The revenge of the humanists

A couple of years ago, when the AI debate was raging only in certain circles and was not yet global, I read a statement that made me think a lot. I don't remember where I found it, but I don't want to present it as if it were my own anyway.
It went something like this: "The only profession that will remain untouched by the current technological revolution is that of the ethics expert." Yes, you read that right, ethics expert, I am talking precisely about moral philosophers.
In fact, the only thing we will need to continue providing to AI agents, without them sorting it out themselves, will be the moral perimeter within which they must operate: the tables of commandments, a manifesto, the rulebook. They can do the rest on their own.
When I was a boy, people used to say: "Go study engineering, medicine, economics, law, at least physics or political science, so at least you'll find a job. What the hell are you studying philosophy for? Do you want to end up unemployed giving lectures to drunks in a tavern?"
And here we are. The lecturer for drunks, the one who out of passion chose the "losing" faculty, will be the new super executive with a million-dollar severance package. And we smart alecks who got the "right" degrees will have to hope that universal income isn't just a meager handout.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

Different

Follow me in this brief thought experiment.
Level 1: the random event - Suppose for a moment that an individual is born with a slight mutation or genetic variant that has the effect of altering one of their so-called "normal" abilities: hearing, sight, walking, digestion, thinking, take your pick. They would be labeled, even officially, as "differently abled".
Level 2: the statistics - Now assume that there is on average a certain number of these individuals, say a fraction of a percentage point of the entire population (for example: 0.00003%).
Level 3: the black swan - Now imagine a catastrophe of natural or anthropogenic origin: a mega asteroid, aliens, a global thermonuclear war, a virus leaked from a lab. You decide, you can be banal and mainstream or creative and conspiratorial, as long as the outcome of the thought experiment does not change: the human species is wiped out, not just from the earth but from the entire universe.
Level 4: the resurrection, or almost - Not so fast, señor! The "normal" part of the species - and only that part - goes extinct. Only so to speak, of course, given that it represented more than 99% of the world's population. Instead, the very individuals carrying the mutation/variant from level 1 survive. They will mate among themselves and their offspring will inherit their gene pool. Including the mutation/variant responsible for their "diversity", as well as their survival. The other version of the ability, the "normal" one, will be just a distant memory. Maybe the idea for a sci-fi franchise.
Level 5: the myth - These new humanoids, in their own way Nietzschean "Übermensch", will be able to tell their children that they are the descendants of an ancient species of "differently abled" beings: our species.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

Work and words

The pedantic rhetoric about work to be "defended at all costs" is frankly bullshit. It's unclear whether these political relics fail to realize the world they live in or if they realize it but pretend to keep living in the days of their youth, because they don't understand a thing about modernity. Or worse, they are terrified of it. 
They keep wanting to impose the "duty to work" by subversively passing it off as a so-called "right to work." "Everyone has the RIGHT to HAVE a job," they repeat. Don't be fooled; words matter, and they use them well to manipulate us.
In reality, work shouldn't be HAD, work should be DONE. And the right, if anything, is a right to an income, or at least to a decent life, not to work for its own sake, at any cost, even if it's a crap, alienating, repetitive, boring, mechanical, degrading, or even dangerous job.
So if work is DONE by algorithms and machines (read AI and robotics) instead of humans, that's fine anyway, actually it's even better, because it eliminates degradation and danger for people and increases productivity and process efficiency. If you insist on wanting people to do work that is no longer needed, you aren't guaranteeing them a right, you are imposing a duty on them. Is that your political line? To me it's madness, but if you take responsibility for calling it by its proper name, without using deceptive expressions, go right ahead.
Having cleared up the deception of the DUTY to work (the one that must be HAD rather than DONE), let's get to the right. The real one, not duty disguised as right.
If the same (crap) work that men used to do is now done by technology, entrepreneurs will still make their fair profit and the system will continue to enjoy the services and products it needs (if it really needs them). Why, then, should the only ones to lose out be the redundant workers? Industry adopts technologies developed through the joint effort of the entire community, funded also by the contributions of those redundant people. The processes are better, the work is done, and done well too, costs are reduced to a minimum, and profit is guaranteed, if not increased. The merit is shared. The additional cost-cutting that would be achieved by failing to pay the dismissed workers is immoral. People must continue to receive a salary (or something similar) sufficient to live a dignified life, even if they no longer find a place in sectors where activities are carried out without them. The profits are still there, taxes on those profits are collected, the funds for the wages of citizens replaced by technology exist, and they come precisely from the work done by that technology. As long as they don't end up in the wrong pockets.

