>>12070531>>12070534>>12070535>>12070536Some of what he says is right, about Kurzweil and the tech cult and the man-machine problem in ii) for example. He makes an error in his analysis of i) however. He recognises the primary role that human feelings and compassion will have in the preservation of useless humans in society, and the self-interest in belonging to a compassionate society. And then he says
>But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyoneThis is where he wants to base his entire argument against the industrial future, but he only tries to tear down a possible future society that consists of a self-prop system without any human input. Unless you're one of those morons that think AI will be ruling us and humans will not be part of any decision making process, including people in government that were in charge of adding AI systems to optimise governing to begin with, then the argument has no merit at all. Any realistic self-prop system of the future will involve varying levels of human control, and thus human emotion will be a variable. By default the idea of a human elite exterminating the rest of the human race is unrealistic, at least in the developed world where people are more likely to have been raised in a way that makes them value compassion and such feelings. Though conversely, a future self-prop system in a third world country consisting even of a few humans with the rest of the population being useless, is much more likely to eliminate their population, as apparent in any third world dictatorship in history and now.
So Ted's analysis of the interplay between human emotion and self-prop systems is very on point, but he chooses an unrealistic self-prop system as the "techies' wet dream" in which the value of human emotion is minimised and thus allows him to tear it down easily. In reality, he hasn't proved that a realistic realisation of i) would destroy itself or be non-viable.
