The last post got me to thinking “what is a working economy?” In my view, it is one in which we have full employment, and people can meet their basic needs, and many advanced needs, doing primarily work they actually want to do, and not much of that. I think we should be able to live well on 15-20 hours of work a week. Imagine that the purchasing value of the dollar grew 15% annually for the next thirty years, at steady wage rates. It could be done, if we eradicated the Federal Reserve and rationalized our banking system. Our monetary policy needs to be that we have none. We create money, once, then forget about it for the next 1,000 years.
But in my imaginative universe, there would be people who wanted to farm “old school”, maybe even with horses and plows, for the satisfaction of the work. Some would use tractors. For maximal efficiency, though, farming could likely largely be automated. I imagine large farm factories, with robotic plowing, fertilizing, weeding and harvesting.
This in turn got me to thinking about artificial intelligence. With ample cause, we do not fear the robots at Ford. Automated attendants, and automated checkouts at grocery stores are no danger.
What should inspire fear in us are what might be termed “functionally aggregated” robots, which do many different things. As long as things are physically confined along a literal or figurative groove, then AI is no danger.
It seems to me, then, that some system of grading AI could be established, in which the potential danger is rated according to the number of tasks that robot can do. The closer they get to functional,physical freedom, the more hazard they present.