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The Real Job Threat
NicknamesAreStupid writes "The NYTimes reports on a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee (MIT director-level staffers), Race Against the Machine, which suggests that the true threat to jobs is not outsourcing — it's the machine! Imagine the Terminator flipping burgers, cleaning your house, approving your loan, handling your IT questions, and doing your job faster, better, and more cheaply. Now that's an apocalypse with a twist — The Job Terminator."
Reader wjousts points out another of the authors' arguments: that IT advances have cost more jobs than they've created.
Someone has to maintain those terminators...until they can maintain themselves.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
If you use and like the amenities that become possible with technology, then calling technology a "job terminator" is at best hypocrisy.
When you fill out on-line lines of credit applications robots decide on a variety of factors if you qualify or not! They can decide to approve or deny them, OR send them for human (I assume human) revision to approve or deny. So lets get rid of these robots! Except the ones that drive you, that would be pretty sweeet!
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
I'm a programmer working on process automation... when computers can do that themselves I'll start to worry.
Too bad AC get's no credit for his "accomplishment."
There Can Be Only One...
We need a tax on production of labor saving devices!!!
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
... I thought in economics they called this restructuralization unemployment or some such term that wasn't necessarily bad unemployment. But they found work elsewhere -- all four of my grandparents were dirt farmers and I sure the hell am not. Sure, I grew up working on farms but picking rock and bailing hay are chump jobs. I herald the man that does away with that work. I think this statement is universally true: You could provide someone the means to complete all the work they want and -- given they are industrious enough -- you can come back the next day and they will be ready to pay you for more work done in new and different ways.
Well, the fact is that at first there were people that lost their jobs (the generation undergoing restructuring in their trade)
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job. I couldn't be more diametrically opposed to that position. Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better. I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
There will always be more work to be done and I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time. I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
My work here is dung.
The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.
So, instead of working, you can now play while a machine does the work. Seems like an improvement to me.
No, it's been known since at least sometime in the 30s that there would be less and less need for labor in the future. What wasn't foreseen was the willingness of the working class to allow wealth to collect at the top and the increased consumption of things that people don't particularly want or need.
Back then it was expected that in the future the normal work day would shrink from 8 hours to something more like 3 hours as workers got more done in less time. Basically failing to account for robber barons that tend to screw up such things and assuming that people would continue to support their own best interests.
Obviously, they were quite wrong in that regard.
Any job that can be automated will be automated. Machines don't get sick, they don't take holidays, and they don't complain. Most important to business is the fact that they're cheaper.
The current system of economy and government will eventually have to change for the simple reason that a world where the only people with money are the owners of the machines isn't feasible. People need jobs to survive. I've spent time between jobs and on welfare, and it was boring as hell. I can't understand people who are content to live on welfare for year after year after year. It's such a waste of time!
The whole concept of work-for-pay will have to be re-evaluated at some point. There just won't be enough jobs for the people. We're already starting to experience some of the social breakdown that comes from high unemployment and low pay for the average worker.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Your steam drill is calling on line one.
Seriously, this is the kind of discussion we get from the economically illiterate. There is a story, frequently attributed to Milton Friedman, regarding this sort of nonsense:
Dog is my co-pilot.
I've had similar thoughts myself. The problem isn't that machines are going to do jobs people now do, it's that people have been misled to believe their function is to do jobs. Your "job" is to live. Go outside. Have fun. Play with your kids. If we're lucky, someday all these mundane things we have to do now will not need to be done in the future. Your lawnba will cut your grass. Something will crawl up and down your house to paint it.
That said, there's really not a lack of useful work to be done. There's tons to be done in the sciences, for example. Medical research is wide open. There's so much we don't know yet.
There was a story about this involving some sort of super AI called Manna. It ended up essentially destroying the economy, I believe, and relegating everyone below the highest classes to concentration camps for poor people.
I don't know that their solution was ideal, but I do suspect that a post-scarce economy is what we need to investigate.
Seriously... Who was under the assumption that our jobs were to make things cost more and require more people? It's pretty cut and dry that the role of technology is 3 fold.
1. Create better outcomes
2. Cost less (in capital, opex, or both)
3. Take less time (this ties in with part 2 heavily, but I split it out anyway).
None of these factors beyond number 1 could ever result in more jobs. If you begin a project and at the end all you've done is created jobs, you are wasting money. Sometimes a massive increase in the first role can lead to an increase in jobs, but for that to be the case, you typically need a massively better outcome than before (which means likely that the prior function was not adequately staffed anyway).
Sometimes is this kick in the pants that forces people to innovate. It's not the first time it happens and people are forced to adapt. Sort of what is happening in the us economy right now...
There used to be this sci-fi notion that one day, we'd have robots do all of our work, and it would free humanity to live fulfilling lives without toiling on stupid shit. Now we have robots doing all the work, but instead we've used this as an opportunity to impoverish the people who have been put out of work.
Can we change course? Where is our sci-fi paradise?
He's putting the buggy whip manufacturers out of business!
on a related topic - maybe the author needs to read Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" and relax a bit: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
friedman and forgothisname suggested in their book that there are basically 4 classes work creative creators, routine creators, routine servers, and creative servers routines will be automated so if your job is one of those categories then you need to be more creative there was a sci-fi story where you place in society was based on your ability to wear out the stuff that robots made, the protaganist found a way to turn his robots into consumers, been so long that i forgot author and title another comment is that according to some singularity proponents we don't have to figure it out we just have to task the robots and super computers to figure it out. let's just remember to include paramaters like exterminating humans is bad, using us as a power source while trapping us in the 90s is also bad
I'm an intelligence analyst. We're not going to outsource anything that requires a security clearance, and there's no automated software or hardware that can synthesize multiple disparate pieces of evidence into a coherent picture of the battlespace and an assessment of future friendly and enemy courses of action. Yet.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I don't care how good machines get there are certain 'service' jobs for humans that will always be in demand. ;)
Seriously though, I was thinking of MMOs recently and the market for them. For the most part the target market is people who've had their lives made easier by machines. I can't see a machine coming up with all that World of Warcraft is.
The day that machines can come up with Facebook or World of Warcraft or the iPad or a best selling novel is when we have to worry. Machines that invent or create art are problem
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Then ?
google 'venus project'.
Read radical news here
The greatest thing we can do for society would be to eliminate the need for jobs. While it may sound cruel (and probably would have some transitional issues) striving to put everybody out of a job is a vastly noble endeavor.
It would be amazing what we could do if we were free to do anything or nothing at all.
...is a new version of the Amish where they shun all technology developed after, say, 2010. That way I can keep my job as a software developer, but I don't have to learn any of these newfangled technologies.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I think minimum wage keeps more people out of work than technology. By setting a minimum, people are forced to have a minimum set of skills. Unless you work at a job you hate, why would you ever try to improve yourself? High school students need crappy jobs to kick themselves out of the crappy jobs.
they won't be back.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
If you use and like the amenities that become possible with technology, then calling technology a "job terminator" is at best hypocrisy.
What a major fail in logic you have displayed there pal. What sort of logic system or formal model do you use where liking the amenities of technology is mutually exclusive/contradictory to calling such things a job terminator?
Seriously, what major brain fart. I like the amenities provided by technology. That doesn't prevent me from pointing out what is f* obvious, that automation in its current form has lead to a certain number of people not being employed (and not being able to find employment) anymore. Where is the contradiction?
More importantly, where is the hypocrisy? Oh wait, you are commingling ethics (and a twisted form of ethics at that) with inference. Kudos for you, here have a cookie for winning the "dumbass logic" competition.
The short story "Manna" gives out two possible outcomes.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
One possibility is that only the rich owns the machines and everyone else is in government housing living on welfare with no possibility of improving ones life.
The other possibility that is presented is that everyone collectively owns the robots that manufacture everything therefor everyone is rich.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Is that if you happen to live in a 1st world country, you still have a place in the economy, babysitting the machines which do everything else.
Outsourcing on the other hand means that regarldess of your skills or choices, you won't have a job.
Milton Friedman was quite a sarcastical jackass. (I have, of course, no idea who he was. This is also my cue to google his name)
Oblivion Awaits
Since the Industrial Revolution, people have been worrying about machines replacing them. People rioted in the streets because machines were cheaply producing the products they had been handcrafting for centuries.
In the 70's people were predicting that the computer would do so much of our work for us that in a few years, we would all have a 10-hour work-week. What a joke!
I for one am not quite ready to go live off the land. Besides, if I did that, I might run into one of those Y2K nuts that still doesn't know the world survived that apocalypse!
It's really not even close to a new argument. The basic idea, put forward by the Luddites was that new technology makes workers more and more superfluous, ruining the lives of workers.
Karl Marx even took it a step further: He argued that while the new technology leads to lower prices of goods and services, which would appear to benefit workers, he pointed out that employers would then adjust to the lower cost of living by lowering real wages, which meant that the lowest-level workers don't benefit at all from the technology.
I am officially gone from
Look at the industrial revolution.
Lots of problems, but it all turns out in a generation or three.
I do think policy should start to look towards that future, with slow reduction of intellectual property, and a ramping up of a basic income guarantee (in the form of a refundable tax credit against a VAT).
Baby steps that could help now (VAT being the least destructive tax on the economy according to many, and more taxes are needed in the US it seems), and make the transition easier.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The real problem with the minimum wage is that it drives up the cost of labor and encourages people and companies to develop these kinds of inventions. It's not a coincidence that McDonald's has started introducing more automation as well-intentioned, but economics-challenged, legislators have raised the minimum wage nationwide. Obamacare also isn't going to make things any better for low-skilled workers.
Congratulations to them, they've discovered something Karl Marx talked about when he published Capital in 1867.
What this means is a question of social relations. What it could mean is less working hours for everyone, more vacation time, more time for studying and learning, more time for out-there R&D projects, all the while with ever-increasing wealth. But that would be if social relations were in one parameter. Currently it means mass unemployment, chronic debt crises, and IP patent lawsuits. It means bust and boom cycles where in the late 1990s, Silicon Valley pulled in any kid with a high school diploma interested in IT and had them working 60-70-80 hours for years, before casting them off into long-term unemployment.
Ever-increasing productivity could be something people looked forward to, instead of being something that was a real threat to putting food on their table, as the Luddites who smashed mechanized looms realized. That better productivity winds up harming the majority of people is a contradiction within the current system of production we live under. At some point, these contradictions become too great and the system breaks down, then it needs some major reconfiguring. We already see one thought of how this will be done in the US, with all this talk about privatizing Social Security and privatizing education into charter schools. Of course, there's little discussion of why the US spends so much on military bases in Cuba, or Italy, or Kyrgyzstan. Or why it needs 11 aircraft carriers, when there are only 20 aircraft carriers in the world, and only two countries with more than 1 (Spain and Italy). Aside from minor cuts that's not even a question, it's easier politically to cut money to the majority of old Americans or young Americans than the military empire.
