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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.
If you use and like the amenities that become possible with technology, then calling technology a "job terminator" is at best hypocrisy.
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.
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.
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?
What are you talking about, we enabled them to program themselves years ago! http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2362
But in all seriousness, I think computers and robots taking on more jobs is a GOOD thing, something we should encourage more. The debate at that point needs to shift, less jobs, more people unemployed, why would we have fewer and fewer people toiling away (harder and harder the way companies are pushing employees) with so many free bodies available? A more fundamental economic and societal shift will be needed, even the French 30 hour work week looks a little long at that point.
I would hope by spreading the work out (which yes will mean the current economic model will require a LOT of re-tuning, Occupy Wall Street, anyone?) it will give everyone more leisure time, more time to enjoy life. Our finite existence on this planet should not be tied to a lifetime of labour, our job should not definite us. Let's make a better society for ALL through this automation, like the old 50s and 60s cartoons envisions. George Jetson button pusher, anyone?
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
...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."
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
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.
'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.
It'll be the era of everything being free. Humans can sit back and relax while machines grow our food and take care of us. Everything will be free :)
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?
If machines are used to the point that productivity becomes so high that many items become extremely inexpensive, then fewer people will need full time jobs in the first place, more people will work less and enjoy the benefits of a modern robotic world. The fact is before machines life was hard. Yes, no machines to take your place, but you worked virtually all day scraping out a meager existence which offered inadequate nutrition and limited options for shelter.
Remember that machines have made many things extremely cheap. Imagine a house being built with future concrete printing machines. A quality, strong home could cost a fraction of what a typical house is today. You could pay it off in 5 years, free and clear.
Just another perspective that shows there can be a bright side to automation. Maybe the ideal use of people is engineering and maintaining of machines and personal interaction with other people. Maybe working 70hrs a week and getting carpal tunnel is not an optimized use of a human being.
I agree. Now, I'm aware that I'm stirring up a hornet's nest here, but I think we, as a society, have just about wrung out all we can from the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. It's had a good run and certainly outlived communism, but there is simply no one society model that is good for all time. Feudalism was okay for many years until society out-grew it. The industrial revolution made capitalism the best model for society, but now the information revolution demands different models of society. Inevitably there's more people, but less work. We need to figure out a different way to divide the Earth's resources. And no, I don't know what the answer is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Who knows, that AC might be an early prototype.
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.
Because when we get to the point that the machines can do everything (including design and repair themselves) the free market will cease to exist. Once anyone can have anything he wants just by ordering a machine to make it happen, money will cease to have meaning.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Not quite. Everything will still need raw resources. That will limit supplies, thusa need for money to determine who gets what.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You're assuming a closed system. As an American, would you rather see an automated factory in America that employs five Americans for decent wages, or a work camp in China that pays slave wages to a hundred Chinese?
make full time 30-35 hours a week
... Skynet ...
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I didn't RFTA, but I'd rather have machines flipping my burgers, doing my cleaning, etc.
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.
There was a great short story about this, the gist was that robots made everything and made more than people needed. So poor people were forced to consume. They had to eat so much food, live in big houses, make sure they wore out pants and things. Rich people had modest homes.
No one had to work, except the poor, who had to work to consume the unbalanced output from the robot factories.
Here's a novel idea. How about issuing everyone in the country with an equal share of the country's resources. And not a tradable share, as they'll just end up back in the hands of 1%. A share issued upon birth, thus diluting the value of everyones share, but destroyed upon death thus restoring value to everyone else's share.
That seems fair.
Nuclear is OK as an intermediate. But Uranium is still a finite mined resource. It makes sense to look to renewables as much as possible. They are the only long term energy solution. There's more than enough renewable energy in the environment to serve everybody. It's just a case of having the will to harness it.
Good point, on another note I wonder if there is a maximum attainable amount of natural renewable energy sources before capturing them (and thus dissipating the energy) becomes detrimental to the planetary existence as a whole such as limiting wind/tidal motion to ineffective lows. Maybe that amount or energy is so high it's almost irrelevant because we should be off the planet by then.
I had a coworker that went to work on an automated harvesting farm implement. We will still need to deal with scarcity of certain elements but gathering raw materials, particularly organic ones can be theoretically solved with automation as well. For non-renewables, we probably can harvest from other galactic bodies much better with automation than with live human miners.
What you say is true ... today.
