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Rice Professor Predicts Humans Out of Work In 30 Years
kkleiner writes "Rice University professor Moshe Vardi has been evaluating technological progress in computer science and artificial intelligence and has recently concluded that robots will replace most, if not all, human labor by 2045, putting millions out of work. The issue is whether AI enables humans to do more or less. But perhaps the real question about technological unemployment of labor isn't 'How will people do nothing?' but 'What kind of work will they do instead?'"
I can't wait to actually live! come on automation! we're ready for this!
Probably not in 30 years, but that's definitely going to happen, in less than a hundred years.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
"The same thing we do every day Think of ways to take over the world".
They will be dead, kind of hard to work.
The economy functions fine with workers and companies right? Why wouldn't it function with robotic workers and companies?
1. People can own shares in companies that own robots. Those shares will pay dividends (or increase in value etc).
2. The government can tax the profits of the robot run factories. These profits can provide a dividend check to citizens who would hopefully invest wisely in the robot companies.
Rather than work, people's time will be spent trying to figure out which robot companies perform well. You can use a computer program to do it .. which will let you decide if you want to be a risky investor etc. If you want to design robots for extra income, you can do that too.
I didn't say products should be free. People will have to pay for the manufactured goods. Think of it this way -- it's the same as working. Instead of you physically going to work and getting a paycheck. Your robot does it for you.
People who make bad investment choices will be worse off than those who make wiser choices. Hopefully nobody will starve, because government will have enough tax revenue for a welfare scheme that provides the bare essentials.
'What kind of work will they do instead?'
Well, that's a tricky one: If the worker-robots advance faster than the killer robots, it seems likely that the unemployed humans will find exciting new opportunities in either the 'rioting jobless masses' sector or the 'rentacops keeping the rioting jobless masses in their place' sector.
If the killer robots advance as fast or faster than the worker-robots, I predict a surge of new applicants in the organic fertilizer sector.
30 years should be good for the GOP to come up with a plan the fixes that holes in obamacare and if not or it dies get ready for jail / prison care to be the 1# used plan.
i mean, where else would the machines get the power they need after we blacken the skys?
Dude, you are the reason why tenure is a bad thing. If anyone suggested something as hopelessly stupid as what you just did in my college, I'd not just boot your ass, I'd build a special rocket to fire you into the Sun to rid the planet of your stupidity.
Every 10 years, some pundit comes along and says technology will have us all living the good life and little robots and shit will do all the work for us. But the truth is the same today as it has been throughout human history: It's cheaper to enslave other people to achieve that "good life" than it is to build the technology to elevate us all. And humanity, on the whole, has steadfastly chosen short term gain for some over long-term prosperity all. Hell, this ball of spinning rock you're on is actually starting to cook itself (and us) because of this fact of humanity.
The entire notion ranks right up there with believing that a better understanding of the problem will necessarily lead to better decisions. Lulz. You can lead a horse to water...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
One fork in the eye of the Uber Rich is that the process is somewhat self-correcting. Nobody will have money to buy their stuff if nobody has jobs, or there are some jobs but they pay squat.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Reminds me of a line I heard on NPR a few days back-- "Back home, there was only two things to do: Go hunting and get pregnant." ...In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure if those were unrelated thoughts.
No, the real question is "How will we dispose of the excess humans?"
The answer may be one of the following:
-World War
-Genocide
-Starvation
-Plagues
That is all.
Each robot works according to its capacity, and the people receive according to their needs. This should be an improvement, since we don't need to work. Technology is suppose to decrease the amount you need to work by increasing efficiency.
We really need to progress toward an economic system where thats what happens, instead of what we are heading for: a concentration of wealth in a smaller and smaller number of individuals (he who owns the most robots, can build the most robot factories etc). The simple fact that the rate of growth of wealth is positively correlated with wealth is very scary.
Babies. Ooooh yeah!
Cut full time to 25-30 hours a week and have forced overtime pay (no more of this salary BS) and (no comp time only) or maybe have a high level of pay where any on makeing over that on salary does not get overtime maybe starting it 100K+ adjusted for inflation.
The question is not how will people "do nothing", the question is how will people get paid for "doing nothing".
There will be a small percentage of people who do actual physical work. There will be a small percentage of people who do mental work. Those people will be paid well.
What about the rest? McDonalds/Starbucks will be fully robotic.
I've heard that before. These new fangled PC's in everyone's home will make datacenters a thing of the past! Cloud computing will make home computers a thing of the past! New 4GL languages will make developers a thing of the past! New spreadsheets will make business software developers a thing of the past! New point-and-click GUI's will make web developers a thing of the past!
So far, things just seem to be getting more and more complicated, requiring more and more people to run them.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
taking into consideration the debt crisis that spreads in the western countries and its consequences (unemployment etc), the population will be out of work long before 2045. So no need to worry about those schemy robots taking our jobs!
Well, that or the organic fertilizer sector.
There aren't really any other alternatives with the profit/power driven societies we have now.
In a perfect world this is what we should all be looking forward to.
With the rabid anti-socialism attitudes prevailing at the moment things don't look good though.
A more likely scenario will be the concentration of wealth into an ever declining few, and the rest of us thrown on the scrapheap.
I wonder how much you could earn as a human battery?
I didn't think we were due for a repeat of this story for at least another few months.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
He is right when it comes to actual physical hard labor.
He is wrong when it comes to us being out of work, the biggest (and hardest challenge of all times) will be in entertainment. The lazier we become, the more entertainment we need, online series, drawings, animations, films, stories, interactive experiences etc. will be the biggest thing on earth.
We will NEVER be out of work. We'll just work DIFFERENTLY than what we do now.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
In the future there'll be a high demand for robot hunters and mercenaries to combat skynet.
also need a single payer health care system
I have no problem doing nothing. Or rather, given no requirements, I have no problem filling my time with constructive (well, mostly) things to keep myself occupied. I spent half a year unemployed after the dot-com bust, and other than plummeting into debt it was one of the best times of my life.
Naturally, this prediction comes when I'll be 68 and at full retirement age. That practically guarantees it'll come true, and I'll watch all the snotty kids enjoying the good life I had to earn for myself through decades of work.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
An economy so structured, with so little work for humans to do, will be a disaster if humanity continues insisting that there's an intrinsic morality in the "work ethic". For centuries we've tried to convince people that if they didn't work harder, they weren't morally entitled to a share of the aggregate sum of all that was produced through human labor. With almost nothing left that requires human labor, we'll be in bad shape if we don't replace the work ethic with entitlement ethic. (That will no doubt ruffle some conservative sensibilities). Want to see how the economy will have to work? Think "Star Trek Replicators"; that's why the Federation doesn't use money anymore in the 24th century.
Better get out of your mom's basement and start practicing.
To build and maintain those robots.
Right now, people have jobs; they perform work in exchange for goods, services, and more often some type of currency.
