technological civilization) have literally nothing to do with the vast masses of third world peoples except perhaps give them welfare because we feel sorry for them.
Before my four bullet points, I wrote "we could". Time is a resource that can be used in various ways. I merely thought about some pressing problem we have right now.
Most people don't have the cognitive horsepower or personality type to do any of this.
I agree. Can be partly solved with education. But anyway, I didn't mean everyone to do science.
In any case doing science seems like a great candidate for automation.
I'm only talking about before Intelligence Explosion (any prediction I make about after that will probably be bogus). Which als...
Mechanical Engineering magazine (paywalled until next month) and Financial Times, among others, recently reviewed the book Race Against the Machine by economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The FT reviewer writes:
And ME magazine quotes McAfee in an interview:
Both reviewers also hint that McAfee and Brynjolfsson offer a partial explanation of the "jobless recovery", but either the book's argument is weak or the reviewers do a poor job summarizing it. Such a purported explanation might be the main attraction for most readers, but I'm more interested in the longer-term picture. Be it the "nightmarish vision" of the future mentioned in FT, or the simpler point about wages offered by McAfee, this might be a good hook to get the general public thinking about the long-term consequences of AI.
Is that a good idea? Should sleeping general publics be left to lie? There seems to be significant reluctance among many LessWrongers to stir the public, but have we ever hashed out the reasons for and against? Please describe any non-obvious reasons on either side.