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The Human Reservation Plan
Bill doesn't want to be left behind by Zuckerberg so he decided to share his own thoughts on AI. Different from his previous shared ideas about how great it was. Now there is a bit more doom and gloom. Crime. Unemployment. Healthcare. Horrible things. What the world needs is a plan. Guess who has a plan ... It's the pope, and Bill and "the government".
Set aside some jobs for humans.
A human reservation. For the human to human interactions. So you don't get the bad news from the machine. That it's the machine that tells one human to tell another human the bad news is apparently softening the blow of the bad news.
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/08/13/2028222
Gates Warns Society Faces An AI-Pocalypse Unless We Get More Socialist
Bill Gates thinks that experts underestimate the potential havoc AI will wreak on society and says preparations to ease the transition are inadequate.
The Microsoft founder and former CEO is usually a cheerful proponent of AI tech, talking up its potential to transform healthcare, education, and business productivity.
Yet in a missive posted to his personal website, the billionaire philanthropist says the AI era is likely to be one of the most turbulent times in human history, and how we allow it to play out will determine whether the world becomes a fairer place or if the divide between rich and poor becomes greater than ever.
This kind of talk will sound dangerously close to socialism for many Americans. There are always winners and losers in a market-led economy, so why should things be any different with AI? Those wealthy enough to invest in it and control it will prosper, as others will find themselves on skid row.
But, Gates says, this time it will be different. Previous technology transitions happened over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required, whereas AI is starting to replace human cognition. The winners are likely to be a small group of people, and the losers will be everyone else.
It will not affect just one or two sectors, according to the AI fab club: AI will replace human roles in fields as diverse as law, customer services, medicine, software, and manufacturing. And it will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade or less, rather than taking a few generations.
Gates wrote:
When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
There will be some new jobs created, Gates says, but without the right policies in place there will be far fewer than today, and entry-level jobs are among those most likely to vanish (as we're already seeing in the tech industry).
Blue-collar jobs will also be affected, as AI-powered robots are advancing faster than people realize - much of the progress is happening in China. These may begin to compete with people on some physical tasks, such as in the construction and hospitality industries, within a few years.
Gates says there are several big risks from AI adoption, foremost of which is that many work roles are set to disappear forever. He notes that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the US hit 25 percent and remained in double digits for much of that decade, but ultimately recovered as demand, investment, and growth returned. He fails to mention, however, that it took a global war for that to happen.
The biggest shift comes when AI operates error-free operation, without humans prepping its work or checking its output. Gates says we need to think now about reducing job losses, or risk much of society ending up unemployed.
Another danger, Gates says, is that AI empowers people to do harm: AI-driven malware already lets low-skilled attackers launch cyberattacks, while generative AI makes fraud, disinformation, and deepfakes easier to produce.
The third big threat is that AI systems could stunt the mental development of children, and crowd out human relationships.
So how is society meant to avoid this apocalyptic vision and ensure AI becomes the force for good that Microsoft's progenitor believes it to be?
Gates says AI needs both a domestic and international framework. Nationally, that means bodies that can set priorities across government agencies to ensure every risk is accounted for. Yet even a nation with its own house in order remains exposed to cross-border risks, so an international body must be built in parallel.
If that sounds like wishful thinking, get in the queue. Gates notes it would require US-China cooperation, and under the current Washington administration, that's about as likely as pigs flying..
Beyond that, some jobs - social care for instance - should stay human. Gates also thinks the tax system will need rebalancing, as more people out of work means less income tax to fund government itself.
A starting point, he suggests, is taxing AI tokens and robots to reduce corporations' incentives to swap meatbags for machines. This could fund retraining and a stronger safety net, but would need careful targeting so it doesn't hinder beneficial uses of AI, like drug discovery and better education
Again, critics will likely dismiss this as socialism and point out that Microsoft was ruthless in pursuing profits under Gates' leadership.
In a final message to world leaders, Gates urges them to act now, "before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded."
This marks a shift for the Microsoft founder, who two years ago told people not to worry about AI, in particular energy use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, arguing AI would eventually solve the problems it creates.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @04:41PM (4 children)
I don't know - I feel like his writing is far from top tier (are we going to have sex?...) but most of the concepts are up there.
The "Australia Project" is presented very open-ended with exceptionally weak development of the end-game concepts. The timeframe of the original story was too short (they noted that it originally rolled out Manna 1.0 in 2010, a date he retracted in 2012 to leave it open ended. It looks to me like we're more on-track for a 2030 rollout instead.) Likewise, 40 years from Manna 1.0 through Altered Carbon style brain interfaces still seems a bit quick to me, but the whole Kurzweilian Singularity premise is that acceleration is accelerating exponentially, and I have certainly seen examples of those kinds of transitions in my lifetime.
