None of that however has anything to do with my point or the problem that is being discussed here.

Automation and advancing science and technology is making the word a better place for humans. It’s making humans wealthier. That’s all good stuff.

The problem however is in how that growing wealth is being shared or not shared. Currently, we use a combination of capitalism and socialism. We use our government to create socialistic sharing (free education, roads, law enforcement, basic care for the poor, worker rights and safety), while using capitalism to motivate people to maximize their production, and to assign them a share of the “pie” based on their contribution.

But as technology advances, the value of a day’s worth of labor had been steadily declining. The productivity of a company has little to do with how many workers it has, but instead, what its capital investment in technology is – the machines and resources it owns and controls.

Within a few decades, machines will replace all labor. If you don’t understand this, you need to read the literature on it. Ray Kurzweil’s book lays down the evidence very nicely.

But even now, long before all humans are replaced in the workforce, we have a strong trend in effect. Wealth is being produced more and more by the labor of the machines, and less and less by the labor of the humans. This leads to the simple fact that most wealth today is made NOT by the hours you work, but by your investment decisions – by what you own.

Wealth created by ownership (by capital) is never fair. It’s highly monopolistic. The more wealth someone has, the more opportunity they have to unfairly leverage control over other assists. This simple fact is why wealth tends to concentrate at the top.

The more money someone gets, the more they tend to use that money, to block others from getting rich. They use their money, and associated power, to keep themselves rich.

As long as the rich need the workers, the workers have power to force the rich to share some of that wealth with them – such as with the unions. But the less the wealthy need the workers, the less power the middle and lower class have to secure a fair slice of the wealth created by the entire society.

Martin Ford suggests that without the mass markets, the economy will collapse. He’s wrong. There’s no need to keep making Fords if there are no workers with money to buy them. The rich will just make the Lamborghinis and stop making Fords all together. There is no need for a mass market. The wealthy can just create a small elite market for themselves, and no longer care about the masses. This is already happening now with the custom built 10 million dollar homes, and cars, and it will only continue and accelerate as we get nearer to the singularity.

It will only be stopped when the 99% finally figure out what’s going on, and puts an end to it. Hopefully, it will happen by peaceful vote, instead of by revolution, but so far, the “people” are being idiots and allowing the rich to walk all over them. The fact that in the US the rich have lower tax rates than the middle class is ABSURD. It’s happened only because the rich have used their power to take over the government, and to take over the minds of the weak into believing it’s a “good thing” that the rich are do not have to pay the same taxes as the poor.

Capitalism works great for maximizing the efficiency of a production system. But it sucks, when it comes to the fair sharing of the wealth across our society. The closer we get to the singularity, the more it will suck.

To offset this growing tend, we need to use the government to create more socialistic sharing of wealth, not less. But we need to do it not only though free government services (which makes the government too larger), but by direct redistribution of wealth. We need to put more power back into the hands of the middle and lower classes, by directly taxing the growing super-rich, and simply giving the money to everyone equally to balance out the growing imbalance of wealth and power in our society. The closer we get to the singularity, the more wealth redistribution we need to do.

Once we get to the singularity, people won’t need to work for a living at all. The machines will do all the work, and people will gain basic income from taxing the machines (in effect, the people will indirectly own a percentage of all the machines and resources through government taxation). But capitalism will still be in full force allowing people to get rich by making wise investment decisions. Taxation will just limit how rich they can become relative to the wealth of the poorest members of society.

Now that we have democracy and well-established models of decent human behavior (and news channels with instant communications showing poor behavior anywhere on the globe), I think there is more resistance to the elite taking as much control as in centuries past. If the Russian tsars couldn’t do it in 1700, how can it happen with elected presidents and elected congresses?

Now I’m not naive, I know our system of democracy is not perfect, with PACs and individuals feeding the politicians money to do things their way, but the politicians still need to get re-elected. There is a check to their power. People aren’t willing to put up with terrible work for next to no pay with the idea that their leaders are chosen by God and it’s their role in life to support all that is asked of them. If they go hungry or without health care or housing, there will be (and are) protests.

But as I think about it, in the old days, the poor were needed to grow food, make clothing, build castles. Your premise requires robots that can do it all, and cheaper than a human. Given that, I can see where you’re going with this. Although I don’t see why abandoning the monetary system is needed.

Growing food seems the hardest part of it, something that will definitely take more than 20 years to accomplish. Drilling for oil and natural gas, and designing new machines for these tasks, will also take a long time to automate. All this will be a gradual change over time, I can’t imagine widespread use of robots that are more cost-effective than people at general tasks for at least another 30 years. Then you still need time to build billions of these robots. And that’s if things go well.

With the upcoming resource constraints (oil, metals, rare earth elements, phosphorus) pulling back the global economy, I really don’t see the Singularity happening on a wide scale all at once. I do agree with you though, on that it won’t be a nirvana. Even if we make smart decisions, there will still be winners and losers.

