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And it's pretty much a large part of "Manna" by Marshall Brain (well worth a read, by the way)...

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

If you want to read a tidy science fiction on the topic of automation, then I strongly recommend Manna. You can read the story for free at the author's website.

Manna
Chapter 1
by Marshall Brain
Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.

Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting with its first restaurant in Cary. The Burger-G chain had an attitude and a style that said "hip" and "fun" to a wide swath of the American middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe Garcia. Over time, Burger-G grew to 1,000 outlets in the U.S. and showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G would soon be one of the "Top 5" fast food restaurants in the U.S.

The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called "Manna", version 1.0*.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Manna? Is that you?

> Do you realize that the driving force of UBI in today's environment is to actually allow people to survive without working?

You realize there's no reason to assert that? There's nothing published or publicly said, by the organizations running these experiments, to that effect.

You do realize there's more context behind UBI than just Y Combinator's press release? Do press releases really need to repeat everything just for you?

I can also confirm it [Ethics] was a worthless class

Underwater basket-weaving is more important and useful than an Ethics class.

You might not have seen everything yet (believe it or not for a 20 yo), but you should have picked up what's right and wrong from your parents years and years ago. Even a well-taught Ethics class would generate a "Sucks to be you" response.

Either you try to do the "golden rule/right thing" by other people even far far down the chain, or you don't. Sometimes they'll agree with you, sometimes they won't. Sometimes they'd disagree with you because they don't know all of the issues. ("Sometimes you'll feel like a nut, ... .") And SURPRISE: Not Every Single Thing You Do is Earth-shattering, either.

With Google China: is it better to give them easy access to locate some data, or not? Their leaders must think so (and also want to hide "uneventful" items.) Europe wants to hide old "eventful" items with the "Right to Be Forgotten." I disagree with the latter - if it's true, if it happens, it should be findable, a minute or a century old. Now if it's false (and proved to a court I guess) then the target article won't be there to start with or will have a correction, and so either Google will forget about it too or will have both items.

I don't know if Google China is ethical or not. Sorry, I didn't realize Google (or anyone) is in the ethics business. If they at least break-even and keep customers, they'll survive. If not, they won't. PEOPLE are ethical at best, I think companies only have ethical tenancies because of that. Just wait until Manna comes around.

All of the billionaires apparently have hidey-holes in New Zealand -- I wonder how ethical they'll all be. (Actually, I'd expect a lot initially -- they're all peers and equals or they wouldn't be there. Ethics will wake up once one of them is sick or wounded.)

You can have a computer monitor their work speed and quality. ... Better to give them push-style notifications that they're falling behind and need to catch up or get terminated, etc

Manna? Is that you? Manna? OK, I'm ready for the next task.

Manna covered this in 2003.

Sounds like they're rolling out the next feature of Manna. Seriously though, there's not much to worry about. If Walmart is going to be recording conversations at the checkout lines, that's only 2-3 employees even when the store is slammed, right?

Manna by Marshal Brain

Of all the dystopian fiction I have read, THIS story -- though there's no war or zombies in it -- is the most terrifying. Every other dark future has its struggles to survive and challenges to solve. But this story offers no hope at all. It leads past the movie Idiocracy, but not that one, an alternate Idiocracy future where energy drink Brawndo will forever water the crops.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Rob

The post-peak-screen voice and VR tech isn't about us. It about enabling the complete corporate domination of human labor by the super-rich, as-predicted in Marshall Brain's Manna. (It becomes more prescient every year.)

Welcome to the world of http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Slowly over time, universal Income is increased (doesn't cover "basic" needs any more)

Actually the cost of most commodities and services *should* be trending towards zero as automation takes over (which is what will make something like UBI necessary due to 50%+ unemployment).
But in all likelihood we'll end up living out the bad ending in Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Time to start investing in that "Australia Project": http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

You should read Manna by Marshall Brain from 2003.

That's kind of the whole point of just going through with it and automating every dumb job - we'll never be 'ready' if we pretend life is a contest of who is most willing to bend over backwards to work harder for their employers, as the chairs start falling away, and the music speeds up.

This gets posted a lot, but it's a decent freely-readable short story on the subject:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

In our current economy, folks sell stuff that others want to pay money for. Everything else is an expense - and human experience and effort is not valued in the economy itself, unless it can be packaged and sold.