All of these ways in which people are losing work wouldn't be a problem if we let go of one fundamental idiocy in American job policy: the idea that more time worked is better.
Americans, in general, seem to think you're only worthy of a respectable income and worthy of overall economic security if you work at least 32 - 40 hours a week, and we're perfectly happy to see doctors, lawyers, programmers, and entrepreneurs pump out 80+ hours per week.
We're just about the only country dumb enough to do this. As automation and industrialization took a firm hold through Europe in the 20th century most of them allowed people more leisure time, effectively spreading the shrinking pool of necessary work across the population.
America, on the other hand, converted all or nearly all of the gains into standard of living increases, most of them not even measured in infrastructure or public works (much of which is in disasterously bad shape at the moment), but in personal possessions like luxury goods and larger homes.
So we watch the pool of strictly necessary jobs, that is to say those that deal directly with food, sanitation, manufacturing, etc. and haven't yet been replaced by robots, shrink by the day, but we still absolutely demand that people work 40 hours a week and take less vacation time than any of their European counterparts.
Less work, more people, absolutely no reduction in hours worked. Where did we think that was going to get us? The invention of entirely new fields and the expansion of academia, research, new bullshit financial positions, etc. isn't enough to replace all of the lost work that simply isn't needed anymore.
So we let people go without. And then we send even more jobs overseas.
Seriously, we had it coming.
No, it's been known since at least sometime in the 30s that there would be less and less need for labor in the future. What wasn't foreseen was the willingness of the working class to allow wealth to collect at the top and the increased consumption of things that people don't particularly want or need.
If people don't want things, why are they consuming them? It's not like this stuff rains from the sky, they have to go to the store and buy it.
SSC
That's the obvious solution.
Threat?
Say THANK YOU, MACHINE.
No, they have to once again go Karel Capek on us here - RUR.
Do you believe that it is a bad thing that people have modernized the agriculture industry and allowed 5% of population to feed 100% of it? (By the way, if you are unsure about your career, still thinking what to do with yourself, I think it's a worthwhile pursuit at this point to think of farming / mining, average age of farmer in USA is 58 years and supplies are the lowest ever, thanks gov't subsidies).
This is nonsense. We want production, we don't want to work. We want more and more production and machines allow us to be more and more productive. We want as much leisure as possible, and we want as little work as possible.
The problem in our way is NOT the machine, the problem is government! Gov't is standing on our way, destroying free market capitalism and causing major job displacement, but in reality there are plenty of jobs, it's just artificial prices that gov't sets for labor are unsustainable in USA and rest of Western world.
With the machines we would still have jobs, but we would be much more productive. Also without gov't setting prices, in many cases humans would actually be more preferable and less expensive than the alternatives - machines, but gov't steps in, sets prices, causes massive imbalances in the economy and we end up with stories like this one.
Normally in bad economies people blame foreigners, bankers and journalists. Since the industrial revolution and the free market capitalism that allowed it, we are also blaming the machines.
This is completely misplaced and shortsighted.
You can't handle the truth.
One day, we'll have robots to post "first", taking yet another job away from the humans.
'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'
The spoons/shovels thing is just a reductionist argument. In the end we want both 'canals' and jobs don't we---both products, productivity, and the means to distribute the resulting goods, services in a way that scales to the contribution given in creating them. Too much in either direction is silly.
While possibly true that the human race may live like the Jetsons one day...the biggest issue today and for the next foreseeable decade or more is still outsourcing and loss of employment to cheaper countries. Once true globalization equalizes itself then and only then will innovation/technology truly start outsourcing jobs from humans. Again this will probably never happen in our lifetime or gen Y generations lifetime. I'm more worried about getting outsourced by big corporations due to H1B Indians taking my job than Mr Robato.
Back then it was expected that in the future the normal work day would shrink from 8 hours to something more like 3 hours as workers
began to spend most of their working day on facebook, ebay, pr0n sites, (unintentionally on) phishing sites, and /.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Humans were hunter gathers for a really long time, and the time from agriculture to post-industrial and informational is just a tiny sliver of the human timeline. The people who don't have jobs now are just like the people who sat on the farm expected the society to provide them with the living that they had grown accustomed to rather than moving to the city. Yes, it is perhaps sad that a person cannot do the same job year after year, generation after generation, but it might also be good that children have an opportunity to do something different from their parents, even if it is not their wish.
It is easy to blame someone else for all the woes in life, but there is some personal responsibility. Maybe one believed that there would always be high paying jobs for unskilled high school graduates. or maybe one believed that a BBA for a JD would guarantee a lifetime of easy money. Or that knowing superficailly how to use a computer would guarantee a high wage. I look at the fields of the South and know that what many Americans want is an easy office job with benefits, and even if they did not spend their youth gaining skills for that, the prospect of doing an honest days work picking fruit is not superior to receiving a government check. Not that I disagree with that. People on the dole serve the important function of increasing the acceleration of money. But to blame machines rather human greed and lack of motivation is simply silly.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Marketing may have something to do with it.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
We can use machines, instead of prisoners, to change my bedpan
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The unbiased objectivity of this dichotomy is staggering, as is my own sarcasm toward it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
That's true. The problem was everybody thought we'd have the Jetson's future. The (clearly, horribly, mistaken with hindsight) assumption has that if two workers worked an 8 hour day, then along came some new piece of technology that meant they could do the same amount of work in 4 hours, the two workers would work 4 hour days and have 4 extra hours of leisure time to enjoy the fruits of man-kinds ingenuity. What they didn't realize, but should have been blindingly obvious, is that the company that hires those two people would, instead, just fire one of them and make the other guy do BOTH jobs in an 8 hour day. So instead of the 1950's era vision of a future utopia with people doing less work and enjoying their life more, we have half the people unemployed (and miserable with no money) and the other half over worked (and miserable with no time).
Isn't the future grand?
I recently blogged about this. I believe there will have to be changes in the way society works. If there are less jobs, people will need some other way to obtain their living. I hope it doesn't break any rules if I insert a link to my blog as part of this comment. http://cjwertz.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/can-we-stop-robots-from-eating-our-lunch/
In the sufficiently long run(barring state intervention in the market in their favor, which seems likely) even the rich humans could conceivably be doomed...
After all, an expert system programmed to have nothing but a tireless interest in fund management or whatever is going to be cheaper than a similar expert system plus an idle owner with a taste for suits and hookers and whatnot.
They'll be able to hold out a lot longer than the squalid proles; but there is no obvious reason why efficiency-oriented robots wouldn't eventually end up out-competing an essentially useless rentier class, since management machines wouldn't have appetites, hobbies, or other human expenses...
You can't dispute the fact that we've outsourced our manufacturing base overseas. I bet if our economy didn't go Milton Friedmann and those jobs were still here, you wouldn't see complaining about the labor market. But, I guess a service economy built around tending to the whims of the upper classes should suffice in 21st century America.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You mean DISPOSABLE domestic animals.
My working dog (Rough collie) gave me a total of 12 good years. she was not useful her first 2 years, and the last 2 she also has reduced useability. She is now an old dog with failing eyesight and hard of hearing with mild arthritis. WE have to take care of her and she mostly lives in the house, she tries to still work but runs out of energy after a few hundred yards and either lies down or walks back home. The Vet says she is healthier than most dogs 1/2 her age but is just old.
Now I could be like the typical scumbag and put a bullet in her head as that tool is worn out, but now is when I pay her for the service she provided.
So please define "domestic animals" are you talking the type that are used by assholes and scumbags that will kill them when their usefulness is past, or are you talking about those of us that are not neanderthal savages?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Back then it was expected that in the future the normal work day would shrink from 8 hours to something more like 3 hours as workers got more done in less time.
It also failed to account for the fact that business won't let you take off early. If it takes 3 hours to do what it used to take 8 hours, they're not going to be happy with that same level of productivity; they're going to insist you stay for the other 8 hours, getting even more done.
Increased efficiency doesn't help out workers; it just causes business to expect them to do more in less time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
You may laugh now, but the US military with its enormous funding is the same "jobs program". In Europe we have governmental corporations and bureaucracy provide those jobs. Every developed country has their own version of artificial jobs trying to fight unemployment .
Who knows, that AC might be an early prototype.
The almost inevitable result is fewer people with jobs, and an ever increasing percentage of unemployed.
At some point there is going to be a major societal shift IMO:
Either the people with nothing change the nature of our capitalist society, or the people with essentially everything take the LAST logical step and build Terminators to "fix" the welfare problem. This could be hyperbole, but from a logical perspective if you are replacing everyone with robots why wouldn't you replace the police/military
so you don't have to worry about strikes etc?
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
It dates back a lot further than that. The Luddites were destroying machines back in the 1810s on the basis that the machines would put them out of a job.
The framing of the question is wrong. People don't necessarily need jobs. Certainly not repetitive ones, boring or drudge ones such as a machine might replace. What they need is the means to put a roof over their heads, care for their families and to have an equitable standard of living.
If a machine replaces a boring or drudge job, that's unquestionably a good thing. If people are struggling to have a decent life because they don't have means, then society needs to change and deal with that.
It's human entrepreneurs, politicians and ultimately voters who are responsible for allowing jobs to be outsourced and automated. If they claim that this will ultimately result in net benefit for everyone, they have a borden to produce results at some point. There are plenty of jobs that people enjoy doing, or that people enjoy being done by actual humans even if they could be automated. Self-service grocery check out counters and automated phone answering systems come to mind. NOBODY wants them. Penny pinchers somewhere convinced themselves they save 1% of money, but I doubt this compensates for lost good will and customer mistakes that cost more to correct later.
Oh here we go again. The "broken windows" fallacy has fooled someone again.
Somewhat related; very recently on Reddit, there was an article about a much safer kind of saw called 'SawStop' (the promotional video is quite amusing). It stops spinning in 1/1000th of a second if you touch it, and saves many fingers/hands a year.
It turns out that the economic cost of table-saw injuries is around $2 billion. Meanwhile, the entire table-saw market is only $175 million (interesting read), or 10x less. In other words, if the big makers (Bosch, Black & Decker and co) used this tech, we'd save tons of money, pain and Unnecessary Surgery (which yes, is featured in Itchy and Scratchy's horror theme park).
Oh dear, but now we've put all those surgeons out of work repairing countless fingers that the previous inferior saws cut off!! Such a shame!
