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Yeah, that's the Star Trek/Culture post scarcity utopia I mentioned. All it would require is for people to work together and for those in power to give up a little to help everyone a lot...... awww crap.

See, that's the core of the issue here. Even if our technological tools do make possible a society where everyone(or at least most) is prosperous, living in peace, free to pursue their own interests and having a good life, without having money and more importantly power concentrated into the hands of few, it doesn't necessarily means it's going to happen(the worst thing is not income inequality  - if everyone has enough, do we really care if some have private jets? Personally I don't care about that a bit. But I do care about the immense power that money affords them).

Not *everyone's* life will be improved in this society, assuming it's even possible. The proverbial "1%" or even 10%, pretty much everyone that is above middle class, will have objectively "worse" lives, have at least some of their privileges taken away. And experience shows us they're not going to give them up voluntarily(at least most of them). And let's not talk about the many people, especially in the US, that are not even part of the 1%, or even the 10%, or even the 20%, they are at the very bottom but still cling to the dream of making it to the 1%. They are *really* commited to it. They don't want a more fair world, where their place would be improved, because that would rob them of them imaginary future billions. And they will fight for them as if they're actually real.

Technology alone isn't enough to determine if we'll get the "nightmare" scenario or the "utopia" scenario or whatever in between. Humans are also political beings on top of making cool inventions; this will play a role in which future we get. My prediction is this : Capitalism has changed a lot during its history. It has made a lot of concessions to the working people(speaking about the Western countries mostly, countries in the Third World/Global South are something else entirely), the most important of those being the welfare state and universal suffrage. Not out of mercy of course, but it's not really in its interest to have hordes of starving people in the streets. It gives a little, it adapts, in order to survive. Its final and last concession will probably be the "Universal Basic Income". Depends how it's implemented(will we have a UBI on top of guaranteed universal healthcare, for example?), but it will probably happen. This will cause capitalism to yet again another take a very different form. I don't predict it has any more room to change again after that. The next change, if we assume we will have another change, will be something else altogether. And of course one other major change that will need to happen is that, whatever system we have, needs to be much more ecologically sustainable.

On 7/31/2017 at 10:40 PM, grumpyOldDude said:

Really apocalyptic

We know the earth's resources is not being replaced anywhere close to the rate at which it is being used up. But is there any source/citations to back up that this is happening at the rate you described? 

And What time scale are we talking about here?

If the worst scenario is projected for my grandchildren's generation, then I can put my feet on the table and relax a bit

This recent well-researched article gives a good overview of the current state of affairs. Absent any significant human action (abandon fossil fuels immediately, stop eating meat, start injecting SO2 into the arctic stratosphere, CO2 removal, etc.) we're lemmings headed off the climate cliff.

The timescale is uncertain, mostly because the climate is a complex chaotic system (e.g. butterfly effect), and the current modeling does not account for all variables and various self-reinforcing feedback effects. My guess (as an informed hobbyist) is that we'll start to see some significant negative effects on food and water supplies within the next decade (the Arab spring was a preview of things to come). Notably, the areas most heavilly affected by climate change drought are also the areas where most of our food is currently produced (california, the midwest). Drought alone could be enough to destabilize global civilization. Climate change warms the arctic much more than the rest of the globe, and therefore reduces the temperature gradient between the equator and poles, thereby reducing the speed of the jet stream and producing stationary weather (drought, flooding).

If we do in fact manage to kill ourselves off (which seems like a possibility that cannot be ignored), it seems like we have a window of opportunity to bootstrap an AI that can carry on after we're gone.  As individuals, we all eventually die anyway.  It's more important in my mind that someone or something can continue where we left off, regardless of the form that entity takes.

If you think about it realistically the only way for humans to reach a point where AI can take care of us, is if we had a population cap. As things stand whenever humans enter a golden age of resources we have a population boom.

We keep populating to a point where the resources can't support us any more.

If you reduced the current world to 10% of it's population there would be more resources per person than they could use in 8 life times.

It's not AI which will defeat capitalism. Capitalism is a self-defeating economic system. Why?

Axiom Set:
1. The interest of a company is to increase profits. Always. Companies which do not do that will go extinct.
2. Profit is the difference between costs vs. income. The goal is to have higher incomes than costs.
3. The great goal of a capitalist is to increase incomes while decreasing costs.
4. A company generally employs people, which is an operating cost / overhead cost.
5. A company generally creates products or services which it sells to a population / market. The company depends on the market having the capability to purchase their goods/services.
6. Most people get money from working for companies.
7. People who have no money cannot buy products or services.

Logical Conclusions:
A) Over the course of time, a company will seek to increase the efficiency of their business processes by streamlining and eliminating redundant work (#1). A part of this is the automation process, brought on by computers. The long term effect is that a company reduces the number of employees required to operate, thus reducing overhead costs (#3, #4)
B) Over the course of time, fewer and fewer people will work for companies (via A).
C) Because fewer people are working, fewer people have money. Fewer people with money means less flow of goods and services by the companies (#6, #7). On the macro economic scale, companies which automate to decrease labor costs also decrease addressable market sizes. This furthers the need to reduce operating costs because incomes decrease (#2, #3)
D) Capital becomes concentrated only in the hands of the company owners / shareholders and the flow of money, goods and services comes to a gradual halt (via C).
E) Final Result: Companies have all of the worlds money and no longer have a customer base to sell products / services to, and thus have no ability to continue creating profits from sales. They go extinct (#1). The economic system of capitalism has undermined itself.
 

