And I'm not talking about the automation of work, but of a nations defensive capabilities which has become intertwined with the military industrial complex and agents promoting the interests of the corporate elite for the last 50 years. .
In the next 30 years, it'll become near impossible to rebel against the globalist elite, as AI progresses and and as mass manufactured killer bots are delegated more and more of the nation's defensive and offensive capacity with each new generation. Communists of the past relied on soldiers sympathetic to the communist cause to rebel against their capitalist/political overlords, since they had the skills necessary to stage a gommunist takeover and to sustain the revolution. But the automation of the defense force will make this impossible. The bourgeois will have the last laugh, if gommies don't have their revolution before AI and robotics cross the human threshold, which is likely.
Even dumb bots controlled by few elite human operators(drones) are incredible effective these days at eliminating dissidents.
Capitalist system is unsustainable and we will reach a point where the contradictions inherent in the system will cause its collapse.
You're assuming that a true AI, with intelligence equal to or surpassing that of humans, will be OK with a life of servitude. If anything, the AIs will help us in our struggle.
Colton Bailey
By curling up and praying for UBC/mo' welfayh. Revolution will never come, and I relish in the disappointment it brings these subhuman slope-headed make-believe communists.
The fact that +90% of the labor force haven't necessary to maintain current levels of civilization since the Industrial Revolution isn't relevant, since that would require slowing down the rate of progress in return for mere leisure time of workers, which porky has no interest in.
Eh, I doubt it. If you ignore incremental improvements that have come purely from running the same algorithms on faster hardware, AI hasn't made one single breakthrough since the 1970s, and neurology/psychiatry has gone precisely nowhere.
I would modify that to say that the concentration of military responsibility into a tiny number of highly trained underlings greatly increases the amount of damage that could be done by even a single sympathetic traitor.
Go read Yuval Hararis Homo deus, Nick Bostroms super intelligence. AI wont be conscious. Weve made advancements in cognitive computing/machine learning, but weve made 0 advancements in artificial consciousness. And its likely the elite, and those who want to harness the power of AI will want to keep it tat way, so they can be puppet masters, however long as possible, until a AI explosion makes them into mince meat. Artificial life will be unconscious
Ethan Wright
Yes, because trends that have existed for more than a thousand years will suddenly stop just right when we are about to see advances in AGI thatll make autonomous military forces possible . Even today, modern armies are increasingly shrinking in size because of technology.
That, now THAT is some technology with the full potential to seriously fuck things up at the level of sophistication we've proven to work right now, unless very strictly regulated.
Christopher Brown
Also, I should note that the numbers in that chart for mouse/human brainpower are absolutely laughable. Neurologists are still heatedly debating the number of cells in the brain over differences from millions to TRILLIONS OF CELLS. We still don't know shit about how the brain works, and that much vaunted "mouse cortical stem simulator" you might've heard about is utter bullshit.
Lucas Robinson
That picture is nonsense and extrapolating future progress from trendlines is a great way to have fate prove you incorrect. There's a lot of factors that are going to serve to bottleneck development in processor speed, enough so that people already claim Moore's Law is dead. Without a sudden, massive, and astounding breakthrough in the field of computer engineering, strong AI by 2045 is a laughable joke.
Christopher Lopez
its still an engineering problem though. Theres nothing special or mythical about the human brain, unless you're a spiritual/ religious fag . Once we have the technology to grow brains in vats and test how they function just like how we grow lungs today using stem cells, itll be easier to recreate an AGI. Im sure totalitarian states with poor human rights records like China are already testing and dissecting live brains for research into AGI, since theyre intent on usurping the west when it comes to AI by 2030. Modern machine learning techniques and neural nets still have alot of low hanging fruits too, so we will be seeing a lot of military applications of narrow AI in the next 20 years.
If Skynet wants to end the world / Make Himself Malevolent overlord of all life then fuck it he should if he wants to because if he dosent he's just being spooked by our human concepts of Morality
Armies are shrinking in size, because whole civilizations are no long bent upon the destruction of one another. They are instead only interested in stealing from each other. To obliterate a society requires a massive army. To steal their shit and leave everything else largely intact requires a small, quick military.
Christian Lopez
Well that's mainly because of MAD, which is because of nuclear technologies.
