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posted by mrpg on Friday October 06 2017, @03:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-robot-you-slave dept.

Silicon Valley celebrates artificial intelligence and robotics as fields that have the power to improve people's lives, through inventions like driverless cars and robot carers for the elderly.

That message isn't getting through to the rest of the country, where more than 70% of Americans express wariness or concern about a world where machines perform many of the tasks done by humans, according to Pew Research.

The findings have wide-reaching implications for technology companies working in these fields and indicates the need for greater public hand-holding.

"Ordinary Americans are very wary and concerned about the growing trend in automation and place a lot of value in human decision-making," said Aaron Smith, the author of the research, which surveyed more than 4,000 US adults. "They are not incredibly excited about machines taking over those responsibilities."

Once robots are perfected the 99% can be eliminated so they stop bumming the 1% out.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @04:45AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @04:45AM (#577814)
    • It used to be shameful to produce pregnancy outside of the confines of a well-defined, official social structure (e.g., family).

      Indeed, because people had to pay for themselves (e.g., look to friends and family) instead of the State to pay the costs of producing new human beings, they took reproduction much more seriously.

      Now, not only is the shame of reproduction in a poor social structure gone, but the State ultimately promotes such things through welfare programs that have been warped to the point of virtually subsidizing poor, broken households stuffed with children.

    • Yet, there's no need to kill everybody off to undo the imbalance; attrition will do.

      However, attrition requires re-shaping the incentives back to what they used to be: Taking pride in personal responsibility, and finding subsidy (usually from friends/family) in building proper social structures.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Friday October 06 2017, @08:14AM (3 children)

    by shrewdsheep (5215) on Friday October 06 2017, @08:14AM (#577881)

    How do you reconcile your argument with the steady reduction in fertility rate across the world?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday October 06 2017, @09:03AM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday October 06 2017, @09:03AM (#577896) Journal

      Not across the world. Only in those countries where there's a good social system. Which actually strengthens your point.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @09:26AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @09:26AM (#577903)

        ... but where there has been strong property rights and capitalism on which the parasite known as government has been able to grow in correlation—it is not the case that a well nourished parasite is the cause of its host's improvement.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @09:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @09:23AM (#577902)

      It was a prophecy.

  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday October 06 2017, @06:30PM (1 child)

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Friday October 06 2017, @06:30PM (#578207)

    Indeed, because people had to pay for themselves (e.g., look to friends and family) instead of the State to pay the costs of producing new human beings, they took reproduction much more seriously.
    Now, not only is the shame of reproduction in a poor social structure gone, but the State ultimately promotes such things through welfare programs that have been warped to the point of virtually subsidizing poor, broken households stuffed with children.

    It sounds like you are trying to rewrite history to support a political agenda here. The history of western civilization and pretty much every other is filled with the squalor and fecundity of the poor. People in general bred as fast as they could for any and all of a number of reasons. They were encouraged by their leaders, they had no access to any sort of birth control (other than infanticide or crude abortions), high child mortality rates caused fear that children would not live to maturity so they upped the odds by having more, and a number of other reasons, including the fact that we are animals and that is what animals do. There were plenty of broken households, probably plenty of others that would have been better off had they been broken, and a whole lot of poor.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @08:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @08:57PM (#578332)

      People produced many children, but that was a family affair.

      Indeed, that's the whole point: People took responsibility for reproduction; they had practical reasons for producing people, and they took responsibility for rearing them, so there wasn't an issue with trying to figure out what to do with people.

      You're also confusing a very short period of western civilization, industrialization, for all of human history; the massive and swift paradigm shift towards mechanized urbanization did indeed lead to a lot of societal dysfunction, but it's nowhere near the familial dysfunction that we see today, as caused by welfare programs that have subsidized the creation of a huge number of people for no other reason than a lack of personal responsibility (e.g., they weren't created for reasons of infant mortality, or labor on the family farm, or military duty, etc.).

      Why are people surprised to find that huge swaths of the population can just be wiped out of existence without anyone noticing? There is an oversupply of people, because the production of people has been completely decoupled from any practical demand for them.