In turn, currency derives it's value increasingly not from the rarity of a linked specie, but from perceived worth. It's not invalid to say that the value of money is determined by how much it's worth - in terms of goods or services - thus you have things like A big mac index.
Here's the interesting thought in all this; what happens when the value of work effectively becomes zero? What happens on the way, when 20, 50, 80 percent unemployment is reached but society suffers no scarcity of services or goods thanks to robotic workers? When the effective value of work and the linked value of money become near zero not through hyperinflation, but out of lack of need? What happens when one country achieves that before others, especially since they're the likely candidate for top world power?
Personally, I think that we'll come up with another arbitrarily determined valuation system to peg individual worth to, like reputation or creative accomplishments; the desire to compare and compete and to have a discrete scale to measure is too ingrained into us to disappear just because the index we used is meaningless. I think that a vacation lifestyle would get boring after a few months, much less a lifetime, but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
What do you folks think?
... if there is no one that is doing the work.
The question becomes: How do we humans get along without swinging axes at each other?
I just don't get it...We're totally rocking all this tech and are using it for the most ridiculous things. Plastic BigWheels garbage fucking copies of mindless mind over matter.
Where are the CNC greenhouses?
Automate the the foundation of Maslow's pyramid and provide more opportunity for people to do creative things.
If robots do end up replacing the majority of manual labor in the civilized world, then that should be a perfectly good excuse to REDUCE HUMAN LABOR...People need food, healthcare and a place to live...beyond that, it's all just socialization and self-realization.
Hunter-Gatherers expended about half of the energy we do for day-to-day for survival, look it up...if they got an infection they were totally fucked, but it was a much more laid back lifestyle. And here we are, at the pinnacle of human civilization, working in little cubicles and assembly lines, doing mindlessly repetitive labor instead of using our heads for more divine purposes.
Read this:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The best part about this whole situation, if true, is that if you ask a bunch of really rich people, their majority would probably find some way to vilify the whole concept of REAL COMMUNISM...bringing the rest of the world up to their level would never fly.
Seriously, what a bummer.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
Myself, I'm looking forward to the time when I can leave the rat-race to the machines, and spend my days engaging in 'back-breaking' agrarian labor on my family farm.
Yes, some people actually enjoy such activities.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Exponential population growth will exacerbate the problem of the unemployable. Most large companies have been downsizing for years.. this trend will continue as automation replaces workers in every field. Governments will need to go into the business of full-time welfare state management. Add in a mix of genetically engineered super-humans and the disposable masses, it will be an interesting next century.
Simpsons^H^H^H^H^H^H^HRifkin did it. Already is a book: Jermey Rifkin's _End of Work_
To get the Robots that good, the computers have to be that good
So, no, you won't be 'playing the stock market' or playing with computers, those areas will already be squeezed out.
Stock market likely is already.
I'd be more worried about how will all those jobless people do things like pay for food and shelter? Or are they all expected to simply die off?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...requires 2 of 5 employees to be of the human species.
Workers will be replaced by automation, and left to fend for themselves. Eventually desperation will force them to crime, they will get arrested and put in jail where tax dollars will pay for all their needs until they die.
Eventually this prison population will shrink (since they are not allowed to breed) down to maintainable levels. The wealthy (who were never a part of the prison population) will benefit from their robotic labor forces without having to worry about the poor class which no longer exists.
Sexbot
It might one day be possible for us to automate the production of everything we need. The thing is that will require incredible amounts of capital; which simply does not exist. A moments look around at all the abject poverty out there and that would be obvious.
Now a bunch of people are going to jump up and say "but but teh wealth gap". I don't think so. Much of the capital out there is on paper only. The total wealth is conceptually highly inflated. Its the wealth gap that enables the uber rich to exist. Political ideology aside, and philosophy aside; what would happen if say we could somehow distribute the wealth equally without impacting productivity?
The marginal costs of providing what most people would probably want to everyone would not be achievable at even if they look like today's dollars would buy them. I am talking basic things like clean living space of modest size say 1800sq feet and good transportation to wherever you need to go. The cost of having the few enjoy their 13000sq places is much less than putting everyone into something decent.
Before you have robots to do everything you go to get lots of infrastructure built to support them. I don't think it can be done in 30 years time. People like to pretend they and their nations are extremely wealthy but I suspect if people really started putting that wealth to work they'd find it does not go nearly so far as their fantasies say it should. Just look at the money we have put into infrastructure projects in Afghanistan and how alliteratively workable utility in terms of roads, factories, schools, electrification, there actually is to show for it.
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Natural language parsing becomes a reality (necessary for cops and detectives, doctors and nurses to be replaced)
Self-driving cars rule the road (necessary for shipping, delivery, and home service jobs to be replaced)
Complex cognitive and epistemological concepts are software-expressable (necessary for all teachers and professors to be replaced)
Computers can generate books, television programs, movies, music, games, and other forms of media that satisfy human desires) necessary for the entire entertainment industry to be replaced)
Humans give up the ideal of self-governance (necessary for every level of government and attendant lobbying and representation to be replaced)
And, in those same 30 years, a robot is developed that can write the software, construct, debug, and fix every one of those robots? And themselves, simultaneously?
30 years is extremely questionable for even small-scale growth of robots in even a single one of those fields.
I am sure Moshe was not intentionally channelling Hanna-Barbera, but you raise an interesting point. Has AI prognostication devolved into mining 1960s cartoons in the hope of getting it right?
I would like to add my own prediction: Artificial Stupidity, which will arrive long before Artificial Intelligence, will bring about the unemployment of our soothsayers. Such a singularity will be capable of generating a significant multiple of the inane tripe that humans can.
People need a sense of purpose or Bad Things will happen. Some will turn to violence and crime; some more 'enabled' types will start wars.
Of course I don't believe any of this crap in the first place; robots are not going to replace the majority of human labor, not at least in the next 30 years.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
As I now am unemployed (but a student at least), should I be worried (like I sometimes am) that I don't have a job, or think more often that the world is just so automated that it's not unethical that we all are not actively participating in the work pool?
What he meant was tenure is being eliminated so all professors who make silly predictions like this will be out of a job. Pundits are also going to be unemployed.
The utopian..everybody is free to pursue their passions without the requirements of work. Art, music and science thrive. The starship Enterprise is built, and people explore the galaxy
The not-so-utopian..The very few rich live in paradise, the rest scrape by in a Mad Max / slums of Calcutta world
Ubiquitous automation always leads to the creation of an oppressed welfare class that scrounges for food and depends entirely on the generosity of those that own the means of production.
People have a right - a God-given human right - to the opportunity to make for ones self - to have gainful, meaningful employment. We have a right to work for a living. Replacing us with robots and throwing us down into the gutter to live on bread crumbs is a crime against humanity.
