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[Reelya]

Do you think humans are smart enough to make a machine smarter than us?

Also I'm banking on biological advancements to keep us as smart as AIs

The logic doesn't hold except in the most superficial sense. We can make a computer that plays chess better than any human, something that was once help up as the holy Grail that proved machines would never be smarter than humans. The same argument could be applied to vision: "Do you think humans see well enough to make a machine the sees better than us?".

Also, there's the idea of bootstrapping design. Consider the human embryo, its has zero "intelligence" yet self-generates into a highly-intelligent human. "Intelligence" wasn't coded into it's DNA, that was merely a sequence of bits which just happens to code to intelligence.

In a similar fashion, we should one day have enough CPU power to "brute force" test many different AI designs - an AI program written to purely evaluate the intelligence of other AIs (the testing AI is not required to possess intelligence, in the same sense that an IQ test is not an intelligent artifact), and a genetic algorithm which mutates and evolves other AIs.

Any AI or digital computer program can be encoded as a number: it's just a search-space problem, then. Brute-force search through the set of integers would yield every theoretically possible computer program (including all possible AIs). No intelligence required for this operation. All programming and design activities are just procedures to reduce the search-space.

[Monsieur Fish]

I'd like more money, but how can people justify Johnny Fed forcing businesses to pay more? How will this affect any other goods and services?

Note, I am a libertarian who has never gotten around to researching this. Call me stupid if you wanna hurt my feelings, bro.

[Max White]

Because if the businesses don't pay their employees more, then employees don't have the money to buy anything, economies start to suffer and soon your entire structure is fucked.
It is a case of 'Johnny Fed' forcing businesses to take their darn medicine, no matter how bitter it tastes.

[Nadaka]

The absolute inequity of power between business and someone hoping to survive by getting a job is so great that someone has to step in and equalize that vast gulf. We wouldn't need minimum wage laws if America didn't abandon unions.

[Max White]

Well, you might still need them. We have plenty of unions here in Australia to fight for workers rights, and still have a minimum wage. Heck, the current government was formed from the union movement.

[Reelya]

Well there is research that backs up the value of a minimum wage - if you assume employers have more power to set wages than workers do, which skews the textbook model that shows any minimum wage as decreasing employment. In the textbook model, it is assumed that employees and employers have a level-playing field and equal power/information which sets wages in a fair and optimally efficient manner.

Common sense would suggest this just isn't so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage

An alternate view of the labor market has low-wage labor markets characterized as monopsonistic competition wherein buyers (employers) have significantly more market power than do sellers (workers). This monopsony could be a result of intentional collusion between employers, or naturalistic factors such as segmented markets, search costs, information costs, imperfect mobility and the 'personal' element of labor markets.[29] In such a case the diagram above would not yield the quantity of labor clearing and the wage rate. This is because while the upward sloping aggregate labor supply would remain unchanged, instead of using the downward labor demand curve shown in the diagram above, monopsonistic employers would use a steeper downward sloping curve corresponding to marginal expenditures to yield the intersection with the supply curve resulting in a wage rate lower than would be the case under competition. Also, the amount of labor sold would also be lower than the competitive optimal allocation.

Such a case is a type of market failure and results in workers being paid less than their marginal value. Under the monopsonistic assumption, an appropriately set minimum wage could increase both wages and employment, with the optimal level being equal to the marginal productivity of labor.[30] This view emphasizes the role of minimum wages as a market regulation policy akin to antitrust policies, as opposed to an illusory "free lunch" for low-wage workers.

Meanwhile we have empirical studies of the effects on unemployment of increasing the minimum wage:

Wellington (1991) updated Brown et al.'s research with data through 1986 to provide new estimates encompassing a period when the real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) value of the minimum wage was declining, because it had not increased since 1981. She found that a 10% increase in the minimum wage decreased the absolute teenage employment by 0.6%, with no effect on the teen or young adult unemployment rates.[60]

Which clearly doesn't match the textbook-model predictions that net earnings by affects groups will be lower after raising the minimum wage (or at least minimum wages are far below the point that they'd hurt consumption). Increased outflows to employees means more customers / more spending. Just the thing you WANT in a period where consumer purchasing is falling.

[Max White]

It is important to realize that people having money is a good thing.
The more they have the more they spend, thus allowing for better economies to grow. In a low paying environment, people feel limited to the single, cheapest options they can find, thus large companies that have more buying power can own the market much more easily. This is opposed to a higher paying environment where people can afford higher costing, local options.
It is like McDonalds vs the local Cafe. McDonalds is cheaper, while the local is nicer. If people aren't earning much, they are forced to eat at McDonalds and the monopoly grows, while if people can afford to eat at the local Cafe, a healthier polyopoly forms.
The minimum wage supports smaller businesses.

