Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
The highlighted parts are a kind of TL;DR, but in the context here actually reading it - it is not much - is actually required to get anything out of it for the arguments used here.
Anything technological is orders of magnitude more complex.
Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything.
Some AI doing everything is harder than the East Bloc countries attempting to use central planning for the whole economy. Their economy was much more simple than what such a mighty AI would require for itself and its robot minions. And that's just the organization.
I did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Douglas Adams hints at hidden complexity towards the end of HHGTTG, talking about the collapse of Golgafrincham's society.
You overlook just one single tiny thing and it escalates to failure from there. Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. You may just end up with a very difference eco-system, but as long as the environment is not completely outside the useful range it will grow and reorganize. human-made engineered things on the other hand will just fail and that's it, they will not rise on their own from nothing. Human-made systems are much much more fragile than biological ones (even if you can't guarantee the kind of biological system you will get after rounds of growth and adaptations).
> Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything
Doesn’t it though?
The bauxite mine owners in Pincarra could purchase hypothetical robotic mining & smelting equipment. The mill owners in Downey, the cocoa leaf processor in New Jersey, the syrup factory in Atlanta, and others could purchase similar equipment. Maybe they all just buy humanoid robots and surveil their works for awhile to train the robots and replace the workers.
If all of those events happen, Coca Cola supply chain has been automated. Also, since e.g. the aluminum mill probably handles more orders beyond just coke cans, other supply chains for other products will now be that much more automated. Thereby the same mechanism that built these deep supply chains will (I bet) also automate them.
> Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them.
If the machines used to implement manufacturing processes are also built in an automated way, the system is effectively self-healing as you describe for biological systems.
> did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Perhaps the centralized AI “Gaia” becomes an orchestrator in this scheme, rather than the sole intelligence in all of manufacturing? Not too familiar with this franchise to make a more direct comparison, but my larger point is that the complexity of the system doesn’t need to be focused on one single greenfield entity.
Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.
So, no. You are not thinking far enough, only the next step. But it is a complex vast network, and every single thing in it except the humans has that man-made item deficiency of decay without renewal.
You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops.
Humans have to intervene fixing unforeseen problems all the time! It is humans that hold all those systems together.
Even if you had AGI, human brains are far from perfect too so that would not change anything in the end, we have biology to the rescue (of us in general, not necessarily the individual ofc) when we miss stuff.
Let us assume, at some point in the near future, it is possible to build a humanoid robot that is able to operate human-run machines and mimic human labor:
> Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.
If robots can repair a man-made object or build an entirely new one, the object is effectively self-repairing and self-replicating for the purposes of a larger goal to automate manufacturing.
> You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops
So… don’t? Surely the robots can be tasked to perform proactive inspections and maintenance of their machines and “coworkers” too.
> But it is a complex vast network
…that already exists, and doesn’t even need to be reimagined in our scenario. If one day our hypothetical robots become available, each individual factory owner could independently decide the next day to purchase them. If all of the factories in the “supply chain graph” for a particular product do this, the complex decentralized system they represent doesn’t require human labor to run. It doesn’t even need to happen all at once. By this mechanism I propose the supply chain could rapidly organically automate itself.
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?
Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