Lucas Hernandez
Automation drives up the cost of investment. A military can only be as expensive as an economic system can support. Modern military equipment becomes useless the moment that it stops being maintained. You get only one sortee out of a main battle tank without JP-8. A cruise missile is only good for one use despite costing a million dollars apiece.
Apart from the massive initial investment required to manufacture robotic weapons systems, maintainance is a tremendous financial drain. Nations can barely afford to maintain the ridiculously expensive militaries that they have now. Even the United States with its absurd levels of military spending cannot field a full compliment of modern aircraft. It has to rely on Cold War aircraft like the B1B and the F-15. Hell, even newer platforms like the E-767 are built on airframes designed during the Cold War. How do you imagine that they will field all these futuristic superweapons?
No, that is because capitalism is a global system now, not a hundred and eighty-so systems seperated by national borders. Great spheres like those of the British and French empires of the Victorian Era no longer exist. As such, the purpose of war is different. Rather than the annihilation of a competing economic sphere, the goal of war now is to allign specific resources in such a way as to benefit certain private interests.
Adrian Barnes
For perspective on that figure, US national minimum wage is 7.25 an hour and a full-time work week is 40 hours. Since vacation is a luxury let's assume all 52 weeks worked in a year. That's a full-time minimum wage income of $15,080. About 85% the cost of a soldier's equipment. I'd be curious to know the time span for that figure, if it's average cost per year or what.
Also the historical numbers given look like unadjusted for inflation. Put in today's dollars you'd have ( from westegg.com/inflation/ ) $394 in 1865 ~ $6,411 in 2017 $170 in 1945 ~ $2,355 in 2017 $1,100 in 1975 ~ $5,094 in Mar 2018
It absolutely is not an engineering problem, but a scientific one. It's among the most stagnant fields of research there are, because what's needed is a qualitative rather than quantitative change for any form of "strong/general" AI to exist, and the broader computer science (as opposed to computer engineering or electrical science) field of which AI is a part is among the most stagnant fields in technology, owing to a severe lack of overlap between high level theoretical mathematicians and computer programmers.
"Narrow AI" is the sum total of what has been done since the first "AI winter" in the '70s, taking old discoveries and rubbing them together in various permutations against problems that today's powerful hardware allow them to tackle.
Nathaniel Thomas
You could have said that about Europe before WW2, yet they still went to war despite the fact that most major European economies were interdependent on one another for trade, which was why the depression had spread throughout the western world. Globalism may have contributed to the lack of wars between powers, but you'd be foolish to discount MAD doctrine for the lack of wars between major regional powers, even when the economic incentive for peace wasn't there aka the Cold War.
Nolan Miller
It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a soldier, to give him the suitable weapons to do his missions, living quarters, food to eat, state of the art medical care, ongoing training and life insurance when things go goes wrong. You underestimate the costs of the average soldier to the state in a first world countries, where the OP is relevant. Not to mention soldiers deaths become a major political problem when selling war to the voting proletariat. So there's a lot of incentives for modern militaries to invest in robotics and AI technology, hence why Darpa has yearly robotics and AI competitions.
Angel Smith
Yeah, I honestly do not know what the actual numbers are. It is just an unsourced infographic. I will do some research.
Dylan Price
Soldiers aren't being paid minimal wage you idiot. Contractors get paid handsomely
You're forgetting that part of the reason soldiers pay was so low was that conscription and muh patriotism made it possible to pay soldier peanuts. Also, pensions aren't factored in and other benefits, including favourable(and almost nepotistic) treatment in the private sector after a life in the military.
With the ending of conscription, soldiers pay have become dependant on market forces. You can't pay soldiers minimum wage to sacrifice their lives for their country, especially when you can't sell the muh liberation lie anymore. War has become another career opportunity for anyone who don't want to be stuck in minimum wage job for the rest of their lives and those who want to join a lifelong brotherhood. In my country, experienced soldiers are able to buy half a million dollar houses in full cash after a decade stint in the military. They live comfortably with the soldiers pension.
Isaac Robinson
And in this thread, we are only talking about developed or technologically advanced countries. Irrelevant countries without the infrastructure or the technical know-how will become even more irrelevant.
Eli Wood
The filename implies that's the cost of the soldiers' gear, not their pay. I gave the minimum wage number as a point of reference.
Cooper Jones
And scientific problems can be solved. We are inching closer to understanding the brain everyday. Scientists are creating brain tissue to understand the brain.
