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Neuropath / Re: Is a Neuropath future inevitable and/or unavoidable?
« on: August 04, 2017, 08:03:23 am »
Short-term profitability will decide this over any cultural resistance to the ideas. Just as we stand on the precipice of the death of meaning and purpose, so we witness, in our meager ways, the final days of human relevance to the only system that still matters (perpetual economic growth). Once algorithms and machines cross the point of no return in terms of outperforming humanity at sufficient tasks, our humanist ideologies will crash beneath their monetary weight. AI with their core code set to the accumulation of wealth and dominance of their market will make the vast majority of purchases (from a GDP perspective if not by number of individual transactions), largely removing even the need for human customers.
(Side note: that would make a nice story idea, a futuristic Earth where a handful of extremely powerful economic algorithms/AI viciously attempt to outcompete each other, a never-ending game of ruthless seven-dimensional economic chess, with products produced at ever-increasing scale, bartered back and forth, with no humans left who actually need or desire them. One AI corners the market on disposing of all the useless junk, gradually achieves total monopoly over all industries, wins the war. Begins attempting to eliminate itself as a competitor.)
The free world has shown repeatedly that economic reward will trump humanist notions most of the time. This is aided by relative reaction speed difference, as governmental and social institutions are much slower to reach consensus/make decisions than purely economically driven ones. Thus will all humanist institutions and reservations eventually fail, if only because all those holding them are far easier to starve out than those playing along.
(Side note: that would make a nice story idea, a futuristic Earth where a handful of extremely powerful economic algorithms/AI viciously attempt to outcompete each other, a never-ending game of ruthless seven-dimensional economic chess, with products produced at ever-increasing scale, bartered back and forth, with no humans left who actually need or desire them. One AI corners the market on disposing of all the useless junk, gradually achieves total monopoly over all industries, wins the war. Begins attempting to eliminate itself as a competitor.)
The free world has shown repeatedly that economic reward will trump humanist notions most of the time. This is aided by relative reaction speed difference, as governmental and social institutions are much slower to reach consensus/make decisions than purely economically driven ones. Thus will all humanist institutions and reservations eventually fail, if only because all those holding them are far easier to starve out than those playing along.