And hence why people have got to start equating higher unemployment as often being a good thing, instead of a bad.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Somebody has to invent, design, manufacture and maintain those machines, ya know?
Hopefully we can stop paying people hourly but rather by productivity.
Aside from people placing the date too early, out of excessive optimism about the capabilities of machines, what is "economically illiterate" about the notion?
Automation replaces, or increases the productivity of, human workers. This reduces the amount of labor, per unit product, required.
This makes goods cheaper which is good so long as you still enjoy access to a cut of the pie. However, there is nothing in "economic literacy" that requires us to assume that humans, especially the bulk of them, will continue to beat robots in the race for a wage-based slice of the economic output. And, if they don't, the fact that productivity is shooting through the roof won't help them very much unless they gain access to a slice by different means, which pretty much either means "rentier" or "charity case".
If it takes 3 hours to do what it used to take 8 hours, they're not going to be happy with that same level of productivity; they're going to insist you stay for the other 8 hours,
surfing the web, talking sports with coworkers, taking smoke breaks, and sitting in pointless meetings?
I will say that the higher the technology level, the less "work" required and the more "panic". Broom pushers and fruit pickers work all shift. My current "real" job is either relax or panic nothing in between.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Imagine a society in which the poor constantly borrow and then in repeated crashes, debt readjustments, and forgiveness programs are allowed to re-borrow. This would constitute a continual redistribution that would provide everyone with a decent standard of living.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Increased efficiency doesn't help out workers
It does, because increased efficiency is what gives them more stuff to buy at cheaper prices. Efficiency has gone up massively over the last century or two, and unemployment really hasn't increased at all beyond noise (except for the introduction of women into the workforce, which practically doubled employment).
It's perfectly clear how this all pans out: celebrities will pay royalties to their fan base to prove their popularity to the royal court of second generation Stanford trillionaires. Most of us will earn our livings by making prudent decisions with the "like" button. (There are two ways to obtain money you didn't earn: social programs and inheritance. Let's kill both.)
Actually, I was writing about Adam Smith on a different thread yesterday. My personal Adam Smith reincarnation, if alive today, would be giving the Tea Party the back of his hand. He would be rolling up his sleeves to determine the structure of the labour force in 2060 with a grim expression on his face.
We already have severely disadvantaged individuals where any economic value the person could possibly contribute could be obtained with less cost and hassle by another means. These were people three or four standard deviations below the mean in good life fortune.
When that bar was way off in the weeds of the bell curve, the traditional economic fable of Schumpeter's creative destructive held sway. It's a good fable if personal reinvention holds pace.
Over the next fifty years, the bar of negative labour value will be emerging from the weeds into the second rough. Ten percent of the population will find themselves under the charity threshold: working in jobs we decided not to automate because it's cheaper to keep these people occupied. Maybe the whole program will be orchestrated by the American penal system. It seems to be gearing up capacity to meet demand. It will be an interesting day when the first prison administrator is convicted of bribing a berry picking operation to not purchase effective machinery, in essence allocating tough on crime dollars to their most valuable use.
Adding to the formidable complications would be any near term success in life extension research, further accelerating the devolution to gated communities and orange jump suits. We've tried the status segregation experiment once before: it was called slavery and it didn't work out so great. This time around, having the right skin colour won't save you.
Yes. Back in my hippie days (get off my lawn, etc.), I proposed a new political party. The justification went like this - the promise of the Industrial Revolution was that nobody would have to work and we could all live like kings. But the flip side of that is that there are no jobs. So obviously the thing to do is to make unemployment not the problem, but the objective - let's work ourselves ALL out of a job, and enjoy the result!
The primary plank of the Technical Party (the name I came up with back then), was that we should move to a society where everyone might get drafted for two to 10 years of 'service' working, then could 'retire' to a life of retirement doing the things one wants to do.
Since most people (I think/hope) actually like being productive, during those many years of retirement we could all be writing that book we all want to write, painting, sculpting, volunteering in schools etc. Some folks might like to continue doing engineering, or working in a restaurant - but that would be because they want to, not because they have to. Retirement is when we transition from working on others' terms to working on our own terms.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
It's fairly straight forward to write, none of you have done it yet, point and check for humans.
"put in a 65 retirement age"
This fairytale again. NOBODY but the rich get to retire, any point in time most people worked until they died. Retirement has always been a fantasy dangled in front of the working by the rich.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Which sounds nice until you realize that most companies manage productivity-based workforces with performance goals, which almost always turn into moving targets. Not to mention that pay never, ever scales linearly with skill level.
"You work twice as as fast as Bob and you want me to pay you twice as much? HAHAHAHAHA!!"
Permanent social inequality was created by a combination of draconian legislation, subsequent imprisonment of 1% (30 million) of the US population, and the transition from rehabilitation to lifetime retribution for those with a criminal record. We already have a permanent underclass, with 30 million more individuals ready to join. They can't get jobs other than ditch digging and McJobs; they can't get credit; they can't get insurance. In some cases they can only live under bridges. This locked-in, highly disadvantaged lower class poses a huge risk to the rest of us; the level of justified frustration created by this kind of arrangement is almost incomprehensible to the rest of us; rest assured that from this huge mass of people, individuals will arise who believe they have lost everything, and therefore have little or nothing left to lose, and they will take out that frustration on those they perceive to be privileged.
Technology is not the threat here. Technology will lead to more people at all levels having more things, more free time, more art, more research. In other words, socially, it is a net benefit all across the board. The threat is a system that has no useful concept of rehabilitation, and that's not about tomorrow; that is here today and operating full steam ahead.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Our reliance on money and the value of work as a means of apportioning resources will have to change, once humans no longer have work to do.
Because the alternative is that people who own computers and robots will receive all the money, and billions who do not will have no means to acquire food, shelter, clothing, medicine, communications, transportation...
That is the obvious endgame to our current system.
make full time 30-35 hours a week
Except we don't. Half the people are not unemployed.
People do tend to work a bit less than they did before (maybe not in the US). Long holidays are mandatory in much of Europe and other places. Also, if you live an early 1900s lifestyle you can work much less.
We don't work as little as expected because we want more as well as some impact from greed (but less than you suggest)
More people like Ted Kaczynski will rise up. Ted (the Unibomber) Kacynski feared the coming jobpocalypse which motivated him to write his manifesto and commit the atrocities that he did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Manifesto I've read the like of Hazlitt, Mises and Adams and am a huge fan of Ron Paul but the swift change in technology and its impact on jobs does concern me since our other systems (e.g. our economic and educational systems) are not fast enough to adapt and there are very few people (esp. our political leaders) who see this quickly approaching present danger, let alone have any idea on what to do about it.
This is not really hard to understand, actually it is really simple, the problem is the solution.
Now once we are past all the "Oh the poor buggy ship manufacturers" idiots...
We have 308 Million people in this country. According to the last census 67% of those are working age ( 15 to 64 years old ).
That gives us about 200 million people who are work capable. Now it is about a 50/50 split male and female.
Given the current estimated national unemployment rate of +/- 9% would give us a gross number of about 18 million unemployed.
Now I don't know about you but an informal sample of my friends, that are married/partnered, about 80% of those have both people working. So lets lop 20% of of 18 million and that leaves us with approximately 15 million.
So lets be clear on what that number really looks like. The population of the 88 cities of Los Angeles County and the five Burroughs of New York City is 17 million people.
So explain how this is going to work. Anybody?
Automation continues to idle workers as does moving employment ( all sectors manufacturing, software, medical, textile, etc. ) offshore. Job creation in this country is increasingly low paying service sector employment which more often then not does not include any medical insurance etc.
The cost of basic commodities in this country is going up at an alarming rate or is churning so drastically ( look at the price of gasoline and diesel ) that it is quickly overpowering almost everyone's ability to withstand the depression we are currently experiencing.
The stock market keeps going up but unfortunately it is feeding on itself without any real value being produced in the form of goods. it is all services and it is being mostly driven by financial and information services which are not commodity goods they are vapor. Facebook does not produce goods, it sells information, the same as Google and increasingly Apple since all of its products are produced outside of the USA.
So we have the problem. The amount of the population that needs jobs that pay something more then minimum wages is growing faster then the number of jobs being created in this country.
The tipping point is getting dangerously close. There is going to be a collapse and suddenly investments will be meaningless. The number of people that wont be able to service their mortgage will grow to the point that it won't be possible, or even advisable, to throw them out and take possession of the "asset" because it will have become worth next to nothing and people are just going to start staying there and refusing to leave because there is simply no place to go. Think about the city you live in. If the economy continues to collapse at the current rate how many of those people who "own" homes will still have jobs that can support the debt that they have in just in the form of a house? If the job they have disappears ( like Bank of America closing down an entire development facility and moving it off shore with very little notice ) then they are just screwed which is why one woman killed herself.
We as a society have to figure this out and we have to figure it out quickly. We spent trillions saving banks and investment companies and we are still collapsing. We don't have the resources to continue propping up banks and the stock market, we simply don't when less the 200 hundred companies are controlling where the jobs are based upon nothing but a P/L statement. Fundamental change must happen and it must happen soon if we are to avoid a breakdown that will reduce the United States to a 3rd world country or worse
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I didn't RFTA, but I'd rather have machines flipping my burgers, doing my cleaning, etc.
that obsoletes the rich.
Of course the question is being framed wrong... The real question is why do we put up with these assholes that have such a limited skill set that they can be replaced by a machine?
Imagine where we could be if the lazy 70% of the population were curious, intelligent, creative, educated and motivated.
J/k.
Maybe.
The "threat of automation" is finally getting attention because it's hitting the middle class. It hit machine tool operators decades ago. There was an assumption that if you went to college, there's always be some kind of office job for your. That's ending. The world of paper pushing is coming to an end. The paper industry itself is hurting and mills are closing. At first, computers increased paper consumption, but that peaked years back.
I expected it sooner. I was surprised to see new office buildings going up after 2000 or so.
What does the future look like? The favelas of Rio and Mexico City, surrounding the cities of the rich. That's where productivity and capitalism takes us.
These sorts of arguments have been going on since at least the Luddites and probably much earlier. Yet people still work, because they want to work. People will find things that machines cannot currently do, and they will do that until they are replaced by machines, then they will find something else to do. And it has allowed humanity to accomplish many amazing feats that we would usually classify as progress.
It has allowed us to build functioning cities without the fear of trivial diseases that used to kill millions. It has allowed us to focus upon increasing agricultural production instead of wrecking our bodies trying to feed ourselves. It has allowed us to build massive and mostly functioning economic systems that are forward looking, rather than satisfying the needs and using the resources of the moment. And, since most of us are technophiles, it has permitted us to emulate bits and pieces of the human mind so that we can focus upon the creative bits (how do I do this?) instead of being intimidated by menial repetitive tasks.