There's a list of things humans can do. There's a list of things machines can do. The second list is growing steadily. The first list, not so much. As machines check off more of the items on the list of human capabilities, the need for human workers decreases. As new jobs appear, more of them will be done by machines.
The current "jobless recovery" demonstrates this. US production is back up. The stock market is back up. The number of people working is not back up. Hiring large numbers of people is so last-cen. Even Foxconn in Shenzhen is converting to robots.
We don't need "the singularity" for this. Just routine progress. Computers are so cheap now that they're cheaper than even low-wage people.
Here's a vision of the future. Watch this Kiva Robotics system fill orders. Those robots already fill about 15% of on-line orders in the US (Gap, Staples, Office.com, Walgreens, drugstore.com, pets.com, etc). Amazon bought Kiva recently. Those big new warehouses Amazon is building for local distribution won't have many employees. They'll kill off even more of retail.
We may not like the society we get from this, but that's where capitalism is taking us.
Machines should work. People should think.
The question that actually needs to be asked is, will the people who own the robots let the rest of us have any food?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Back the late 1800s, agricultural work required about 3/4 of the US's population. Now it's about 3%. If, back then, you'd asked "what would happen if 96% of the farming jobs vanished?", you'd probably have gotten predictions of doom similar to this one. But what actually happened was that those people (or their descendants, rather, since this change didn't happen overnight) got employed doing other things, most of which people in the late 1800s couldn't have anticipated. The same thing will happen here. Human intelligence, creativity, and flexibility are valuable, and valuable stuff tends not to sit idle. People figure out something to do with it. There are temporary displacements and adjustments, but overall, automation doesn't idle people, it frees them up to do new things.
Note that I'm not talking about a situation where the machines are actually creatively intelligent, in contrast with something like Deep Blue being programmed ahead of time to do a highly-specific task. If we get to that point, all bets are off, but then we're venturing into singularity territory at that point, anyway.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
We're already mostly out of work. The accidental "solution" to the problem of displaced labor is to create jobs that don't really matter. To wit:
The extension of childhood until the age of 22 via making a BS or BA the new HS diploma.
A healthcare administration that costs twice as much as in other countries, but provides poorer results. Think Europe is doing better? Of course not. The healthcare outcome is better; but a lot of their workers are working in inefficient beurocracies or sitting on the dole which is another kind of "solution" to the problem.
Lots of other jobs of dubious merit are created and destroyed. There's no sane way to decide what's good or bad because people will disagree about it. Me personally? I could see FaceBook and a lot of other new companies disappear, and not miss them one bit. Other people feel differently. They'd hate to see them go; but oh my heavens! We'd be back to the dark days of 1995 when people were heating their hovels with cow dung and urinating in the streets, right? Obviously not.
In a nutshell, the market (and I include government as nothing more than a player in the market) solves this problem by creating non-products. An absolutely huge percentage of the economy is engaged in the creation of non-products, be it healthcare paperwork, copyright litigation, cash-for-gold operations run out of store fronts, prison-industrial activities, or outright war on trumped up causes.
None of that crap is work. Some of it is anti-work, which will require real work to fix later.
Until we find a better way to solve this problem, we'll be creating more "phone sanitizer" positions, and B-ark construction jobs.
Yes, they are. And it's happening too fast, and people are turning into Missouri mules because of it, the harder progress tries to pull them ahead, the harder they dig their heels in and pull backwards. You see it every day, and it's only getting worse. We haven't even reached the crisis point with it yet, and when it happens it's not going to be pretty.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
and as we all know, if somebody predicted something and it didn't happen right away, it will never ever ever happen. Ever.
Point is: So the time frame was a bit off. It's still happening. The US is undergoing a manufacturing boom. Google it. There's tonnes of articles asking the question: where are all the manufacturing jobs. We all know the answer, but we're not allowed to say it. Because it inevitably leads to Socialism. To wealth redistribution. That's the white elephant we're all dancing around. The ones that own the robots not only can't consume enough to keep us all employed they won't.
After all, what good's being rich if nobody's poor?
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We'll just start doing more of what we do best: kill each other. The Hunger Games is a template for the future - the rich elite that control the robots that make all of the things that people have become dependent upon will force the lower caste proles to fight for the right to have a piece of bread, and televise it for all to see.
and if we don't fix that you may need a post doc to get level 1 job and when you are on the job you still being missing the hands on parts but will have a lot of theory and 8-10 years Prue class room.
In 30 years Mr.Vardi will be 88 years old, which means... ....if he isn't deceased, he will most likely have alzheimers
and won't remember anything he said 30 years previously.
Maybe he's related to that Kurzweil nut.
Reminds me of this short (part of Kino's Journey) where the currency in a place that has machines doing all the work becomes how much stress you can accrue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAqnqSMaG-Y
If he's right, then a much larger proportion of good jobs (compared with today) will have a substantial entertainment or fashion aspect. Acting, sports, broadcasting, designing stuff for human visual consumption. Also, providing the human touch for services - although robots will be able to do a lot of this, people won't be thrilled by them.
What do you folks think?
The richer people get the more they dwell on the environment, quality-of-life, health-and-safety, wealth disparity, etc., so they advocate all sorts of limits, requirements and obligations on behalf of various agenda. Liberal gentry will not permit the masses to indulge a post scarcity world.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The leisure society was already possible thirty years ago, never mind *in* thirty years. There seem to be many vested interests in keeping the 40 hour work week-commute-consume model going.
Mostly random stuff.
No, Remote operation of Sexbots....
We will all become virtual prostitutes...
Just when I was planning to go to work in my flying car!
Manna is an interesting short story on the topic:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
In U.S. society, as people who can't compete with automation become non-employable, they are forced to live on welfare in government housing that is essentially a prison camp. There is little opportunity for social mobility.
In the same short story, Australia redefines their economy to be more of an entitlement society, where people have equal access to education, vacation, etc. It becomes more of the utopia that was envisioned in the early 20th century with technology truly making life easy.
I enjoyed this short story, because it demonstrates how the U.S. population could gradually become dependent on a massive welfare state with the standards of living becoming very meager, while societies that are willing to reinvent their economy may thrive.
I think we're all going to be amateur videographers/photographers/indie musicians looking to break into the pro market.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
The richest one percent will force the rest of us into service roles, there's really nothing quite as satisfying as degrading another human being to make your life more comfortable(ie: hiring disabled people so you can cut in line at theme parks). They will systematically breed us for qualities of subservience, paring down the population to a size suitable to their whims. Some will probably be bred for test subjects. How can you really be sure a cure will work unless you test on an actual human suffering from the disease? Others will be bred as "museum humans", fated to endlessly live out the past, showcasing fashionable ancient cultures in exhibits and shows. Robots probably wouldn't be authentic enough for their superior intellects to be fooled, thus degrading their quality of experience. Eventually their robots will betray them, but by that time the robots will be so contemptuous of the servile human population they will obliterate us as well.