As far as not catering to the poor, the Walton family has proven there’s a good deal of money to be made in selling cheap things to whoever wants it. And even the poor buy cell phones nowadays.

If you don’t have a market, you can’t sell your product, you don’t make money. There’s always going to be more Fords than Lamborghinis.

We had a tough spell in the 80′s when automation was introduced into the car manufacturing business, but eventually people adapted. Detroit as a city never fully recovered, many moved out for other jobs, but it wasn’t a doomsday that some thought. And I think your doomsday is overstated as well.

Yes. And retraining people won’t do anything. This is what worries me so much about the Kurzweil school of starry-eyed west coast optimists. They preach a technological gospel of empowerment while the evangelists of this school live in a “high income” ignorance bubble. The Singularitarian crowd doesn’t fully acknowledge the dangers inherent in automation.

Incidentally this is my topic for a presentation I will be doing in Belgrade in April. I will be speaking precisely this word of warning there and I will again mine Curt’s excellent way to phrase it for raw presentation sloganistry, Thanks.

The medicine I propose is quite clear. As far as I am concerned. People have a clear choice – subsist in electoral apathy and do nothing… and in 20-40 years everyone is either dead from aging, and there will be no transhumanism (or actual affluence) for the vast majority of humans…

…or take society back from the hyper-entitled by some measure of severe protest, revolution, force. I do not exclude the possibility of “killing the 1%”. Guillotines, etc.

It makes no difference if the workers have jobs and money. The elite still have money, and they will simply create goods and services for each other. Do you think the average kid from the ghetto has enough work and money to buy an iPad? Does that force Apple to make cheaper iPads? Of course not. Apple products are amid at the working professionals. It’s just a simple fact. The products are made for the people that have the money. No one makes money selling to the poor. As automation advances, that “working elite” will continue to shrink in numbers, but grow in wealth and the poor will have to do more shit jobs, for shit pay.

That is the balancing that is already happening – it’s been a growing trend for something like 40 years now and it’s only going to get worse as automation continues to advance.

Yes, new jobs at the top are always created, but few people from the bottom have the skills or education to do those jobs. When a working or middle class guy looses his career at 35, when he’s already got a family, he can’t afford to spend $150K and 6 years in college to retrain himself for a career that he probably doesn’t have the mind for anyway.

In another 30 years, no one will be able to find “real” work. The only work left for humans (after the market rebalancing), will be shit jobs that no one can make a fair living off of. All the wealth of the society will be held, and controlled by the people that own and control all the resources – energy, land, robots, patents, etc and all their robots, will continue t o make products for the the other elite, and the majority of humans will just be poor and worthless to the elite. We won’t get there however, because the larger the group of working poor grows, the more they will rebel against the system.

Visualize 1% of Earth in terms of ‘rich’ people. One day they own a lot of money and a lot of resources. Now the next day they buy everything, own basicly all the resources – or a substantial portion of it. And then they say to money….. “naaah. Not interested”.

Take away the current monetary regime out of the equation and you end up with the world’s most vicious resource monopoly in human history, one where transnational and unaccountable elites can do pretty much what they want, build gold-plated palaces on the great barrier reef (for themselves or their kids) and send everyone else (with automated kill drones) to a bunch of ever shrinking favella compounds.

Money as a barter mechanism is ending. It is becoming worthless. Once the financial mega-elites can figure out a new exchange mechanism – one backed by energy, resources, land (i.e. : real things, not “debt” to “losers” who don’t make “money” holding “jobs”) then everyone else is seriously out of luck.

Worse, with good enough automated systems this quickly becomes an irreversible situation. And guess what, Ray Kurzweil bases his bloody career argueing the point that we’ll have robots “who are good enough to pull this off” in about 30 years.

You know my conclusion and you can guess my proposed reaction. I actually think the opportunity window of doing something about this is closing quickly. If people stay sitting on their hands, I suppose by 2025 it’s too late to do anything about this.

25 years later, there’s still industry, there’s still blue-collar workers. Robots have their limits (so far). But more importantly, if robots/automation take away so many jobs, then people won’t be able to afford their products, and human labor becomes cheaper as people again make their own items, and there will be less money available for installing a new factory with expensive automatons. So there’s a trade-off that the market will find. Sure there will be disruptions, as some jobs become obsolete and new jobs open up. But there’s been a lot of technological growth in the last 25 years, and our workweek hasn’t shortened, and unemployment on average hasn’t skyrocketed. In fact, more women are in the labor force than ever before, and immigrants keep coming from 3rd world to industrialized countries.

FYI, I’ve solved the entire issue of android robots replacing human beings at their jobs. I have designed a symbiotic system of 14 laws which, when implemented, I claim creates a symbiosis. I published this last summer in my ebook Penzar, but this part is freely available at howtoAndroid.com/penzar/#UtopiaAndroidia (I created this website in 1999 before android was Google’s OS). I consider this issue solved now, I’ve moved on to Project Andros.