The grim motives behind the little speeches of clever folks who instrumentally confuse verbs (to have and to do) or nouns (rights and duties) to screw the masses and favor the usual wealth hoarders are easy to expose.
Besides, enlightened entrepreneurs should see the advantage of such a solution: increased productivity, contained risks, social stability, and guaranteed consumption.
Given that, as the great Karl Popper taught us, technology drives politics, economy, and history, you cannot stop the ongoing revolution with semantic tricks, and trying to manage it inappropriately due to political inadequacy or individual greed will not help anyone.
Besides, in the environments where this technological revolution is taking place, this is common knowledge to everyone. Those who haven't caught on yet are stuck in an obsolete vision of society.
And it is high time they "un-obsoleted" themselves.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

Feral in an urban context

In so-called developing countries, I often happen to see some truly unique individuals. The most incredible ones are those who live practically in the wild, yet within an urban environment.
They follow behavioral codes and develop survival tactics that for us regimented ones (someone will read "civilized") are totally foreign. They behave a bit like pre-agricultural nomads, but exploit all the possibilities that modernity makes available to them.
They may appear curious, funny, mysterious, but they are certainly full-fledged human beings, self-sufficient—indeed, certainly better than us specimens of "homo technologicus" at getting by in times of hardship.
Furthermore, although they are viewed with suspicion by passersby and are also targeted by police raids, they seem to cling to a sense of freedom and self-determination that is perhaps the real motivation behind their extreme choices.
I wonder then, why don't we see people like that here—or at least, almost never? Could it be that we carefully suppress certain traits inherent to human nature itself, so that that kind of individual does not appear in society? Would they bother us? Would they throw our system of rules and values into crisis? Would they scare us?
I find the simple question itself—its legitimacy and possibility—profoundly unsettling.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

Neo-slavery

I thought I wouldn't write anything on the problem of rider slavery, because it has such a trivial solution that it wouldn't deserve much attention. Instead, I decided to write about it precisely to address the reason why this solution is not applied.
Let's start with the solution. The total cost of delivery must include a contribution for the rider that is much higher than the current one. Much higher. And whoever places the order must pay it.
If you don't want or can't cook for yourself and prefer restaurant food, but you don't want to go to the restaurant, neither to eat there nor to pick up your meal in person, and you expect someone to deliver it to your home, well, you have to pay for that service, because the person providing it is there to serve you, not to be your slave.
The restaurant owner might give you a small discount on the menu because you aren't taking up space in the dining room and don't need to be served at the table, but someone still has to work to package and deliver your meal.
You pay the rider's cost, and currently it is too low. Even a fool understands that.
So why hasn't such a trivial problem been solved?
Because the cause is all of us, responsibility is highly distributed and therefore ignored. In cases like this, it's easy to pretend nothing is wrong. Furthermore, the injured party is a minority and weak, so the majority takes vile advantage of it and gets away with it. Even though the sacrifice would ultimately be minimal, people still decide not to make it. Even though when the roles are reversed, that is, when our own salary is at stake, we stand up for our rights and denounce abuses, whether real or not.
We are selfish and greedy, not out of malice but by nature. This is what politics and the law are for: to smooth out the natural flaws of the individual in favor of the community. 
Unfortunately, politics and the law do not always do their job well. Nor do we citizens. Unlike the riders, who despite this always and inevitably get the short end of the stick.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

High tech Buddhism: how to get out of the infamous video-scrolling-loop

The debate over the effects of smartphones on society and human mental health has been ongoing for quite some time. 
The situation has obviously gotten worse in the last 2-3 years. Buses and trains are full of people who seem to be staring hypnotized at the screen of their phone, swiping their finger on it now and then, just like zombies. 
New techniques, such as continuous video scrolling loops, have been introduced. They target some well known weak points of our psyche and they promote the production of some hormones that give us pleasure. If you feel guilty after having wasted hours watching some silly videos non-stop, well do not worry: it's not your fault. You're being manipulated like a lab mouse. Fortunately (maybe) we're not mice, and we do have methods to preserve our mental independence, if we want to. So if you are happy with your hours of trance like state you can ignore the rest of this post. But if you want to get out of this mental trap you might find what follows useful. 
The solution is actually grounded in some very old ideas. Good old Siddhartha Gautama, aka the great Buddha, had a very similar insight when he was trying to find a way out of our obsessive thinking about past and future, that distracts us from the only moment that matters: the present one. That solution is called MINDFULNESS.
Let’s clarify the problem first. 

Expectations and reality

If the expectations you had
were never actually met,
you'd better exit virtuality
and start to manage reality.