Stephen Downes

This post relates a bit to my comments to Clark Quinn (which still haven't appeared on his blog, which is exactly why I take my comments and make them blog posts). Here, Tim Klapdor channels a bit of an apocalyptic vision of AI: "what is the Ideal? I can't spot it. Every proposed ideal future feels like a dystopia." But let me flip it around - why does it feel like a dystopia? "(A)n ideal world free from labour and effort, where AI and robots are capable of doing everything... also a world where human effort is worthless, and we are unmoored from our place in society... a neocolonial state where we the people, become enslaved by the robot masters." But why take this view? In a world where people are valued strictly and only by the work they do, AI is an oppressor. But if we reject the abstractions that define our society, AI becomes a liberator. AI tells us: what we had was never wealth, what we had was never knowledge. We made it all up, then sold it as though it were worth something. Wealth and knowledge are concrete and physical, not the abstractions we created to stand in their place.