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ESRogs comments on Kevin Drum's Article about AI and Technology - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (33)
Enslaving, in terms of putting to work w/o pay, doesn't make much sense in the hypothetical where the marginal value of human labor is effectively worthless, right? What would the poor be enslaved to do?
Perhaps a more realistic scary scenario would be this one: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/11/dire-problem-and-virtual-option.html (essentially: when you're no longer of productive benefit to society, you go to virtual reality / video game heaven).
How scary that proposal sounds might be a matter of debate, though I suppose most folks around here would prefer a more egalitarian scenario where cognitive enhancement is distributed evenly enough that no human is left behind.
For my own part, I'm content to wirehead to the extent that I have confidence that machines are capable of being more productive-to-others than I am along the axes I value being productive-to-others on.
Put differently: I don't seem to care very much whether I am doing important things, as long as important things are getting done at least as effectively as they would be were I doing them.
There's a slight refinement to this in the case where the entities doing the important things are basically like me, since there's a whole question of whether I'm defecting in a Prisoner's Dilemma, but I interpret the connotations of "machine" as implying that this complication doesn't arise here.
Ah, a very interesting point of view. Framing it as a dichotomy between important work and wireheading seems a bit stark though. Are you meaning to include any sort non-productive fun under the umbrella of wireheading? I usually think of that term as implying only simple, non-complex fun (e.g. pleasure of orgasm vs experience of love and friendship).
This gets difficult to specify, because "productive" and "important" are themselves ill-defined, but I certainly mean to include "virtual reality/video game heaven" within "wireheading," including VR environments including virtual people that pretend to love and befriend me. (This is distinguished from actual people who really do love and befriend me, whether they have flesh-and-blood bodies or not.)
That said, I have no idea, ultimately, if I would prefer the continuous-orgasm video game or the fake-love-and-friendship video game... I might well prefer the latter, or to switch back and forth, or something else.
Ah, that clears things up, thanks!
It certainly seems more analogous to welfare or gated communities than a hypothetical "war against the poor" does.