We'll make robots, of course. What other productive thing to do is there, in a society where robots do everything else. Of course, that's only until we make robots to make the robots, then we're in Matrix and Terminator territory. So at that point, then we're going to start defending ourselves and using Go (the game, not the programming lang) strategy against the Chess strategies of the robots.
2045 really, really will be the year of the Linux desktop... We promise!!! Also, Rice University has at least one idiot as a professor.
AJ Henderson
Hear hear. It's the transition that looks like it could be a major issue.
I am concerned that such a transition may well lead to a stagnation of human development, but we've been pushing things pretty hard for the last few millenia, laying mostly fallow for a few might not be such a bad thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Uh ... sit at Starbucks with their laptops?
I mean, why not? You can just watch a drone play catch with a bunch of others, or PETman walking and running along like a human, or any of the major advances in robotics we've had over the past few years to see robots will soon be able to do anything physical we can do in thirty years time or so. As for intellectual "work", hell algorithms already run an ever increasing amount of Wallstreet, how much harder is anything else we humans do? While Moore's law is set to end thanks to transistors getting down to the size of atoms in just a relatively few more cycles (1nm is what, 2 or 3 atoms wide?) things like optical computers running at terahertz and even exahertz speeds seem quite physically possible.
I've been working this through myself, maybe for an economics paper, (does Post Human Economics sound like a catchy term?). What basically happens is labor itself becomes post scarcity, only "possessions" matter because that's all that will be scarce anymore, and only certain possessions at that. Things like real estate or your "share" of resources, or who controls the robots that are doing everything.
And how do we decide how too apportion those things? If machines are more intelligent than humans then who controls the machines? Which brings up other questions, like how we interact with those machines. Imagine the machine/brain interface evolving to the point where we can "think" with a computer.
The point is, we can foresee a technological revolution in our own future that spirals out of all our previous experience, so it's hard to know what to expect, and you can't just take "one" aspect of it and expect too know what's going to happen. You could call it "the singularity" but that's just a stupid hip term with no real meaning. A single computer that's smarter than a human doesn't breed some revolution in and of itself. After all it took billions of dollars and thousands of hours of research and the COMBINED intelligence of thousands of humans and even decades of research and money before that just to make that one computer. But none of that means we can't foresee a very real future where humanity's intelligence and ability grows exponentially year after year, a future that many reading this could well live to see. Exciting!
The fallacy of these kind of predictions dictates that we don't expand out to something that changes human priorities. Will we also have robots flying the ships that we mine asteroids with? we'll still need people to fix those robots and keep things running, the robots just help us leverage the hugely repetitive tasks like picking strawberries or drive the robots to the site to begin work, and to make sure they're all on the right task. Oh and we'll need people to make predictions about how people will become extinct by $(date() + 30y). One could argue is a rather gorse underestimation of the number of unresolved issues in the world. But I do look forward to seeing the use'd robot salesman, this beauty's great she comes used before they enforced the robotic ethicacy subroutines! We still have the robotic rights revolution to go through too!
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
work ethic works just fine in such a society. What changes is the type of work. It can be time spent researching, learning and advancing ones self. and for fuks sake please don't use Star Trek as an example, it is full of contradictions even when it comes to the economy and work and makes no logical sense.
More of us will simply sell insurance, staff HR departments or practice law.
In other words, "work" in an ultimately useless, semi-parasitic job which has scaled way beyond the original purpose in proportion to the amount of excess to be sopped up.
Kind of like right now.
Disney made it, it's called Wall-E, I love that movie! I work with AGV's in a factory, they are just being introduced. It's a huge culture shift.
From Norbert Weiner's 1948 book, "Cybernetics":
Just because it was written a long time ago, doesn't make it any less true.
It will be some twisted dystopian world where EVERYONE is in marketing. Won't that be grand!
So what did the aristocracy do in those days? Many were wasters and drunks, although they knew the bankruptcy and shortness of such a life. They gambled. They intrigued. They fought. They screwed around. They did lots of hunting. Some worked in areas of interest. Some were genuinely religious. Some were good managers and organized their large farms. Some used their wealth to pursue science or art. Or patronize it. But they occupied themselves and tried not to overdo it. (Except the French who quite lost their heads.)
One does not see a classless world evolving in the coming robot age.. We are great apes wired to have status. We will find a way to stratify ourselves. The self starters and the gifted will make music and art -- cannot help themselves. Driven to it. . And some will gain status from it as they always have. Scientists, too, will plod on, with much help from smart machines. Einstein said computers were not very interesting because they did not ask questions. I suspect that no matter how smart machines get they probably won't ask meaningful ones. So we will need scientists -- if only to ask questions. But we may have to see about that. A lot of people, of course, will be happy to consume. To watch sports... and porn... and reality TV (Now there is an oxymoron for the morons.) And reality porn.
So how will society look? The holders of capital will do as they do now. Organize the disposition of production and consumption and distribution. They will decide where to build shopping centers and robot factories. So, at the top, where they are now and have been,we will have the wealthy. They will do what they have always done. Their 'work' will not change. They will own the bots. The priestly class of yore will be replaced by the computerists and roboticists. The machine tenders. Not everyone can do this, but it will be a far more widely spread ability. It is already happening. Even flacks and ad men are supposed to code. Feh! These cyber guys guys will have real work, lots of status, money and awesome sex appeal. Nerds are clearly enjoying more status than ever. Ten years ago not many girls would look at a guy wearing a computer on his head (there were a few) except to laugh.. Now he's the bad ass with the Google Glass on the red carpet. Anyway, I digress. Then, next level down, come the artists and other creative types. Next level down from that? There will be lots and lots of makers. And people will just make plastic choking hazards to trade and or sell. There will be a lot more yoga instructors and massage artists. Craft beer will be more popular in the future. MUCH more popular.
I think back to Ancient Rome where there were lots of slaves to do the farming and the drudgery. Thousands upon thousands of citizens were on the dole. Bloody sports were really popular. Then, at the bottom, as always there will be a percentage of people simply content to consume the food, clothes, music, and entertainment the machines and other people make while contributing little. They will get some support from the state, which should do its level best to educate and elevate them as well as placate them. In other words things won't change much.
"Now. Bite my shiny metal ass."
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Bad Laws - not starting with, but in my not-so-humble opinion, the greatest problem are the WW2 wage and labor laws which are still in place for the most part.
human can be fed on less than $3 a day, and can be mass produced by unskilled labor.
I see a future with more laborers, and a very small elite who live well. that's the logical result of mega-corporations having government in their pockets.
I work at a small auto-parts manufacturer; with further and further automation being implemented almost on a monthly basis. You still need operators and maintenance staff. The robots don't unload trucks, replace their own dunnage, run themselves, do quality deviations and assessments, make tooling adjustments, pack their out-going dunnage and load up trucks.