Sure there are problems, like losing the security of doing the same job until you die (do you really want that?). Yet I would rather live in a world where machines contribute to our lives rather than die in a world because my job makes me a cripple, or there isn't enough food, or diseases run rampant, or having to do 'for ( i = 1; i = 1000000; i++ ) { }' to understand a new bit of physics leaves me contemplating suicide.
That's what we are building those machines in the first place: either they drive down the cost of production so much that people don't need to work anymore... or they don't and people still do have jobs.
Honestly, I work hard as a researcher to automate the most I can. When everything boring will be automated, we will spend time only on funny things.
All these gloomy stories about jobs, work and salaries, they are total non-sense. A world without jobs and salaries but with full automation is much more attractive than a world with the current economical system but where everything has to be done by hand...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Spoons? Meh, in my day we used plastic sporks.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
While, yes, we're not at 50% unemployment (yet), we are at 16.5% (http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp). This assumes you use the "correct" U6 statistic, which includes unemployed, underemployed, and those who are part time who would work fulltime if they could.
My solution: Tie efficiency gains to legal maximum hours per week. What's that you say? We only need 4 days a week to do the same job we used to do in 5? Boom. 4 day work week. As efficiency gains increase (self-driving Google cars, more automation/software doing work people previously did), work week continues downward.
Yes, its completely feasible, and prevents the ownership class from continually squeezing the worker class for an extra couple of widgets produced per week.
Yes, well done on confusing my HYPOTHETICAL with the real world. Try re-reading what I wrote and try again.
Inefficient humans are replaced. Oh, no! They're taking our jobs!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
You either sign up for our current system, which produces lots of shiny consumer goods, but leaves millions of people economically insecure... or you become Amish. No other outcomes are even conceivable.
Hey, here's a thought - maybe we could ask rich people to pay a little more in taxes and use the funds to keep people from starving in the streets, provide job training, provide useful services - which would produce enough demand that we could enjoy technology without having our jobs terminated.I know, it's crazy talk.
Yeah. I mean I work in IT and I can tell you that a machine will never replace my job because in the end most of the problems I fix are because a human designed the software or hardware incorrectly or because a human cannot figure out how to use or be trusted with software or hardware. My job is secure until robots design the software and hardware themselves.
Sign me up. I'm 28 and would love to spend time writing code and working on robotics/automation to replace jobs, as long as the fruit of the labor goes to the people I'm replacing and not to one person.
What's the rationale that robots or software costs us jobs?
First we had one way of doing it, then we found a better way. You think it's right that we should keep doing it the wrong way? You think people are entitled to jobs even though it's not the best way of doing it?
Hey, maybe we should adopt the same policy to everything. Make code buggy so we can employ more people in IT support. Make cars less reliable so more people are needed to fix them and build replacements.
And you realise that makes everything more expensive, right? So everything costs more. This isn't some economics shenanigans either; absolutely more resources are required for the same level of production. There's three fundamental ways to improve quality of life: find more resources, make things in a way that requires less resources and manage resources better. Sure, there's arguments within the economy for the distribution of resources (or money, anyway) but when you're asking that we make the same thing with more resources you're always losing and still not addressing your distribution issue.
And yet everybody's still employed (minus social security, unemployment, and shady dealings). The thing with robots is... it requires people to design them, build them, and then maintain them, to replace a single job with superior efficiency. So that's 2 teams and a full time maintenance tech. The only people threatened by this would be the people working ground level at the factory. I think Dell or HP once tried an automated self help telephone system for almost a year before they got rid of it cause it wasn't adding value and pissing people off. Same with microsoft help, they've put decades of work into that little window and I still don't find it useful.
The publisher vastly underestimates the value of communication in the human society. It's more valuable than robots to start... if you can't communicate, you can't build the robot, nobody was born with a super robot building gift as far as I know. They go to school (teachers SCHOCK not robots) and interact with peers gain an interest and then build robots.
Now if they put a robot in say a good times and fire Pedro from Mexico - the green card, who's making $6 an hour and doesn't share the good times passion for making burgers that don't look like shit, now I'd call that progress any day.
Ask Good Times why they won't do it though, the ROI probably isn't even ballpark justifiable for them to consider it. Thus the completely false and absurd nature of this article.
Exactly. The looming automatic cuts after the "supercommittee" fails to fix all our problems are being described as not fatal to the military itself but "devastating" to military contractors, and industry lobbyists and local politicians are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
And the extent to which it is true that military contracts are a "jobs program" is hilarious: I hear stories from friends in certain large companies about how certain incompetent people get passed from project to project, never actually contributing anything, and their managers make no attempts to fire them. They just get thrown on whatever has the most money so they won't notice. Sometimes the amount of waste is astonishing.
I'm sort of reminded of the Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. In that book, this game was so important to people that it had a ministry. I sort of imagined the game like a highbrow D&D.
Probably the next jobs out there will be figuring out how to provide enough energy for all these robots. If that fails, the jobs after that will be farming, making cobblestones and figuring out a substitute for wood.
As a typical worker bee who maintains such labor saving machinery in a large metropolitan area, I don't believe that increasing leisure time by having shorter work days is the best answer. As a typical worker bee, I get up, and typically spend an hour each way commuting on overcrowded roads to get to my worksite, so if I work 8 hours a day/5 days a week I am devoting 50 hours a week to my job. If my workday was cut to 3 hours, I would still devote 25 hours a week to the job, just half of the time as I originally spent. Now if I worked the same 15 hours over 2- 7.5 hour days, I would only have to devote 19 hours a week to my job. Of course, customers would still often demand full-time availability, but that could create an opportunity for someone else to work the other shift or shifts. Unfortunately, with the cost of payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, healthcare, and so on, its a safe bet that most employers would still rather have just one guy working that 40 hour week.
Another consideration of the human factor is productivity over the course of the day. Unless you are a line worker, cashier, or the like, it takes a while to get oriented to the day's tasks and gather the information, tools, parts, or supplies to efficiently do what needs to be done, and at the end of the day to put things away, finish administrative tasks, and get ready to leave. 8 hours a day seems to offer the largest sweet spot of peak productivity, much less you spend too much time commuting, setting up work, and cleaning up afterwards. Think about shop class in junior high, (I may be showing my age talking about shop class) you had a 50 minute period to try to get something accomplished, and you spent 5 or 10 minutes listening to the teacher explain the task for the day, another 5 or 10 minutes gathering the stuff you'll need for the job, and the last 10 minutes to clean up. You'll be lucky to actually spend more than 20 minutes working on the project.
AS outsourcing is cheaper than building the robot.
Yet Chinese factory owners have been saying that they're replacing humans with robots because the human workers cost too much.
The problem with #3 is that there is a finite number of fields - and worse there will come a point when all new fields are created and instantly filled with a robot/piece of software.
And by lately, I mean ever?
Dude, I hate to break this to you, but combines and tractors DID ruin agriculture jobs in the United States. Time was that a majority of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. Now we're down to about 1% of the workforce.
And sure, in the past, all those displaced ag workers found other work, including doing things like building the tractors and combines. But if we get to the point (as suggested by TFA) where suddenly, large swathes of the workforce are being replaced all at once by robots... what then? The robots build themselves (not entirely, obviously, but without a lot of human labor required), so there's no help there.
I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?
You mean, nowadays you can't get documented workers to break their back on farms, under deplorable working conditions, for a tiny paycheck and no benefits. FTFY.
I guarantee you that you could find people to do the work if you were willing to pay a decent wage, didn't expose them to pesticides, provided retirement and medical, etc.
Middle class people - I remember those. They were those people who could actually expect to make enough money to live on, without having been born to rich parents.
Whatever happened to them, anyway?
Back when they invented steampower, what happened wasn't that the aristocrats partied joyously with the peasants and everyone had easier, richer lives. What happened was the immediate discarding of tens of thousands from the employment markets, followed by economic migrancy, social and political unrest, the rise of communism, and a lot more besides.
Clearly a dumb move, but when have greedy power-elites ever been any different?
Now I for one would welcome our new robot overlords, if I could only be sure that the vampires (like, the IMF) overseeing the new order would just share the wealth and let people get on with the things they really want to do with their lives. Travelling, art, education, exploring inner and outer space, a lot more besides.
Why should anyone have to work for a decent standard of living anymore? It's the goddamn 21st century already!
(Hmm... just realised that we could be looking at a robot-apocalypse engineered by vampires. I gotta go talk to a publisher.)
Anyway look, go and read this guy.
(http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2011/9/7/cnncom-are-jobs-obsolete.html)
What they didn't realize, but should have been blindingly obvious, is that the company that hires those two people would, instead, just fire one of them and make the other guy do BOTH jobs in an 8 hour day. So instead of the 1950's era vision of a future utopia with people doing less work and enjoying their life more, we have half the people unemployed (and miserable with no money) and the other half over worked (and miserable with no time).
Not exactly. What you're missing is that because widgets now cost half as much to produce, there is now additional consumer (or producer) surplus. So the customer gets his widgets for $500 instead of $1000, or (if there is no competition) the business owner makes an extra $500 in profit per widget, and there is now an extra $500 in someone's pocket that they can buy stuff with. He can buy a gadget in addition to a widget when before he only got a widget. The guy who lost his job making widgets can get one making gadgets because there is increased demand as a result of the extra money in people's pockets.
The existing unemployment isn't a result of automation. It's a result of the mortgage crisis. People aren't spending money because they're trying to get out from underwater on their mortgages. The jobs are no longer needed to make the things they're no longer buying. If you want to fix the economy, you find a way to reduce consumer debt so that that money can go to buying stuff rather than paying interest.
Hey, here's a thought - maybe we could ask rich people to pay a little more in taxes and use the funds to keep people from starving in the streets, provide job training, provide useful services - which would produce enough demand that we could enjoy technology without having our jobs terminated.I know, it's crazy talk.
It's not crazy talk, actually, it has been tried before, they call it communism (same wage for everybody).
Suppose you do tax the wealthiest more (say you increase the tax rate by delta_x %) to provide assistance to the poorest. Now, suppose that for one reason or another you need more, what do you do, tax wealthy people even more? Repeat as necessary. I am not saying there is such a thing as a perfect system, but your rhetoric begs the question: "More, ok, but how much more?". At some point, if by making more money (probably by working more than you would have otherwise) people just end up giving it in taxes, my guess is that they will either change country/find a way to avoid it (1$ salary)/not work to earn more (hence, everybody gets the same wage -> communism*)
On the other hand, there will always be people that live by achieving as little as possible (I'm certainly not saying every poor person is like that), giving them education/services/etc. won't change them unfortunately.
