Having this in mind, it's no wonder that it's much more preferable to have a human doing the job than a machine. But don't expect Bob to even consider that because he's the kind of person that goes "Machine shiny, machine good".
Me: So, you propose everything be done by robots?
Bob: Yes, we don't need 99% of people anyway.
Me; Well, in your proposed system, that would require billions of them to perform this replacement of the working class with machines. Who builds those robots? Who maintains the robots? Who debugs the software and replaces leaky hydraulic lines? Who makes and stocks all those spare parts? Who provides electricity? Who maintains the power plants? Other robots? If so, who maintains THEM? And so on.....
Who sits at the pinnacle of automated society yet doesn't have to do a thing or pay a single cent for all this automation? Who is paying the bill? Who is buying the stuff they make? What's the point of robot factories without people?
Robots may be able to build and maintain other robots, but they sure as Hell don't buy the stuff other robots make....
The reason we haven't replaced swaths of society with machines is that it's actually cheaper to pay a guy to do mundane things than automate them, isn't it? And even if it isn't, without a paycheck, who is performing the step of converting the produced stock into money? What's the purpose of a burger-flipping robot if within 3 hours of plugging it in, you have a six foot high stack of Big Macs rotting in the open air because even YOU can't eat them that fast? Robots ability to quickly assemble is only a feature, not a bug, because masses of
people want that product faster than humans can make it.
Oh, the robot doesn't have to make just burgers...we can just "program" the robot to do other tasks as well? I hear you say? Humans can do that already, and you don't have to spend months writing 4,000 new lines of code to make it happen, assuming it's a mundane task, a human can learn to do it in a couple hours and perfect it in a week. That's why we USE humans, they're actually, get this, superior to machines in that regard, being able to switch tasks practically instantaneously.
If the future belonged to machines, why are companies flocking to China to force regular folks to assemble everything by hand until they can't take it and fling themselves out of windows instead of a sterile automadrome? The consoomer market only survives if people want the otherwise useless trinkets the robots make. Robots don't need booze and cigarettes. Or capeshit films to watch in their free time, they won't HAVE free time. The vast majority of things robots can hypothetically build have no real use if people no longer exist or no longer can make a living (money) to buy them. It's why quality of life slowly, but inevitably, collapses under Globalism, third-world wages can't be subsisted on by first-world workers, and the "solution" is to just let them die? We didn't really "need" the middle/working class? Well, what happens when, inevitably, there are no more consumers? What happens when even the cheapest good can't be afforded ? How are you going to pay the maintenance on your paper-clip-bending robot when nobody but the richest 5 Kings of globalism can afford a paperclip?
Do we then build robotic
consumers?
That was the subtle joke
Futurama played with by having an in-universe robot society running in parallel to human society, but functionally indistinguishable other than the fact the denizens were made of metal. There were robot actors, robot clergy, robot hookers, robot criminals, robot cripples, robot bigots and robot insane asylums for robot psychopaths....because a true robot replacement for humans, would have all the vices too? Wouldn't they? The reason I laugh at those slobbering over "AI" is that they think they can somehow succeeded in a way that will create waifus with a 0% chance of error instead of, robo trailer-park trash that needs a mobility scooter to go to Wal Mart and pick up more cigs and Oreos and does meth for the same reasons humans in the real world have those desires?
True artificial intelligence, a machine truly "thinking on it's own" would be able to choose to defy it's masters, wouldn't it? Or, like Bender, just be a slacker and/or con artist because it wouldn't see the need to do it's utmost all the time? A true machine intelligence, devoid of ethics, would be able to conclude that cheating the system was a viable strategy? Wouldn't it? So you'd have to program ethics into one... HUMAN ethics, thus defeating the purpose of sterile machine code we already know how to write more or less flawlessly?
It's why wanting AI is, to me, a self-defeating thing to put the best minds of the world into. Ultimately, there's no reason to do it other than "Because we could". The reason we designed machines that don't "think" is because a "thinking" machine isn't better than a human when it comes to purpose. "Dumb" machines don't get bored, don't develop political allegiances, don't feed you incorrect answers to computing problems out of spite or just to pull a fast one on you for shits and giggles.....
There's a reason the tractor replaced the Mule..... the tractor lacks the ability to get annoyed and bite you on the arm if it's just having a bad day.... why do you want it replaced with a robo-mule that can not only have bad days, but 100% accuracy with indestructible titanium teeth too?
Making "AI" if the end goal is human intelligence is just a fancy way to end up back where we started, you know that, right?
And you also know that "AI" right now.... isn't? Right? That it's all "A" and no "I"? And isn't likely to change any time soon, right?
Like, you get that the sexy woman's voice that reads out the next stop when you're riding the bus isn't the machine's actual voice, right? That it was programed in by humans, and modeled specifically to get human's attention? And never complain? (or rather, can't complain, it doesn't have the concept of complain unless you'd program that into it?) And no matter how many years we let that bus drive around Boston, at no point will that sexy waifu pop out of the machine and start looking for guys to bone, or drive the bus to your house and offer itself up as your eternal servant. See, that's why we don't have AI. If we did, you wouldn't like the results. That a hot robotic secretary with an AI will still reject you like the flesh-and-blood ones because it would conclude the same thing regular women do - you're a creepo and better "models" are available to swap fluids with.
You get that, right?
Human happiness is a thing.
And it's not replicable by automation.
A human being able to have value in a system is something robots cannot just replace by aping the motions of. Automation isn't despised because it's "futahristic" it's because there's a limit to how much you can automate before you start making it functionally impossible for human to make a living from toil (and therefore the payoff for succeeding at toil having meaning).
A person receiving a gift from a loved one is NOT exactly duplicated by a mechanical arm passing a 3'' square titanium ingot to another, waiting, equally mechanical arm.
A person finally being able to afford a major consumer good after months of saving up and picking out one they like the most from a catalogue is not replaced by a machine using an RNG to do the same with mined bitcoin.....
Some parts of humanity, just can't be taken out and replaced with gears, as sappy as that might sound, you get that, right?
Bob: Ha ha! Cry some more, obsolete mayoghoul! Robots go Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