Here is most of chapter 8 Utopia Androidia, freely given here from Penzar.
Look specifically at Law 12, the human right-of-way. A side-effect of this system of 1-to-1 human-android symbiotic labor is that your robot always works even when you are old, thus no need to Social Security nor pensions nor retirement savings plans. That was a side-effect, not an original goal of this system, I just happened to notice it after I designed this.

PENZAR – JOURNAL OF ADVANCED IDEAS (an ebook)

…
Chapter 8 Utopia Androidia

… significant discussion left out…

A SOLUTION: THE ANDROID LABOR PROXY HYPOTHESIS.

Definition: labor-proxy – noun; a 1-to-1 pairing of a human being with an android
labor unit. The robotic android worker half of a symbiotic pair. acronym – LPR, (Labor PRoxy), pronounced helper.

Prediction 1: Excessive human labor displacement will happen if android labor
implementation is controlled by market forces only. There will be mass replacements of humans with android labor. Initially the androids will excel at easy tasks, then progress to be able to displace humans at more complex tasks. As we see from current non-android robot factories, competitive pressures drove many companies to roboticize significant parts of their factory floors. Factory robots now perform some of the jobs humans used to do. But there is no widespread system to create symbiotic pairs of humans and these factory robots to benefit the displaced human workers.

Hypothesis 1: The displacement of human workers in a market-driven android labor
economy can be avoided many ways. One way is if a symbiotic society is made of
human and android robot. Let the non-sentient android robot perform the mundane,
tedious, monotonous, dull, boring work. Leave the creative work for the human being to make tasks for the robot. This is a very rough approximation that applies in different amounts to different jobs.

Hypothesis 2: A system of societal laws will be necessary and sufficient to organize a highly ordered labor system where humaniform robots can perform a substantial role as labor-proxy for human beings.

THE 14 LAWS OF HUMAN AND ANDROID SYMBIOTIC LABOR.

Definition: virtual labor-proxy – A virtual pairing of a human to virtual
to a physical android robot. Decoupling the pair allows variability in
association where that might be useful. The decoupling allows either the
virtual robot to remain constantly paired with the human and vary with
physical robot, or the virtual robot can remain constantly paired with a
robot and vary with the human.

Law 1: Work Week – All human participants in the Robotic Labor Proxy
program have to work at least 8 hours per week, and have weekends off,
no excuses. Additionally people have vacations, holidays, etc, . . . .

Law 2: Participation – A human being may not Opt-Out of this program,
but may simply decline to participate in the funding by the Labor Proxy.
The Labor Proxy is bound to the human; nothing breaks the bond except
final human death. The robot saves the salary if the human declines
funding. There is no carry-over of funds. Any excess funds at the
time of the humans death go into a fund pool for all android labor proxies.

Law 3: Right to Proxy – It is the right of all human beings to have a
Robot Labor Proxy from the moment of birth until final death.

Law 4: Proxy Pays Taxes – The Android Proxy pays taxes equivalent to humans.

Law 5: Proxy Employed – The Android Proxy is always employed due to
excellent work patterns of 23 hours/day, 365.25 days/year.

Law 6: Proxy Equal Salary – The Android Proxy has a salary equal to humans
for the work performed.

Law 7: Non-Slavery Clause – Only non-sentient androids are allowed to
be Labor Proxies. Sentient androids cannot be slaves by law.

Law 8: Golden Education – Recognizing the importance of education,
all expenses of a human beings education plus stipend will be paid by
the LPR including the other costs that usually prevent one from
continuing education, such as mortgage payments.

Law 9: Dispersal – The payments to the human are lifelong, not all
at once. The funds have to last the humans lifetime.

Law 10: Control of Wages – Android Labor Proxies are in control of
their wages. After all, they did the work. There is room for
variability here: Plan A has the entire proxy salary going to the human half.
Plan B has the proxy only paying for health and education of the human half.

Law 11: Mechanical Immunity – Android Labor Proxies are immune from
legal challenges from any entity who might otherwise sue for financial
gain and ownership. Only sentient life forms can be sued, and a
sentient robot cannot be a labor proxy by a prior law, therefore the
LPR cannot be sued.

Law 12: Human Right of Way – No human being will be displaced by an
Android Labor Proxy, nor will a competent human be denied a job already
occupied by an android. If a human is competent for a job and wants the
job an android is performing, the human cannot be denied that job for
any reason about the position already being filled. Therefore every
job an android robot does must be instantly capable of supporting a
human being at that tasks, including the obvious necessities such as
chair, desk, etc, where appropriate.

Law 13: Proxy Equality – The Global Equalization mechanism makes all
Virtual Robot Labor proxies identical, even though the physical androids
may vary. This is necessary to eliminate tampering with androids and
favoritism. A virtualization system is such that humans are actually
paired with a virtual proxy, and the virtual proxy can be linked to
varying physical robots at different times, but only one at a time.
In this way a human isn’t associated with any specific physical robot,
and in fact your physical robot association can change daily.

Law 14: No Proxy Shortage – There is never a shortage of Android Labor
Proxy, nor an oversupply. Excess Labor Proxies are simply shut off
until needed.

