Automation is collapsing our economy

Would you say human language is a form of programming? Imagine a world where humans could 'learn' (form strong neural connections) very very very fast. Suppose the proteins needed were altered in such a way as to make it possible to teach a child extremely efficiently. Look at the case of Ainan Celeste Cawley, I think he taught himself calculus by the age of four. BUT, he still needed to have language (at least I would think so). Without language, I'm not exactly sure what a human (even gifted) could self-learn? Much? Not much?

Imagine if all humans were born like Ainan Celeste Cawley.... I bet such a world would seem as foreign to most people as one populated with human-looking AI. IOWs, if we learn more and more about proteins and how they are used to store memory, will we be able to MAKE humans that are almost indistinguishable from AI, given they're made, from the DNA up, ARE they human or are they AI? At some point, one wonder's what we even mean by the "A"?


As for BernanQe, he'll go down in US history, one way or another. Humans are moving away from resorting to force (whether we want to admit as much or not) and as we do, fiat currencies no longer become compatible with a free civil society. They're inherently incompatible.

Perhaps destroying ours will be BernanQe's legacy?

 

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Oh no a turning machine could do it, it just would be fucking HUGE, probably needing to exceed 40 petaflops! But all that is gross overkill, by going analog and using spiking neurons perhaps even spintronic or mimristor synapses, instead of having to simulate a neuron digitally a real one can be made in silicon that uses a very little energy and puts out very little heat, perhaps less then biological neurons, while also being able to spike millions of times a second rather then a thousand or less like biological neurons do. That will likely be the only way to make AI that fits in the size of a human skull and also use a few hundred watts or less.

Learning speed may not be slow, espically with that spiking speed of thousand of time ours, for ever second of thinking time we experience it could expreinces hours! Intial training could be done with a virtual body in a virtual realm via simple computer programs at speeds thousand of times faster then a human child. Of course all this depends on the technology developing which may still take a decade and more, but both technology at it theoretical rate of learning are moving expenetially.

 

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We agree.* Why I said I did not want a robot with that type of AI near me as if it slipped and fell on me I be crushed by it weight same as if run over by an 18 wheeler!

Yes the processing could be much faster, but the experiences are not any faster - still just one sunrise per 24 hours, One full moon per month, one car back fire to distinguish form gun shots per month, conversing with a human is at the human's speed, etc.

SUMMARY:
NO MATTER HOW FAST THE PROCESSING IS, LEARNING TO COPE /ADJUST / RESPOND WELL/ TO A CHANGING ENVIROMENT PROCEEDS AT ITS RATE OF CHANGE.

You have a strong and erroneous belief that leaning is all a brain problem and ignore that it is really about learning how to have better INTERACIONS with the environment via your sensorial inputs. For most interactions with the environment, evolution has optimized the neural processing speed. It is like the eye, the resolution is limited both by the iris opening and the density of photo-transducers in the retina AND IS THE SAME - No wasted over kill in either. Evolution is a damn clever designer, but has made some glaring mistakes. Perhaps, in the long run, putting so much ability to modify the environment in man is the most disastrous one.

* The point of the Turing computer was with it you can prove any computational terminating problem can be solved. It was never, not even by Turing, suggested as a way to make practical computers. Von Neumann did that for digital machines, and the only improvements have been technical, not conceptual (except to extent digital parallel processing logic has been developed).

 

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Not in a virtual world. For example lets say it reaches border collie inteligence, and in a virtual realtiy we have a program tell it in virtual audio to pick up and retrieve simple objects "red triangle", "blue square",etc, it would be able to go through thousands of retrievals in seconds and learn what those objects are in seconds, not limited by the speed of motion or interaction in the real world. The only limition would be learning how to interact with us, which we can't simulate in detial or accurately virtually and once we could we would already have strong AI (Catch 22), and even that could be aggumented with academic knowledge.

So lets say it reaches the intelligece to learn from TV or lecture presentations or read books (academic knoledge), it could go though an hour long lecture in a second or less, go through TV series in seconds, read books in seconds, etc, etc. It could likely learn a new language in just minutes, but to provide finishing would still likely need a at least a few dozen hours with a human instructor, so learning rate would likely look very logrithimic, learning incredibly fast most things (once it has learned how to learn) and then very slowly acheiving perfection.

