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It’s 2030, And Robots Have More Rights Than You Do…

It’s 2030, And Robots Have More Rights Than You Do…

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Ruminating over our robot overlords…

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It's 2030, And Robots Have More Rights Than You Do...

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Ruminating over our robot overlords and the missing scenario

Now that ChatGPT has exploded onto the stage, there is renewed hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whenever AI captures the public imagination, we are subjected to unrestrained conjectures around how it will inevitably take over the future and change our lives.

We’re led to believe that AI will usher an era of hyper-intelligent overlords, so far advanced beyond our own coarse and analog cognitive skills that the existential question of the future will center around:

  • how much power or rights do we confer on these beings?

  • will they act benevolently or malevolently toward us?

But these questions presuppose a core assumption around AI that everybody agrees isn’t true now but will inevitably become true in the future – after a few more iterations of Moore’s Law…

That’s the idea that AI will achieve general artificial intelligence, and with that is implied some degree sentience (otherwise there is nothing to give any rights to).

The Newsweek piece on the right in the images above is by the transhumanist futurist Zoltan Istvan. He describes how AI ethicists are divided on the matter of whether future hyper-intelligent robots should be granted rights.

On one hand, by not affording human rights to robots possessing AGI (general intelligence on par with humans), we are committing a “civil rights error” that we will regret in the future.

This is opposed by those who assert that robots are machines and will never require rights, because they aren’t sentient (this is where I land on it, and I’ll tell you why below).

Others believe in a middle ground  where some robots that display general intelligence would be afforded some rights “depending on their capability, moral systems, contributions to society”  (which sounds somewhat reminiscent of a “three/fifths” clause to me).

But overall, Istvar seems to assume that AI will achieve super-intelligence, and become vastly superior beings in terms of brain-power to us clumsy meatbags of humanity.

That leaves us with three possible paths forward:

#1 Appeal to the benevolence of AI super-intelligence

“Given the possibility of reward or punishment, if machine intelligence does eventually become something like an AI god that can greatly manipulate and extend human life for good or bad, then people should immediately begin considering how our future overlord would like to be brought into existence and treated. Hence, the way humans treat AI development today—and whether we give robots rights and respect in the near future—could make all the difference in how our species is one day treated.”

This is a variation of Pascal’s Wager – a prototypical game theory construct which concluded that the consequences of believing in God and being wrong (nothingness) were better than to be wrong in not believing (eternal damnation).

#2 Hopium. Maybe the AI’s will simply leave us alone

However, according to Istvan “given our influence and the environmental destruction we cause on planet Earth”, we may “easily aggravate AI” who will take matters into their own hands to correct matters, and us. This latter scenario is a variation of Roko’s Basilisk, which is also mentioned in Istvan’s piece.

Roko’s Basilisk was a thought experiment that emerged from programmer Eliezer S. Yudkowsky’s LessWrong that shook the foundations of the site and scared the beejeesus out of otherwise super-brainiac nerds.

It’s “The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time!”,  hyper-ventilates Slate magazine.

It still  informs Yudkowsky’s thinking to this day. He’s recently promulgated the “The Alignment Problem” which assumes that humanity will inevitably create super-intelligent AIs and they will inevitably destroy us. We may as well “die with dignity”, since we’re all doomed anyway:

“tl;dr:  It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight.  Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.”

These kinds of thought constructs around the inevitability of omnipotent AI’s are simply restatements of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument. First formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. While an impressive feat of logic akin to Zeno’s paradoxes, it is simply a circular argument that God must exist:

“God is the greatest possible being that can be conceived. If such a being exists only in the mind and not in reality, then a greater being can be conceived — one that exists both in the mind and in reality.”

In simpler terms:

God is the most perfect being we can imagine, and it is more perfect to exist in reality than just in our imagination. Therefore, God must exist in reality.
— via ChatGBT session 72b43f3e-043f-4db2-aca9-63a76b7945c9

Give God a mean streak, and you have Roko’s Basilisk. Or Skynet.

#3 Upload our consciousness to the cloud and merge with the robots

Here Istvan suggests we merge with AI and attempt to guide it

A final option is we attempt to merge with early AI by uploading our minds into it, as Elon Musk has suggested. The hope is people could become one with AI and properly guide it to be kind to humans before it becomes too powerful. However, there’s no guarantee we would be successful, and it might just make AI feel violated in the long run.