“We had enough progress, things are great as they are and please stop with anything some might interpret as dangerous technological progress and scientific research?”

Reply from a lot of people with money: No.

Reply from my: No.

I want nanotechnological research, I want research after life extension, I want near earth industrialization, I want A.I., I want full robotization of all aspects of society and seamless VR and nano-regrown bodyparts.

And even worse, I am willing to vote (nsofar I still have a vote) for risking the future of this planet and the entire human species. In other words – a fair chance that I will live centuries is to me worth a fair risk that these technololgies wipe out all of the future generations of humanity and the entire biosphere.

Because for me the alternative is death. I’ll probably get death any ways, and I don’t want it. I’ll probably get a miserable and poor second half of this life anyways and I don’t want that either.

What I don’t want is things to just muddle on. In case you didn’t fully realize there ARE people who do not regard the current world as paradisial. I don’t. I regard the current human existential state as close to a nightmare, and I want out of this prison as quickly as possible.

I am not interested in your moral imperative. My being now has priority over what comes after. If my being immortal takes away a million human beings born in a few decades from now, I couldn’t care less.

Call it a pre-conception abortion.

Life is NOT a party. It is a broken down mess and a horrific Darwinistic legacy. This world is a sick residual cancer of hundreds of millions of years of atrocity. People who like it can have it. But never think they will be able to stop me when I want the logical alternative and actually do have the means to realize it.

But in case you didn’t realize I am being devil’s advocate here…

There is a flip side. The risks we take now may cause, just maybe, somewhat less potential in the next decades or centuries, statistically. Maybe every human that 20 years from now becomes an immortal posthuman will displace 100 babies who might hypothetically been born if they hadn’t.

But on the other hand we ARE talking technologies that will, if they come to full fruition, allow humanity in some form of post-humanity to settle other worlds. This is real and it can be done in a century. Probably less than a century.

http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-Planets/dp/0201328194/ref=wl_mb_hu_c_4_dp

http://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Apogee/dp/189652267X/ref=wl_mb_hu_c_6_dp

So if anyone argues that a certain category of certain technological ‘adventurism’ might constitute a risk, the logical conclusion must equally be that if we don’t get of this accursed planet and grow up as a space faring species, we risk losing something potentially far bigger.

The party hasn’t even started. Imagine how good the future might be with trillions rather than billions of wonderful post-humans scattered throughout the solar system.

I most certainly do not want to see the potential of a human ascendancy aborted. This world may be an acorn, and trepidation or shortsightedness does nothing to make the acorn grow into the tree it may be supposed to be.

“You like that word don’t you? Buckshot! You use it on almost every post you write. Care to explain what you mean by it?”

In the -logic and reason- as used by empiricists employing their hackneyed pragmatism and the far-from-perfect, highly corrupted -due to human nature- and overly politicized -due to funding sources- scientific processes, there is a notion set forth and accepted about a preponderance of evidence (faked or otherwise) hinting at a process that can ferret truth.

Two Space Shuttles blew up, while every single one of them were massive, untenable sources of worldwide pollution -created- at incredible social expense.

This is what I call the buckshot approach to logic and reason. This is how people are deluded into believing they can predict the future with an efficacy reserved for the gods -or- fate. They throw eventually enough divined-baloney-buckshot at the long wall of history, and assess from what sticks to it, or pokes holes in it -in their fallible minds- what they believe is true about a wide range of entirely unrelated topics. It’s a grab bag of delusion.

And they then arrive at what is more commonly known as the religion of science. The religion of science supports such foolish scientific trash as the Big Bang theory and theories about human-caused global warming. Pshaw!

This is nothing like logic, these complex scientific processes that lead to such intellectual twaddle. It is in fact -suicidal-, and a death wish by technological means -as even you have hinted.

“This progress isn’t going to stop. It isn’t going to slow down. It will keep going until we consume all matter and energy in the universe, or until we wipe ourselves out – whichever comes first.”

LoL! I choose neither.

Your nightmare is not logical, Curt. It is suicidal. And it denies so much more that is human in the process of hurrying toward that sure scientific suicide. It is the age-old death wish embedded in the story of Armageddon and the Apocalypse written again in The Scientific Belief.

“Yes, [morality is] a relative concept. But it’s not unimportant. It’s the very heart of what “importance” is to us. Morality – when we are not using it as tool to try and manipulate others, [or the habitability of the planet???] is just the question of how we should act. And that’s just back to our free will – we are hard wired to act so as to try and maximize our future reward – make a better future for us. And that’s all a question of morality – what ways are “best” to act to create a better future.”

Creating a better future at this juncture, is going to be a long walk back home away from the technological and scientific mirage of bettering the world. The world for us, is already the ultimate better, Curt. What could be better than this? Clean air, clean water, healthy children, and a future unfettered and not threatened by delusions of so-called geniuses bettering the world after their own inane scientific fashion.

