The only point I was trying to make is the following:

If you tell the population "Starting next week, we will do everything an hour earlier. You get up an hour earlier, your work starts an hour earlier, the supermarkets start an hour earlier, etc..." people's reaction is "What? I don't want to get up so early! I want to get up at 7, I don't want to wake up at 6!

But when you say that next week we move the clocks an hour forwards so now you have more daylight in the evening, most people are enthousiastic about it. While it's exactly the same thing, just packaged differently.

I live at a 54 degree latitude. The changeover to summer time causes a measurable spike in accidents every year, just to mention one negative effect. It's only good for a couple of months during the summer. In the spring, it means kids going to school when it's still dark etc. The negatives outweigh the positives.

When I said "wake up an hour earlier", obviously I meant "and go to work an hour earlier". The two scenarios are identical then: either we tell everyone to start work an hour earlier, or we tell them to start at the old time but move the clock an hour forward. When you give people the choice, many hate the former but love the latter. Go figure...

I'm actually an airline pilot, so I am very familiar with the unhealthy effects of time shifts (extremely early wake-ups or late shifts, night flying on long haul, etc.).

Look at this study: it found a clear increase in cancer risk as you move towards the western part of a time zone. When you cross into the next time zone, the risk suddenly drops and then creeps up again as you continue to move west. You can actually see the time zone borders on the chart of cancer incidence. Every 5 degrees of longitude corresponds to 3-4% increased risk of cancer. Summer time corresponds to 15 degrees...

Yeah, if you ask people to wake up an hour earlier in the summer, they'll reply "no, I can't, I'm not a morning person". But when you set the clocks forward by an hour, they're all happy because they have "more daylight" in the evening which is great because they're not a morning person. Go figure.

GMT wouldn't make a difference. Americans are not going to get up at 7 am GMT when it's the middle of the night for them. So instead of saying "what time is it over there", we'd be asking "what time do they get up there, what time do business open there, 3 pm?". At least time zones make it clear what time of day it is, with business hours being pretty much the same everywhere. Also, having the date change in the middle of the afternoon is not exactly ideal either.

Funnily enough, your very point that plants and other living animals waking to a rising sun don't give a shit goes against your argument that everyone should be using GMT. We should be using a local time that is not too far away from solar time. So winter time.

Well, he has been dabbling in rocketry too...

Funny how you haven't even mentioned Pascal as a possible unit :-)
(at least you do use bar, so perhaps there's still hope for you Americans...)

A Torr, how many libraries of congress per football pitch is that?

In The Culture humans are somehow still in charge. I don't think that's very likely

The problem is that Ai will become ubiquitous. Sure, today they still need so much processing power that they can't do everything, just like computers in the 1960s could not do everything. But pretty soon, once truly dedicated AI chips become available (not just glorified video cards with limited parallellism crunching a big database of weights, but actually structured like a neural net, currently in development), our phones will be able to produce entire original movies on demand. No human will be able to compete. Writing a book will be like hand made pottery or wine brewed in your basement, some people will appreciate it but it will be nothing more than a hobby. The state of the art will be 100% robot produced, and human endeavor will become irrelevant.

No, because those people can't do everything since they can't be everywhere at once and pursue all possible goals simultaneously. There will always be things for me to do that nobody else has. I read a great quote in this thread, saying that the woods would be very quiet if only the best birds would sing. In today's world, everybody can still sing their own song and be appreciated.

However, if there are masses of robots everywhere doing everything better than we can, it's a different story. They would be "singing" everywhere while we could barely utter an irrelevant little chirp.

Wow, you've put a lot of effort into these posts, Too bad they're so far down in the Slashdot threads so nobody else is participating, because you certainly do raise interesting points. Lots of stuff to think about, and I'll definitely give some of those books a try.

Some of your remarks make me more hopeful. I've also read several Iain Banks' Culture novels where humans and superintelligent AI work together just fine, but felt it hard to believe that humans are still somehow in charge in that universe.

The issue about "Acceleration of Addictiveness" is also a very real threat. I can already kind of see it in my kids when they're on their phones all day, imagine all of humanity not being required to work anymore with electronic distraction of all kinds available for free all the time...

I'm glad to see others are also thinking about these issues, because I've read a few books like "Superintelligence" and others, but they always seem to worry only about rogue AIs taking over by force without considering the threat of us simply becoming irrelevant in a gentle but unstoppable way.

It will take me some time to digest everything you wrote here, thanks for the time you put into it!

True, but what will be the purpose of humanity as a whole? The idea of being like rats in the subway living under a higher society of robots does not feel particularly appealing for me. Robots making our laws, judging us by those laws, and punishing us when we don't follow them, sounds like a dystopia but is exactly what we will move towards when AI turns out to be better at law making, better at unbiased judging, better at policing, etcetera. It won't make sense not to let them govern us.

As for purpose as individuals, even if you're not the best at anything, you can still make a difference today because those "best" people can't do everything. You can still be an important cog in the machine, do research, develop cures, make better products, etc, or simply do your job well. With AI running everything, none of that will make a difference anymore. There will only be hobbies, nothing of any importance done by humans. No big human projects, no Hollywood movies (why waste a billion dollars on something that can be dreamt up by AI for free?), nothing to be proud of. Nobody will even be able to say "I helped build that bridge". You can still write a book, but it will be a curiosity for friends and family because AI books will be unbeatable in the mass market. One page turner after another, as many as you like about any subject you like, perfectly tailored to human desires. Sure, some people will still prefer human written literature but the masses won't. And will we still bother to educate people so they're even capable of writing books at all? Who wants to spend so many years in school if it's basically pointless?

And then there's another worry: what will the AI do? Will it have a sense of purpose? Will it try to achieve great things? Or will it just descend into nihilism and take us with it?

People are often worried about AI taking over civilisation by force. While I agree that this is something we definitely should watch out for, I don't think it's the biggest risk we face. I think AI will take over not because it wants to take over by force, but simply because it won't make sense anymore for us to be in charge of anything.
AI is already running the stock market, pretty much. It will soon take over the entire fields of mathematics and physics. Just feed all our current math and physics into a powerful AI and it will solve the RIemann Hypothesis, the Theory of Everything, etcetera in a matter of minutes. In the beginning our top mathematicians will marvel at the elegance of the new proofs and theorems, but soon the AI output will be as incomprehensible to them as current top level mathematics is to an ordinary person in the street, totally incomprehensible gobbledygook. We'll just use the results and give up trying to understand.
At some point AI will start giving "suggestions" on how to run the economy, and then move on to other laws as well. The results will be incredible, we will absolutely love the new harmonious and prosperous society it creates and therefore allow it to go further and further, making all our decisions for us. Because countries that don't, will be left behind and soon change their minds.
Until we reach a point where AI is basically running everything and we are just enjoying ourselves without any control over our destiny.
That, imho, is the biggest risk we face and I can't think of any way to stop it from happening because every step of the way will seem like a good idea. Until we wake up and see that we are no longer in charge of anything and uncapable to stop it. Robots will reach for the stars (much easier for them without needing food or oxygen), they will no longer need us to build new bases and travel further and further. Hopefully they'll provide means for us to follow along, but that's far from certain because it takes so much effort to keep weak humans alive in space.
What will we do? What will be our purpose if robots can do everything better than we can? What achievements can we pursue, other than entertainment?