On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 2:07 AM, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > The abstract doesn't mention AI. I estimate the cost of automating the > global economy, i.e. replacing all human labor.
Except replacing _all_ human labor is neither possible nor necessary. Not possible because some will be retained for reasons of politics, conspicuous consumption etc. (even today conspicuous consumption drives a market for handmade goods of higher price and lower quality than their machine made counterparts). Not necessary because replacing most labor gets you most of the benefit. There was a time when people talked about how fully automated self replicating factories would magically transform the economy. In reality it turned out replacing the 90% of mind-deadeningly monotonous jobs conferred a big enough benefit that it didn't matter all that much that it was vastly harder to replace the remaining 10% of jobs that actually needed intelligence. > I stated the assumption that doing the work of 10^10 people will > require computing power equivalent to 10^10 human brain sized neural > networks. Sure, unless it doesn't. A lot of human jobs don't actually need full human intelligence. Conversely we might end up using more than a human brain's worth of processing power on a lot of problems, maybe because we haven't had millions of years to optimize the algorithms, maybe because we are dealing with exponential search problems that have unlimited appetite for computing power, maybe because the standard required to be competitive will keep going up as more computing power is available. The truth is we don't know how much computing power will be involved. > Nobody has made a molecular scale self replicating robot. Perhaps you > can explain why such a thing would be impossible. Even the hard-core 'nanotechnology will be magic fairy dust' advocates these days are acknowledging such a thing is unlikely to be developed because it would cost a fortune while being of little use. ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
