Category: Future

The danger of uploading one’s consciousness to a computer without a suicide switch

Let us begin by noticing that justice, as most people presently conceive it, permits or even requires that at least some crimes be punished as far after the fact as is now possible. … Radical life extension would so scramble and confound our normal notions of justice that there’s no telling how future Americans would react to the new reality.

Nuclear war could come tomorrow. Those of us who survive it might spend the rest of our days in misery. But that misery would be relatively short. Radical life extension via mind uploads would seem to risk inconceivably long, possibly endless misery. And this holds even if no future generation deliberately inflicts that misery.

Source: Immortal but Damned to Hell on Earth – The Atlantic

The Proto-Post Scarcity Economy

The thing that never sits quite right with post scarcity economics, though, at least the very little that I’ve read, is that it’s always sort of an all or nothing affair: you either don’t have enough of anything or you have enough of everything. Thinking of this as a mental exercise is kind of fun, I think, but in reality it seems to me that getting from point A — a scarcity economy — to point B — post scarcity — is going to be a long, complicated journey as some things become more abundant in some places, while other things are still scarce.

The key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when we decouple labor from reward.

The Federation has clearly taken the plunge to the other side of people’s fears about European socialist capitalism: yes, some people might not work. So What? Good for them. We think most still will.

It’s interesting to me because these are things we’re going to have to reckon with, I believe, in my lifetime. If robots do all the dirty work, and the US is hugely rich, does every single person really need a job? Are we going to let all of that money pile up in the 0.1% ruling elite, or can it be distributed to everyone? … What happens when the surplus is more than enough?

Source: The Economics of Star Trek – Medium

In this 2012 Making Sen$e report, “Man vs. Machine,” Paul Solman examines the future of the American worker.

Story One goes like this: “If you’re talking about 100 years from now, all jobs will be gone … including the creative ones.”

Story Two sounds like this: “The recovery of jobs is not all that bad … it’s moving in the right direction.”

what’s behind the trend toward greater wage inequality? The non-economist in me wants to think about institutions and social norms. Some of the increase in inequality has to stem from changing attitudes in our society. I just don’t believe that it’s only technology.

There is a real need for corporate leadership, and there is a need for accountability. When companies engage in productivity layoffs with record profitability, unprecedented levels of cash and all-time-high stock prices, no one in the media says, ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ No political leader speaks up to protest. We don’t hear anything from the labor unions. The companies are applauded for it because they’re cutting costs and improving profitability, and that’s supposedly what a company exists for. But it’s not that simple. They do have other responsibilities.

Source: Should We Fear ‘the End of Work’? | PBS NewsHour

Vernor Vinge is consistently one of the most interesting and conceptually dense futurists I’ve had an opportunity to listen to. While watching this excellent talk of his at Singularity University, my ears perked up at the mention of technological unemployment, the primary focus of this blog.

It’s not clear that the marketplace will actually compensate people who participate in these crowdsourcing/social networking/group mind schemes.

Source: Vernor Vinge on Technological Unemployment