Of course for such a speed of thought it would need something very diffrent from human boardom or it would go crazy, likely a digitial computer impluse center to have it stay on task or even modulate it speed of thought even if it has to wait relatively 'forever' just for a human instructor to finish giving it a command.

 

Well:

1) their brain doesn't have to be in their body and
2) nothing gets smaller faster than highly integrated electronics.

Experience can be as fast as you like. Listen to a human talk at 100x normal speed, for example.

 

... Anyways could talk about how AI might learn be slit off into another thread? Like the last 5 or more posts?

 

Important new text added at end after 2 hour delay.

True the AI of the robot could be separate from the robot's body, But I still don't want him near me, as I have often seen communication interference on TV or even total drop of signal a few times. If I'm sick in hospital bed, I want a good looking young female nurse washing me. Not some robot, whose brain is the basement.

On (2) Yes much smaller still is possible, but my limiting point was the density of heat generation, not circuit volume. I forget the details but there is in information theory for any non-reversible logic machine a least possible energy loss for each bit switched. It is related to fact that if the whole process is not reversible (I.e. can not start with the decision robot makes and in then reverse his calculation to discover the "inputs" it was based on) Entropy will be increased as it does in ANY non-reversible process that makes heat. Only way a process can avoid producing heat is if it is 100% reversible.

Yes it is true that humans can understand speech much faster than they can make it. But only by a factor of about 20, not 100, for extended speech (more than a few seconds) if comprehension is not seriously degraded, as I recall. (I think you can understand a sentence or two of faster speech as you don't really do it directly. I.e. you can hold it in "short term memory" and "play it back" more slowly.)
To even double that "times 20 rate" the speech must be pre-process in a computer to greatly reduce the duration of the vowel sounds and several other tricks
Natural speech spend much more time making the vowel sound than is needed.

Closely related is fact that with computer's rapid display of short segments of the text to be read at the center of the screen where reader keeps his fixation point, at least a 10 fold faster* reading with full comprehension is possible. This is because in normal reading of printed text about 90% of the time the mind totally ignores the motion blurred image on the retina when you make a saccade to the next fixation point.**

There are some very interesting experiments related to this and fact saccades are ballistic. Modern (and the best 40 years ago) eye motion detectors permit the next fixation point to be accurately predicted by time only 10% of the saccade has been done. Thus the next segment of text to be read can be displayed there and all the rest of the screen be filled with rapidly changing letters in the book's lines of text. The reader does not even notice this, but you looking at same screen and not knowing where each fixation will be, can't read anything - You just see a full page of rapidly changing letters. It is not uncommon for the reader to say: "I'm ready - lets get started with the experiment." When in fact the screen has been displaying scrambled letters everywhere except for the short line (less than 2 inches long) of three to five words where he is making a saccade to for several minutes!

* This is (or was) called rapid sequential viewing (or reading). Much of the early work more than 35 years ago was done at JHU Braddock visual center, and I often visited the lab doing it for about a month but the good looking female technician running the tests was not the least bit interested in me.

For reasons not clear then (perhaps still not) there must be one blank (dark a I recall) frame projected on the screen before the next text image is. They had a special "refresh faster than TV " computer driven monitor but I forget what was its framing rate. It was faster than most people tested but for one guy, they could not discover his max reading speed - He had full comprehension of what he read when every frame of text was shown briefly only once by a single frame! I. e. he could read well new text at half the special monitors refresh rate.

** You can easily demonstrate that the eye motion blurred image on retina is totally ignored: Put your nose near a mirror and look at your left eye, then look at your right eye. To do that with head still, you had to "swing" you direction o gaze -rotate your eyeballs, but you will never see their rotation - that retinal data is totally ignored.

BTW all the above is pulled from more than three decades of storage in my memory - I rarely search for information else where - too much crap in the internet. If you search and find some error in the above, please tell me. My fantastic memory for an old man still has the "rewrite function" operational.

 

because of "can kicking"

Either choice is bad. Read the link's text for even worse news or my summary of that part of link's text at: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?134352-Gold-Bubble-goes-POP&p=3158120&viewfull=1#post3158120

 

Bullshit! Switching out to a different currency is not going to fix the systemic problems this thread discuses or was meant to discuss.

 

Well that is the POV of the previous chief economist of the World Bank - pretty good economic background, what is yours?

I would have said same but slightly differently:
The root of current economic problems is the unlimited ability to create debt and using the "thin- air" money made, not for productive investments, but to let current generation live "higher on the Hog" at the expense of the next generation. I.e. it is not just the "greenback" but all western plus now Japanese excessive fiat money production that is to blame.