That's cool, and offers some important efficiencies, until the game gets optimized too far. The most efficient system is monopoly, and we keep bounding up against that over and over, with increasing frequency.

Which is kind of ironic, given how the concept of 'incorporation' came into existence - as contracts of limited time to operate by governments, with limited liability.

Now, those same incorporated entities basically consume any task, just in order to gobble up that sweet, sweet government-backed currency, that artificial food of pure economics. They now control government to a great degree, just to have more free access to those dollar dollar bills.

And it's at the moment, the primary goal of most folks entering the world - to find a corporation to be employed by, to help a company grow, to spend 50+% of your waking hours, forgetting about your personal interests, and worrying about not having your professional persona hurt at your workplace.

Could we get an economy build on humane scientific exploration of possibilities next? Like, actual exploration of truth?

Ryan Fenton

That will be far more devastating to them than if they are have a period of time to actually get new jobs.

These folks are not qualified to do anything other than drive for a living. A very large percentage of them are barely trainable as it is. The jobs they are capable of learning to do, automation is already wiping out. Like the manufacturing workers, their ranks will be decimated, and they will end up blighting the country because we force them into abject poverty. There is nothing of value that society will be willing to pay them to do, so we better figure out what the plan is because Manna is comming.

Just bought a copy of "Manna" for kindle, the first few pages are good! http://marshallbrain.com/manna... Fiction is a great way to explore possibilities.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Actually, if enough labour is replaced with robots, communism might be preferable to UBI. UBI in any form currently being proposed will not solve mass unemployment. It'll gravitate towards a Universal Minimum Income, i.e. the minimum amount you need to survive. And much of that may be paid in kind, which sounds nice but takes away a lot of your choices. I can see a future where most of us will live in government provided (shit) housing, eating in a communal dining hall, and being supplied with most of our other needs like clothing and furniture, with only a couple of bucks of freely spendable pocket money. With no hope of betterment, and only the happy few enjoying the fruits of their robots' labour. They wouldn't need much of a consumer market anymore, and the old economy would become more or less meaningless. The only thing that would matter is ownership: of land, robots, and natural resources.

The communist version of that would be that we all share ownership of those things, and of the means of production (robots). You'd still have little chance of betterment, but at least all would be equal and - much more importantly - it would leave everyone much more free in their choice of lifestyle. At least if we set the size of the pie to be divided at a reasonable level, because if some eco-nutter in power decides that we should minimize our footprint, we'll all be stuck in that shit government housing again, eating shit food.

I'm no communist, I believe in individual ownership, and I believe that our current economic system is fair and reasonably effective. But I also believe that it will break down horribly if we get to a situation where the employment rate will be very low for a very long time.

It's possible the technology will not automate those jobs out of existence, but merely regulate them.

When the computer literally directs the work the people will become the machine.

That's the utopian version. The dystopian one - which seems more likely to emerge from what we have now - is that a small group will own the robots, the rest of us will be without means to make a living and will be on universal basic income... which most definitely will be as low as possible.
The utopian version isn't necessarily all that great either. It could end up like communist Russia, or like This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. "Control everyone's lives, and you'll eventually get around to controlling everyone's deaths". That's a great read, by the way. Another good one on the subject is Manna, a free novella that covers both the utopian and dystopian labor free societies.

How to Make a Million Dollars by Marshall Brain

Seems this story is slowly getting more and more relevant :) http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

It's called "Manna", short for "Manager".

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

What work exactly is being shifted from a machine to a human at the self checkout? The only difference is that the customer is doing the work instead of the cashier. And if the scanning is done with a portable hand terminal or with a smart phone (like it is in our local supermarket), self checkout takes a lot LESS human time since there's nothing to unpack; purchases are selected, scanned and bagged as you go. At the checkout you scan the bar code on your phone's screen, pay, and walk out, all of which takes a couple of seconds.

As for scarcity of labour, the fear of AI is that it is set to replace certain classes (for lack of a better word) of humans, rather than certain jobs or industries. The obsolete buggy whip maker might retrain to become a cobbler, a farm hand replaced with mechanized farming might go to the city to find a job at the assembly line. But versatile AI and robots? If your job as burger flipper, lathe operator or middle manager is replaced by a smart robot, that same robot could do pretty much any other job for which you would conceivably be qualified. Perhaps some jobs will always be unsuitable for robots, and perhaps some new humans-only jobs will be invented along the way, but the grim reality seems to be that overall there will be far fewer jobs to go around.