This idea is ascribed to Elon Musk, although I’m sure Istvan is certainly aware that this is the essence of The Singularity espoused by the likes of Ray Kurweil (Google’s Chief Scientist) in his book The Singularity is Near. Russian Cosmists  were trying to articulate the same thing over a century ago but they didn’t have computer networks and machine learning yet to provide the foundation.

Years ago, I was supposed to be writing a book about the dangers of this techno-utopianism, and in it, I call the idea that humanity will merge with AI and vanquish all our ills, “The False Threshold”:

What would make all this possible is the virtuous cycle created by digital computer networks, powered by Moore’s Law, incessantly halving their physical footprint while doubling their processing power – eventually we would achieve, and then surpass, the interconnectivity and the processing power of the human brain itself.

When that happened, all bets were off. The assumption is that somewhere along this continuum, when the right thresholds of parallelism and computing power were surpassed, mind itself would leap out of the process – emerging with a vengeance and folding back in on itself, forking off subprocesses even more intelligent than itself, and so on, ad infinitum. “Our final invention” will then survey the world, with all its deficiencies and inefficiencies, and being infinitely smarter than all human minds combined, will deftly solve everything.

Kurzweil says this could happen as soon as 2029 and these techno-utopian visions almost always veer into some version of neo-Marxism predicated on Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

The Singularity as Rapture

The expectation of super-intelligent AI’s taking over our affairs (techno-utopianism) has all the trappings of a religion. I originally wrote about back in Transhumanism: The New Religion of The Coming Technocracy in response to a WSJ “think piece” (Looking Forward to the End of Humanity) that “Covid-19 has spotlighted the promise.. .of transhumanism and the idea of using technology to overcome sickness, aging and death”

Make no mistake, The Singularity has all the trappings of an eschatological event.  It differentiates from most Christian or monotheistic impulses because it is we who are birthing our own Gods. This dynamic of usurping (God, or in this case reality itself), gives it a distinctly Luciferian impulse.

The missing scenario is that AI will never happen.

A scenario that this article doesn’t entertain (nor any others navel gazing the future of AI) is that AI isn’t really a thing and believing that sentient, self-aware AI’s will take over the world will never happen.

(On a side-note I will say that whether the majority of the plebes become algorithmic serfs living under social credit and CBDCs is another issue entirely).

Our hand-wringing over how to deal with these super-intelligent software constructs hinges on a single, baked in assumption which is unprovable:

That is the idea that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter.

The core tenet of Scientism (notice I didn’t say “science”) is that consciousness, sentience and mind are all by-products of matter. Something that happens when certain neuro-chemicals slosh around in a brain and enough synapses fire and wire to produce self-awareness.

This is the modern day equivalent of the Ptolemaic (or geocentric) universe: the belief that the Earth was the center of the cosmos.

It was the “settled science” of its day, and disputing it would get you burned at the stake.

The reality is that matter is a by-product of consciousness, the base layer of reality is mental, not physical. This has been espoused for a long time (the Hermetic Axiom “All is mental” which was cribbed from far older texts) , it’s also the foundation of quantum mechanics.

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
— Max Planck

Seen in this light, our brains don’t emit consciousness the way a kettle vents off steam – they’re receivers that tap into – and filter – the underlying substrate of reality. And while the foundations of quantum mechanics lays out the primacy of consciousness, it can only really be experienced via gnosis. For those who have had that experience, there is no doubt. For everybody else, there is only New Age woo woo.

Unless AI is approached with this understanding (and I have no expectation that anybody will ever take this seriously), then we can safely assume that generalized AI, sentient and self-aware, simply won’t happen.

Time for a Reality Check

AI is really the current iteration of the “flying car”. Something that was used to symbolize the future that never happened. At least not in its stereotypically posited form. This is because AI isn’t really artificial intelligence – it’s algorithmic imitation. 

While it may be very very good at algorithmically imitating accountants, lawyers, doctors, coders, copywriters and even chess grandmasters or Go champions, it still isn’t sentient, it still has no understanding of what it’s actually doing, it has no consciousness. It may as well be a toaster.

This is why torturing ourselves with what are at their core, largely theological constructs over outcomes to which we ascribe a misplaced inevitability is beyond delusional, it’s unhinged.

The error gets compounded when we actually shape public policy around these assumptions.

A very similar dynamic is playing itself out in the “climate crisis” narrative, where we are being gaslit with hypothetical constructs from computer models that are ascribed an inevitability that requires all of humanity reorder itself around them. The proposed “reconfigurations” or “recalibrations” of society (to use WEF-style euphemisms) are invariably along neo-Marxist, technocratic lines.

First thing’s first: Let’s get our own rights back right now.