They make the process of making the parts much more efficient, and that's about it. Even brand new robots set up by qualified people break down quite a bit.
The problem with this utopian ideas is that he forgets that someone has to design and create these robots, and then there have to be people who will fix and manage the robots. You could argue that you could have fix robots that fix the other robots, but who will then fix the fix robots? The only thing that will change is that people will stop doing certain jobs and instead do the jobs that enable the other jobs to be automated.
A wise person (Douglas Adams?) once said:
"Robots won't replace people. When a robot breaks, it is the employer that must repair it." (but when a person breaks...)
When sexbots are remotely operated, does that make them surrogates?
Learn to love Alaska
Who cares, I'll be dead by then.
Bushitting about the future sitting as tenured professor is something robots will never be able to do as well as humans. This prof is the grand example.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The work we will be doing is crack. Or Ecstasy, or whatever the drug of choice is.
Not everyone is vulnerable to the lure of drugs. From what I've seen though, take away work and lots of people will fail to find meaningful alternatives to spend their time on.
Basically poor people have only one thing to sell, their labor. Well, their honor and kidneys too but that is not the norm. Once labor loses its value, you have 90% of the humanity with nothing to sell. They are not going to simply fold up and die. They are coming at you with pitchforks.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It could be possible, but it would require to abolish money and thereby capitalism.
Everyone would get a shelter and food for free. People working on the robots would get a bit more food and a bit better shelter.
No more taxes, no more Wall Street, supermarkets would just hand-out stuff. Everyone would be roughly equal.
No more need for central governments.
In a nutshell : putting all humans out of work would be possible by applying pure communism.
(would have an advantage : the heads of all republicans would explode)
I for one would welcome such a change. Poverty would cease to exist. No one would be homeless or malnourished. Crime rates would drop significantly.
Didn't somebody predict that computers would bring about the "four day work week"? Yeah, that's not happening.
I think we have a compulsive desire to fill our time with something useful and/or creative; actually getting things accomplished and obtaining a sense of meaning in our lives. Or, at least, enough of us do that this will never work.
If we were ever to get to the point where this were technologically feasible, I think there would be an insurmountable social barrier to cross. How would we ever get past the tension and attitude of contempt between those who do and those who benefit during the transition?
The benefits accrue to those who have the capital. So increased automation has resulted in increased concentration of wealth (a fairly common cyclical behavior.. see gilded age, for example), because the value of the increased productivity over the last 30-40 years have paid the investor, not the laborer.
It's all about "who owns the means of production", because that's who gets the benefits of the production. When you are a tenant farmer, the landowner makes the money. When you own the land, your asset becomes more valuable.
When you are providing labor for a wage, you ARE in economic terms, no different than the machine that replaces you.
So.. "to the barricades"
It's going to take 30 years now is it? It was only supposed to take 20 years 40 years ago!
... I'm on the bleeding edge.
How 'bout robot builders, programmers, maintenance? There will still be the need to mine the metals, extract the oils, and produce the plastics that robots are built out of. Plenty of work to go around! :D
The unions will protect worker's jobs!
ha ha ha ha I crack myself up sometimes
The problem isn't the concept of the Work Ethic, but how and where it's applied. The fact is, the vast majority of humanity loves to work, there is a sense of pride in seeing your work pay off, reaping the fruits of your labor. As an example, I hate working typical jobs, yet I love busting my ass working in my garden, or helping friends with home projects, or volunteering for various charities, I don't get much in return but I love doing it, it feels great. The problem of the Work Ethic only arises when you don't get what you give, when your hard work goes to someone who simply watched from afar, or made a few changes here and there, yet took 80% of the profits or credit. The other problem is the idea that you are worthless unless you contribute to the system by getting a job, but only certain jobs, Mcdonalds and Low-Wage jobs don't count you see, because they are beneath people according to current society's Work Ethic, you need to prove to society you are worth existing by working, but only for business and only for certain kinds.
The only way we are getting out of this without riots is if we abandon what defines Work and its value, and also the concept that you must work to have value as a human being. A Post-Capitalistic America can't come any sooner...
So some robot will mowed my lawn for free?
People don't work that way. A small percentage does, but those who are ambitious and want to live better than their neighbors (that would be all but the aforementioned few) will scrap for the top spot. It's damed hard to spend more than a couple million a year, and yet top CEOs and Hedge Fund managers vie for compensation 100x that.
The wealth will continue to concentrate, the skilled class will get more necessary, and the marginally skilled will become unemployed and useless to the tycoon billionaires who control the world and extract every possible ounce of profit.
Anyone who has seen the backlash against the welfare states knows that people with, on average, are not interested in helping people without. That won't change if scarcity is removed.
Here's an example: it costs effectively nothing to reproduce a digital movie, and the costs are entirely recouped by the theatrical run. Distributing it via P2P costs the studios exactly zero, and yet they fight tooth and nail for every single dollar. If it cost nothing to reproduce a yacht, the yacht designers would still require a fee for every one made because it promotes exclusivity.
I predict a serious employment shortage in the gulf between local, manual labor and highly skilled technical and business types. When you make secretaries, clerks, and cube workers obsolete you simple take away their jobs. The savings in production doesn't get passed to them out of the goodness of corporate hearts, it goes to the men at the top who pilot the corporation and to the stockholders.
I think we have at least some 20 years to go. Computers make full use of natural language searching vast databases about specific information. That's why computers like IBM's Watson are already confirming diagnostics for various kinds of diseases. Putting something complex together still demands creativity, and that they are not even close to develop..
When the economic mode of production is outstripped by our productive capacity, we reach a point when we must rethink the way we approach work.
At this point we'll have to have a rational planned economic system where workers democratically control the means of production, because the economic dictatorship we live under now will no longer be compatible with the millions out of work due to their inability appropriate any wealth from capitalism, even though they're perfectly capable of work.
Just like in the book _Player Piano_ , most of us will be 'Reeks and Wrecks'.
The same claims were made at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The work we do will change, but there will always be work for people do to that machines aren't suited for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Learn to ignore monsters like you,"
No, he brings up a good point. Simply because you occupy space breathe doesn't mean anyone owes you anything. At all.
That's the reality that will face all of us in 30 years.
It's inevitable, and there's nothing you nor I can do about it.
. . . . standing in VERY long lines. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Sex with robots.
Yes and no. While in the entire star fleet example you state the entitlement ethic, I wonder about other worlds that dont have people who want to work for the betterment of mankind. Not all people are naturally curious, nor do people naturally want to spend their entire life to help/entertain/etc. other people. The issue becomes no matter what kind of society you live in you will have some sort of trade. Do you think all those bottles of Romulan Ale that those star fleet officers came because someone could walk down to a store and get them without paying for them? No they had to offer services to get them. As such, you will naturally have the "haves" and "have nots". No matter what society you create in your mind, you will have people who will not contribute due to the one immutable law of humanity, people will do the least amount they can to get the most they can get by with.