That would be fine if we would end up not doing any mind numbing work while still increasing our living standard. And that's a big if. As it is, labour is our chief mechanism for generating and distributing wealth. With all work done by robots, we'll need a new economic mechanism, or all wealth will end up with whomever owns the robots (Marx' means of production). Do read "Manna", a free ebook that deals with some of these issues. I for one am not convinced that if robots will slowly replace most human labour, our economic system will shift accordingly to move towards a society of abundance rather than a future with most of humanity living in cheap Terrafoam tenement blocks under robot guard, on whatever pittance is deemed the minimum to keep us docile, while the happy few get to enjoy the rest of the planet.

The "Parable of the broken window" was written in 1850. Let me clue you into something: NO ONE in the 19th century, and next to no one in the 20th century even, could have anticipated the sea change that is pervasive automation that we're seeing today. It's nowhere near the same thing as what we experienced in the industrial revolution with tractors displacing farmhands. The changes that are happening are different in kind and require different economic theories to reason about them, because the parameters involved are different.

The jobs being displaced are of entirely different categories than mindless or repetitive jobs. Kiosks are only the first step. Software developers and architects, financial analysts, dozens of types of first-level and middle managers, and even CEOs are potentially on the chopping block in the next 50 years, as machines can do their jobs cheaper and more efficiently.

Just because the economy has more money doesn't mean that money is being spent on paying out wages to people. It could be spent on paying other billionaires for use of their automated systems. As the cost of maintaining these systems decreases with reliability and durability improvements, there just isn't much need for human labor. And despite the population increasing, what I think you'll see is a much slower growth in total wages paid out to the lower 99%, or even stagnation, and sharp decreases during any hint of economic downturn of any magnitude. Meanwhile the top 1% will see exponential growth in wealth, as the 1% always retains the means to keep getting richer, and now we have governments around the world who are willing to meddle in the markets to ensure that the top 1% continue to gain in wealth even as the economy overall shrinks.

As long as our economy operates on the theory that you have to work to earn money to buy things like food, clothing and shelter that you need to live, we need productive jobs to put people in that they can perform to earn that money; otherwise they'll be homeless beggars or looking for government entitlement programs to keep them from starving to death.

If your solution is to let them starve, you're a heartless bastard. You try starving and see how much you like it.

If your solution is to pay them a universal basic income, you're on the right track.

If your solution is to wave your magic wand of 200 year-old economic theory and say "don't worry, as long as there's money people will have jobs", you're burying your head in the sand like an ostrich.

While we're quoting diametrically-opposed theories at one another, take a look at these for an opposing viewpoint:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Actually that Manna story is a bit closer to reality than you think. We are now in the realm of self-driving automobiles - 8 years to get bugs out of the system sounds quite feasible. And the expense is coming down significantly - it is already in the $50k cars, so it will trickle down to the $25k cars fairly quickly. Don't look at it as to what the employee will pay, look at the ROI from an employer's standpoint. A robot that does the work of a minimum wage employee that does not require training and pays for itself in about 15 months... look at what was science fiction in 2000... and then look today.

Already covered in Marshall Brain's book "Manna".

The real problem is not the robots. It's the humans.

If you use robots to further your greed, then yes, the rich get richer. If you use robots to help out humanity, surprise! They help out humanity. (It should be noted that Manna actually has a form of Universal Basic Income which is used to manage resources).

Thanks for injecting more evidence from notable sources into this discussion.

Because animal fast concentrates pesticides more than plant fat, I'd agree protein and fast from meat is riskier in our society especially for cancer. That said, have these studies you cited made a clear distinction between processed meets (e.g. frankfurters) and factory-farmed meat raised on grain and *also* grass-fed organic meat? From other discussion of such studies, I doubt they have. The subject pool of people who eat cleaner meats these days is so small to begin with...

And there are counterstudies (responding to the one link you supplied that villifies saturated fats):
http://www.webmd.com/cholester...
"New research questions that belief. A recent review of 72 studies found no link between saturated fat and heart disease. The review also showed that monounsaturated fats like those in olive oil, nuts, and avocados don't protect against heart disease."

