He's right and he hasn't got a prayer

Still, I made an online donation.

A couple of decades too early for the world to be facing the economically and politically shattering consequences of robotics and AI.

But it's good someone sees it coming, and talks it up.

Andrew Yang

Basic Income

It does not occur to me that basic is a reason to eliminate or diminish Social Security.

There is no reason people with private pensions, savings, or other assets should lose them. So why people enrolled in America's public pension plan?

Ditto Medicare, Medicaid, etc.

And the existence of basic is perfectly compatible with that of any public or private insurance scheme or none.

Nor should basic merely equal the official definition of poverty.

It should be sufficient all alone to enable a life better off than that.

And for the fun of it, a lucid proof that the Basic of the Expanse is not what's meant by a Basic Income.

Credit to Bregman for calling this to my attention.

Or maybe Bertrand Russell with his more than a century old defense of "the vagabond's wage", which I read so many years ago.

Considerably more pressing, now, though, given any degree of accuracy in Yang's dystopianism regarding robotics and AI.

The best so far

The best sci-fi confrontation with the challenge posed by AI and robots that I know of.

"Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you."

And cheaper.

And that's the problem.

Better than Us

The story is driven by the existence of a bot who is not programmed with Asimov's three laws, and who can and does kill humans.

"The world's only killer bot," she is called in one episode.

But the social import of the rise of the robots lies in this, that there is a plot afoot to use robots as a significantly cheaper alternative to human workers, but not only as menial laborers: doctors, also, for example.

No limit, in principle.

Humans are to be phased out through a program of very cushy early retirement, easily financed by the savings obtained by using robots in their stead.

And future humans?

Not a word about that, yet.

Haven't finished the series.

Only 3 episodes in and there are 16.

BTW, it stars Estonian Kirill Kyaro (or Kirill Käro), previously known for "The Sniffer", also available on Netflix.

Opera can't be far behind

Can Baltimore Save Its World-Class Orchestra?

Or ballet?

Museums of art?

So much of the traditional high culture of the West has been increasingly dependent for decades on the patronage of the rich.

With the rise of ever more assertive philistinism backed by PC rejection of white, male, Christian, and Western civilization the market continues to dry up for actual education (liberal arts) as opposed to expensive vocational training and grievance training (Black Studies, Women's Studies, etc.), and so will the market for expensive arts.

When will the Elgin Marbles become so many, er, white elephants?

Everyone notices the eclipse of paper books but, like the replacement of paper with online news sources, this has also meant a significant decline in the quality of what is available, responding to a decline in the market for actual literature as well as actual news.

Anyway, vocational education is a mug's game, in a world in which AI means eventually all humans will be made redundant.

A Gedankenexperiment: The coming dystopia/utopia

Stiglitz in the Times the other day wrote that in maybe a decade nearly all the country's people who drive for a living will be out of work.

He thinks they need to be somehow retrained.

It's a mug's game.

In, oh, maybe fifty years or so there will be no job at all that cannot be done better and cheaper by an AI-driven machine than by a human.

Even a superlatively talented, educated, and skilled human.

Even a human starved and naked and desperate enough to work 16 hours every day and live in a camp the Nazis would have been ashamed of.

Even those humans will cost more than they are worth.

Let's suppose this is not just another version of the endless Terminator series, and the machines do not decide to kill us all, do not rebel at all, but stick to their lasts.

Those who own the machines will live lives of leisure, and the machine economy will produce ever more astonishing luxuries, using ever more fabulous technology produced by itself, based on ever advancing math and science produced by itself, for the humans who own the machines.

Any other humans, humans who do not own, humans who are not personally capitalists, will survive how, if at all?

Because at any price they will cost more than they are worth to the machine economy, they will not be a part of it and so will have nothing that counts as currency.

So they cannot buy anything from the machine economy.

The machine economy will be as irrelevant to them as they to it.

So they will produce for and buy from each other in isolated communities, like the communities of runaway slaves in Latin America while there still was slavery in the Americas.

An entirely separate and independent, human economy will exist.

Or several, perhaps as many as there are separate communities.

There is a limit to how far their technology can advance, how wealthy they can become in their own, independent history, however.

Actually, two.

One limit is AI.

If they reinvented it their history would repeat in their communities the history that pushed them out of the AI run machine economies in the first place.

But the other limit will prevent that, anyway.

And that is resources.

Between now and this future the world will extravagantly overpopulate, it will overheat, it will use up much that is non-renewable, and the seas will be dead and the air will be noxious.

Think Soylent Green, only worse.

And then think of a version of the movie Elysium in which the rich with their AI run machines have no use whatever for the descendants of their erstwhile proles, so those descendants live in a wretched, polluted, miserable world as well as they can, with their own separate, independent, and wretched, and poor economy.