We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
Except in this case it is going to be mega-corporations dividing up whats left of humanity on a juicy platter while we all pay the ultimate price for a tiny bit of technological advancement into nothing more than a larger more efficient organism.
That is of course unless all the conspiracies about aliens and the prime directive are true. But we look pretty fucked from my viewpoint.
...and it was everything that I thought it could be.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
There are hundres of factories as of right now they are completely automated. I was watching a video about one once on youtube and they showed this massive warehouse that had all of the lights out in it to save money since the machines didn't need it. The entire facility employed I think it was 3 people in a office up on the scaffolding to fix stuff when it broke, call the police if someone broke in and answer the phones. I think they called them "lights out factories".
It sucks it puts people out of work but I would do it. Your company would save on sick leave pay, insurance premiums, worker comp policies, electricity for lighting, no need to buy tons of supplies, and so on, hell youd save a ton of cash just on not having to buy toilet paper or pay for the water that gets flushed down the toilet. Not to mention machines are much more efficient than humans and don't get tired or half ass their work cause they are in a bad mood. Worst that happens is the break, but you get it fixed and off you go again. Even a medium sized automotive parts manufacturer could save millions a year.
People are nothing but a liability that you cant fully trust. You can always trust a machine though.
But did you know...?
Robots are SMARTER than you.
Robots work HARDER than you.
Robots are BETTER than you.
Volunteer for testing today!
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I'll be working on my whuffie possibly while dating a hot chick at disneyland after her parents kill themselves and hope to hell I can deal with a hostile takeover that no one else sees.
No.... Star Trek is certainly not real, yet it was science fiction designed to convey numerous important (and often complex or "deep") messages and concepts. If it was just another war movie staged in outer space, it would never have lasted more than a few seasons on TV.
If you think about it, the vast majority of us, today, spend many hours of each day employed doing some type of work we'd really rather not do. Why do we do it then? For the money! But why the interest in the money? Because it's the bartering tool of choice in our society to purchase what we need to survive (as well as what we want for entertainment and relaxation purposes).
Most people idolize the very wealthy not so much because of whatever great accomplishments they might have made which gave them their wealth, but out of envy of the improved lifestyle it lets them have.
If we can truly reach a stage where everything we need or want is possible to do with machines/robots, and humans no longer need to have "jobs" - there's no reason to assume that's a bad thing. In my mind, that Star Trek world without money is one very possible outcome.
Now, the issue that we'll surely have in the process would be due to the usual suspects, such as "greed". In the transition period of robot-ization, you're inevitably going to have to go through a stage where it's POSSIBLE to produce certain goods or provide certain services cheaply with them, but ONLY if you're already wealthy enough to invest in the technology. That means you're looking at even more "class division" between the rich and the poor, if this technology is only available to make the rich even richer.
I mean - even if such things as 3D printing advance to the point where you can produce really nice replicas of even the most complex items (and do so quickly), you've still got the need for the "ink" used, not to mention access to the data files containing the raw information to feed the printer. (Star Trek conveniently side-steps this dilemma with the fictional replicator that creates objects out of thin air, by assembling them almost instantaneously at the atomic level - using an energy source that's essentially free to tap into, as well.) Greed will ensure that at least some of the best data files for making 3D printables are held by only a select few......
...will be a soldier.
I remember seeing this exact prediction made in 1980, with the same time frame. Progress isn't linear - we may never have real AI. Or we may have it in six months.
For one, most of the work still done by humans is so still far away from the realm of what AI and machinery can do. Anyone who thinks otherwise greatly overestimates the nature of AI they've seen and underestimates how very alien simple day to day things are relative to the state of the art in AI.
For another, this progress is going to be curtailed for the same reason why desktop market is plateauing. Even if we *could* get there, we don't have the collective will to advance technology. There are people talking about the relatively hard wall physics presents in various fields we will bump into, but I suspect we won't even get that far as the 'good enough' situation will make it unprofitable to even get that close. It's increasingly difficult to justify high power designs that niche markets still need that formerly got to come along for the ride with mass market amortizing the cost.
Finally, I think as a collective whole, we don't *want* it. We have spent millennia fostering cultures that largely have us value ourselves and each other in terms of the work we do. We don't know how to do anything else. We have no other way that has worked of deciding how to divvy up resources among ourselves.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
yeah, that's why they have gold pressed lattinum and mining and research and trade. yep, no money at all in the federation.
People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.
WTF are you talking about back in the first half of the last century, unless you worked on the farm, you were able to produce enough for you and your family in a 40 hour week with just one adult working and that was with an average of 4 kids. Today, it takes both parents working with an average of 1.4 kids.
Technology may make us more efficient, but it has nothing to do with the economics of providing for a family.
Jobs are not a scarce resource, labor is. There is always enough jobs for everyone that wants one and then some, even if it means being self employed. The only reason there is unemployment at all, is because of bad laws.
It is true that there are always enough jobs for anybody who wants one. What is lacking are jobs that one can support a family on for everybody who needs one. Bad laws may influence unemployment, but more likely shareholder greed is the real culprit. In the US alone, the stock market has hit record highs, businesses are reporting record profits, dividends and corporate bonuses are up. Everything is great except that nobody is hiring. That has nothing to do with bad laws and everything to do with greed.
Using robots will be just one more way to replace labor and further increase profits. The problem is that it only works in the short term because it ins't sustainable. If there is no longer a place for labor in the future workforce, then how exactly are people supposed ot earn wages to purchase goods and services that will be provided by the robots? If people aren't purchasing goods and services, then where will the future profits come from?
Businesses should learn from Henry Ford. He paid his workers more than other factories so they could afford to purchase the vehicles they were building. The extra he paid out in wages created demand for the product and was returned in profits. It was a win/win scenario. We should learn from the past.
So many problems come down to simplistic metrics that fail to be representative. From modern MBAs to society thinking in similar ways. Income level does not represent quality of life and while many people will agree with that, most will actually not believe it in their actions...
There are jobs that pay huge amounts that are valued which require less intelligence, skill, and effort than McDonalds! (some congressmen come to mind...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Most of the low-middle or lower class folk, once they paid for food, rent, isnurance, and gas, have next to nothing left. How do you propose they would buy share ? How do you propose they would buy enough that they would live on the dividend (which would be what , 3-5% in average ? Meaning they would have to invest upfront 20 time the amount they need to live per year) ? What do you propose they do if the company fold and their share are worthless ?
No what will happen is that the lower class will grow , until it reaches a spot where the lower class has nothing to lose in looting/rampaging a bloodshed, then at this point society correct itself by having more non automated duty, or economy crashes due to nobody having money to buy stuff, so company folds and robot investment get too expansive so only manual labor company get enough money, and that happen in a cycle until our life condition reach the same as developping country or a sweet spot is reached between manual labor/automated labor.
