Artificial Intelligence and Social Consequences

[tusavisionSubscriber]

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

This is one short story about a hypothetical timeline where AI replaces management and thereby eliminates social mobility and entrenching the Bourgeoisie.

In all honesty: I think Marshall Brain has it all wrong. I’m pretty familiar with fast food economics. They are the cotton plantation of wage slavery. Raise minimum wage high enough, and there will be a cotton gin moment where we see another X% of the population looking at permanent unemployment cause their burger assembly skills will be obsolete.

Redbox is coming to a fast food joint near you. It’ll be advancements in food packaging which will fascilitate the process.

As burger patties become packaged like presliced cheese/individually packaged snacks, the machines will be developed to build a burger from a magazine fed conveyor.

Human hands can feed bullets in to a bolt action rifle at maybe .3/second. A magazine feed can feed that same rifle at 3/second.

Now you have hopper fed french friers, magazine fed burger assembly machines, and beverage dispensers. You’ll have 1 employee staffing the drive up and one manager cleaning the store.

That’ll last until they go self-check out and you order from a computer like you navigate automatic telephone trees. The entire kitchen will be autonomous with maintenence crews on call.

The manager will be the last to go. Replaced by a customer complaint hotline on par with vending machines.

Machine shops still have managers, but you see fewer and fewer machinists. Management isn’t the low hanging fruit IMHO. It’s workers.

[elspruSubscriber]

Ya, there are already autonomous Ramen soup makers in Japan,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVOSlUn7e0

Though I’d have to agree that management really is the most up for replacement,

since it is the cognitive abilities in which compute excell beyond humans.

humans are still better at physically moving around their bodies, in complex environments.

However when it’s more abstract information,

such as statistics, schedules, mathematics, computers are superior.

Already things like telemarketing have computer-screens dictating what people say.

It is potentially one of the first areas that can become fully automated, and already has in some instances.

The stock market and financing also a cognitive task is now also largely automated,

since computers are far better at calculating trends in an impartial manner.

Cleaning may be one of the most difficult physial tasks,

as it requires a variety of heights, angles and motions.

so some of the last physical jobs to go might be toilet scrubbers.

Programmers and technicions will only be around

so long as robots can’t program and repair themselves,

which likely they will be able to do much better with higher precision.

That leaves homo-sapiens as sources of randomness,

points from which to derive insipration.

robots and nature can form symbiotic relationships,

as nature is a vast collection of liquid-robots,

many sources of inspiration for solid-robots.

solid-bodies are great at storing and making identical copies,

liquid-bodies are great at mixing, distilling and mutating information.

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