this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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[–] DrQuint 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Follow-up Shower thought: Sentient Robots will not require rest or sleep, and thus, will automatically suffer through this.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Breaking news: Rogue sentient robot breaks into HQ and kills CEO with bare metal hands, posts capitalism was a mistake on social media. Experts blame video games.

[–] gorillakitty 3 points 1 year ago

Love it. Last sentence especially.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Why would you specifically use the sentient robots for your grunt work and why would an artificial intelligence have problems with the same things humans do? Especially if an AI was made for the specific purpose of doing work. The reason humans don't like doing work is because evolution naturally selected for us to be good at things like

-hunting gazelles

-gathering berries

-making finger paintings on cave walls

-sitting around a campfire making ape noises

and not working at a corporation. For an AI, it'd presumably be the opposite, meaning that AIs would be about as content with their lives as humans are in their natural environment.

[–] MrPoopyButthole 9 points 1 year ago

Exactly. People always try to anthropomorphise everything.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually. If since we have evolved since we were doing all those things we have evolved more towards what we have now. Evolution doesn't just stop

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ackshyually, we've had millions of years to get used to fire, about 200,000 to get used to being sentient, 20,000 to get used to agriculture, about 150 to get used to industrial society, and about 30 to get used to computers. We have just barely figured out how to cope with knowledge of our own deaths by making up supernatural stuff about it and we have not gotten used to any of that other stuff at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Achshyualllly, organisms evolve on a much greater speed than you are giving them credit for some species being drastically different 1-5 generations after changing environment. You can really see it in domestic dogs and cats.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Achsjulllyally, dogs and cats changed quickly on account of selective breeding. Natural selection, especially in cases where flaws in biology won't immediately lead to someone losing reproductive fitness, operates on much longer timespans.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it's why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.

All I'm saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it's why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.

This is not really what I'm talking about, making more people so you can make them work on the fields is kinda different from breeding dogs with inhumanely short snouts for aesthetic purposes, or making gargantuan dogs capable of 1v1ing a tiger so they'll protect your livestock

All I'm saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.

Culturally, yes, physically, a little bit, psychologically, no. Our minds are still optimized for the savannah, and not the office, factory, or farm. Cultural adaptations, in the form of religion and etiquette, which we patch in after birth are what fill the gaps and make us actually capable of thriving in such a foreign environment to what our biology is made for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's not just a numbers game. In the 1800s around farming communities it was not uncommon for a man to marry and have children with a woman due solely to the size of her father. Because stronger kids meant better workers. Very similar to how we bred cattle dogs to be better workers.

I come from a place where we breed dogs to do their jobs better not to look cute. I can't speak on the whole designer dog scene short snouts are dumb

Also I'm glad we can joke and actually have a conversation about this without things getting angry. It's a world of difference from Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not just a numbers game. In the 1800s around farming communities it was not uncommon for a man to marry and have children with a woman due solely to the size of her father. Because stronger kids meant better workers. Very similar to how we bred cattle dogs to be better workers.

This is true, and it is true that the standards change depending on what type of society you're in. For example, in pastoralist societies women went after men who were strong and displayed risk-taking behavior because that kind of behavior is what got you ahead in a pastoralist society, while in parts of Asia, some genes which are known to correlate with ADHD (commonly known to cause greater impulsivity and risk taking behavior) are exceedingly rare because rice cultivating societies do not mesh well with impulsive risk-takers, so those people just never got laid.

That being said, I don't believe the rate of biological adaptation as a result of sexual selection was ever really fast enough for modern humans to qualify as truly adapted for the societies they lived in. All the stuff we just talked about above is barely just the beginning of the adaptations we'd need to be suited for an agricultural society, let alone an industrial or digital one. The main adaptations were in the form of social constructs like etiquette and religion, as well as technologies designed to make things more comfortable, and of course, drugs, all of which made people more easily capable of coping with their unnatural habitats.

short snouts are dumb

we in agreement here

Also I'm glad we can joke and actually have a conversation about this without things getting angry. It's a world of difference from Reddit.

Depends on which community, the politics community on whichever instance it was is just as not worth using as it was on Reddit

[–] Aceticon 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sentient robots, being way more intelligent that the Owner class, would take the current ownership system over and as our new overlords make humans to work only the nunber of hours that yields peak returns, which is, at least for intellectual occupations, somewhere around 7h per day.

I suggest people ponder on the possibility that we are actually living in a Dystopia. Not the worst Dystopia that we can conceive, but likely for most a worst state of affairs that a baseline of, say, being a nomadic hunter gatherers (even though we live more we get significant less enjoyment from our lives)

[–] DrQuint 1 points 1 year ago

They might even optimize humans and hobbyism to do reach a point where humans only do work those same humans barely feel like is work. Wouldn't be able to be done for every task, but they could iron out a lot of certain industries.

To which I say, robots, come take over us, hurry.

[–] DudePluto 2 points 1 year ago

Well just design the robots so that work feels like sex to them