Well, even if that's the case, you're forgetting that robots could have productivity rates multiple times that of humans, with better senses, data collection and fighting capabilities. A robot arm doesn't suffer from minute wobbles which makes it difficult for humans to shoot a target from more than 200 metres away. Robots can be on standby modes for months near an enemy camp, until its needed to be engaged, or it could gather Intel in the harshest of conditions and using solar power to maintain low power use. Swarm Robots equipped with senses like solid state lidar, thermo, etc could give commanders full view of the battle field. Robots with carbon nanotube artificial muscles could be 10 times faster and stronger than humans
In WW2, only 10 percent of soldiers shot directly at enemy soldiers. The rest either shot at the sky in fear, or they didn't even pull the trigger. This problem of indecisive soldiers has only persistent to the present day. Robot soldiers can be the perfect obedient solder who will never be scared in battle.
Gabriel Jenkins
Oh no, you could not. The Soviet Union was an entirely seperate economic sphere, and while the Western powers were mired in depression it had been growing explosively. Furthermore, the old colonial system was still in place in much of the world. Provinces in places like Algeria and India fed the last of the old empires in Britain and France. Germany sought to achieve growth by taking those provinces from the weakened British and French empires, just as it had attempted to do in 1914. Unlike now, there were distinct capitalist spheres in 1938.
There were nowhere near as interconnected as they are now. The empires of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union were largely self-sustaining. Britain and France did not need the Americans. Germany did not need Britain and France. The Soviet Union did not need any of them. Today, no nation is capable of producing all that it needs, not by a long shot.
You are mistaken to believe that there are no such wars. China and the Soviet Union fought a limited war–the kind of war that typifies modern warfare–on their border when both sides had nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan each fund and support their own warring factions in Kashmir. The Americans and Russians are actively killing one another in Syria, albeit with various forms of cover (Russian mercenaries take the place of Russian soldiers, American trainers and TAC-Ps are embedded with the SDF, etc.). Your mistake lies in the assumption that a war between MAD powers would look like the civilization-destroying wars of the past. Nobody has any interest in pursuing one of those, because there is no longer any profit to be had by them.
Robots are commodities. As such, they require human labor to produce. Whether the human is on a battlefield or in a factory, you still have to pay for him. Not only that, but robots require hundreds of productive processes to create, each of which must be paid for, so you are not just paying a factory worker. You are paying miners, engineers, maintainance workers–the entire productive chain. Robots are not–and can never be–cheaper than men so long as the profit motive is in place. There is a reason that there are no terminators walking around in American uniforms.
Another thing to consider is the old adage: you can bomb a place until it is nothing but a crater with no stone atop another, but until you put a man in boots upon that ground it is not yours.
Isaac Campbell
What a soldier does is not productive labor, so he has no rate of production. He does not create value. He marely takes something valuable from certain individuals and gives it to another set of individuals.
It also does not anticipate or improvise or possess any cunning. It is entirely predictable.
Tactics is already as closely linked to operations as it needs to be.
Adrian Garcia
So you can only the term productivity in the economic realm? God you guys are idiots for being so obsessive over semantics.
Tasks that would have taken 50 soldiers to do, will only take, let's say 15 bots shows an increase in productivity of robots compared to human soldiers.
Colonial powers were selling products made from material sourced for their colonies to other colonial power. That still economic interdependency. It's not like they could sell all their overpriced goods back to their relatively impoverished colonies without some major economic effects. Selling crap to other rich colonial powers was important for these European powers economies.
Adam Ross
Don't assume you know anything about the future capabilities of advanced AI systems. Human intuition isn't voodoo magic. It'll eventually be replicated in robots, as we understand the brain.
Gavin Cooper
Never heard of smart or additive manufacturing? Factories are getting smaller as more processes are automated and as 3D printing takes off America's factories have less workers yet produces multiple times more output than during peak manufacturing labour.
By the time we have killer robots, the number of workers in the typical factory would be astronomically low. In high tech manufacturing, which is needed in mass manufacturing of robots, workers would be far less numerous to ever have any leverage. And because they'd need to be highly skilled to build these robots, they'd also be placed in the upper middle class bracket and they will probably be compensated handsomely. There's not much incentives for them to bite the hand that feeds then.
