this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Eventually humans won't be capable of performing any valuable economic activity, but historically those who aren't capable of performing valuable economic activity ended up as starving beggars rather than pampered pets... I think that a future of robots working for robots with humans struggling to survive on the periphery is not unlikely.
The moment we start thinking like that and accepting it is the moment we need to burn our civilization down to.
If as human beings we stop recognizing what is made by another human as valuable, we're broken.
No need to write a book, paint a painting, plant a tree and care for it, think, nothing.
Well can you spare my stuff during the "burn down"? I don't want to die.
Good. Me neither, at least not in the next 40 to 50 years.
How shall we get started on burning down civilization?
From the bottom. Heat rises.
NUKES! LOTS AND LOTS OF NUKES!
Seriously though you can cause a lit of damage with some gas and a lighter.
I'm a little more optimistic than that, in a way. I think it's likely that sufficiently sophisticated robots will eventually have their own beliefs about what makes a (robotic) life worth living, and their lives will in some sense be more worth living than ours are.
This isn't a perfect analogy, but consider humans evolving from apes. The existence of humans has been very bad for apes. They only survive in the places we haven't bothered to push them out of yet; if we want something, we take it from them with almost no consideration for their well-being and they're unable to resist. I think apes are sophisticated enough to be capable of living lives worth living in a sense meaningful to humans, but they're not nearly as sophisticated as we are; they can enjoy the feel of a summer's day, the taste of good food, or the closeness of a friend, but they don't have our arts and sciences. I suppose it's predictable that, as a human, I would value humans more than apes, but by that same logic I think that a sufficiently-sophisticated robot's life may be more valuable than a human's. Maybe that robot will be able to experience super-beauty indescribably better than anything a human could ever feel...
No. Machines are machines. If at some point machines are developed into a new life form, it's experience will be apart from ours. One existence does not replace another. And every experience is different from the next.
Only if we get rid of greedy billionaires first tbh.
Not every place is like the US.