"Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives."
-Scott Alexander, in
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
(Yes, I did just push this post twice in a day. It's really good, you should read it. :V)
More quotes!
"Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point."
"(there are some scenarios in which a few capitalists who own the robots may benefit here, but in either case the vast majority are out of luck)"
@Angle This is a bit trash. The capabilities of a human aren't determined by their IQ. Same goes for computers. Computers will never be working their way up the IQ "food chain" like this. Anyway, if you're interested in this kind of deal check out Manna by Marshall Brain, basically talks about what happens to humans if robots don't need them anymore.
@Diff I agree that IQ isn't a particularly good measure of human capability - but the point still stands. Once machines can do everything a person can do, only cheaper and better, there will be no reason to employ that person.
@Angle Yep. What ended up happening in Manna was that basically every human ended up in a highly efficient housing totally reliant on government handouts with no way to become self-reliant again. The ones that weren't there were trapped working insane hours for basically no pay without any human contact although if robots could take the jobs of humans then even those humans would be trapped jobless.
@Diff Haha yeah. Though honestly, I actually expect this to end with most of us just being slowly killed off while the fewer and fewer people who own the robots come to own more and more of the world. :/
@Angle Yep, unfortunately I doubt that you're too terribly far off there.
@er1n Yeah, didn't like the super drastic topic switch halfway though. Totally abandoned the world that was set up to go and find another.
"In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money – they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race entirely"