Artificial Progress.

It can’t have been lost on future entrepreneurs that with the advent of robots, AI etc the market for their new gizmos will be for ever diminishing because there’ll be fewer and fewer people employed and able to pay for them, and computers and robots have no need of products aimed at human beings only an adequate supply of electricity. Already a growing proportion of society is influencing the market to make cheaper and cheaper products because they can’t afford quality on account of being unemployed or on minimum wage. At times it seems our best efforts are aimed at designing ourselves out of the loop. No need for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker when you can buy six Mr Kipling apple pies for 80p made by the thousand in a massive machine a kilometre long with two operatives on a zero hours contract. When AI can design the machines, CAD can machine them, computers can control them and big data can find the one remaining person with enough money to buy one one begins to see the fault in the logic. It’s rather like the new self guided personal drone transporters that look a great idea when viewing the grid locked traffic from above but forward twenty years and the aerial chaos will be horrendous. And it’s the same with AI itself. Anyone who’s every used a computer will attest to the absolute and total arrogance of anything digital. Miss out a nondescript semicolon or forward slash and no amount of swearing and threats will cause it to change its mind. Turning the bloody things off and on again may work in binary but for humans it’s tantamount to a near death experience. So for any AI experts out there remember if you finally reach you goal of true human intelligence all you’ll achieve is, well true human intelligence and consider where that’s got us. And remember unintended consequences only occur when you’re operating at the level of a ten-year-old boy who thinks playing cricket in a greenhouse is a brilliant idea. It’s not a brilliant idea.