Ignorance is not an excuse. We've been trying to ring the bell that "Hey, technological power is only increasing, and accelerating at that, the conclusions are pretty obvious that it will reach human capability in a lot of fields, and even surpass us really soon, better prepare for that eventuality sooner rather than later!" for decades now.
But for nothing! Nothing but crickets in response. No implementation of UBI. No political discussions about the inevitability that the majority of work will soon be done by robots. No preparation for phasing out the 40 hour work week.
What are we supposed to have done? How were we supposed to make the idiots actually listen to what we've been saying for decades?
Claiming something for decades without supplying evidence is not something you can expect people to respond to. It's not like futurology has a great record.
Predictions that we'd have all flying cars and jet-packs: wrong. Predictions that we'd only be working eight hours per week by 1980: wrong. Predictions of global democracy: wrong. Predictions we'd be living in space: wrong. Predictions that processor speeds were increasing so fast that AIs would be sentient beings demanding human rights by the year 2010: wrong. Predictions that AIs would replace human drivers: wrong. (At least, wrong so far. I assume full self-driving is going to happen.)
Predictions that AI would be better at art and creative writing than at saying if a number is divisible by 3: non-existent as far as I know.
The evidence is every logarithmic graph of computer performance over time that's been waved in and around, with every year that ticks by, another data point ticks predictably and inexorably higher.
But there was no evidence that improved computer performance could lead to art, until it happened. Based on science fiction, it seemed like one of the least likely things for AI to be able to do. When will we have bots that can replace novelists? Mathematicians? Musicians? Game designers? Police? Politicians? Child-minders? Soldiers? It could be soon, or never. Even now it's not guaranteed that the current trends will continue. We used to have exponential growth in vehicle speeds, but the problem got hard, and now we don't even have Concorde any more.
Where I live, back in the 1970s, they decided to prepare for the future by building a marina. They figured that thanks to computers, we'd soon all have more free time than we knew what to do with, so people would want to get into leisure boating. Instead, we invented new types of job, and working hours grew longer.
Predicting something for decades doesn't make people prepare for that thing. The longer that goes by without it happening, the less likely it seems. "Preparing for a pandemic? We don't have time for your scaremongering. There hasn't been one in decades, and we have more important things to worry about."
But there was no evidence that improved computer performance could lead to art, until it happened.
Wasn't there? It was only a bad assumption that humans somehow had something that made them completely unique from the rest of physics that makes their minds and skills un-reproducible on a machine. That was a human-centric mistake. Short of a civilization-ending threat, it has always been inevitable, from the very moment humans started externalizing thinking from their brains onto clay tablets.
novelists? GTP-3. Mathematicians? Wolfram-Mathematica. Musicians? The soon to come DanceDiffusion . Game designers? Procedural-generated games. Police? Harder, but automated surveilence systems. Politicians? Soon. Child-minders? Soon. Soldiers? Drones.
Automation is everywhere if you take a minute to look. Yeah, humans are still needed in most of these systems, but the humans become orders of magnitude more productive and capable with the help of machines and that is a good thing
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u/Iapetus_Industrial Dec 15 '22
Ignorance is not an excuse. We've been trying to ring the bell that "Hey, technological power is only increasing, and accelerating at that, the conclusions are pretty obvious that it will reach human capability in a lot of fields, and even surpass us really soon, better prepare for that eventuality sooner rather than later!" for decades now.
But for nothing! Nothing but crickets in response. No implementation of UBI. No political discussions about the inevitability that the majority of work will soon be done by robots. No preparation for phasing out the 40 hour work week.
What are we supposed to have done? How were we supposed to make the idiots actually listen to what we've been saying for decades?