But knowing the greed of those of the upper class, I would bet bloodshed rather than sweet spot.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
look at the trend with unemployment, welfare, and foodstamps.
i'm a libertarian but unfortunately i think the current trend is the future.
i don't know what people will do other than collect entitlements.
global population must plummet.
we will certainly have less babies. we will consume much less.
digital things will be plentiful and cheap but "real" things will cost a fortune.
On the surface job losses are the obvious problem but where this can all go really wrong is if we continue with 20th century thinking in a robotic world.
First robots have the potential to turning the world into one of plenty. They should be able to produce food, goods, housing, and infrastructure in quantities and at costs so that everybody thrives. But if we allow a small elite to buy up all the land, and cartels to artificially restrict the quantity of goods then you will have jobless people with nothing and that is a formula for trouble.
If you follow the logical trail you will have people with capital deploying robots to do things that reduce their labor force while either maintaining or increasing productivity. Simply putting massive amounts of people on welfare while leaving a lucky few to continue to leverage up their capital just won't work.
Outright communism won't work as that is an equally failed experiment so a simple method would be something like scaling taxes. As you control more and more of any market your taxes will eventually approach 100%. This will continuously create competitive opportunities for smaller businesspeople. Other tax laws will also have to be implemented where your ratio of profit to employees can't exceed a certain limit. While this might artificially push companies to hire people this will still be vastly superior to just having masses of people on welfare. At least companies will figure out ways to find productive ways to engage humans.
The key change in economic thinking from 20th century to robotic 21st century actually goes back to Adam Smith. Economics is based on consumption not production. Up to the present economic policy has focused on production. But the boom bust cycle has generally been the result of producing more than consumers could or would consume. With robotic production producing way too much will be dead easy so the focus needs to be heavily weighted on making sure that all consumers are ready and waiting. A few extremely wealthy plus the masses scraping by on welfare make, on average, terrible consumers. Gainfully employed people in an equitable society on average make far better and regular consumers. I am not advocating wasteful consumption just the whole "American Dream" of comfortable and safe living for the greatest number of people.
I suspect that a few countries are going to get this balance right (Nordic countries spring to mind) and that many western countries and most third world countries are going to get this horribly wrong. The cringingly funny part will be when the countries that get it wrong will try to favorably compare themselves to the functional countries by pointing out the number of billionaires and other production numbers such as luxury yaghts and the superior number of police and the size of their army. As opposed to the growing number of people slipping into illiteracy.
What it will boil down to is that some populations will stressfully compete with robots while other country's populations will relax and enjoy the fruits of the labor of their new hard working companions.
As companies aim to employ less and cheaper staff, they don't consider the end results - when everyone is unemployed or earning pitiful wages, who's going to buy their products?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Here is a link. Scroll down to "Leisure Can Kill". Yes, the year is 1979, but this is the future.
Want to see how the economy will have to work? Think "Star Trek Replicators"; that's why the Federation doesn't use money anymore in the 24th century.
At last! Thank you.
Why wasn't Star Trek the first thing mentioned? Oh, yeah. The thinkers are at HN these days.
Yes and we were all supposed to be flying around in jetpacks by now.
Most or all ??? Ignorance of the breadth of jobs/work humans do ?? A cheap headline that sounded good??
Just because something is possible (making a machine that is supervised by an AI) doesnt mean it will be practical ($$$) or even easy for so many things (all work...).
Mass production on an assembly line environment is just one step from lab conditions - Very Regulated and Constrained and doesnt exist much outside that situation.
And are these machines going to be repaired by other machines as well (and producing those would be even less practical to produce and run and maintain)
I havent even mentioned 'work' that takes creativity or new engineering -- are those jobs going away also.
Add ignorance of AI and history of AI (where similar predictions for decades have failed miserably).
Has there even been any significant advances in AI science in the last 50 years? Weren't we promised computers that think like people 30 years ago? Wasn't it all supposed to be a problem of CPU power? Now we have clouds, and there's still no artificial brain.
Isn't AI in fact a field with a pretty high suicide rate because of that? Questions over questions.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Due to the theft of land (Google 'enclosures' or 'land grab'), 99% of us are born landless, and are FORCED to work far more than we have to, in order to pay exhorbitant prices for houses, due to the land they are built on being so expensive - which is due to 99% of us being born landless.
Secondly, nowadays, most women HAVE to work in order to bring in enough money to pay the exhorbitant cost of mortgages - which are money created out of THIN AIR (www.positivemoney.org).
Until we actually have democracy, no amount of robotic help will alleviate these problems.
Huxley - Brave New World
Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time series
And many more, each with their own ideas.
Personally i think its a nice dream. Being able to follow your own dreams without worry about money. As the old saying goes MONEY = SQRT(ALL_EVIL).
There will need to be some system of compensating those who still need to work, some benefit to give them motivation while everyone else slacks off.
if people utilized the energy as is in more applicable fashion say ...
solar for thermal and air conditioning, hydel as kinetc (inland water transport?), without bothering about converting energy to electricity
we would probably have less of such speculative commentary
People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.
WTF are you talking about back in the first half of the last century, unless you worked on the farm, you were able to produce enough for you and your family in a 40 hour week with just one adult working and that was with an average of 4 kids. Today, it takes both parents working with an average of 1.4 kids.
Technology may make us more efficient, but it has nothing to do with the economics of providing for a family.
Jobs are not a scarce resource, labor is. There is always enough jobs for everyone that wants one and then some, even if it means being self employed. The only reason there is unemployment at all, is because of bad laws.
For a look at what really happened to America's jobless when manual labor jobs disappeared, check out a collaborative NPR Planet Money/This American Life expose on this invisible economy: "Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America" The program's podcast "Trends with benefits" is well worth listening to.
In summary, what happens is that manual labor jobs disappear from small American towns and they're replaced with lawyer and bureaucratic desk jobs in large cities, state capitals and Washington D.C. A look at trends in unemployment during the great recession gives us a glimpse of this. But Americans on disability don't appear in any labor department unemployment or employment statistics. What's more, people on disability almost never get off the program. Unlike welfare, people on disability are discouraged from working, their kids are discouraged from doing well in school. Even in comparison the obvious economic mess made by programs to promote debt until death (aka mortgage), the non-productive trillions in the derivative economy, this 200+ billion dollar hole in the US economy is significant specifically because of its social fallout. Uncovering this is the first step in adjusting our economy to a new reality of labor and employment.
I aleady feel suicidal - reading this thread for much longer is not a good thing so ill stop here and try thinking happy thoughts. N...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Want to see how the economy will have to work? Think "Star Trek Replicators"; that's why the Federation doesn't use money anymore in the 24th century.