[Pnx]

Why do people always equate intelligence with certain aspects that we see in humans like the will to survive and prosper?

It's reasons like this that I'm skeptical about humans ever achieving AI. Human beings in general seem to have this ridiculously self-centred view of the universe, and look at everything around them through a filter of anthropocentrism.
As a result, a lot of people assume that intelligence is somehow tied up with humanity, so you get ridiculous leaps of logic like "if it becomes smart enough, it will automatically start behaving like a person". Also, I'm not really an expert on the topic, but a lot of AI-type projects I've seen seem to be approaching it from the angle of making computers able to mimic or pass for humans as an end-goal. I've always suspected that thanks to that, we're never going to actually create a true thinking AI. We're just going to create computers that are programmed to be able to fool humans into thinking they're human-like effectively, which is completely different.

A++ derail, would take part again.

Well yeah, that is sort of the idea, because once an AI is capable of having conversations, thinking about subjects, forming opinions, and making judgement calls... what's the difference between it and the human mind?

There's actually this whole idea amongst transhumanists/futurists/whatever-you-want-to-call-it where eventually AI's will eventually reach the point where they're capable of doing everything a human being can do (which includes programming), and at that point they'll become capable of improving themselves, streamlining their thought processes, developing their hardware, things of that nature. Then they use the improved intelligence they've developed to make themselves even more intelligent, which they can then use to make themselves even more intelligent... and it sort of becomes a big feedback loop. At which point you'll reach the singularity.

Now, whether that will all really pan out, and more importantly when is something I'm honestly quite curious about.

[Max White]

Why do you want AI that can talk to people? Sounds dull, what would it talk about? Its system specs? What somebody else told it? Seriously, it lives in a box...

I want an AI that can calculate the most efficient train time table, or write nice music, or drive a car... I don't know, I guess as a programmer I'm used to seeing software as a tool to solve problems rather than a thing to do stuff with.

[Reelya]

My view is that computer intelligence will be so alien in design compared to our brains, that milestones like "as smart as a human" will be meaningless. A computer able to converse effectively with a human on random topics will likely already be lightyears ahead of us in things like mathemetical computation and logical proofs", they won't have the same logic blind-spots that humans demonstrably suffer from at all, but they will probably have their own quirks, which seem inhuman to us.

BTW to DeKaFu (and Max White): mimicking humans isn't really "strong AI" research, it's more in the line of user-interface research as a front-end to expert systems and web spiders etc. But the media tend to conflate anything which mimics a human as "AI". What are you going to talk to talking AIs about? Whatever their job happens to be. You want to talk to them so that they can help file your income taxes or other boring stuff. Think about all the call-center workers who could be replaced with a robot voice, once their comprehension levels are high enough.

[Max White]

Because Bay12: Histories of wealth and computing.

[Lagslayer]

The absolute inequity of power between business and someone hoping to survive by getting a job is so great that someone has to step in and equalize that vast gulf. We wouldn't need minimum wage laws if America didn't abandon unions.

If a union has to force the employees to support it, is it even ethical? That's like saying "You are too stupid to defend and organize yourselves, so we are going to put leaders in place to force you to organize.", and I feel that sort of destroys the whole point. What do you find inherently wrong with employees not wanting to join the union, but still wanting to work in the factory or whatever? Because as far as I'm aware, some states have laws that force people to join the union, while the others do not force you, but you are never barred from joining it of your own accord.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The problem arises in that if everyone isn't in the union, the employer works to give preferential treatment to the non-union workers and weaken the union's power, thus rendering the union impotent or nonexistent. If everyone is in the union and has to be, they can't do that.

Unions are not universally good entities by any means, and can be paternalistic, but they do provide a power bloc for workers that is otherwise nonexistent.

I myself am somewhat torn on the issue, but there's no question that unions have their place.

[Scelly9]

PTW

[Nadaka]

The absolute inequity of power between business and someone hoping to survive by getting a job is so great that someone has to step in and equalize that vast gulf. We wouldn't need minimum wage laws if America didn't abandon unions.

If a union has to force the employees to support it, is it even ethical? That's like saying "You are too stupid to defend and organize yourselves, so we are going to put leaders in place to force you to organize.", and I feel that sort of destroys the whole point. What do you find inherently wrong with employees not wanting to join the union, but still wanting to work in the factory or whatever? Because as far as I'm aware, some states have laws that force people to join the union, while the others do not force you, but you are never barred from joining it of your own accord.

The union IS the workers organizing to defend themselves.