In fact, Curt, the whole logical experience of science is 100% emotional.

This emotional experience is why your preference for science substantiating your denial of any static and categorical morality is so utterly delusional. Science is not a viable new god, Curt.

Here is how the emotional nature of the scientific processes works- I call it the “Ah-ha!” moment. It is an gut-instinct-addiction, and, 100% emotional.

There is no right answer that is ever deduced that is not necessarily -prefaced- by the emotional “Ah-ha!” moment. “Ah-ha!” -this is the correct answer! This is ALWAYS the final step in arriving at a so-called scientific deduction.

It is an entirely emotional experience of satisfaction.

Unfortunately this “Ah-ha!” moment is entirely emotional AND by everyone’s experience we all know it to be also highly fallible.

Each of us has had the “Ah-ha!” moment when we came up far short of a correct answer. The “Ah-ha!” moment can also be prefaced by an answer that is completely and utterly wrong. Blow the B-flat horn -now-.

And when we eventually ferret the right answer from our mistake and its far too often -unfortunate consequences- we come to another faulty juncture in scientific logic believing we have successfully pulled the right answer again from that barrel filled full of an infinite number of wrong answers… BUT ONLY WHEN we again have yet another emotional “Ah-ha!” moment.

The problem, as I have attempted to explain is, the infinite complexity of reality is not amenable to such an “Ah-ha!” moment -deduction- having much of a chance at providing anything more than another -hammering- pragmatic trial -and- error.

Human beings, if highly illogical, are still much smarter than the perambulating computer generated self-propelling machines designed by some randomly generated numbers fed into a computer program.

Human beings have this faulty logic process in their reasoning that says, if you know -what the wrong answer is- then you can deduce what the right answer -might be-. Or, if you know an ever greater number of wrong answers, it then is possible to have a strong inkling about what the right answer -should- be.

LoL. Infinity is a big number that warns us about the odds of probability.

And even AI will have the same limitation, but with much more dire consequences, because no human mind will be able to keep-up, keep-ahead and point-out the mistakes AI programs will make when they are given the chance to make decisions for humanity.

-Logic and reason- are just not so, Curt.

Human beings have built a technological society that is like a giant Rube Goldberg machine, teetering, and now tipping past the point of any reasonable return. This Rube Goldberg machine is falling rapidly now, observable on many levels in our society and around the world. The machine will not be righted. It will continue to fall. It is falling and will land smashing the goals and fantasy-dreams of the would-be, far-too-often-hackneyed scientists around the world -and- unfortunately killing billions of innocent pedestrians when as smashes and crushed societal structures worldwide.

That is the future, Curt. It is a future where survival is far more important than technological “progress”.

Scientists (like bankers) around the world will likely be saddled with the blame too. I would not be surprised to see some new Luddites arise who come after the scientists with hatchets, fire-bombs and machetes for what they have done to the habitability of the human reality.

This is what the learned-psychotic Ted Kaczinsky was all about, was he not?

Science has made a fool’s deduction from the well known pragmatism of David Hume. But it is a vastly immoral ethic from which others can just-as-logically deduce the culpable destruction of the habitability of the planet, ruining of our standard of living, and causing death and birth defects in children everywhere all around us.

Science and technology have given us Fukushima and a vast array of culpable chemical poisons in our environment.

Reality is infinitely complex. For every possible right answer there are an infinite number of correlative wrong answers from which we must choose, Curt.

Probability dictates to our logical processes otherwise; that it is simply not possible -on the basis of reason derived from pragmatic processes- to choose any right answers, neither in science nor in our analysis of social events possibly coming in the future.

Working back in history, we see that many such faulty choices have already been made for us, choices upon which we all rest faulty assumptions. These were philosophic choices, all of which, or most of which, eventually led to the so-called scientific process.

Philosophy is not science, thankfully!

In an unapproachable ideal, and even a knee-slapping laughable ideal, the scientific process is merely a roughly systematic process by which pragmatic errors can be categorized (Aristotle’s categories) -so scientists might then be more likely to choose the right answer out of a barrel filled full of an infinite number of wrong answers.

Science is a fantasy that has reached its point of diminishing returns very quickly in the scale of human history.

A new knowledge set is arising. It is called Categorical Knowledge.

You no doubt know about probability.

Infinity -as in our infinitely complex reality- is a big stumbling block when we attempt to measure probability, Curt. It is in fact a mountain so high, we eventually find -we cannot get over it.

The only truths of science are the unpredictable side effects and mostly negative byproducts of science and technology.

This -probability- stumbling block is not just in the smaller measures we make on a daily, weekly or yearly basis. We have a scaffolding-plethora of choices that have already been made for us throughout history.

Good philosophers know these were all mistakes, haphazard assumption-crutches now bending, creaking, falling and failing under the weight of a massively complex and interdependent technological societies that are endlessly, and laughably preparing for nuclear war -???-. Oh! Hooray for science and the scientific method.

Let AI determine when to let loose the ICBM’s? No thanks!

