If Robots & AI Entirely Replaced Humans, There'd Be Nothing But a Pile of Dead Non-Sentient Scrap Metal

The hype about robots & AI replacing humans is just that, hype

I highly—VERY highly!—recommend you read the article “The Illusion of AI Understanding and Creativity” by Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher and a computer engineer expert on artificial intelligence. This article is an easy read. It’s easy because the author—with a Ph.D. in computer science and another Ph.D. in philosophy—really knows what he’s talking about and for that very reason knows how to express the key ideas clearly.

Kastrup explains away all the mystery and whooooooo-whoooooo nonsense and hype that we hear lately about AI and how it may replace human minds entirely one day (as the idiotic transhumanists dream about and desire). When you finish reading Kastrup’s article you will know why the title of my Substack post here is true: absent humans, AI and robots are just a pile of non-sentient dead junk.

AI is fundamentally a way of making the creativity and insight—the intelligence—of real, once or currently living, people available to be used or enjoyed (or suffered: e.g., RoboCops, facial recognition surveillance, AI military drones, etc.) by LOTS of other people. It is thus analogous to the printing press, radio, T.V., and internet that make the speech and writing and singing and performing and thinking of real people available to be used or enjoyed (or suffered) by LOTS of other people. But take away the real people and such technology is just useless dead junk.

The WEF Folks Are Big on AI

If one goes here one can read all of the many ways that the WEF folks are thinking and planning on using AI. The WEF folks, the billionaire rulers of the world who treat the have-nots like dirt, will use AI to keep doing what they’ve always been doing—until we remove them from power.

The WEF gang wants to use AI the way the upper class has always used new technology starting I suppose with the first hand-held stone or stick—to increase their power and wealth and privilege and especially control over ordinary people. Upper class people often—when profitable—replaced workers with technology, be it a cotton gin or a steam engine or a robot, thereby strengthening their power over the working class (they used the new technology essentially as scabs against any potential working class strike.) They used new technology to harm ordinary people, to make them less secure and more impoverished. The problem is the WEF folks, not the technology they use. I write about this in “Is Technology the Problem?”

When good people, not people like the asshole WEF types, have the real power in society, we can figure out how and when to use AI to make society more enjoyable and fun and meaningful for us. Why not?

Did you read that Kastrup AI article yet? I hope so!

In case you missed it in my recent Substack about Universal Basic Income, here’s what I wrote about robots:

ROBOTS?

Capitalists have been replacing human labor with machines for hundreds of years. They do this whenever it lowers the cost of production. No doubt the trend will continue, with robots doing more and more things once done by humans.

​But this does not mean that the world will be a good world when robots do all the work and humans do none of it. In a good world, robots will do as much of the unpleasant or boring or dangerous work as possible, and humans will do things (many of which were never done before at all!) FOR EACH OTHER to make the world even better than it is today.

For example, in the past most people had to work on farms to produce our food, and NOBODY created computer games. Now very few people are required to plow farm fields and instead people are freed from that task to do things such as create computer games (and perform in theatrical productions and be medical-research scientists, etc.). What makes for a better world is when people contribute reasonably according to ability toward making it a better world for each other. In a good world like this, the principle is "From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire, with scarce things equitably rationed according to need."

​It would be a terrible world, however, if people no longer did things to help make it a better world for each other. This is true no matter how much robots do. A world in which people used the ubiquity of robots as an excuse for not doing anything to make life better for others is a nightmarish world, and its principle is the freeloader's principle: "Take from others but don't give anything in return even if you are able to."

​This is why people (such as Robert Reich who calls robots "i-everything" devices) who defend UBI by arguing that "Soon robots will do all the work and people will all need to be paid to do nothing" are wrong. No! Robots will NEVER do all the work, unless it's a nightmarish world based on the freeloader principle where sick people have nothing but robots caring for them and the only entertainment is provided by robots and so forth.

​It is true that the ruling class may want this nightmarish world with the same class inequality we have today, justified by the idea that ordinary people are useless because robots do all the work; all the more reason for us to oppose it!​