Now, leaving the end-game concepts weakly developed is the classic "write your own ending" writers' device, and I see the prospect of being able to choose to live in a 1700s Jamestown reproduction with flawless medical care and the other problems solved, and then to vacation in zero-g orbital playgrounds when desired to have some obvious appeals and certainly be no more of an oppresive dystopia than actual 2026 life on Earth anywhere I know about. Having a "bad behavior immobilizer" price of entry certainly cuts down on the problems of police brutality, as long as the fascists don't get control of everyone's off-switches.
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(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @09:19PM (3 children)
Sure, I agree about the writing, the guy is no J.R.R Tolkien, and as you say there are inconsistencies in the realisticness but the story is readable and he gets his point across.
Actually my problem is not so much with the storytelling than with the concepts, I see so many holes in it that I don't know where to begin nor how to not end up writing a huge critique of the whole thing, but I'll try to keep it short.
*** WARNING: SPOILER ALERT BELOW ***
1. The whole "Manna" thing managing people with headsets. Sure I can believe that, I've already seen employees walking around supermarkets with headsets when stacking shelves, etc... no doubt they are being told to do stuff by a controller somewhere, most likely a human one for the moment, but LLMs are advancing enough that I can imagine them taking over to manage a store from a human.
But to jump from that to a neo-feudal society with a thin sliver of aristocracy at the top and the majority of the rest of the population being unemployed and imprisoned in big brown hovels guarded by robots is just unrealistic.
For one it completely ignores human nature, every single time in history that the wealth gap got too big, that society would collapse into fighting. From the Luddites to the Socialist/Bolshevik/other revolutions, there is no example in history where the majority of people quietly went into their imprisonment.
Even the Romans knew not to push the masses to that level because people who are desperately poor have nothing to lose, but everything to gain by overthrowing the current order.
To think that USA, a country pretty much founded on "freedom" and who to this day have more firearms per capita than anywhere else in the world will quietly be herded into what are effectively prison cells without even attempting to fight and destroy such a system is just not believable to me.
Secondly it actually ignores the market economy -- If the majority of the population is imprisoned in these hovels and given basic meals and an existence, who is going to buy all the products the robots make? Who will frequent all the manna-robot restaurants, supermarkets, and all the other services? The economy would cease to function because the vast majority of potential customers are not in the economy. Sure you can service the rich, but they are too few in number to support such a system indefinitely.
Thirdly the idea that humans would be unemployed by robots ignores that if so many humans are unemployed, they will become cheaper than robots, so there will always be jobs for them. Those humans are a resource, having them sitting idle and captive is a loss, the story even hints at that by pointing out the robots are happy for the humans to go to Australia as they would no longer be a burden to the system. We still this even now in the early days of AI -- everyone was talking how "AI will replace workers" until the actual cost of tokens started to bite, suddenly its cheaper to keep your workers than pay for the AI, markets tend to find balance between extremes.
Back to the story: So the humans sitting in these brown prisons are actually a drain on the economy, putting them to work, even for lower wages than robots would make sense because (a) it will give them something to do, (b) it will keep the economy functioning even if you to top them up with welfare payments and (c) they will actually contribute to the economy along with the robots.
I will also point out that "it will give them something to do" is critically important, having more than 50% of the population imprisoned, desperate to get out of the hell they are in and resenting those who put them in this predicament is not wise.
Because those elites, who are (like all aristocratic human groups) fighting amongst themselves for more power and wealth will be looking for any way to outwit their opponents and grab even more power. Based on the story it seems the societal structure is essentially of an aristocratic oligarchy with a "King" who presumably is placed there by the will of the strongest grouping of oligarchs (the democratic elections being a facade) .
That means oligarchs are always on the look out for extra power, sure they probably have their own robot armies as security, but they would all be roughly evenly matched. If I were an oligarch in such a world and I wanted to make a bid for taking over, I'd need a larger army than the rest -- and as luck would have it there is more than half the countries population imprisoned: hundreds of millions of destitute people, desperate to get out of the hell they are in and angry at those who put them there.
All I would need to do is promise them freedom, get them to sign up to join me, provide arms and training and I'd have an army large enough to take a swing at the "king". Win or lose, that society would not survive the conflict that ensued.
To cut a long story short, the neo-feudal society envisioned in the story I feel has little chance of reaching the end state that was described without collapsing, but even if by some miracle they manage to herd most of the USA population (we are talking hundreds of millions of people here) into prisons, I doubt the society will stay in that steady state very long, possibly not even a single generation. One ambitious oligarch (or a peoples resistance organisation) with a source of weapons would make a pigs breakfast of the whole thing in short order.