What's my point? None in fact save for saying I don't think fixing the world's problems is as easy as that.
*No need to tell me how communism isn't only about equal wage, thank you
The unemployment we have is not because we have got so good at producing goods and services that no one wants anything more. Pretty much everyone wants more than they have right now. Perhaps the 1% can't consume any more than they do, but the 99% certainly can.
The unemployment we have right now is because our economic system sucks. Capitalism has traditionally been good at making sure that most everyone produced something that other people wanted. Right now there are people want to dine out and chefs who want to make food for others, yet it does not happen. Or, even more bizarrely, public bridges which are failing from lack of maintenance while building workers and engineers are idly watching it happen.
I don't know what the solution is, but it is NOT to prevent people from working. That won't prevent the bridges from falling down. It is also not to make a committee to decide how many shoes should be produced in the next 5 years in which places; that has been tried and it failed. Suggestions certainly welcome.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Build pyramids.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm somewhat amazed at so many people writing comments to the effect of "there will always be more work". History is filled with examples of humans exhausting resources. And for every resource there was people saying "There will always be more..."...
There will always be more oil.
There will always be more water.
There will always be more air.
There will always be more trees.
And now "there will always be more work". Guess what? We now are suffering the consequences of deforestation and contamination, even the last 8 years of war have been a consequence of oil shortage in the US. Already there are entire fields of labour that can't get people out of the poverty line. Why are we supposed to believe that there will always be more jobs?
But... the future refused to change.
It's worse than that. If you count ships like Spain and Italy's "aircraft carriers" as carriers, then you should also count all the LHA/LHD class ships in the US inventory, which would bring our "carrier" total up to around 20.
I read this as a new currency issued by Apple.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't know what the solution is, but it is NOT to prevent people from working. That won't prevent the bridges from falling down. It is also not to make a committee to decide how many shoes should be produced in the next 5 years in which places; that has been tried and it failed. Suggestions certainly welcome.
Would you not agree that sites like Kickstarter are exactly how communistic systems would be built to work? Where the people decide exactly what they're willing to assign value to and how much value? It's distributing that "value", or "effort", or "money" that we're running into problems with.
Communisim only works in theory due to human nature, but I'd argue a hybrid between capitalistic market place evolution, socialistic safety nets, and communistic shared community/civilization-owned industrial production is the answer. Someone just needs to figure out the best/worst parts of each components, and their required doses.
To stop making so many people. I really think that that's going to happen anyway. Consider this, there is a whole generation of kids graduating college right now who are putting off having kids because they are saddled with debt, plus they are finding themselves in need of longer education because a 4 year degree today is like a HS degree used to be. So, the childbearing age will get squeezed to the point where we'll be producing people at less than the replacement rate. Eventually, this could paradoxically lead to unemployment receding a bit. That is, we'll have jobs go wanting because there won't be as many young people plus we'll have older workers age out of the workforce in larger numbers than can be replaced.
The first terminators would be tanks and UAVs, hardly targets that could be overrun by humans with water buckets and sledge hammers....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
...this?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Okay, let's try Star Trek as a decent talking attempt. They occasionally lightly laughed at the Ferengi for being money grubbers, while everyone else tried to be lofty. Replicators are big in this.
Thing is, there WAS an "underground economy" running on Star Trek - Positional Meritocracy. Only if you were good enough did you get to serve on the Enterprise, and a couple squeaked by. So that show was fairly free of backhanded deals, but you can bet the ____-class crews in real life would cut deals to get a form of "Tenure", and we're back to Haves and Have Nots.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The problem is that the business owner isn't spending the extra $500 on a gadget, or at least, maybe he is, but he only needs so many gadgets, and he's getting an extra $500 / widget. So in the end, he accumulates more and more money while the guy who lost he's job has still lost his job.
Lets just pay half the population to dig holes and we'll pay the other half to fill them back in. Everyone will have a job, and everyone will get paid. Great. Now where can we buy the shovels?
You can get by working 1/2 time. I know plenty of people that do it. The thing is they live like they did in the 1950s. 1 car, no cable, no cell phone, no internet. They own their property with a 1000 sqft double wide on it and spend their leisure hunting and fishing. Now if you want all of the modern goods you need to work full time. The fact is you can not work at all in the US and live off of societies waste better than someone who worked 100 years ago. That is the beauty of productivity and technology increases. The US waste stream contains for free better quality goods than were available to presidents and royalty 100 years ago.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
What a tired, worn out argument. How about we tax the benefits like medical insurance that companies provide, so that they would not have a disencentive to hire two part time workers instead of one time and a half worker?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
http://wimp.com/handcake/
AND be friendly.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As far as I recall the concept of money didn't appear at all in the original series of Star Trek. The implication was that they'd moved beyond the need for money.
Latinum and the Ferengi only came along in TNG. Of course this was in order that they could find new topics for shows that featured greed in a recognisable form.
And yet still, as far as I recall (I'm no Star Trek geek), there was no implication that any of the human race used it. Well as anything other than something to trade with Ferengi.
My recollection is that it only came into use as something that humans used with the execrable Deep Space Nine. Which came about after the death of Gene Roddenberry. By that stage we're talking about cashing in on a franchise. It has little to do with the real Star Trek concept. It was soap opera by that stage.
Bribing and "backhanded deals" only belong in an environment of scarcity. The star trek concept of replicators explicitly rules that out as a motivation. Latinum as a non-replicatable material, was always a cheat to rewrite the basic rules.
I've inherited the job responsibilities of over 5 coworkers who've left my department and weren't replaced. I've kept roughly the same hours and workload. This is because I'm a programmer; I automate as much as I can. We didn't get the flying cars, but the Jetsons really really nailed the "press buttons all day" job description... and George's complaint about aching hands and fingers when he got home: Carpal Tunnel anyone?
In a sense, I've killed some jobs... but so did everyone who ever invented a time-saving technology. There's always something new to spend time on... perhaps one day in the US, they'll aim toward more leisure!
Which is why sales taxes are always heavily regressive on the lower classes. Wealthy people may spend more money than a poorer person but not in a directly proportional manner. Which means that the lower down on the scale of wealth you are the larger the percentage of your income is that goes to sales taxes.
ugg dont remind me. We STILL use lotus notes.
People always do something with their time. It doesn't just get shelved, it's spent. So what happens when people are left unemployed? Two things really. Either they socialize and turn small events into larger ones, become introverted, or... focus their attention on others in a negative way. So while machines may provide food and shelter, people will spend more time on religion and criminal behavior. Flash mobs, war, self sacrifice. All of the emotions, behaviors, and other social constructs of humanity will become much more dynamic. Free time does that to society. It's also why keeping people busy with work tends to lower crime.
Life is not for the lazy.
I consider myself to be an educated person (high school and college diploma) and I have no idea who he is either. I guess it depends on what you mean by "educated". If you mean "educated culturally", then no, I'm certainly not (though I'm working to remedy that). But by and large when people say educated they mean a general scholastic education. Or you're just a troll. Since you're posting under AC I strongly suspect you are, but I figured I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
People have been making this argument for hundreds of years. I've been through a handful of recessions, and in every recession people say "This time it's different. You'll see. The machines are taking all the jobs. Unemployment will never go down again. We'll all end up being slaves to a tiny number of people who own all the machines." And yet, eventually, unemployment does go back down. Machines replace people in some kinds of jobs but as the economy grows new jobs get created, both in old industries and in new ones that nobody expected.
People have a pretty impressive array of sensors and actuators for the money - automation is expensive, and it's an up-front cost. You have to shell out large amounts of money before your first widget rolls off the assembly line. Where labor costs are low we're seeing robots replaced by people.
So what was Harry Mud after?
I think not bringing back a descendant of Mud was a mistake in TNG. She could have goosed Riker every time he turned his back. She could have been on the run after cheating the Ferengi etc etc.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A job is just a way to meet your needs. Sure specialization allows you to demand a large enough income to meet your needs, but in the days where security matters more (such as this downturn), a little despecialization to gain security would seem to make sense. I mean, if you find yourself with time on your hands, meet your needs.
As for myself, I'm a programmer, but I've got a 1acre perennial farm that requires very little input. If you have land, time, water, sun, and determination, you can meet your needs, without it needing to be backbreaking or boring.
It used to be, that given some land, a person could meet most of their needs themselves. Have we become so detached from the basics of life, that to not find employment means you die? WTF??
Outsourcing and automation are not the only options here. And if people are displaced by robber barons, then lets get them a little land and connect them with a means to provide for themselves. If the automation is to assist individuals in their work, then wouldn't it make sense if we each grew most of our own food? Technology enables and decentralizes. Eventually everyone will be producing their own food, power, tools, and *. Let's get started.
I thought the 21st century is going to be the century of mass unemployment too, until I read Bill Gates take on the subject:
I think the industrial revolution is really just the tip of this sort of iceberg. _Cradle to Cradle_ has a very interesting perspective on it.
Personally, I think your "solution" is pretty much exactly the wrong direction. Until we get to the GP's "Sci-Fi Paradise", central planning and collectivism are inevitably doomed. I'd like to see basic life-style guarantees (not income. But, say, food, clothing, and shelter) for everyone, but I don't know whether that's actually a realistic expectation. Or even a worthwhile goal. If there's an unlimited food supply, we have to start talking about population control, which turns into a very ugly conversation very quickly.
I just don't believe that government should be involved in charity. I guess it would be all right if contributions were completely voluntary, but then we could have a private non-profit organization (or, even better, organizations) handle it all instead.
Amen. If you live in a cheap house, drive a cheap car and try to buy used goods it's still possible to survive on half wages, and enjoy one's free time more. My car was built in 1992. I can do do basic maintenance on it myself. My phone is a few years old, and this laptop I'm using here was built in 2006. I get at least 50% of my clothes from thrift stores, and buy food when it's in season. I brew my own beer. By not spending so many hours at a "job" I have time to shop around for bargains, prepare my own meals, work on my hobby projects and even post on Slashdot. Sure, It would be handy to have more money, but at the end of each week I'm usually a few bucks ahead, which I am slowly accumulating to buy a property or other investments. I plan to have the time to manage these investments myself instead of paying some rich banker to fuck me over. Maybe in ten years I'll regret the experiment and wish I'd got a proper career, but then again maybe I'll be sailing aorund the world in my own boat, which is rent-free and cheap as long as you're happy to travel with the wind and eat what's available where you are. Fortunately this tends to be very fresh seafood and seasonal vegetables, which is hardly an unhealthy diet.
sustainable living
Are you still proposing this or have you actually learned something sense you were a hippie?
