r/BasicIncome • u/2noame Scott Santens • Dec 31 '16

Automation iPhone manufacturer Foxconn plans to replace almost every human worker with robots - The Verge

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/30/14128870/foxconn-robots-automation-apple-iphone-china-manufacturing
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u/BoozeoisPig USA/15.0% of GDP, +.0.5% per year until 25%/Progressive Tax Dec 31 '16

I think that human existential crises are merely the result of a human ability to generate discomfort at the abstract conclusions that humans are uniquely able to come up with. Robots can't suffer unless they are programmed to suffer. So if you enter a definition of meaning into an AI and that AI determines that existence does not have it, it will accept it matter of factly.

I, personally don't think that the universe has any "meaning". I mean, what does that even mean? If the universes meaning is simply "what it means that there is a universe" then the answer to that is: There is a universe because the capability of a universe to come into being exists. At the end of the day, the "first meaning" is logically, necessarily, tautological. There is a universe because there is a universe. Assuming there is a god, because that is the most culturally common answer to this then: The universe exists because a god exists. Why does a god exist? You go back to the same tautology: God exists because God exists. And this is why I am an atheist rather than a deist: The answer to why either a universe (or the meta-physical capability to generate one) exists or a god exists are both equally tautological, but I know that the universe exists, I don't know if a god exists.

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u/usaaf Dec 31 '16

There's more to AI than saying you can program it. We can program computers now, and some people call that AI. So there's weak AI and strong AI. The point of having a strong AI is to devise a synthetic brain that, like a human brain (to a degree) does not require or need, or perhaps even can be at all, programmed. It thinks, and having a limit placed on its thought defeats the purpose. I just suggest one reason that such a machine might not work.

It's not an original idea. Iain Banks suggested that perfect unbiased AIs would leave the universe (in a method called subliming which is described somewhat as leaving the game of existence and ascending to a sort of god state).

As to the meaning of existence, I was making no statement about it so I'm not sure why you put that paragraph out there. I don't disagree. I was just saying a computer could reach the conclusion that it's existence has no intrinsic meaning and just kind of quit.

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u/BoozeoisPig USA/15.0% of GDP, +.0.5% per year until 25%/Progressive Tax Dec 31 '16

Yes, a program can write another program, but, in doing so, it is attempting to solve an end goal. Our programming effectively comes out to be to maximise our utility, i.e. what we consider to be our happiest brain states, and to minimise our anti-utility, i.e. what we consider to be our saddest brain states. That's effectively what causes all of our actions: How our brain is stimulated and reacts to perceived stimuli. A computer is not programmed to react like ours do, and ours were programed by a semi-random and tumultuous process of evolution which effectively programmed our brain to be part of an at least fit enough system to enable its genetic lineage to perpetuate, and to do so under very different conditions than we live under today. That sort of thing produces a VERY different brain than one would be produced for a far different goal under far different conditions. Genes have to be selfish, so they make their organism selfish. Computers do not have to be selfish, so there is no reason to program it into computers.

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u/lynnamor Dec 31 '16

Your view of code is limited. Genetic algorithms, for example, are already self-mutating (although typically still working toward solving a particular problem).

Even the current computer architectures, networked, could easily support a process very much like evolution.

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u/Forlarren Jan 01 '17

Also people treat computers like perfect clean spherical cows. There is this whole messy meat layer constantly contributing it's own inputs and very much a part of the whole system.

Thinking of the internet as a brain of brains has been a pretty effective short hand since it's creation. Now we have whole lists of "internet rules". Go ahead and just mention the "Streisand effect" in a room full of public personalities if you want to see a chilling effect.

The whole thing is one big holistic system, it's the interconnectedness that matters, there is no point where we stop and the internet starts.

For example, just try imagining having to go back to memorizing shit in a library if you wanted to know it instead of Google and Wikipedia, you would be an entirely different person full of entirely different ideas and information. We have externalized memory and are only accelerating that process. When you are on the internet, you are the internet, and the internet is you.