The irony around all this introspection around how we treat AI’s and what rights they should have is that here in the Covid Era, we’ve just had our own basic human rights rescinded. By edict.

We didn’t get them back after the pandemic ended, as most of the emergency mandates are only conditionally “on hold”. Our civil and universal human rights are now provisional, at the behest of various unelected health authorities, bureaucrats, apparatchiks  and whatever lunacy comes out of Davos.

If we allow it, this will only get worse as “climate emergencies” approach over the horizon, and we face the real prospect of climate lockdowns, and social credit based on CBDCs, health-passes and carbon rationing.

We’ve abrogated our own rights in the present, and then quibble over which ones to bestow on inanimate software algorithms of the future.

*  *  *

My book on this topic has been on the back-burner but I still write about transhumanismAI and their implications for CBDC’scarbon rationing and social credit. Subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list to get new articles (and I may revive the book and serialize it here). You can also follow me on me on Nostr , Gettr, or Twitter. My premium letter The Bitcoin Capitalist covers Bitcoin and crypto stocks.

Tyler Durden Sun, 02/12/2023 - 21:15

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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Mortgage rates fall as labor market normalizes

Jobless claims show an expanding economy. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

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Everyone was waiting to see if this week’s jobs report would send mortgage rates higher, which is what happened last month. Instead, the 10-year yield had a muted response after the headline number beat estimates, but we have negative job revisions from previous months. The Federal Reserve’s fear of wage growth spiraling out of control hasn’t materialized for over two years now and the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%. For now, we can say the labor market isn’t tight anymore, but it’s also not breaking.

The key labor data line in this expansion is the weekly jobless claims report. Jobless claims show an expanding economy that has not lost jobs yet. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

From the Fed: In the week ended March 2, initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits were flat, at 217,000. The four-week moving average declined slightly by 750, to 212,250


Below is an explanation of how we got here with the labor market, which all started during COVID-19.

1. I wrote the COVID-19 recovery model on April 7, 2020, and retired it on Dec. 9, 2020. By that time, the upfront recovery phase was done, and I needed to model out when we would get the jobs lost back.

2. Early in the labor market recovery, when we saw weaker job reports, I doubled and tripled down on my assertion that job openings would get to 10 million in this recovery. Job openings rose as high as to 12 million and are currently over 9 million. Even with the massive miss on a job report in May 2021, I didn’t waver.

Currently, the jobs openings, quit percentage and hires data are below pre-COVID-19 levels, which means the labor market isn’t as tight as it once was, and this is why the employment cost index has been slowing data to move along the quits percentage.  

2-US_Job_Quits_Rate-1-2

3. I wrote that we should get back all the jobs lost to COVID-19 by September of 2022. At the time this would be a speedy labor market recovery, and it happened on schedule, too

Total employment data

4. This is the key one for right now: If COVID-19 hadn’t happened, we would have between 157 million and 159 million jobs today, which would have been in line with the job growth rate in February 2020. Today, we are at 157,808,000. This is important because job growth should be cooling down now. We are more in line with where the labor market should be when averaging 140K-165K monthly. So for now, the fact that we aren’t trending between 140K-165K means we still have a bit more recovery kick left before we get down to those levels. 




From BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 275,000 in February, and the unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in government, in food services and drinking places, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing.

Here are the jobs that were created and lost in the previous month:

IMG_5092

In this jobs report, the unemployment rate for education levels looks like this:

  • Less than a high school diploma: 6.1%
  • High school graduate and no college: 4.2%
  • Some college or associate degree: 3.1%
  • Bachelor’s degree or higher: 2.2%
IMG_5093_320f22

Today’s report has continued the trend of the labor data beating my expectations, only because I am looking for the jobs data to slow down to a level of 140K-165K, which hasn’t happened yet. I wouldn’t categorize the labor market as being tight anymore because of the quits ratio and the hires data in the job openings report. This also shows itself in the employment cost index as well. These are key data lines for the Fed and the reason we are going to see three rate cuts this year.

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January…

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the "most ridiculous in recent history" but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let's take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was "the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history": it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month's jobs print won't be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that's the only tool left in the Biden admin's box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years - and thus denying expectations from Sahm's Rule that a recession may have already started - in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years...

... for one simple reason: last month's average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic...

... but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS's latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month's wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it's more than just the Biden admin hanging its "success" on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge... such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There's more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of "new jobs" has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there's even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers...

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

... but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue - especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border...

... and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened - i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden's handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November... and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 13:30

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