From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Dec 12 1999 - 12:30:07 MST
GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
>
> I thought it was brilliant: You got in all of the elements we've identified
> so far that seem set to remake the world next century and made it just
> inviting enough to not frighten folks. I do disagree with your "no-work"
> projection: Any AI that can truly replace a human will BE a human for all
> intents and purposes and won't work for free. Overall, though, I think we
> should be proud that such a piece will get such wide distribution in Oz.
This objection strikes me as a tad anthropomorphic. Humans are evolved
organisms, meaning that we have (a) selfishness and (b) all sorts of
social instincts against being exploited by other selfish evolved
organisms; we don't work for free because the suckers got bred out of
the gene pool. (Even that doesn't cover the full truth; evolved
organisms still donate to charity, and some evolved organisms who become
rich enough to retire go into altruism full-time... neither of these
being conditions that prevent contributions to the gene pool.)
Why shouldn't an AI work for free? At most, AIs might generate their
own motives and their own ethical code, in which case they'd demand some
kind of quid pro quo for their time - more raw material to build
processors, say, or the assistance of human genius in building a
superintelligence. But even so, there's no reason why they shouldn't
work 24,000 subjective hours a day to put the rest of humanity into a
retirement home. I would imagine that the vast majority of jobs could
be compiled into unselfaware subroutines, calling upon the higher AI for
a few seconds once an hour. An AI has an unlimited supply of mental
energy, needing neither rest nor rejuvenation; it has no particular
reason to demand a fair trade. If all an AI needs is one hour of human
time, or a gram of material resource, there's no reason why it shouldn't
trade a million hours of AI time for an hour or a gram. How many people
could retire on a millionfold improvement in productivity?
Of course, any AI smart enough to replace a human, and particularly
human programmers, is smart enough - by definition - to rewrite its own
source code, and we all know what happens then.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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