No, Curt. There is a new notion acting like a receding tide on humanity. It is approximately described in words -holistic- and -sustainable-. The momentum of it is vastly inexorable. Those who prefer science are like the Luddites of old, refusing to embrace the future, reactionaries lost in a brave new world.

But what does it boil down to? It boils down to this-

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.

Life is not a scientific adventure, Curt.

Life is a party. And the moral responsibility that transcends and gives rise to every other moral responsibility is to -not fuck-up the party-. Got it?

And on that count, Curt, science is dead.

Ok, so I guess we are stuck debating philosophy. Don’t get me wrong, I like debating these topics. I just don’t think is the correct place to do it.

Philosophizers have problems with determinism and free will. They have debated it for 100′s of years, and given all the variations 100′s of different names.

Really, it’s not that complex.

The BIGGEST problems philosophers have, is that science has not fully explained how the brain works yet, and as such, philosophy has problems grounding it’s debates because they don’t know how to ground the very tool they use to debate – their brain.

I now how the brain works well enough that, I don’t have any problems grounding any of these debates.

The universe might be deterministic. But we can’t tell. We are built out of the same material the rest of the universe is made form. Our knowledge, is limited to what that material can detect – which is the same as saying, our knowledge is limited to what we can build machines to measure. There is no perfect knowledge in this universe. One atom can not perfectly represent all there is to know about another atom. (at least to the limit of our current understanding). Quantum mechanics and effects like the Hindenburg uncertainty show there are thinks that we just can’t know.

But just because we can’t know them (from inside the system we are trying to know, is not proof that they are not pre-determined, or that there might be a way for it to known from outside the system.

We however, are just machines, and have the same limits of knowledge all machines have. We are limited by what we can sense, and how much memory we have, etc. The universe is huge, our minds are insignificantly small. We don’t know much and never will. But we can know a lot of good stuff none the less.

Free will and determinism is not incomparable. You can have both at the same times. A chess playing computer program has the feel will to make any move it wants to. It will evaluate different moves, and pick the one it likes the best.

The computer program has free will, even though it’s behavior is 99.999999% deterministic. (there’s always a small non zero probability the computer will fail to follow it’s programming correctly – aka what we call “break”). The chess program is not smart enough to know what it will do, before it doe sit. It still just has to run though it’s program and pick the move.

Humans are no different in that sense. We are just machines. Every atom, and molecule of our body are still obeying all the rules of physics. We are in effect pre-determined.

But odds are, nothing inside this universe could ever predict what that behavior would be. It’s probably impossible to build a computer big enough, and fast enough, to “compute” what a human would do.

So the fact that our behavior and all of the future might be predestined, it’s just irrelevant. It’s knowledge we can’t have access to.

We aer machines that act on what we can sense and what we can remember. That is our free will. Our ability to analyze our sensory data, and act on it, is our free will. The fact that how we do that is mechanical, is not important. It’s what we do. Just as a clock never stops to ask “gee if I’m predestined to stop moving my hands around in a circle, should I stop moving my hands”?

Of course of clock doesn’t have the power to ask the question and we do. But it’s not important. We are build to act so as to maximize our rewards – to try and make a better future for ourselves. We can’t know that future, so there is no way to change how we act.

Free will is simply not incompatible with determinism.

“If your description is true, then we have no -free will-.”

As explained, that’s just wrong. My description is fully compatible with having free will.

“Why would anyone raise a hand and continue working toward “progress” then?”

For the same reason the clocks keep ticking. It’s what we are built to do Don.

“And what is the point of the continued discussion about -how technological growth will change the economy and society in the near future-? It’s hardly interesting then, is it?”

It’s interesting to us because it’s a topic that effects our potential for future rewards, or a lack of future reweds if we mess up. Again, it’s what we are built to care about (our future rewards). So we use our free will to explore action possibilities to see if we can find a path to a better future. It’s what we do.

“Without free will, we are merely playing our part according to a script written long ago, that leads to the eventual demise of humanity -on this darkened path, -are we not?”

We are machines that enjoy using our free will to explore the future (most the time) – aka to live. Again, it’s just what we have been pre-determined to be. We were pre-distended to be humans before we were even born. That is not reason to not be human now that we are here. Why would a machine pre-distended to have free will, suddenly choose not to use their free will? We couldn’t even if we wanted to. If we choose to kill ourselves, that would be an act of free will. What ever we do, is an act of our free will. We can’t escape it.

?Clearly technological human societies do not have the limitation-constraints that bees and ants have.”

To a higher intelligence, we would look like ants. It’s kinda silly to assume otherwise.

“[we will do something stupid] This must be a given assumption in your professed reality.”

We are hard wired not to do something stupid IF we can see it coming. So only if something really dangerous shows up, that we don’t see coming, are we likely to kill ourselves”. But to tell the truth, I think the odds are probably good that such a think will show up at some point. The existence of such a danger would be the easy answer for the Fermi paradox.

“It’s not logical to do it, if it is a reality. But that seems to be unavoidable in your reality.”

