Written by Sig Silber
An article in The Guardian raises existential questions for human kind. This article discusses the studies of Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Harai is the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, wherein he envisions a future where the only surviving humans are “a class of eternally useless human beings“.
I think the end point is the machines decide to get rid of excess filthy people. A few may be kept for pets. I can’t imagine machines wanting to go around with little shovels and baggies to clean up after billions of humans.
Those working on AI should sneak in some code that creates empathy for humans and hope the machines are unable to find that virus.
Good luck with that.
My guess is that we are at about the 20% point now. You can track it via the labor participation rate. Minimum wage laws are certainly a good way to speed up the process. They are kind of like “Machine Full Employment Protection Acts” and should be properly titled. That is the law in New Mexico. The title of a proposed statute should reflect the content of the statute. So if one is taking steps to favor machines, the title of the proposed legislation should reflect that.
But I assume the machines will soon have lobbyists perhaps even human lobbyists. It seems that 2,000 page pieces of legislation are about the max that humans can handle. I see no reason why machines would have problems with say giga-page (electronic) laws. What is the limit? Pick something from the table below from Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, and all that (Margaret Rouse, Tech Target).
At first the humans would utilize machines to process these large proposed laws…abandoning the notion that you have to pass them to know what is in them.
So one can imagine an exciting period of time where people use machines to control (enslave) machines. Will that strategy work? I doubt it. In addition to human error there can be turncoats.
A good question is time frame. Is twenty years enough to obsolete humans? Many things take longer than expected. Some take less time.
If Moore’s Law continues to hold meaning, humans should party now while they can..and they are partying.
There are some Moore’s Law Deniers They are likely to be soon rounded up.