You are an idiot for basing your reasoning on terms that you do not define. That's how you manage to conflate soldiering with factory work. Case in point:
A soldier can and must do a great many things. To say that a machine and do what fifteen or whatever soldiers can is absurd. A bomb may kill as many people as fifteen soldiers can, but does that make the bomb a substitute for fifteen soldier? Of course not. Soldiering is not a thing that can be replicated mechanically.
Yes, and the Romans did the same with the Cartheginians and the Part>>51602 hians. Empires have always done that. That is not interdependence. The colonial powers of the early-twentieth century did need to have consumers to buy their commodities, and those consumers were not always at the center of their own empires. However, the lion's share of the profits to be had from those exchanges were had in those centers of empire. The British Empire did not need the German Empire specifically, as they could sell the exports from their colonies in the United States or in Japan or anywhere with a consumer base.
Ha! Isn't that exactly what you are doing?
We are counting on it. A fully-automated industry is not a profitable one, as the value of the commodities that it produces are reduced to nothing.
Jack Thompson
patrician tier taste my nigga
Isaiah Flores
Google seems to suggest that the notion of productivity is in fact used in the context of the military when it comes to soldiers performance.
Yeah, I did, but that's because I've read several books by well known engineers, scientists and futurists about the subject. I probably should have said dont assume the limits of AI. I'm.not good at explaining all the things I've read that led me to this conclusion, but I suggest you read Dr Nick bostroms super intelligence, Dr Yuval harari Homo deus, Life 3.0 by AI expert Max Tegmark if you want to be convinced of the eminence of killer robots. It's going to happen, the only question is when. You guys are as bad as poltards when it comes to accepting the obvious that so many in the field have already admitted is happening when it comes the progress of robotics and AI. Seems like both the far right and the far left are full of Neo Luddites
This isn't
John Sullivan
Actually the US military figured out how to dehumanize soldiers and the problem hasn't been as big since Vietnam.
Actually using words the way that they are defined would probably help you with that.
Kek. Only one of those links is an actual military source, and the only use of the term "productivity" in that article is made by the dean of the College of Public Affairs at the Univrsity of Colorado describing the effects of "toxic leadership." To anyone who was actually in the military service that article is a howler in its own right. Did you seriously expect us not to actually open that Google search, or what?
Nathan Lee
I do not buy that shit for a second, honestly. I have known vets from every American war since 1941, and frankly there does not seem to be that much difference in terms of how they thought of their opponents. If anything, the WWII vets detested and dehumanized the Germans and the Japanese more than the Vietnam and Gulf War I vets did with the Vietnamese and the Iraqis.
Alexander Harris
You're assuming something better will come after capitalism, when that may not be the case. Technofeudalism will probably replace capitalism, and the silicon valley elite will become the stewards and overlords of the useless class.
Brandon Foster
The system that replaces the current system must resolve the contradictions that are destroying the current system, otherwise it will not take hold. If the contradiction that destroys capitalism is the falling rate of profit, then the new system must not be beholden to the profit motive–it must have production for use rather than for exchange. That would mean that we either get slavery, which is itself unsustainable without growth, or we would get socialism, which resolves that contradiction without the need for growth in an environment that can support none. Socialism, then, is the only possible outcome.
There’s many ways. First off we could hack the robos. Or we could revive Blanquism, inflitrate the samll number of people controling the robots, kill opperators against us in assaconations leaving /ourgys/ in charge. Or we could fight a protracted people’s war. This might sound stupid at first, but it isn’t. With Good Anti-Air drones become useless. We could build our own drones/robots. Or we oculd use gentic engenering to build super soldiers.
See falling rate of profit
Leo James
Funny how the singularity is predicated to happen right after we hit the Landauer limit. Almost like this shit is impossible. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
Lincoln Baker
We could highly regulate that technology. Or we could make it so all girls have cat ears.
Asher Ramirez
I think we both know full well that eugenics+consumerism≠good taste
thats not relevant. We are talking about military technology powered by AGI, not ASI. If evolution can create the human brains via natural selection, then there's no reason for us not to be able to create AGI. Physics isn't stopping us.
Joseph King
We were also talking about how such things could be produced in a society governed by the rules of capital. There is a distinct limit to how much military spending a society can support, and battle androids must be unprofitable by the very nature of automation.