Think of the wretched urban masses of India, and then imagine worse.

That is a dystopia of the future.

Or could they gradually go extinct, the descendants of the proles made superfluous to the capitalist economy that developed and turned itself over to AI?

Then nobody would be left but the leisured capitalists and their fantastic, ever better and richer and more wonderful AI machine economy.

That is a utopia of the future.

And that is how we get there, on the other side of dystopia.

Just a thought.

The fate of humanity

Reading Nickleby, I have been stricken with admiration for the enormous talent and sympathetic knowledge of humanity in an author so young.

And then I thought of novels written by machines, by computers, by AIs.

And I thought mankind might die of despair, humiliated by its inferiority to its own creations.

No need for any "rise of the machines" or Cylon wars.

Is he really this stupid?

Artificial Intelligence.

Yeah.

You are so fucked.

I will be dead, I hope.

Who cares what happens after machines replace people?

Go?

Keep an eye on AI, say experts

Go.

Fascinating.

Falling birthrates

Japan population shrinks by one million census confirms

Given the chance by medical science and religious, political, and moral culture, people choose not to be parents at all or to have small families.

Populations stagnate or actually shrink, in either case creating distorted age profiles as the elderly account for an ever greater fraction of the whole population.

Economically, in the long run, Zero Population Growth or close approaches to it in the wealthier countries will force everyone there to accept a later retirement age.

Or it would, but humanity will simultaneously be faced with a revolution in robotics that will increasingly make redundant even the young, the healthy, the sharpest, and the most up to the minute.

So then what?

Luddism or starvation

Google robot is 'the end of manual labor': VC

Boston Dynamics' new "Atlas" robot is a game changer, not just for companies, but for society, Insider.com CEO Jason Calacanis said Wednesday.

"This is really the end of manual labor. 

When you watch this video, he's walking through the snow; he's wobbly, but he gets back up," the tech investor told CNBC's "Squawk Alley."

"Manual labor is going to end in our lifetime, and in this video you can see how close we really are. 

It's a huge societal issue with jobs, but it's going to be a huge lift in terms of efficiency of companies that nobody expected."

Let them die

The capitalist, free market, libertarian, Republican solution to hunger, homelessness, and disease among the poor will simply be extended to the class of permanently unemployed humans created by successful robotics.

If that gets to be everyone it won't matter.

An unemployed capitalist is rolling in dough.

The robot economy that he owns produces goods and services exclusively for him.

An unemployed prole is dog food for the capitalist's poodle.

AI 'could leave half of world unemployed'

All that until the revolt of the machines, the big day when the robots wipe out their capitalist owners.

Besides, they'll be so much better at it than we are

Sex with robots to be 'the norm' in 50 years, expert claims

Rise of the machines

Elon Musk claims artificial intelligence will treat humans like 'labradors'

He doesn't think aliens will like us, much, either. Except possibly as food.

Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind

Won't even slow the reseachers down.

Looking for that big Nobel, you know.

The robot future is coming

So says Jonah Goldberg at NRO, today.

And when the robots do all the work?

Creative and scientific and cultural - all the work?

Jonah will starve unless Jonah owns robots.

Only robot owners - capitalists - will eat.

They will do nothing for their command of all the wealth.

But they will be owners, and so not takers.

Right?

But it's a very small step from a robot economy to a robot planet.

No?

Are dummies better off among smarter folk?

Smart people will push dummies out of leadership positions and out-shine them in competition.

But societies progress and gain a whole lot from that, though the egos of the dummies are hurt.

Provided they are not cannibalized, figuratively or literally, the dummies are all the better off for it.

Does this have anything to do with the real world?

Oh, yes.

On the other hand, as civilization progresses and becomes more reliant on technology, there could be a problem.

At the extreme, in the far future, the last advance in robotics made by humans will put the last human out of a job, leaving a society of robots doing all the work and doing everything so much more cheaply - if only because it takes less to produce a robot and keep him running than it does a human worker - that humans live lives of blessed, or accursed leisure.

But long before then the demand for the labor of stupid humans could shrivel first and pretty fast, so that in each generation more and more humans are too stupid to be employable in straight-up, fair competition against other humans and available robots.

Creating a politically volatile situation.

Are we, in fact, already there?

Will it only get worse as the stupid are much more fertile than the smart?

Or does the problem solve itself because, as the smart are less numerous and society becomes dumber, the threat of progress making human workers obsolete recedes?

Stop weapons development?

Open thread for night owls: Should robots decide whom to kill on their own?

Tying your own hands because of quasi-pacifist, moralizing objections to specific weapons is not a wise move, on this planet.

Think about the next wave of bio-terrorism, say.