Capitalism is what happens when people are allowed to trade resources and services freely and it's how civilisations have been running themselves the past thousands of years. It will exist as long as there are scarce resources. In a post-scarcity world there is no need for it, but we are millennia away from the technology(ies) that will allow it, if it's even possible. 

>>Capitalism is what happens when people are allowed to trade resources and services freely and it's >>how civilisations have been running themselves the past thousands of years. 

Really? Thousands of years? Slaves and serfs were free to trade resources and services as they wished? Are we talking about the history of the same planet here?

Most people would place the dawn of capitalism between the 13rd-16th century; depends on your definition and feudalism dissolved in stages and not overnight, so the 2 systems co-existed for quite some time(and still do in some places), but capitalism certainly isn't something that existed since humans have existed. Unless of course by "capitalism" you mean "people produce and consume things", in which case yes, it has existed once we moved beyond hunter-gatherer society, but it's not what most people mean by it. In feudal societies people still produced and consumed things, but under a different framework and mode than capitalism. Let alone slave society.

I mean, if we're going to argue that the Roman Empire or Medieval Europe were...capitalists societies, I think we've stretched the term so much as to simply mean "things are produced, traded and consumed". In which case, I guess...yeah, Julius Ceasar and Genghis Khan were...capitalists.

Anyway, I guess it depends on what "school of thought" you belong to, and if you consider as "capitalism" any society in which trade is existent, even if it's not the primary source of wealth, then capitalism obviously stretches back to the paleolithic era. But in that cases we're just using the same word to describe different things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism

>> In a post-scarcity world there is no need for it, but we are millennia away from the technology(ies) that will allow it, if it's even possible. 

We are not talking about the Star Trek replicator here, so I don't think we are "millennia away from it". It's not a magic machine that prints anything we desire that we're talking about here, simply large-scale automation. We're pretty much very close to being able to automate most of the work needed to at least satisfy the most basic needs, such as food, clothing and housing. We're certainly not millenia away from being able to completely automate the construction of things such as houses, roads, cars, ships, etc - I'd say we're at most a few decades.

Anyway, some relevant news...

https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/07/31/teamsters-convince-congress-to-block-driverless-trucks/#.tnw_2qcnmQeV

On 01/08/2017 at 5:08 AM, Aressera said:

Humans have created an explosion of technology in the last few hundred years which has been driven by global industrial capitalism and consumption of finite resources like fossil fuels. This technology has had untold negative effects on the environment and other organisms, and will continue to do so until we reach a tipping point and the whole house of cards falls down. The climate change induced by technology will be incredibly destructive to civilization as we know it and will probably be the straw that breaks our backs in the next few decades due to food/water shortage, wars over resources, and mass extinctions.

Well, I don't think that the problem is the technology itself but rather the people that are using it!

On 01/08/2017 at 6:42 AM, Aressera said:

What I foresee is not total annihilation of humanity, but rather that global technological capitalism will collapse (accompanied by a large fraction of people in cities dying due to lack of food/water that was usually transported over great distances), and as a result humans will be forced to revert to a semi-primitive subsistence agriculture lifestyle without unsustainable technology (which includes most tech). There will be at most a few billion people around living in small isolated communities. Like it or not, this will happen. There are too many compounding factors that create a perfect storm of climate, limited resources, and global conflict.

That's very apocalyptic. All predictions are false, the question now is to know at which degree your statement is true. 

On 02/08/2017 at 10:45 AM, mikeman said:

I don't predict it has any more room to change again after that. The next change, if we assume we will have another change, will be something else altogether. And of course one other major change that will need to happen is that, whatever system we have, needs to be much more ecologically sustainable.

Yes whatever the system is, we must be more ecologically sustainable. That's not even a choice. Actually, we are experimenting the dumbest experiment in history which is knowing of much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an environmental crisis. 

On 02/08/2017 at 8:18 PM, Aressera said:

This recent well-researched article gives a good overview of the current state of affairs. Absent any significant human action (abandon fossil fuels immediately, stop eating meat, start injecting SO2 into the arctic stratosphere, CO2 removal, etc.) we're lemmings headed off the climate cliff.

Thanks for sharing that with us, I really wasn't aware of how bad things are going. But I think we should remain optimistic no matter what, even if it's pretty much given that we will surpass the 2 degrees. By remaining optimistic, we can manage to find a solution

Capitalism can never truly be ended in a free environment. I see someone selling used goods for cheap, I buy them, fix them up, and sell them higher. Profit, and capitalism.

But as we're talking about a truly smart AI, that changes everything. It will work on improving itself once it reaches a point, and then who the hell knows what happens once it's too smart for us to understand. Maybe it'll give us space ships, fusion power, and our own personal pocket dimension where we're god. Maybe it'll think our carbon is delicious and grind us all into soylent green. Who knows.

7 hours ago, conquestor3 said:

But as we're talking about a truly smart AI, that changes everything. It will work on improving itself once it reaches a point, and then who the hell knows what happens once it's too smart for us to understand. Maybe it'll give us space ships, fusion power, and our own personal pocket dimension where we're god.

Is it possible for a fool to create machine that is more intelligent than himself? There may be a law of nature that prevents this.

Can we build a machine that understands how the universe works? Seems paradox.

On the other hand - could we treat it as a form of evolution if we build intelligent machines, see them as our children?

If so there is nothing stopping them to get smarter and smarter. But what makes a process like selfimprovement happen at all?

We do not know - we don't know how life works. And this brings me back to the first question.

So i guess AI will be just a tool in someones hands. It will help to invent and optimize, but i won't do this on its own.

It will be too complex to be understood, but not too smart.