The good news is, more and more people are aware of the many nuances here, and we can expect better and better studies to come out on all this. Some of this depends on what you focus on -- cancer, hearty disease, dementia, daily energy level, overall resistance to infection, and so on. It also matters whether we are talking what growing kids need, what active adults need, and what sedentary adults need, and what older adults need since needs and risks may be different in all these cases.

And one has to put any risk in context. As it says here from one study showing the dangers of processed meats:
http://www.webmd.com/food-reci...
"In absolute terms, the increased risk is pretty small. For example, the risk that a man will get colorectal cancer during the course of his lifetime is about 4.8%, on average -- or said differently, about 1 in 21 men will develop it in his lifetime. A 17% increase in that risk bumps it up to 5.6%, or changes that risk to about 1 in 18 men. By comparison, a 2005 study determined that smoking a single daily cigarette could increase a person's risk of lung cancer by about 200% to 400%."

However, the health effects of "diabesity" (Dr. Hyman's term for diabetes+obesity) from eating refined sugar and refined carbohydrates are enormous and devastating to out society. So while I tend towards vegetarian/vegan foods myself for both health and ethical reasons, I have to concede that the risks of even processes meat consumption may be much lower risk than eating a lot of refined sugars and refined carbs which many people do (including many vegans and vegetarians for whom "vegetables" may not be a big part of their diets). In this case, many people might be choosing between a 20% increased risk of cancer vs. hugely increased risk of heart disease from refined carbs and a much less fulfilling low-energy life.

But even Dr. Fuhrman, who promotes a mostly vegan diet, says that people who get 10% of calories from meat and eat a lot of vegetables are going to be much healthier than a 100% vegetarian who does not eat many vegetables.

So someone like Marshall Brain may have benefited enormously from going on the meat-heavy Dukan diet and losing 50 lbs to even as I tried to encourage him (in blog comments) towards eating more vegetables instead (precisely because of cancer risks and other health risks).
http://marshallbrain.com/dukan...

That said, eating lower on the food chain makes sense for many reasons -- including ethical ones beyond the concentration of pesticides and heavy metals like mercury in animal fats. And Marshall Brain probably could have done the same using Dr. Hyman's or Dr. Fuhrman's approaches with greater long-term health benefits and a permanent shift to a new sustainable eating plan.

Also, different people may respond differently to the same food (i.e. "Nutrigenomics")

What you've thought of is basically the second half of Manna.

For fast food automation here's a link to a short story called Manna by Marshall Brain that I've seen a few times on /. and is a good read. It covers an idea for the "automation" of cleaning at a burger chain that seems quite disturbingly possible.

Poverty rates have been rising in the US since the 2008 financial crisis. So how do you figure it has reduced? From this point on, with the effects of automation, poverty will keep climbing.

The US will be getting the terrafoam system, slowly but surely. :)

Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?

A good overview of the concepts is in Manna, a short story by Marshall Brain. It's a quick read and gives an easy description of the economic problems we're in the midst of.

In broad terms, we can imagine an automated factory which is capable of producing all the goods needed by everyone in the country.

Such a factory could get its energy from solar cells, and in addition to making everyone's goods it could make enough solar cells to replenish the ones it has when they go bad, and it could have enough energy to recycle all the waste products from goods that people throw away.

That's a the metaphor of course, but it largely sums up where the labor pool is headed in the next 50 years or so: consumption has an upper bound, automation is making huge sections of the labor force unnecessary, and increases in productivity make the labor we have more effective.

As a data point, note that companies are road testing automated trucks *right now*, companies are testing automated last-mile delivery via drones and rolling robots *right now*, and automated farming is coming on line *right now*.

The trucking thing alone will directly eliminate somewhere between 3 and 5 million jobs, and millions more in support structure: restaurants and hotels on the highway, for instance.

We're at the point *right now* where we have too many capable workers and not enough jobs, and improvements in technology will bring us closer and closer to the "completely automated" factory metaphor used above. The actual factory will be a host of factories distributed around the country, "automated" will still require 100K workers for maintenance and upgrades, and energy will be rooftop solar

...but it's still conceptually one big factory capable of producing everything everyone wants, largely for free.

The regular rules of economics are about to break down. It's currently a sort of cycle, where money flows to the people (through salary), the people purchase things from companies, and the cycle repeats.

With no one working, no one has money to purchase anything so the cycle stops. People starve and the economy halts.

UBI is an attempt at a new economic model. People are given money to spend to keep the economy going, and as a side-benefit people don't starve or commit crimes to survive. Society benefits by having reduced crime and an active economy, and people have more leisure time to do things such as raising children or getting educated.