What would you do about the net negative producers (you know the ones, produce 2 hours work for someone else in each hour they 'work' e.g. most hippies)? Seems like it would be better just to leave them alone. Even better just let them starve.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So in the end, he accumulates more and more money while the guy who lost he's job has still lost his job.
Except that the owner doesn't take the money and stick it in his mattress. If he doesn't buy a widget then he buys a bond or a share of stock or whatever you like, and then whoever sold it has the money. That person might use the money to buy a different share of stock and it goes around again, until at some point it ends up in the hands of someone who spends it buying more gadgets.
The problem comes when someone earns some money and they do stick it in a mattress. Then they have the money instead of the gadget. But that happens totally regardless of how much automation there is: Whenever someone decides they would rather have the cash than the gadget (or the stock), someone else comes that much closer to losing their job. It doesn't matter if it was the owner or the employee who decided to do that, and it doesn't matter how much automation there is. Your argument is basically that the owner is more likely to stick the cash in his mattress than the employee, but there isn't any reason to think that. The owner might be more likely to invest it and the employee more likely to spend it, but investing it just moves the question of whether it promptly gets spent to the person who sold the investment, who again we have no reason to assume is more likely than the employee to stick the cash in a mattress instead of promptly spending or reinvesting it.
Historically speaking, abundance-style cultures like smbell is talking about are much happier all around. They're still human, so of course those problems are still present. But they're much less prevalent. Because their people are so much happier the ones in scarcity-driven cultures like ours.
How many "primitive" cultures have we run across who voluntarily embraced our way of life?
My recollection is that it only came into use as something that humans used with the execrable Deep Space Nine.
Hi! Your opinions are wrong, and you should feel bad. TOS mentioned money and wages in the context of humans a few times, it was only in TNG that the whole "we're beyond money and serious interpersonal conflict" thing got pushed by Roddenberry (whose death during the early years of TNG, incidentally, allowed it to become a better show, since he had become overly dedicated to Mary-Sueing the humans).
TNG may have been my favorite of the series, but DS9 was arguably a better show overall, and hardly an execrable cash-in. You can reserve that appellation for Voyager/Enterprise if you wish. DS9 was still an idealistic series (if you don't believe me, watch it in concert with the new Battlestar Galactica), it was just more realistic about what allowed that idealism to exist. Given that the Federation was explicitly anti-genetic engineering and it's not really set that far in the future, the general "niceness" of the humans pretty much had to be environmental in nature. DS9 was set at the fringes of that environment, both geographically and situationally, where its elements couldn't always be counted on, which made it a more interesting show in some ways than the others.
Things get broken...
Among other reasons such as marketing, greed, prestige etc.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The programmers will put everyone out of a job. They'll be the last to go.
What does it mean to be wealthy in a world where no one need work for a living?
Automation and technology is supposed to (in an ideal world) free us from "lower" work to allow us to work on creative or "higher" work. If that was the case, technology should be leading to more and more "higher" works such as art, science development, etc. But, all it's really doing is taking away the ability to make money. So what's the missing piece? Or, is the trick to go from doing the jobs technology takes over to getting the technology to make money for us? :)
If so, I'm all over investing in an army of worker robots to make money for me instead of giving all my money to colleges
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
The Star Trek ideal is that everyone contributes to society not because they get an instant-gratification reward of wads of cash, but because humanity has evolved to the point where individuals strive to better humanity rather than line their own pockets.
And as mentioned, that ideal was brought about by the replicator. If you can make anything you want out of thin air, money is useless.
Things got confused in the lore, btw, because Kirk mentions selling his house in Generations, but DS9 had several scenes where Jake and Nog argue over the fact that humanity has abandoned money. Voyager also mentions Fort Knox having been converted to a museum after humans abandoned money.
The robots we're discussing are going to be our replicators.
Sure, they can't make scarce materials, but they can go get them whereever they are, for free. Found oil somewhere that currently isn't exploited because it's too expensive to extract? Robot labor is free. Go get it.
Find raw materials for making solar panels on Mars? (assuming we ever run out of. . Sand) A robot-crewed spacecraft is on the way.
In short, once robots are making everything for us, we might as well have replicators. Hell we probably WILL have replicators by the time we manage to run out of something - after all, with robots doing all our work for us we can concentrate on higher pursuits. Even the most prolific inventor today still has to take time to mow the lawn, cook dinner, and pay bills.
BTW, you might want to give DS9 another shot. I hated it too, but decided to give it a second chance and am watching it on Netflix streaming. It's actually pretty good, and is much more nuanced and complex than any of the other ST shows.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Haha - it was tongue in cheek even back then. :D
When I was a high school freshman I applied feedback theory to a comparison of capitalism and Marxist communism for a social studies term paper on the Soviet Union - caused quite an uproar! The conclusion of course was that communism can not work because the feedback loop is broken - no system can remain stable without positive and negative feedback. I.e. 'To each according to his needs, from each according to his means" results in two unlimited, disconnected feedbacks.
Later I saw that in practice, the feedback loops, not being able to join through the economy, are routed through the political system in the form of forced labor, bribes, black markets, nepotism, and many other characteristics of totalitarian systems. Thus one has the leaders of communist countries living lives of luxury - they have 'bought' goodies with power instead of money.
[This strongly shows that power and money are duals, at least. Both are measures of trust and can be equated to energy in a flow model of the system.]
One can make an argument that the degree to which those faults are observed in an political/economic system is a reasonable measure of the degree to which the economy has been made into a 'socialist utopia'. But I haven't really thought this particular bit through, so I won't stand by it yet.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
So what was Harry Mud after?
As I said, I'm no ST expert, so if you know, why don't you just say. If it was money, what is the currency called? As I said the only currency equivalent that I recall in ST is latinum. And that didn't arrive till TNG.
Hi! Your opinions are wrong, and you should feel bad. TOS mentioned money and wages in the context of humans a few times
As I said, I'm no expert and I don't feel at all bad. I used to watch TOS on TV reruns in the 1970s, and not a lot since, so I'm only talking about general recollections rather than a Rainman type recall of everything that was said. Please do go ahead and quote some specifics, if you have some.
DS9 was execrable though. Entirely unwatchable as far as I'm concerned. Far worse than Voyager. Heck, it was worth watching Voyager even if only for Seven of Nine. There was no such saving grace in DS9.
The mistake of DS9 was to have a stationary location. Stationary location, regular characters spending much time in a bar bitching about each other = soap opera. Where's the exploring strange new worlds? Roddenberry must have been spinning in his grave. Thankfully they realised the error of their ways and moved on to Voyager.
Folks, our society is a patchwork of thinking, social constructs and memes generated during a two thousand year period when life was brutal, vicious, violent, filled with poverty, plague and horror. Even the last 300 years of industrial revolution, though amazingly better than the dark ages before them, were marked by gross dehumanization, global war, profound degradation of the natural environment, humanity as commodity, rampant corporatism, concentration of wealth and the creation and now growing destruction of global middle classes.
None of this is sustainable and must pass if humanity is to survive its adolescence. The "Star Trek" ethos points to a world where children are taught to aspire to their own potential greatness. Find what they love and pursue that passionately. With the advent of advanced technologies, human beings can be born with few or no genetic or prenatal defects. They can grow up with substantial software and hardware augmentations that provide access to learning and personal experience giving people the chance to develop more fully. Long life spans would suggest artificially extending adolescence perhaps through a person's 30s, allowing extending brain plasticity and growing human intellect beyond anything we can current appreciate.
So the Meritocracy we see in Star Trek would be a natural place for a large intellectually developed population to play. The vanishing few who for whatever reason chose not to play here would either have a basic quality of life provided for them (minus amenities), or travel beyond the fringes of civilization to play in less restricted spaces (because they don't play well with others.) You would have primarily a society of artists, scientist, game players (many games could be designed with goals promoting human values and advancing technologies), explorers, social engineers and social builders. I could easily imagine worse fates than for humanity to fall upon an arc of self evolution as compassionate artistic scientists. I could easily see humanity slitting off into a 100 new species with common rules civilized of co-conduct. All of this demands that we shed the past like a snake sheds its skin, and instead focus on a worthwhile human future. Then pursue that future passionately.
Actually all Star Trek series have money in them, not just TNG and DS9. The Federation uses "credits", beginning with TOS and continuing through VOY. They never explicitly say what credits are backed by (and I doubt anyone ever really thought about it), but the name suggests that credits are backed by some centralized cache of rare (dilithium for instance) Federation resource or pool of resources. In TOS it could have been anything because they didn't have replicators yet (just food slots, which weren't full replicators). Dilithium was also traded to other races in a few TOS episodes. They treated it as a form of currency. They also used coins (credits?) in Trouble with Tribbles to buy drinks. It wan't until TNG that they start claiming to have near infinite resources, equally shared (and that stops by Season 3).
In ST4 Kirk says: "They're still using money, I guess we better find some." ST4 was a comedy, and that was probably just meant as a one-liner, but it's the main source for the notion that they don't use money in the ST's future (that and some stuff Picard says in 1st season TNG). Kirk might have meant two things besides "in the future there is no economy". First he might have meant that they didn't bother with actual cash and coins. Like going to a restaurant and finding out when the bill comes that they won't take your debit card. Second he might have meant the bus itself. Public transportation might be completely public (like schools currently are) by his time. It's kind of surprising that San Francisco doesn't have that already, given the culture.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Oh here we go: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation_credit
Sorry, I should have cited that in my previous post.
You are kind of right in the sense that Gene Roddenberry didn't want there to be money, but I guess the writers felt otherwise. Note the blurb at the bottom quoting Ronald Moore.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
bar bitching about each other = Cheers!
the problem with DS9 wan't a fixed location, it was bad writing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dilithium was also traded to other races in a few TOS episodes. They treated it as a form of currency.
Yes, I remembered dilithium, But it's an expendable source of energy, something akin to uranium. So it's not a currency. Those trades were therefore barter, not buys or sells with currency.
Thanks for your recollections of the various conflicting occasions the topic of money has come up.
'Nuff said.....
The article argues that IT is destroying more jobs than it creates and does so by pointing to total job growth in the United States, which was positive in each decade from 1940 through to the end of 1999, but negative in the first decade of this century. I don't know if this is an accurate portrayal of the argument put forward by the authors of the book, but if so it's flawed to the point of uselessness.
First, it assumes that all job gains and job losses are due to IT, which is clearly not true. Teasing out the effects of IT on total employment is extremely difficult, but essential for establishing any sort of causal relationship.
