It seems to me that humanity is faced with an epochal choice in this century, whether to:
a) Obsolete ourselves by submitting fully to the machine superorganism/superintelligence and embracing our posthuman destiny, or
b) Reject the radical implications of technological progress and return to various theocratic and traditionalist forms of civilization which place strict limits on technology and consider all forms of change undesirable (see the 3000-year reign of the Pharaohs, or the million-year reign of the hunter-gatherers)
Is there a plausible third option? Can we really muddle along for much longer with this strange mix of religious “man is created in the image of God”, secular humanist “man is the measure of all things” and transhumanist “man is a bridge between animal and Superman” ideologies? And why do even Singularitarians insist that there must be a happy ending for homo sapiens, when all the scientific evidence suggests otherwise? I see nothing wrong with obsoleting humanity and replacing them with vastly superior “mind children.” As far as I’m concerned this should be our civilization’s summum bonum, a rational and worthy replacement for bankrupt religious and secular humanist ideals. Robots taking human jobs is another step toward bringing the curtain down permanently on the dead-end primate dramas, so it’s good news that should be celebrated!
Robots taking human jobs is another step toward bringing the curtain down permanently on the dead-end primate dramas
Well, so is large-scale primate extermination leaving an empty husk of a planet.
The question is not so much whether the primates exist in the future, but what exists in the future and whether it's something we should prefer to exist. I accept that there probably exists some X such that I prefer (X + no humans) to (humans), but it certainly isn't true that for all X I prefer that.
So whether bringing that curtain down on dead-end primate dramas is something I would celebrate depends an awful lot on the nature of our "mind children."
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.