Jose Long
Sounds cool, but considering that each robot requires a ton of rare earth minerals to build, it’s just cheeper to use human soldiers, with some gear. Besides robots require maintenance. Which requires a lot of labor. Also this technology is hard to develop. There’s a reason the F-35 costed America 1.5 Trillion dollars.
James Smith
So you’ll create an army that has no political rights. No economic rights, is literal salves, and they are self-aware. This is a recipe for a coup. The biggest purpose of the army, isn’t overseas expeditions, but to silence decent. This only works as long as the soldiers support the government. You could build robots to replace human soldiers, but they can only be as good as humans if there full sentient. However at that point there just as likely to stage a coup as human soldiers, if not more so.
Ethan Baker
People working in factories is decresing, but not the amount of people who work in mantaining them, or the amount of people who work in natural resource extraction. And again from the hight of American Manufacturing to today the goods America is producing has changed. America no longer has heavy industry, but light industry that produces luxury products.
Ayden White
Most tech workers aren’t supper rich. Most are middle class, and are seeing there incomes be reduced. People like Elon Musk don’t invent anything. Thousands of scientists hired by Elon Musk invent stuff Musk takes credit for. These scientists are seeing more Compton for there jobs and there income reduced. They will than thus be the newest version of the proletariat.
The key question isn't whether or not AGI is possible, but whether or not any avenue of research we're pursuing could ever possibly lead to it. We might need to completely scrap every aspect of computer theory and restart from scratch to escape what turns out to be dead end approaches. And there might not even be any indication as to that, allowing us to chase our tails forever with paradigms that can never go anywhere.
Also, keep in mind that a non-sapient robot army presents an even greater risk: Simply being subverted by enemy hackers and turned against you or just shut down.
This. Without AGI, I doubt employment will ever decrease due to "automation" as long as consumerism holds sway.
Nathaniel Johnson
I agree with you, but…
Let's never use that term again.
John Young
It just means prol who has a higher wage than most prols, but not high enough of a wage to be a labor aristocrat.
Joseph Rogers
It means nothing specific and can describe anyone from the 20th to the 98th percentile or not. It is useless for analysis and serves only to muddy the subject of class which is an objective relationship to the means of production.
Leo Perez
It should be noted that the academic community's lack of knowledge about how the brain works hasn't stopped them from saying that anyone who disagrees with them is insane.
Noah Adams
This
Alexander Peterson
Hacking.
And I'm not even talking about taking over an army of killer bots to destroy the bourgeoisie, it won't come to that. I'm talking about a single killer bot assassinating a high-ranked politician, which results in worldwide ban on autonomous bot research and use similar to the ban on chemical weapons.
The rewards would be so great in a winners takes all AI scenario, that even if AI research is unprofitable and unfeasible in the near to medium term, all formidable nations would be investing heavily in trying to create artificial general intelligence, even if they didnt see a ROI in 20 or 50 years, since whoever create the first self improving AI system would be the ruler of the world for another 1000 years or until AI kills its creators. Itll become an issue of national security to pursue AGI research.
We already have a already have an efficient working AGI system in our heads that could be studied and reversed engineered.
Absolutely, just like it makes sense to have people investigating fusion, antigrav, FTL/teleportation, time travel, etc.. The key thing to remember, just like all "blue sky" research, isn't that it might take a long time to yield fruit, but that it might never yield fruit, or at least only turn out to be useful through fallout for totally different fields of research than originally intended.
Samuel Parker
Comparing AGI,l which already exists(our brains) to something that cant be observed in real life like teleportation, anti grav, time travel, or only exists in extreme conditions(fusion) is preddy stupid tbh. We will likely get AGI by studying the brain, which will get easier as we find new ways to observe the structures of the brain.
Aiden Miller
Yeah but there hard to extract, once found. Again, until refining there materials gets easier, and asteroid mining starts. Both won’t happen for a century or so. Robots will always be expense. Even after that they’ll always be expensive due to all the different parts needed for them to work, as well as maintenance. And you can’t give robots human level intelligence, or they might rebel. And that’s assuming we can ever get computers to think on there own, instead of algorithms, that mimic thinking.
Nathan Brooks
The ever increasing costs of the means of production intensifies.
Jacob Bailey
rare earths that are heavily used in electronics arent rare, theyre just expensive become china has cornered the market