(I did not even get into the whole black market economy and parallel societal structures, which would also happen long before the mass imprisonment)
---- [ Continued on next post in a few minutes, despite my shortening attempts I still hit comment limit] ----
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @09:28PM
Which brings me to the Australia project, on paper it sounds like a utopia, everything is free, you can have and do whatever you want. bliss and pleasure and joy forever...
However to be in this utopia you have to agree to a set of terms, including:
1. completely foregoing any kind of privacy and anonymity
2. Having a robot inserted between your brain and your body
Now this robot can record everything from your eyes/ears/sensory organs, and it can also take control of your body. It can disconnect your retinas from your brain and inject images instead, it can disconnect your ears and inject sound into your brain. It can speak on your behalf using your voice, and move your body. It is effectively your own personal spy and policeman in one, built into your body, that can never be turned off, and can disconnect you and take over your body if the system decides needs must.
That to me is terrifying, it is possible for you to be a prisoner in your own body. How can you even know if the other person you are talking to is really that person, or if their body has been taken over via the spinal robot?
I mean the two girls who came to the brown hovel to talk about the Australia project, their brains may have been disconnected and the robot was doing all the talking, trying to convince more people to have spinal-robots inserted and their bodies taken control of. Perhaps the whole story of the guys father buying shares in the company to give his son and partner an "escape route" from their current predicament may even be a lie in itself they tell everyone. Just because the Australia project bills itself as some glorious human emancipation society doesn't mean it is true. Once the spinal robot is inserted you can never be 100% sure that you are talking to the original person the body belonged to.
Then the whole "network vulnerability" of the system is glossed over in the story with "magic technology and referees", like somehow they have made the perfect bug-free software system that can never be hacked and your body taken control of unwillingly.
And of course the idea that some nefarious person/group would not abuse this excellent opportunity to turn 2+ billion people into human robots that would obey their every whim is not even mentioned, as if the human condition has vanished completely (a large oversight if you consider that in the story the Neo-feudal USA is full just those kind of people "at the top", so they are obviously out there).
So to me the Australia project is a far worse prison than the brown cubes. As I mentioned earlier, in such a dismal state as the brown cube world there is always hope for resistance, for people to organise to overthrow the oppressors, either by themselves or with sympathetic (if self serving) oligarchs. They still own and control their own bodies and they can trust their senses are not lying to them.
The Australia project however makes that impossible. Because of the spinal robot, people no longer own their own bodies. It is impossible for people to ever get together to discuss things, to complain about the system, or consider overthrowing it or just trying to reform the system because they have objections. Everything is recorded, everything is logged, and if you violate the rules they can disconnect your brain from your body.
On the flip side, the robot controls your vision and sensory organs. When you wake up and you "see" what is in front of you, how do you know you are really seeing it and the robot is not projecting images directly to your brain? How do you know the people you are talking to are really there? You end up not being able to trust any of your senses. Dissent, let alone revolution, becomes impossible. It is like some horrific mix of the Matrix and 1984, but on another level. I think I'd go stark-raving mad if I was put in such a position.
I noticed that they don't mention the spinal-robot when they got the characters to sign up to their terms, you only find that out after they have shipped you to Australia , you've done the induction and now you are near the end-stages when they release you into the system. It is never mentioned what might happen if you refuse the spinal robot, the general gist of it is that you have no say about your body or what they do to it at this point.
I wonder how many people would have agreed to their terms if the first thing they mentioned was the spinal robot.
I can also make a point about the laws of physics making "free" energy impossible, nothing is free - even the wind turbines have a cost, by extracting energy from the wind they change the local climate, and they are not energy dense, having enough of them to support such an advanced technological society just seems like wishful thinking.
Which is another point, both of these societies are extremely complex and energy hungry, which makes them extremely fragile. I haven't even gone into the fact that in the story there are apparently only two countries on earth, the USA and Australia, it is as if the rest of the world does not exist, and people can't leave the oppressive brown cubes to live elsewhere. Likewise there is no war or geopolitics, no happy middle between these two extremes presented.
I mean I can suspend belief for a good fantasy story, but this story has too many holes for me to suspend belief, especially as its not supposed to be a fantasy as much as a warning about a real future world.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30, @03:54AM
>But to jump from that to a neo-feudal society with a thin sliver of aristocracy at the top and the majority of the rest of the population being unemployed and imprisoned in big brown hovels guarded by robots is just unrealistic.
Is it? I thought he traced that development rather thoroughly: information sharing between employers, you're either compliant and above average nose-to-the-grindstone or you're unemployed - everywhere. The hovels were for the unemployed, who became the vast majority of the population after the physical robots started making and maintaining themselves...