UBI is one of about 5 proposed solutions for the economic transition we're facing.

It's had a couple of small trials to great success, so it seems like it might be a viable option.

There are pretty much two possible ways for it to go.

Funny, I thought Manna was supposed to start at the burger flippers. Oh well! They've already got these paranoid little hedge fund monkey's judging each other throughout the day, sounds like hell on earth. Couldn't happen to nicer slime bags.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

There is a great short story I read about 10 years ago: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm/ that deals with this exact topic. The similarities are scary.

Obligatory: http://www.marshallbrain.com/m...

I see nobody's linked it yet, so this seems like a good place to put the oblig thingie.

I started laughing at the part where doctors and lawyers have their jobs managed by this system too because "their work can be easily subdivided into fixed tasks". Why does anybody take this ridiculous story seriously? Is that what you people imagine other professions are like?

here's a short story that explores 2 ways an automated society might go

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

I see nobody's linked it yet, so this seems like a good place to put the oblig thingie.

Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.

The problem with "real" economic theories is that there are so many to choose from.

Here's a different economist who extends our current economic system to its logical conclusion, and also presents a viable alternative. It's very readable and a quick read - well worth a few moments if you want to see where we're headed.

It's clear to anyone who studies economics as a math problem that our current system is untenable going forward. In the limit of extremes, automation will supply all of humanity's production needs, while employing no one.

A fine situation, but in that scenario who will have money for purchases?

We're already feeling the pinch here in the US due to globalism. Real wages have been stagnant (against inflation), good jobs are increasingly hard to find, and people are forced to work multiple mc'jobs to make ends meet. Automated vehicles and drone delivery systems will put perhaps 10 million people out of work in the next 10 years.

America can stem the tide a little by stepping away from globalism, bit it's a temporary measure. Ultimately, AI will take over more jobs than it generates, people will tighten their belts and reduce spending, and this will continue until our current system collapses completely.

Something has to change, and we pretty-much know *what* has to change, but no one has any idea or plan on how to get there.

Traditional economics is religion, not science. It never predicts what will happen, only why something *did* happen. It makes conclusions by building a model to fit past data.

If you want to fix the economy, you have to look to the future.

Real economists don't do that.

Working at a warehouse doing the remaining things that are just a bit too tricky for a robot to do yet

Anyone interested in this train of thought may enjoy reading Manna: http://www.marshallbrain.com/m...

http://marshallbrain.com/secon...

Politicians and wonks aren't referring specifically to the Turing definition of Artificial Intelligence. To them, and to much of the public, AI encompasses everything from HAL-like sentience that may take decades to appear, (or might be just around the corner, depending on which pundit you listen to), down to Siri, factory automation, and self-driving cars. And when these more mundane things are included in "AI", then preparing for the economic, social, psychological, and ethical fallout coming in the near future might be a pretty good idea.

People have been claiming that automation will lead to vast numbers of unemployed since the early days of the industrial revolution - the original Luddites - and, to date, have been demonstrably in error.

The key phrase there is "to date". At one time it was inconceivable that we would ever run out of oil, or forests, or that we could have any significant impact on a thing so vast as our planet's weather. Yet today we recognize these things as real threats to our survival as a species. I would say the idea that "we'll always have jobs for everyone" is a similar fallacy; there may always be opportunity for humans to work and create, but will there always be an economic need for them to do so? When robots do all of the physical work, and Artificial Intelligence makes all of the necessary decisions to keep the supply chains and the factories and the mines running smoothly, and there are robots that repair other robots, as well as maintaining the machines that the AI's run on, and the electrical plants that power them - what need will there be for man to work? Check out Marshall Brain's Manna for a compelling picture of how our advancements in automation and AI might well effect our economy and our society.

The increased use of robotics in industry, manufacturing, and other sectors, is almost certainly just the latest change that will ultimately just result in another redistribution of the labour pool to areas that have not been automated.

"areas that have not yet been automated". FTFY

It still sucks if you are one of those put out of work by a robot and have to try and find employment elsewhere, but doom and gloom on a national scale is just FUD.

It shouldn't suck, and it doesn't have to suck. If the benefits of automation and increased efficiency were spread around as they should be, instead of being the new currency of the hoarders in the "point-one-percent" class, we could all have better lives.