 

Our Economy is collapsing because of... Kingdome

I'd like to attempt to use the Kingdome as an example of why our economy is collapsing. The Kingdome is basically the home stadium of the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League (NFL). Back in the 1960s the voters repeatedly rejected using 'Public' money to pay for the NFL to have a stadium. But, this is thing, people like football. Not enough to pay for a stadium for their home team - but enough to stick their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the bill. Welcome to the "Middle Class". So, finally in 1968 voters approved the issue of US$40 million in municipal bonds to construct the stadium. Given that Bonds can be issued for repayment in 40 years (or longer) it's a pretty sweet deal. AND hey, just think of all the 'economic activity' stadium building creates. Not to mention, if you're a crooked politician, you couldn't really give a shit about who get's stuck with the bill - all that matters is getting reelected. How better to get reelected than to build the home stadium for the "Middle Class's" beloved NFL team? Win-Win (actually, Win-Lose, but the Losers haven't even been born yet, so hey, F*ck them).

The Kingdome was razed to the ground by implosion on March 26, 2000. About 24 years after it was built. The Seattle Seahawks have a new stadium, and their owner, Paul Allen is worth an estimated $15 billion. As for the great-grandchildren of the people who took on the US$40 million in municipal bond to build themselves a nice shinny stadium, well, though the stadium is gone - if they still live in King County, they are still responsible for more than $80 million in debt on the demolished long-gone long-forgotten NFL foodball stadium their great-grandparents got to enjoy. Lucky them. This only works when you have a system of income tax hand-in-glove with a Central Bank. That way, the Central Planners can buy votes using State-force/Fiat backed currency and the Police/IRS/militant arm of the State will force the children of the middle class to repay what their great-grandfathers spent. It's sort of like a mafia racket - only much worse. Even the mafia isn't so crewel as to go after the unborn.

Because of all these debts, both the wife and the husband have to work to re-pay on bonds for stuff long ago forgotten. There's so much debt now, that mother's do not have the time to remain with their children during their formative years 0-4. The State "generously" pays a 'tax credit' to parents to shovel their infants (as young as 6 weeks) into day supervision factories. Empirical evidence suggests these children are not developing a properly formed somatosensory cortex because they are not being held, soothed, kissed and hugged enough. Because the forbrain is not connecting properly with the primary cortices they are developing body dismorphic syndromes, everything from phantom limbs to anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Also, a recent study found these children are not learning to recognize facial expressions and have a low emotional IQ. One could think of child supervision centers as places where no one speaks (or speaks very little and in a very limited vocabulary) - imagine how hard it would be to develop language if you only got a tiny bit of language from a parent for an hour or two in the evenings, on the car in the morning being dropped off and maybe on the weekends. Your language skills will be stunted. This is what's happening to the development of children's brains today. Which is probably a pretty good side effect for the State, as it's just that much easier to manipulate them once they're a voting adult (see: War on Terror and the "Patriot" Act).

But hey, we got a mother Fucking God-damn nearly 'free' NFL football stadium built in the 1960s.


The FED is the reason why our economy is collapsing because it allows the Middle Class to get away with all their petty childish selfish desires without feeling the economic pain of their decisions. The FED brings out the worse in society, and since it was cut loose from Gold, it's been down hill ever since. The Central Bank is to the Central Government what the One Ring was to Gollum. I'm afraid it'll take death by Fire before the two are ever separated.



The only thing holding this shame of an "economy" together is the economic progress automation has brought. But, I think you'll find the State's desire for Debt is much greater than our ability to automate. I expect the State to start more Wars to burn off some of the middle class and I also imagine those Americans not dead will start putting their children to work to just to make rent. Just like in any other 3rd world country. Oh, and they'll be flag-waving the entire time. Because, if the Middle Class knows one thing: it's that they Love their State and their State Loves them.

 

Look, exactly how is changing the currency going to fix how automation is making more and more job obsolete?

 

There seems to be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that making jobs obsolete is bad for society.

It's not. Making jobs obsolete is GOOD for both the economy and society.
The more made obsolete the better. That's less work that needs to be done.

 

Making jobs obsolete could be great for society, just not one based in free market. Once a non-free market system is implement to pay out the automated labor equally to every person we could all profit from automated labor. We are a very long ways away politically from implementing such an economic system.