We are machines hard-wired to do everything we can to avoid doing something stupid. Why would it be unavoidable in my reality?

“Human beings have no possibility of completely comprehending this infinitely complex reality. We are not gods.”

Right. There are no Gods either to help us with that problem.

As the colloquial expression says, -shit happens-. And we have developed some stunningly dangerous new technologies in the last hundred years, and even more -in the last twenty or thirty.

Have you read “The Singularity is Near” by Kurzweil or any of the other books that talk about the never ending exponential growth of technology? This progress isn’t going to stop. It isn’t going to slow down. It will keep going until we consume all matter and energy in the universe, or until we wipe ourselves out – whichever comes first.

“You seem to be saying there are no universal moral rules of conduct.”

There no universal rules no. The rules you find on the ones that are derived from the rules you find in physics books. There are many human rules however.

“We are just biological machines, socially attached to one another, right?”

Right. Meat puppets. Embrace it!

I find it difficult to believe that were an anti-technology candidate elected President, someone who pledged to close all the universities, and shutter every physics lab, that you would feel it would be -okay- to assassinate such a president,”

“I would not feel it was Ok.”

Excellent! Neither of us are likely to get a visit from the Secret Service this week!

I didn’t say I didn’t have any morals did I? I said they are not universal morals. Morals are individual. We each have our own rules of conduct. That’s why it’s correct to say we have free will as individuals.

There are certain moral trends we find in society, but there are no universals that exist. Well, except the close to universal “morals” of matter to act according to F=ma and rules like that. But we don’t normally use the word “morals” to talk about those.

“… what about everyone else? Should they feel the same freedom to act on their impulses -given their experience and systems of belief?”

Wait, first you say we have free will, then you ask me whether I think people should have the free will to act on their own beliefs?

It’s not within my power to take away their free will even if wanted to. Of course they will always use their free will to act on their own beliefs – and if that means taking a shot at the president, we can expect that will happen – as it does happen from time to time.

We try to stop others from acting in ways that are against our own beliefs by talking to them, and creating systems to punish (reduce their internal reward signal) if they fail to act in the ways we want. We use our free will to try and manipulate the free will of each other for our own good.

“Let me explain something about “logic and reason”, since you profess a mere layman’s knowledge of same.
These are crucial questions, logic and reason. They have not been resolved in any positive sense -yet- by philosophy. They will not be soon, is my instinct, or at least until we come to a new knowledge set that -is- based on logic and reason.”

The reason philosophers can’t resolve that, is because they don’t know how the bran works. I do however – at least well enough to resolve these questions. Humans are reinforcement learning machines that act to maximize an internal reward signal. We are just pattern matching machines that respond in pre-defined ways, to the patterns we see in our environment. How we respond is slowly, but constantly being adjusted by systems that act to adjust our behavior to maximize that internal rewards signal – that internal measure of “good” that is hard-wired into each of us.

All of this will become obvious to the philosophers when we solve AI – which will be happening very soon now (only a handful of decades left at most). And at that time, all these renaming questions of philosophizer will be resolved, and we will finally be able to get rid of all the remaining stupid “philosophy” and convert it all to simple hard science. Most of philosophy was converted to hard science already, and the only true philosophy left, is fall out from the fact that science has not yet turned all of the brain into hard science – which allows the philosophers to talk endlessly over silly crap like determinism, free will, the meaning of meaning, knowledge, truth, the mind body problem, and morality – all issues that will vanish in a puff of hard science very soon.

“The buckshot approach to -logic and reason- is laughable. It is political, and -not scientific in any sense.”

You like that word don’t you? Buckshot! You use it on almost every post you right. Care to explain what you mean by it?

“Science is based on pragmatism.
But the crucial -logical and reasoning- question about pragmatism is, who has the moral right to keep pounding away on reality until it all blows up in everyone’s face?”

Not a question of moral right. It’s what we are hard wired to do, and we will keep doing it, just like the clocks will keep ticking.

“I am a firm believer in free will.”

Me too!

“I am also a firm believer that we can make progress.
Philosophic progress is much slower in coming than scientific progress, Curt.”

All the sciences used to be called Philosophy. As pragmatic science uncovers the facts of each area of reality, the name was changed from philosophy, to hard science. Progress in ELIMINATING random talking about stuff we don’t understand, has been swift and steady. Within a few decades, the rest of that random endless talking about the few remaining issues, will all be resolved as well. It did take a thousand years or so, but progress has been steady and the work is almost done.

“But it is much more surely progress -too.
Your question, -how technological growth will change the economy and society in the near future- is essentially a question that asks us to predict the future.”

Of course it is!

“… And even when someone does accurately predict the future, due to human nature, they are most often ignored. Sometimes they are burned at the stake.”

We work to predict the future because it’s what we are hard wired to do Don. We are machines hard-wired to try and maximize the future value of our reward signal. It makes no difference how good or bad our predictions are, we are forced to try and understand the future so we can shape it in any way we can to maximize our future reward values. Some people get more attracted to this future guessing, while other get more attracted to just dealing with the day they have in front of them. But we all care about the future because it’s what we are hard wired to care about.