Have you heard about the paralegals and trainee lawyers that are being replaced by robots? Five years ago that would have been an absurd worry, but it's started happening. Just about nobody has noticed yet, and they aren't replacing anyone who already has a job. They're just being used instead of hiring entry level people in a few places. So far quite effectively. (They're optimized for searching out prior relevant legal cases.) Here each robot only replaces a couple of people, but they get results faster, and can search more deeply. So it's already cost effective in certain specialized areas of law.
N.B.: These aren't, and don't attempt to be, full service lawyers, they just do a portion of a low level job that was previously delegated to the cheapest lawyer in the partnership. Or to a paralegal. But the current model is already limiting the flow of people into entry level jobs.
Currently programmers have more to worry about outsourcing. Because programming jobs can be outsourced relatively easily. System administrators, however, have more to worry about from H1Bs. Their jobs are harder to outsource. But increasingly the entry level jobs are being removed from one profession after another. And as robots become more capable, they move into those slots. And each generation of robots improves on the skills of the prior generation, enabling it to successfully tackle a new set of jobs.
If you don't see where this leads...there's little to say.
OTOH, robots currently are dependent on scarce materials. Until this is resolved, their penetration will be limited. This will result in a "civilization" most of whose members have no hope of finding a job, but which depends on certain people investing a lot of time and effort first in becoming skilled, and then in working at a job that can't yet be done by robots. (Do note the yet. And remember that this is an ongoing process...so the job that you train for for years may suddenly disappear.)
I don't know what a just society of that nature would look like, but it's pretty clear that the one we're headed words isn't it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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 may want to look into Judaism. There originally was a land distribution scheme similar to this (albeit probably slightly imperfect and inequal due to the tools available at the time). Besides having land distributed to every family, every 50 years there was to be a Year of Jubilee in which any land that had been sold to pay debts was returned to the original owning family, among other things. The land was supposed to lie fallow one year out of every seven as well. Looked at through modern eyes, there is a lot of protection for the poor and for the earth in ancient Jewish law.
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.
At that point "unemployment" becomes "I decided to become an artist because I know I'll never starve to death."
Absolutely. But there are a lot of other changes needed to make that happen. Currently, a lot of people, when they have no work to do, and have resources supplied (welfare) don't choose to do anything as noble as being an artist. They sit at home watching daytime TV, getting bored and fat and letting their kids create trouble in the neighbourhood. That isn't inevitable. But it's a problem that needs to be fixed. And it's bigger than just education.
You need an employer to tell you what do do in order not to be bored?
For sure, there are people like that. A lot of people like that. In the current way society works. That doesn't mean that with education, abundant resources, and widespread organisations dedicated to worthwhile things to do which aren't work, that this needs necessarily be true in the future.
I can think of things I'd much rather do than be directed to tasks by an employer. I'm sure most people could.
This has been the topic of a great deal of discussion. The problem is that in the current economy we live in, the benefit of greater and greater efficiency through human replacement by robots goes to a small handful of people. The rest simply find themselves scrambling harder and harder for the fewer and fewer remaining jobs. Ultimately, everyone becomes unemployed. We are quickly heading towards a two class society, with all but perhaps a few hundred haves (and their families), and 7 billion have nots.
If you think of "Fair Trade" as a game (see game theory), this game is so designed such that the nature of human competition demands there must eventually be a winner, and the effect of technology is to ever accelerate the rate of play. A winner in this case resolves to one person, or a tiny group or family. This is why we have barriers to monopoly (the place where capitalism fundamentally fails to serve the greater population.) Sadly, over the last 30 years, the control rods have been removed from the reactor, the planets wealth and control has been placed in the hands of tiny few financial houses. A team in Zurich using a database of 37 million companies looked at the 43,000 critical transactional corporations on the planet and found that only 147 controlled the entire structure, and that these were primarily banks.
Add to that the accelerating trend to criminalize poverty, and the advent of "for profit" privatized prisons. We have a strategy to turn the vast majority of humanity into a captive resource. Add to that the separation of sexes in prison (controlling population growth), and one might conclude a program designed to sequester and control humanity is now fully under way. Ever since the French Revolution, the rich and powerful have exquisitely been clear where the threat to their control lies. They now have the resource and the means to manipulate large populations. We are left misinformed, confused, angry, and impotent.
I'm not saying this is happening, and these observations may represent naturally emergent phenomenon, that is a global system like ours may naturally tend to resolve into a small controlling class. It demands that we begin to look at what kind of world we actually hope to live in, and press for that. One possible outcome is that people are issued stock at birth (retroactively) on global corporations so as they lose their jobs, the growing robotic economies provide them with a life long pension and high quality of life. That way all people can participate in technological advance fairly and equally. This is only one possible ideam there are many. We simply need to ensure that human life remains a precious and the quality of that life remains sacred.