Second, up until 2008, US job growth in the previous decade *was* positive, to the tune of about 4%. While not a stellar performance, it does still represent growth in jobs, not decline. It is only the massive job losses since the recession started which leaves the decade as a whole with a small decline in total employment.
All that the article has shown is that recessions cost jobs and that big recessions cost lots of jobs, which isn't exactly news. It says nothing at all about the effects of IT on employment. Unless you think that IT causes recessions.
-deane
I guess that's what you get with outsourcing the writing! I suppose as a casual viewer, Rodenberry's vision is the impression that stuck with me. An optimistic future of people striving for the best, not playing out present day money grubbing scenarios.
Actually dilithium wasn't fuel, it was an engine component. It was the thing that allowed them to produce a controlled matter-antimatter reaction. Under normal circumstances you didn't need to replace it, though if they did something nuts like sling shot back to the 80's they had problems (but they repaired the dilithium even then). The gist seemed to be that dilithium was a substance that was rare, useful, but there was way more around then needed for just practical purposes, and everyone wanted to stockpile it... similar to gold today.
I half agree with what you're saying about DS9, BTW. The first half of the series was pretty bleak (quality wise). There are quite a few gems in the later seasons, but I never made it that far though when the show was on the air. I only discovered them on Netflix. There's also a whole lot of Ronald Moore's hand in DS9, and he wanted DS9 to be like his BSG remake: not exactly true to Star Trek. In a way it's too bad he didn't get VOY instead of Brannon Braga. Braga could have probably done a lot more with the space station, and Ronald Moore seems pretty good at "ship alone in uncharted space" hence BSG.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
When machines are so effective that only 10% of the population must work in order for 100% to have its needs met, what economic system do you use to distribute the products?
Realize that in order for any kind of labor-reducing machine to be economically viable its total cost of ownership must be less than the money it saves by eliminating human labor. So the existence of machines creates jobs (production, maintenance, etc...) but the total money that flows into those jobs is *and must be* less than the money that previously flowed into the human labor the machines eliminate. If this is not true, nobody buys the machine. When it is true, the machine eliminates jobs.
Sure, *in theory,* the people can just go do some other job. But realize that *all* jobs are slowly being eliminated by machines (the profit incentives are too great), and there is only so much economic demand for knowledge work (you only need one cow to figure out how to open a gate in order for all the cows to walk through...similarly you only need so many inventors in your economy in order for everyone to benefit from the inventions).
Also remember that service-based economies don't produce any wealth. We can't all get richer by giving each other backrubs (or whatever form of entertainment people can provide that machines can't...yet).
Our capitalistic values make it hard for us to feel good about just giving free food to people who don't work. But when there simply isn't enough work to do because our machines are that advanced, do you just let the unemployed starve?
Or do you give them food?
No, but when robots first started getting into mainstream usage in factories, companies selling robots and companies replaces workers with them would often repeat "You will need people to make the robots" While true, it's not 1 to 1.
Unions wanted guarantees about the future of their workers, so they where lied to.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
eventually a robot ill do your job a lot more efficiently.
Since your job depends on people buying your stuff; when they are unemployed, you are.
Your job isn't that special.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
so you dont' want to get paid? oh, you do? with out? the fruit of the labor of the unemployed?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've been saying this for years and its where I see communism will really rise. The problem with communism is that your average worker isn't motivated to work. Advances in technology takes most jobs and gives them to a machine which will do a perfect job every time. The people who don't want to work won't and live a fairly comfortable life being serviced by machines. However I do believe there will be a small percentage of people that will be motivated to create new art and science and for those people this machine run world will be a real utopia.
All of the salesmen, engineers, and managers that you mention get paid by the people who buy the machine *and no one else.*
That means that the total cost of ownership of that machine is enough to cover all their salaries.
Someone will only buy a machine if its total cost of ownership is less than the total cost of hiring people to do the same work.
You see, if every person who lost his job to a machine instead got a job maintaining that machine, then the machines would be so expensive that nobody would buy them.
So, once a machine is so affordable and productive that people will buy it (and reduce their human staff), *less money* is flowing into the hands of the machine producers/maintainers than was previously flowing into the hands of human workers.
So the machines create less work than they eliminate, and that's what we like about them.
But as we invent more and more of them, we continue to remove demand for human workers from the economy. Eventually, there aren't enough jobs for all the people.
We can't all get richer by doing each other's laundry, and the inventions only need to be invented once, so not every displaced worker can get a better (or even different) job.
If we don't want to reject machines for the sake of creating jobs, we will have to instead pay a lot of people to sit around and do nothing. Or at least feed and clothe them.
Which is exactly what we do once we put people in jail for trying to steal food because they couldn't find a job because the machines are doing all the work.
Welcome to the future.
Watching commercials doesn't take over my ability to control my body. At the end of the day, it's still my choice.
SSC
What do I need money for if providing me with everything I need is automated?
Which is why sales taxes should not be charged on necessities. It should only be charged on toys. In many states, including my own, that is the law (although they don't enforce it here, because they still collect sales tax on groceries of all kinds).
However, I think that you will find that the poor also spend a lot of their money on toys, probably more on a percentage basis than the rich. The consumption mindset is something that keeps the poor poor. Hollywood also helps keep poor people poor by enforcing a consumption mentality. We need to educate people that they don't have to have the latest gadget. They can put their money away and invest it. By showing a little restraint in the present, they can have a much better future. However, the whole world has bought into the "have it now and the future be damned" mentality. It will not be an easy attitude to change.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
How about we not even allow companies to provider medical insurance and make it a person's own responsibility for their own healthcare. Company provider healthcare is a snare to keep people from moving jobs. I have found that it is actually CHEAPER to provide my own insurance than use my company's insurance, and I am no longer tied to the company if for some reason I feel like moving on.
Secondly, we should make insurance be insurance, and not what it is now. Insurance is for when you have something bad happen that would be out of your means to afford. It is not meant to cover every time you go to the doctor or dentist. Those should be out of pocket expenses. If we handled those expenses ourselves instead of shuffling them through the paperwork and contract negotiations between the provider and the insurance company, then it will be cheaper.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
In TNG aboard ship they had replicator utilization credits. On-planet, only a select few were allowed to use transporters for transportation.
Corporations are people. Why not robots and machines. Not paying them is slavery and against the 13th amendment.
What the hell are we going to do then? Not work as much.
Milton Friedman was also a supporter of a citizen's income program for alleviating poverty. He didn't believe that capitalism plus automation would somehow equal jobs for all; he believed that society could afford to provide everyone in the market with an equal baseline (which some would consume, and some would capitalize, etc) without distorting the beneficial mechanisms of markets.
You do realize that in evolution babies get the advantages and parents ... well ... die, right ?
It is *much* easier to create a hyperintelligent baby (a robot with a computer for a brain) than to transfer an existing brain into a robot. Orders of magnitude easier, at least.
This is similar to a halting problem, you want to have a program that could analyze and "understand" itself to the point that it could rewrite itself in a better way... If it were possible to create such a program then it would probably not exist at all, because whoever would write it would also knew better ways to write it - and it's turtles all the way down to understanding the "ultimate optimal form" of such a program and writing it in that form so it is no longer capable of self-imrpovement.
The halting problem has nothing to do with this. By your reasoning humans are impossible (having improved on themselves in many domains). Guess what ... they're not. Which must obviously mean that humans are fundamentally limited in the problems they can understand, not that they are somehow magically above the problem.
Furthermore the halting problem is only a problem if you want to find the "optimal" intelligence. The one that can't be improved upon. To improve upon any specific intelligence, human or otherwise, the halting problem is totally irrelevant.
How about instead of ascribing all these magical properties to the human brain, we assume there is nothing special about the human brain ? Neurons are a certain kind of imitation machines. They do not "really" think, which I realize is a hard pill to swallow, and it means human intelligence is in the software, in culture and practices, not hardware. You would not describe a human baby growing up in isolation as intelligent, in fact, you would probably describe it as a plant, or at the very best as a robot stuck in a loop. Yes, really.
This makes a lot of sense once you stop seeing human beings as a sort of angelic miracles that will put and end to the randomness of darwin's law of the jungle, and instead see the obvious truth : that human beings and brains are an extension and amplification of DNA, and will create and thrive in a "law of the jungle" set of circumstances, which is only temporarily masked during periods of massive expansion. Given that DNA which is nothing but a copy machine created us, it makes perfect sense for human brains themselves being copy machines too.
Start here
I would like to point out another small "detail" fact. Everybody knows about weird "synchronizations" that occur when you put humans together. Have 2 women live next to eachother, and their periods will synchronize. But it goes quite a bit farther than that. Suppose we measure 2 people's brainwaves (which is basically measuring the pattern in which large amounts of neurons are firing together). They are somewhat different (if these 2 people are from the same culture/region, not that different at all). Now put the 2 people in the same room, with instructions to completely ignore the other guy, doing different stuff. Bang, the brainwaves synchronize. There is no good measure of how similar 2 brainwaves are, but the waves will phase-shift until they phase-lock and they will remain locked. That's not all that happens, they actually start to synchronize further. That's from merely being in the same room as someone else, giving them zero attention. When talking to the other guy, it becomes basically impossible to tell the waves apart. Our brainwaves do not just synchronize to eachother, but they attempt to synchronize with everything. This probably means that one of the major shifts in human thinking was the rise of electricity, causing everybody to think at ~50 Hz, the frequency at which all light sources, all electronic audio sourc
You're the type of guy that likes to point out that there is a perfect cure for cancer called "Smith & Wesson", right ?
Go to Somolia or Uganda to see what the United States was like 150 years ago. We have no notion of poverty in this country, really no idea at all. In fact, in an informed historical sense there is no poverty in the United States or Europe. Even massively populated countries like China and India have successfully met the essential requirements of their people for the past decade - an incredible accomplishment. We live in a post-poverty world where dying of starvation is many times less likely than dying of heart disease from over-eating. So you see other young adults such as myself crying about poverty in this country - usually from their iPad at Starbucks and it's a curious spectacle. It really is a kind of social meme, a meaningless chant coming down from ages past when the smokestacks of the industrial revolution towered high above the impoverished and starving workers. You find similar myths (and I mean that in the most positive sense) sung in the halls of religious worship. It's an idea, a way of understanding the world. And like many of these religious notions it has no bearing on reality. At the moment we are living in the utopia imagined by our forebears. And once in a while it's profitable to stop for a moment and appreciate that. Then we can go back to pushing the limits and redefining poverty to mean owning at least 2 HD televisions.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
The answer is so trivially simple it's laughable, except, well except that once you know the answer, it's like taking the red pill, and looking at the tubes in everyone's back, including your own, is not so much fun. (In this matrix you don't get to tear them out.)