Given the under-employment of Gen-whatever they call its graduated after 2000, even without significant new robot replacement, the whole self-sustaining robot aspect is the real lynchpin that pivots us from our current boiled frogs state into a full blown human reservation. Back in the 1970s it was Richard Pryor commenting on Logan's Run "they ain't got no black people in their future, they're not gonna have any black people - that's the plan." This go around 50 years later, it's really the poor people, black was just a shorthand for poor 50 years ago, it's really the poor who you don't see in Star Trek visions of the future.
> every single time in history that the wealth gap got too big, that society would collapse into fighting.
Technology - not just Death Stars, but all forms of "government" (read: wealthy) controlled technological terror keeps the rabble in-line, coupled with all kinds of modern opiates for the masses, including the internet "venting chamber" where otherwise subversive radicals can go to blow off steam (and finger themselves for "intervention") instead of actually going on revolutionary violence sprees against their oppressors.
> USA, a country pretty much founded on "freedom" and who to this day have more firearms per capita than anywhere else in the world will quietly be herded into what are effectively prison cells without even attempting to fight and destroy such a system is just not believable to me.
Ever see a SWAT raid? An ICE arrest? Citizen wielded AR-15s are no match for a coordinated police response. How big do you think a citizen militia can get without government blessing? Waco was less than 100 counting women and children.
>there is no example in history where the majority of people quietly went into their imprisonment.
6 million Jews shipped off to concentration camps comes to mind - Germany only had 500,000 Jews before the war started - they "acquired" 3.3 million more when they took over Poland. Sure seems like they swept up the majority under their sphere of influence.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30, @04:20AM
> If the majority of the population is imprisoned in these hovels and given basic meals and an existence, who is going to buy all the products the robots make?
The ultra wealthy are gonna have some super-cool yachts, island complexes, space ships, etc.
Just the other day I sat down and asked an LLM about creation of a new framework like Qt, the LLM told me it would take 35 developer years of effort, etc. etc. etc. then proceeded to deliver the first 80% of the job that afternoon. That's just an informational thought experiment example, not using "real" resources like refined metals, fibers, fuels, etc. The ultra wealthy can keep their robot fleets occupied making buildings, vehicles, realistic sex slaves - of course when pesky "world opinion" isn't annoyingly weighing in anymore real sex slavery will be more openly practiced in "private places."
Nobody has to buy products to "make money" - money isn't real, resources are real. Once the economy is imploded, it will all be about resource control, who owns what and what they're willing to trade it for. If the Oligarchs can avoid too much open warfare on each other, once they've got self-servicing self-replicating obedient robot armies they won't need the poor anymore - they'll have the robots to do what the poor used to do for them.
> the manna-robot restaurants, supermarkets, and all the other services?
Those services become un-necessary when the population is all retired into end of life care institutions, at age birth. My mother and uncle checked into one of those not far from here last year, as they turned 77 and 79. It's a nice place, and they're free to leave anytime they like, but it's not a big stretch to picture campuses like theirs where people aren't allowed out, and in practice the majority of residents don't often leave due to health issues associated with age. The campus provides housing, recreation, food - mostly food, the whole damn place revolves around food actually - when you buy in you pre-pay for your meals in-perpetuity. It's not bad food, actually really fancy stuff every night if that's what you want. And it's not a stretch at all to picture robots providing the necessary services instead of University students working for tuition vouchers.
> if so many humans are unemployed, they will become cheaper than robots
That is an interesting question: it's not about money, it's about resources. Are horses cheaper than cars? Not even a question of capabilities, horses just use more resources than cars, so we have a lot of cars and very few horses these days.
> the humans sitting in these brown prisons are actually a drain on the economy
That's the 'murican way. Put 'em in prison, pay $100K+ per year to keep 'em locked up. We can afford it.
> putting them to work, even for lower wages than robots would make sense
This is the US we're talking about - saying something makes sense is a good argument for why it's unlikely to happen.
> the actual cost of tokens started to bite
I suspect tokens are going to follow the price-curve of a byte of RAM from 1965 through 2024...
> having more than 50% of the population imprisoned, desperate to get out of the hell they are in
The story is pretty solid about this, the brown boxes aren't unheated concentration camp barracks with inadequate food and brutal forced labor. They boil the frogs, not making them too uncomfortable, otherwise they will try to jump out of the pot. Kind of implied in the story is that eventually, when they've rounded up all the poor they want to round up, when the people outside have sufficiently cut ties with the people inside, there will likely come an "unfortunate incident" day when the resources expended on keeping the camp inhabitants happy and docile can be re-purposed...
To be continued... maybe.
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