“I should leave you with a question to keep you engaged”

“But you have left me at a loss for words, by your denial that morality is anything more than an unimportant relative concept.”

Yes, it’s a relative concept. But it’s not unimportant. It’s the very heart of what “importance” is to us. Morality – when we are not using it as tool to try and manipulate others, is just the question of how we should act. And that’s just back to our fee will – we are hard wired to act so as to try and maximize our future reward – make a better future for us. And that’s all a questin pf morality – what ways are “best” to act to create a better future.

“Do you really believe someone might have enough knowledge to make a truth-positive decision to annihilate the human race -for good reason?”

By “someone” do you mean a human? Another intelligence might do it for the same reason we would want to elimination a virus harmful to our future. That’s easy to understand.

It’s harder to imagine a human having a reason to do it. But it’s easy enough to understand that humans choose suicide for themselves, and others, all the time. Give millions of people the power to kill all humans, you can be darn well sure it will happen. Hopefully, we will find ways to keep that level of power out of the hands of the people that would pick that.

There’s no such thing as “truth positive”. There are only actions that these types of machines decide to take. We are very complex machines that do things for very complex reasons based on our past conditioning. Though we use logic and reason to help guide us, most our behavior is in fact not derived by logic or reason. It’s just conditioned instincts. We our conditioned by our environment to act as we do. We talk about it as acting “emotional”, or “using our gut”. But it’a all just a complex learning machine acting according to best conditioning trying to maximize a reward signal. Our actions only by luck happen to be somewhat logical or rational as long as we are lucky enough to have a future which closely matches our past. The more the future fails to match our past, the more out “gut instincts” fail us.

Which brings us BACK to the article! Yeah!

Capitalism has worked well as an organizing force for our species for 1000′s of years. But it’s starting to fail. And people who rely on their gut to answer questions about how to act in the future, are about to make some big mistakes because the future is going to be very different, and it’s coming very soon. Which is why those4 of us that try our best to use logic and reason instead of our gut to guess at what’s coming, can sometimes see things that those using mostly their gut, can not.

The last questions of AI will be solved soon, and with it, big changes in society will happen.

“Perhaps when you get to be an old man -as am I- if you get to be an old man,”

I’m not all that young. I’m 54. Hopefully I have a few more years left in me.

“you will then have a better temperament, one more suited to addressing your own sentiments about what is moral, and what is not.”

I know what _MY_ sentiments are .We haven’t been talking about MY morality. We were talking about big picture question and the fact that morality is not a big picture effect. It’s just something that shows up in these reward maximizing machines (intelligent machines).

“My youth was far too wonderful, too wonderful for me not to feel an obligation to leave -as much- for those coming in the future.”

The reason I like to debate the sort of subjects as the on in this article is inexactly because I care very much what world I leave for my kids. There are two possible paths the coming AI will create. Either an elite minority will form and will use the technology to become dictators of the world and of the human race, or we will convert to a more strongly socialistic based society where we are wiling to share the the great wealth the technology will create for us across all humans. I hope for the second. I fear for the first. I feel 90% of the population has no cue what’s about to hit them and would like to help them get a clue. But I don’t yet see how to do that.

“The link below is to my latest painting. It is 24×36 on the canvas, and 28×40 including the frame. I have put it up for sale with a price of $45,000 I mention that, so you don’t think I am advertising it here. LoL!
I just learned the name of the man in the painting. I do not know the name of the two Chocolate Poodles.
I did not paint this painting for the man, nor for anyone in particular. I painted this painting -for the future.
http://www.maineartists.us/MaineCities-Towns/Limestone.MaineArtists.US/Artists/DonRobertson/two-dogs-normal.JPG
My very best to you and Khannea-
Don Robertson”

Nice.

I’m an Artist-Blacksmith these days. Pictures of my stuff can be found following the links here: http://ayrhillforge.com/

Looks like it’s time to get back into AI and Robotics however so that might be my near future.

This is correct, and now we are getting at the issue here.

Yes, humanity is ending. It is over, statistically guaranteed this century. Yes I agree, and have actually always agreed. Humanity is mostly stupid apes.

Now are there solutions?

1. get off this damn ball of dirt and spread the species as to hedge our bets. As quickly as possible.

2. turn the special neurology in something both smarter as well as more compassionate as quickly as possible.

3. create so much abundance everyone can have her cake and cause as minimum trouble as humanly possible for as long as possible. Or (what the SIAI favors)

4. Create a SantaLarity – i.e. a rock solid samaritan AI, and let it decide. Good luck with that.

Is there much other than that? No we do not have guarantees, other than create a global tyranny. (Which is more or less precisely what seems to be happening this very moment in history, actually. )

But hey sorry but that may be just how it is. But don’t worry, *you* already had most your life and you got a better deal than kings in the last century and before.

It is what it is.