I been over this with you repeatedly now. People need to work to make money, as most people are labors, the less work there is the less they make, unless we implement regulations such in increasing the minimum wages, reduce work hours, and solutions that gets people to own shares of increasingly automated labor so they can supplement their incomes with the dividends, perhaps some day live completely off those dividends.

 

Could you define for me what you mean by 'free-market'? I don't think we're using term with the same meaning. Here's how I'm using the term: Free market is a summary term for the exchanges (each as a voluntary agreement) that take place in society between two people or between groups of people.

Notes:
- Exchanges include tangible commodities or nontangible services.
- Society is Lawful. The law protects private property and against fraud.
- Money is sound.


My second question is - why do you think every person should be afforded equal pay? Assuming we will never live in a limitless world. Shouldn't people that provide society with more value, be given more access to resources? I think they should. I don't want the wasteful member of society given equal access to resources. That doesn't make any economic sense.

How do you define 'money'? You continue to use the words 'pay' and 'money' as if there terms mean the same thing in all monetary systems. The importance of sound money is this - it GAINS value and ensures that as productivity gains are made - LESS money is required to purchase the same goods and services.

With sound money, right now, we should only be working a couple days a week (at most).
But, because our money is being debased, our productivity is being stolen we are actually working longer and harder than ever. It makes no economic sense that 50 years of productivity gains and people are less prosperous for it.

There's no need to distort the market by increasing minimum wages WHEN money is sound - the price of items falls. Use silver as an example. If priced in silver, fuel is extremely cheap. ALL of the productivity gains in making fuel, are priced into silver. It only takes 10 minutes worth of work to buy a gallon of gas in silver (about 10 cents) IF payed at the rate of 1960. So, LESS work is perfectly fine, when money gains in value. People can also retire knowing their savings will GROW in value all on its own. No need to invest. The money itself is an investment of your lifetime or labor.

 

If I own a robot that does everything for me why doe I need to exchange anything with people, if I need to exchange anything I can have my robots provide that labor.

Which has nothing to do with the problems I discribed with automation,

People that provide society with more value should get more, sure, but people that provide society with no value which will be a lot of a people in the commoning decades, perhaps a majority of people, will need a minimum income. Especially to keep consumption stable and prevent the whole economy from collapsing or worse bifurcating into an completely automated economy for the rich and an impoverish subsistence economy for the poor, the ones that survive that is.

Again the problem with automation is the value of person is slowly decreasing as more and more of what a person can do is automated, eventually if the universal doers ever come, people will have no value what so ever, other then the capital they own in automated labor, those that own no capital will have no value what so ever.

Automation is the reason why all the first world countries growth rates has slow to a trickle, problems like standardless money, goverment maleficence and corruption, banking corruption, etc are all ready to destroy our economy that has been made stagnant by automation.

Yeah and that hasn't helped japan which despite lowering prices and deflation can only match lowering wages, there economy is still stagnant and unstable, and will remain so until major economic changes or something else induces a collapse.

Ok now your making sense, that is if you could explain how making the money sound would cause keynes predictions to be right. Because I would think sound money would make the true worth, the decreasing worth, of a person's labor even more obvious, not less.

As I've specified our economy can't grow much more via the laws of physics, so the economy will need to become stagnant, so then how will saving GROW?

 

Isn't this an example of begging the question? Aren't you "assuming" that value is measured by labor (which is automated by the doer) and then proceeding to suggest automation reduces human value to nothing - as if all a human could do is labor? That's circular reasoning isn't it?

How about genuine emotional connection? Isn't that worth something? You could 'simulate' emotion - but you can't both simulate and BE genuine at the same time. AND as I stated before, while now it's 50 children to 1 teacher - perhaps in the future, it'll be 50 or 500 adults to care for 1 child. Those children may need real genuine emotion to grow into caring human beings because if they grew into humans that had never had contact with genuine humans, they may never learn to give two shits about humans and this isn't' something society (by definition) wants. Society is people interacting with one another - thus it must have people and they must interact or there's no human society - and then I guess the point of how to care for humans in society is mute.



So, let's assume you have a universal doer. That doer needs access to raw materials. You may not need to work very many hours a year with children - but you'll need to work SOME hours with children and you'll need to do a good job of it. THEN you can use the money you earned by providing value to those around you, to pay for the resources your doer can access to provide you with the material things you want. IF you are valueless to society - then you'll best hope for charity (and they'll still probably take away your doer).