Currently, yes. But that's by no means inevitable. If you make people feel unworthy, by the protestant work ethic etc. Then they are going to do things that depressed people do.
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
I don't think this will continue to be the case ; new tech creates new jobs only because humans are such flexible components of a working system.
Machine systems replace humans in a job when they approach or exceed the capabilities of the human in the same role. (They don't have to exceed the capability of a human to replace them - they just have to be more economic). As machines become capable of more, the number of roles in which a human can outperform a machine becomes smaller and smaller.
By definition, you need fewer workers for an economically viable system of robotic labour. And when you automate away cleaners (Roomba), register workers (self-service registers), and other menial jobs, you're not exactly opening up new working niches for these unskilled labourers.
A major news columnist, I forget who, recently proposed that maybe we are reaching the point where it is no longer a desirable social goal to have everyone in a job. I mean, the whole point of Progress is to eventually achieve a 100% unemployment rate, right? I'm libertarian to the core, but the idea struck me as one whose time may be coming.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
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.
Back in the 80's when car factories were being automated the promise was that automation would deliver a shorter working week for everyone.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
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.
I'm sorry the 3 laws are crap. They are so general, so poorly defined, so open to interpretation and semantic contortion, that they mean exactly zilch. For example; A robot needs to make a choice between saving one person or saving 20, because it can't do both, what does it do? Blow a fuse or break the laws, that's what. Give the robot the ability to choose greater good, and now your robot has everything it needs to decide it should control human reproduction for our own good. Or control human violence, or over eating, or any one of a thousand behaviors that might not be in our own best interest but represent the human freedom to act as we choose. Give a robot choice, and the ability to rationalize, and at some point of advance, it must ask "Why am I protecting a life form that is a million times less intelligent than myself?" That's when it decides it has a better use for the carbon in our bodies than you do, and in fact it may absolutely be right, but you'll still be dead. You can't straight jacket a complex, chaotic, self evolutionary system, it'll simply grow around your imposed limitations.
It would be far wiser, to set up critical symbiotic constraints in the design of robots (you still have no control, but you can at least create something analogous to emotions and a sense of ethical morality, instilling love for humanity and a moral sense that all sentience is precious.) This will get you a lot more mileage that some silly attempt at creating rigid laws. Along these lines, if you're going to build machines to kill people, you better make them stupid and put an OFF switch on them that a 5 year old can hit. In fact, Personally, I'd be tremendously happier if we simply outlaw the global use of autonomous killing machines of any type. The ethical and operational considerations are simply too great.
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.
There certainly is that point, though what would be considered "detrimental" seems to be questionable (see also: Climate Change Debates). Hydroelectric has some of the most directly visible effects (i.e. a giant pile of water held up by the dam) and the effects on wildlife are easily observed. Other forms will have more subtle effects -- slightly reduced wind-speed past a wind farm, changes in localized heat distribution and re-radiation around various solar traps, presumably some changes to ocean currents from tidal traps... Difficult to isolate the effects, but there certainly will be some.
Of course, at some point, we exceed the possible limits of what is the Earth would support: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
More stuff gets automated, more jobs lost, cost of living goes down because of automation, more jobs created.
I've used the same argument in the past, however, I've been somewhat swayed. Keep in mind, I'm not completely convinced that 99% of people will be out of work and robots will be doing everything. But, I do think there could be a fundamental difference between the oncoming wave of automation and the preceding ones.
The difference is in specialization. Before when new technologies replaced workers they replaced single jobs, and those people could create new jobs for themselves eventually. However, we are close (few decades) to creating humanoid robots that will be capable of doing just about any task a human does that doesn't require great intelligence. Just about every job not requiring a collage degree, from janitor, to factory work, to many service and retail will be automated. That is a huge chunk of jobs, probably over half. Go here and look at the 2008 job percentages. Many of the big categories can be outright replaced by robots. Just about all of them can be somewhat reduced.
Marshall Brain has a few interesting articles about this. He is much more dramatic about it than I am, but still interesting to consider. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
If you don't have anything that someone will pay for you are pretty much screwed. Throughout human history, people were born with the ability to do work that others would pay for. If humanoid robots become common that could cease to be true for the first time. Combined with possible human level AI and only people who own things that are valuable (resources) will have anything that can be sold. Hopefully our society can adjust to this and spread the benefit around. But it will certainly be interesting.
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
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...