Anyway. Read this: http://douglassocialcredit.com/resources/resources/social_credit_by_ch_douglas.pdf If economics was not so corrupt, C. H. Douglas would now be regarded as the Einstein of economics.
Social Credit would solve everything...
First we hear Jobs was gonna kill Android. Now Androids are gonna kill jobs.
Anybody want a peanut?
Politics and productivity are not always the same thing. I learn that every day at work. Shovels were a compromise, sounds to me.
Table-ized A.I.
...I don't mind taking one for the team, as long as the robot taxpayer gives me food and shelter, medical care and clean water, I will be prepared to give up my precious job to a robot. We need to move away from a system where one needs work to survive, as it is unlikely we will ever again have enough jobs for everyone.
Ah yes, "shock doctrine" Friedman. How much his ideas have improved life around the globe...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The halting problem has nothing to do with this. By your reasoning humans are impossible (having improved on themselves in many domains). Guess what ... they're not. Which must obviously mean that humans are fundamentally limited in the problems they can understand, not that they are somehow magically above the problem.
Actually, my - lame - theory only means that humans won't create anything that will "understand" (i.e. explain, predict, optimize, possibly describe properties) specific thing (process) better than the authors themselves. I.e. you will never get a tool that replaces a scientist or a programmer.
And humans haven't understand themselves in their full complexity yet. This is a bit separate question, but I think we will never be able to do that. We can possibly create a neural network accurately reflecting human brain - but it may turn out that you can't "teach" this network without providing it with exactly the same inputs a human baby is provided with, starting from physical feelings and not ending with interaction with other people. And suddenly modelling a single person requires you to accurately model a group of people, creating a chicken-and-egg problem.
However even having a neural network is not understanding it, I'd argue. At least - in my engineerish, non-scientific opinion - you can't, by just looking at it, tell what will it output for any given input and how to transform it into other forms while preserving its properties. I think that - in general - we only really understand formal rules that describe how this network "works" (i.e. how to calculate its outputs), but we don't really grasp it.
Sorry for not having read your wikipedia links yet - maybe they already answer my doubts. I will.
Coding etudes
I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?
The only sane thing to do then is to abolish money.
disclaimer: I am a you row pee'n
You know, this has become a meme? I.e. a meaningless social idea that's repeated again and again. We live in a world of incredible abundance, where you are orders of magnitude more likely to die of heart failure due to overeating than from hunger. I tried looking up the number of people who die each year of hunger to get some exact numbers? They're so small that nobody can agree on them. This is historically unprecedented and is directly an effect of industrialization - i.e. of making people "jobless" through mechanization. What has changed is the notion of poverty. Now you not only need food, shelter, free public education, a road system, a police etc. You now need an iPod, a computer, a snazzy phone. I live in the hood of my city - really I pay $350 a month in rent. My neighbors are mostly uneducated, those who are employed work factory jobs. It never ceases to amaze me at the incredible stereo systems and cell phones these guys can afford. A good friend of mine is currently unemployed, has two live at home kids, lives off of the dole and has a brand new iPhone 4s. Fuck I wish I could afford one of those. These poor people in poverty, it's a really tough rap.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
You are still missing the point. This story is about the future, not the present. The owner of the widget factory might go out and buy a gadget, but when that gadget was built via automation, that doesn't create jobs. In the extreme you have a situation where consumption (the thing that currently drives capitalism) fails to create any jobs. And in that situation you have a major social problem.
You don't have to get all the way to the extreme case before this becomes a problem either.
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the machines will take our work. It was said in the 19th century. Look what happened, 2 centuries later, we have a few more billion jobs.
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/10/25/352918/robots-are-not-causing-the-recession/
Here's the last line in the article; "I hear about people going out to lunch less often and cooking for themselves more. If the whole economy became a tiny number of highly paid robot engineers and a mass of low-wage salad-makers, there would be many reasons to regret that outcome but high unemployment wouldn’t be the issue." The whole article is worth a read, and even has an informative graph!
This has already been going on for decades. Certainly MY quality of life is higher than it was even ten years ago.
On the other hand, you are correct in implying that it's not proceeding quickly enough. As automation acceptance rates accelerate, the process of "improving quality of life per unit of work" has to accelerate at least as quickly, or bad things happen....
Well certainly, as you grow older, you generally make more money, are able to buy more goods, nicer house etc. What is the reality for young people, say mid 20s, today vs even 15 years ago? It used to be you could work your way through college with a part time job and a little help from your parents, be able to afford a crappy apartment and a crappy car and put food on the table. That is no longer the reality, which is why you see kids today working full time, going to school full time and still having to take out thousands of dollars in loans even for a state school.
I'm 25 years old, i dont think its too much to ask to be able to work 32-40 hours a week, have healthcare, my own modest place, a used car, feed myself, pay my bills, internet, phone, car insurance, and have a couple of bucks left over to maybe go out to eat two or three times a month, maybe go to a movie or concert once a month and out for drinks with friends occasionally. Thats all i really want at this point. But even that modest lifestyle is just not a possibility for the majority of people, myself included. I was an assistant store manager at a big box retail store, in charge of a staff of dozens and a store with several million in merchandise, 40-50 hours a week. Im living at home, but even a cheap 1bdr in a non shit neighborhood (nowhere near work) would have been nearly half my monthly takehome.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
If they had opportunity to do something interesting rather than put up with menial labor, I doubt "70%" would be considered lazy.
If you had 40 more hours a week to do what you want instead of having to wash dishes to pay for your crappy apartment, you'd find some way to fill the time. I envision an unprecedented outbreak of craftsmanship. And massive increases in the size of softball beer leagues. Why not?
Of course. But you are you representative of the masses?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Maybe, to keep in tune with the article, we should let machines run regulations. A machine can't take bribes.
There's a certain sense to that. But the machine and/or regulation should have a sunset provision in it. I'm leery of regulations that might last to the heat death of the universe.
This great phenomenon is vastly under-appreciated by the world's governments. If they don't start formulating policies (and alternatives to capitalism?) fast, there'll be a bloody revolution when millions can't find work because robots are doing essentially everything. I don't know the answer (socialism, time banks, feudalism, or whatever), but we need to think this through to keep people from starving (esp. when the robots rebel, of course.)
"One empirical experiment is worth a thousand expert opinions." --Bill Nye, the Science Guy
...that all people must be forced to work at the threat of starvation when clearly there are sufficient resources for everyone already?
Right, the disgusting psychos who can't feel anything positive unless they cause visible pain to hundreds of millions people.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm not sure this is entirely true. If you look at what comes out of the food-slots, it's always in the appropriate serving container, usually specialized to what's being ordered. Unless there's one hell of a big china cabinet somewhere on the Enterprise, I would think that the dishes the food is served on is synthesized at the same time as the food. I think the reason why you don't see a big replicator somewhere else used for more complex durable goods was probably either a) Roddenberry didn't think of it at the time (just wanted a "magic food gizmo" to look futuristic), or b) It occurred to him that it was possible based on the food replicators, but he thought it would be "too powerful" of a tool to give the characters (removing the ability to have plot points that require work to get some kind of tool or gizmo because they could just replicate it).
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
I don't mean anything too dramatic, something like a 5% VAT with a credit for 30k/person (paid as a check, or done as a credit in tax season) would only amount to $1500/person. It's not charity, it's a progressive tax.
The VAT has the benefit of encouraging locally produced stuff (by taxing foreign companies that sell here the same as local companies that sell here, and not taxing local companies that export, the Corporate Income Tax is bad, because it does the opposite). Once the system is in place things can be adjusted when/if technology brings a cornucopia.
If families received $3000 (2 adults) up front every year it would allow for some micro entrepreneurship too ($3000 goes a long way towards a small grass cutting business for example). It's not really about welfare initially, but it builds a system that it can exist, and increases revenue in a non-regressive way that is less harmful to the economy than other taxes. It is a slight redistribution of income, but it's generally accepted in the US that a slight redistribution is OK to do with taxes (I am not intending to argue the right or wrong of that, it's to dogmatic and there is no right or wrong answer).
I also think the "jobless recovery" has a lot to do with basic computing skills becoming omnipresent, and the efficiency they provide hitting. It's good in the long-run, even though it really really sucks for 10%-20% of the population (the 10% not getting work, and their families). It's a similar situation to the industrial revolution in the loss of work due to efficiency.
As for the actual article, DUH computers took more jobs than they created, they wouldn't be used in business if they didn't.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The owner DOES stick the money in his mattress. The big corporations have an absurd amount of money that isn't being spent and is being hoarded.
That's not actually cash. They call it "cash" but what they mean is liquid assets. They have that amount in investment securities: Stocks, bonds, etc. They would have to be completely incompetent to hold it as actual cash when they have the alternative of getting at least some interest on it.
Incidentally, the reason they're doing it is the preposterous tax system. When an investor invests in e.g. Microsoft and Microsoft sells a million copies of Windows, if they don't have anything good to do with the money they are (in theory) supposed to issue it as a dividend to the investors. Then the investors can do something useful with it, either invest in something useful or spend it. The problem is that the tax code taxes dividends immediately, but it doesn't tax increases in stock price until the stock is sold.
What that means is that the majority of investors prefer the company to hold onto the money and invest it for them, because the investors who would only take the dividend and reinvest it get the same result but put off paying the taxes indefinitely. And the investors who want the money now can still get it just as easily by selling some shares (which are each worth that much more money as a result of the corporation having the extra "cash"), with the bonus that they can deduct what they paid for the stock when they bought it rather than paying tax on the full amount.
The owner of the widget factory might go out and buy a gadget, but when that gadget was built via automation, that doesn't create jobs.
Yes it does. Someone has to make the machine that makes that widget. Someone has to see that it continues functioning properly. Someone has to guard the factory where they're built. Someone has to drive the truck to get it to the customer, etc.
In theory you could ultimately replace all of those jobs by machine, but at that point the cost of goods will be so low that you can just have a government collect $2 in taxes from whoever still has the last job and use it to buy food and shelter for all of humanity forever.
The only decent episodes of Star Trek were the outsourced ones.
Roddenberry episodes were like MASH episodes directed by what's his fuck...Hawkeye, terrible.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
O'RLY? Ok well when you can get a robot to figure out just what it is that the end user wants when the end user doesn't even know what they want, get back to me. In addition when a robot can understand and parse 20 different vertical specific application on 4 major operating systems and 6 different server operating systems across diverse geographical environments then also get back to me. Yeah, like I said before, my job is very secure.