Because we cannot know what sort of jobs society will value, we need law, sound money, private property rights and a free-market to create those jobs. That is the most efficient means of finding value. Because, value IS what people THINK in their heads. The free-market is the best means of finding and providing for those thoughts.

 

Again a robots emotions may in fact be genuine, that a philosophical argument with no answer. An AI with a artificial analog neural network would arguable experience "real" emotions as its operations are all hardware not software. And again, are you saying everyone could make enough money to get by, by provide this "emotional connection"?

That would make no economic sense, an android teacher could teach better, teach more, be on call for the student 24/7, never get mad with the child, never abuse the child, its a reason why more computer added learning is becoming more and more common.

More so lets imagine this out for a moment, lets say everyone does have jobs as teachers or some other soft field, and these people buy stuff made by robots, how does that money re-enter the economy? Well the few people that own all the automated labor would need to be buying up all the services of the people, it would need to be like 10 teachers for every rich person, and whose to say they won't just buy superior robotic teachers for themselves and reduce their expenditure?

Sorry but free market does not do what is best for society, free market only does what is profitable, you will need regulations to make human emotion directly profitable somehow to get the market to optimize what you want it to.

The doer could work for their own resources. Once you own a universal doer the problems is fixed, as long as everyone owns a universal doer, who ever does not will need to "hope for charity".

We also need clear air, but that too is not the causative problem as automation is. What I can predict based on present data is that there will not be enough jobs for society, the sorts I can take only an educated guess at, but the number of jobs will most certainly be less then the number of people needing jobs.

Now that circular logic.

 

I have no idea what a society with universal doers would find as valuable. I imagine that such a society would be so prosperous that the 'value' needed to be provided by an individual to society (and converted into money) to gain access to resources would be pretty small - at least to meet the needs of a decent lifestyle. The way you describe these universal doers it's as if they can pull carbon from the atmosphere and soak in sunrays and make and do anything and everything. Yes, if this day should come, life will be probably pretty interesting for your average human. Just sit back and enjoy existence. Heck, reminds me of a short story I once read where these humans had all downloaded into a spaceship call The Needle (I think) and were flying across space and hit some dust. The Needle wouldn't make it to their planet and so they were destined to sit in the craft forever. Each 'human' partitioned their part of the mainframe off into their own worlds where they lived as gods and rarely, if ever, made contact with the other humans. Some were evil gods some weren't. The Engineer spent his time trying to reconfigure the ship to actually make it to a world where they could grow bodies and "BE" organic again. (I can't quite remember how it ended

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If the AI has real emotion it's no longer possible to press this sentient being into doing work. If it wanted to do work, then sure, it could - but if it could produce genuine human emotion, it wouldn't want to because happily working 24 hours a day 7 days a week is definitely not your typical 'human' emotion.


I'm not sure if I think humans would like to pump so many resources into providing children with a stimulating learning environment. Just look at the world we've created. Everything is about 'alleviating' parents from the 'chore' of parenting. Publicly funded tax-credit-based Day Supervision Factories take infant humans in the forth trimester and watch them from 6am-7pm. Leaving parents with the luxury to work longer and buy more stuff. School starts and ends to fit the work cycle - not the learning cycle (which should start around 11am for teens). TV and video games babysit kids once they do come home. Various SSRI's take care of the lost emotional development. School "Education" programs take care of all the 'teaching'.

Doesn't seem like a society cares that much about children if you ask me. So, again, I have no idea what a society with a universal doer would value. Probably a lot of drugs and robot sex. Heck, I doubt most humans in such a society would 'want' to be around other humans. Thus, there wouldn't be much 'society'. Of course, if these AI could experience human-like emotion, I suppose they'd just pick up where we died off and BE the humans.

 

So, assuming a Universal Doer can make itself, then there is no need for any human to perform any labor. OK. Then the problem becomes one of private property rights. Before we worry about 'money', we need to agree on what is private property. As I understand, there is no satisfactory answer in the field of Ethics. Generally private property starts with the notion you mix your labor with material and it's yours - example, you plant a seed, you own the tree and the fruit from it is yours. While a Universal Doer will do a lot of things - it won't do everything. Thus, for some thing, this notion of private property will continue to remain true. Example: you feed and water your kidneys - you own them.

I think we agree you own your body?
I think we can agree we own the actions of our body?

How's that for a starting point?