Link: Interesting Video About Automation and the Singularity

cameroncowan

I finally got into Ello (I was mad that I couldn't get an invitation for the longest time). I found this interesting video about automation and what we should do when most jobs no longer require humans. I have often wondered what we were going to do with the millions of unemployed people when machines create untold abundance. What will we need human workers to do? I have thought that there will be certain areas where we will want to interact with people. I think bots and other machines will be more assistants rather than fully taking over tasks in a few areas. I think it will be more balanced but that does not solve the problem of millions of unemployed undermining the economy and the wealth of nations. Do we save the jobs? Do we stop automation? Is this the natural course of history? Should we all be prepared to be destitute? Should we consider minimum income proposals more closely?

The video is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&feature=youtu.be

I found it on this interesting post. He projects a much more dystopian view of the Singularity and how it will affect humanity. I think his post is not mindful of Bostrom's work which I am plowing through but it might provide some discussion fodder.

The post is here:

https://ello.co/scottdakota/post/ofb9vzDer9NoiQvwdueyAg

The video is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&feature=youtu.be

The post is here:

https://ello.co/scottdakota/post/ofb9vzDer9NoiQvwdueyAg

Who is the unnamed actor who does this enforcing, establishing, and requiring?

Ideally everyone, but probably with some opinion leaders and media outlets being the ones to spread the news about norm violations.

How far does the contagion spread?

I'd assumed it'd be a full boycott rather than a boycott in ratios. A half-boycott seems likely to fail for the same reasons that trying to "eat less meat" doesn't work well for humans. I'm not sure how many degrees of separation that would apply to, or even if it needs to be a specific number - in practice, I don't think anyone wants to bother following the "who bought from who" trails indefinitely. Two or three would probably be enough, though - it just has to be enough to make public pressure for boycotts against B2B products feasible.

How do they come to all agree?

Standards of transparency might need some kind of formal system. I don't know what exactly, but that's not really the hard part of the problem anyway. I was picturing the definition of what counts as an offence working more like cultural norms than a specific standard, though. Which people wouldn't always agree on - if a meat-growing company starts selling "traditionally farmed" factory farm chicken in addition to its' grown chicken, maybe half the population thinks that's bad and starts buying their grown chicken elsewhere, the other half thinks it's fine and keeps doing business with the company, and the company can decide whether having a traditional meats product line is worth loosing half its' other business. Though, the problem with that is that it'd breed companies that specialize in doing business with niches that don't care much about morals, or have very different morals. I'm not sure what to do about that yet, or how big a problem it would be.

Does this only apply to large companies, or to companies of all sizes? The self-employed? Everyone?

There'd need to be some schelling point for company size that allows smaller, younger companies to get started without being so vulnerable to the public. I don't know exactly what that schelling point would be. (Under the current system, having it start at a number of employees, dollar amount of profit, or the owners' degree of insulation from personal liability (sole proprietorship vs. LLC vs. publicly traded) would all be possibilities. But I can't say for sure what it should be in this hypothetical future society, because laws and enforcement of laws and balances of power will have changed a lot.

What stabilises the value of this fiat currency of opprobrium?

I'm not sure what this means. Can you explain?

What stabilises the value of this fiat currency of opprobrium?

I'm not sure what this means. Can you explain?

In general terms, your proposal is for everyone to act the way you think they should, and then society's problems will be solved. It is literally by fiat: you say "let it be", and imagine it working. But unless there are internal reasons why the whole thing would work, reasons for each individual following what they judge to be their own interest, then it isn't a mechanism, any more than a picture of a clock is a clock. A cultural nor... (read more)