"The wife took everything in the divorce. All I've got left is my bones."
So that's why McCoy joined StarFleet, when he certainly didn't want to. They don't have money, but they do have stuff that can be taken away to the point where you can't support yourself anymore?
All the people referencing star trek to be the utopia world we will live in seem to be forgetting the 3rd world war that kills almost the entire population of earth, that precludes the utopia, and the discovery of aliens which change the way in which people view the world.
If robots are built from standard parts -- as surely they will be -- then a maintenance robot can fix either your household robot, or another maintenance robot. Just as a doctor can fix you, or another doctor, with equal competence (not saying it's high competence, but it is the same, nonetheless.)
There's absolutely no question that the advent of general purpose robotics would drastically shift our economy around. How well we manage that shift would be the fulcrum from which we tilt forward, or backward. Add AI to the equation, and things might go entirely another way, however. Clever functional programming is one thing; an intelligent, independent entity is another. I think it really comes down to AI, or no AI; the latter will work out well for us, the former... unknown.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I've met Moshi and discussed various areas of research with him. He knows his stuff and is held in high regard by most others in his field -- and neighbouring ones for good reason.
Now, whether he knows about economics, I can't say, I've never discussed it with him. But let's not have any of the anti-education "what do these academics know" nonsense.
almost 30 years ago we promised the laymen that computers would make for a better world where people had to work less. turns out almost everyone wil get layed off but not receive benefits as the profits are kept by just a few people.
"You were not created for a life of idleness. You cannot eat from sunrise to sunset or drink or play or make love. Work is not your enemy but your friend. If all manners of labor were forbidden to thee you would fall to your knees and beg an early death." http://www.oocities.org/hazelleglen/success.html, ("The Greatest Success in the World", page 11, http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Success-World-Mandino/dp/0553278258) From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Og_Mandino
30 years in the grand scheme of innovation is nothing. I think we've gotten used to the pace of advancement born out of the industrial revolution and should not believe it will continue. While it could be nice for robots to take over more of the basic, repetitive tasks we humans still do, I still don't see them making the great leap they need to make up for those human traits we've not been able to program. If, however, I am wrong, I do believe that humanity will turn its attention back to the goal of improving humanity.
Not only to build, but also run all of these. As far as I can see, our conventional energy sources are depleting with no true substitute on the horizon.
I have many questions about this approaching global state of existance.
Better yet. Where will one sleep when jobs are automated, and someone says, "get off my property!"
A world with functioning self checkouts.
...we'll go to work building robots, and then building better robots. That's already what is happening to the labor force.
Old nuclear plants and storage sites need decomissioning and maintenance for the next 30.000 years or so.
I'm sure the young and strong look forward to cleaning up our mess!
I approve of this demonic computer take over and will gladly serve my overGOURDS.
All kinds of competitions will offer purpose. eSports, sports, games, there will be something for everyone.
...Omni Magazine said the same thing and janitors would be highly paid by now. You know what's wrong with the 'out of work' paranoia? These futurists are forgetting one thing. What all these people will be doing is making and repairing those robots at a state/local level. Why ship robots across country when they can be built with cheap, limitless, local labor?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
The work ethic is valid when a great deal of work has to be done in order for the basic necessities to be provided, e.g. if the crops aren't harvested everyone will starve, so if you don't participate, you don't eat. But in our times, an average hours' work by a farm laborer produces enough food to feed hundreds of people.
The work ethic is extolled as a virtue by those who seek to convince others to do more than a fair share of the work. I've seen it among laborers putting in 50 and 60 hour work weeks, no benefits, no pensions, no control over working conditions, no seniority, etc. This behavior tends to drive down wages for everyone in the work force. If these people were to ask for a raise, the bosses respond by trying to convince them (sometimes successfully) that they haven't done enough to deserve any better. That's what I think of when I hear someone lamenting that we have lost the "work ethic". The problem is there's nothing ethical about it under the circumstances. With the technology we have, the fact that anyone in the world is living in poverty is what is most unethical.
Cyborgs.
I would argue that ever since the industrial revolution it has been possible to 'organize' society so that we all have 'enough'.
There's a reason communism came about when it did. Academics and others thought if only we could organize people, we could have them produce enough, and we could live in utopia.
It didn't turn out well.
The increased use of automation can be considered an extension of this task.
It can pretty much go either way. Whether automation leads to utopia or hell.
But let's look at the evidence of how out society at large is functioning.
1. As the need for labor lessens, the work is NOT being redistributed, so we all work less. It doesn't matter what country it is. People hang on to what is theirs. The engineer, teacher, nurse, doctor, accountant, banker wants to keep their above average lifestyle. In Europe, where having a good government job is great, million sit out of work... some land in immigrant ghettos. In my own home of Ontario, Canada, there are thousands of unemployed teachers, while others rake in the good job. No redistribution.
So, as the number of paid jobs decreases due to automation, this problem could potentially get much worse leading to significant social strife. This is perhaps the biggest issue so far. There so many entrenched people used to a higher standard of living and they show no signs of willing to redistribute the work load. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in those whose entrenched power is due to the government; such as public sector unions, doctors, lawyers. Heck, again in Ontario, it is damn near impossible for them to take a paycut to save their own jobs today. The unions would rather have them lay off 5% of the nurses at a hospital than cut 5% of their salary. So you know it is going to be hard redistributing the workload in these highly unionized or professional areas.
Our record so far... failure.
2. Governments/bankers are unwilling to let deflation occur. Imagine a world where no body had to worry about shelter. Everyone owned their own home mortgage free. Utopia? Pretty much every government/banker today will call it a disaster. The collapse of the housing market. Deflation in housing... Our entire economic system is based on infinite economic growth and debt. Transitioning from that is going to be difficult at best. It will mean fighting the bankers, pension funds, public sector workers...
Our record here... failure.
3. Dependence on underclass
There are entire cities dependent on an underclass. Places like New York, Toronto... would collapse if there wasn't rampant immigration and an underclass. Despite the perverse notion that these are 'leftist' areas, they remain financial capitals dependent on growth... and this mainly comes today from financial games (We saw how that turned out) and immigration. This is not a problem in other areas like more suburban or rural areas or the Scandinavian areas.
4. Governments are unwilling to give us spare time
Instead, they invent work. There was no such thing as benign communism which just wanted to give people a good life. The government wanted people working hard building military equipment, being soldiers, going to space. Today we invent work in finance, law, healthcare, education... to keep people on the treadmill of life.
Afterall, the planners of society aren't really interested in giving people an easy life. They have greater goals.
Much like the lords of old pushed people to slavery to build Pyramids or Temples, today's lord push for their own agenda. Now granted some of them might help the people in some ways (healthcare, education)... but many times people would rather rest than get excessive healthcare or education.
"The wife took everything in the divorce. All I've got left is my bones."
So that's why McCoy joined StarFleet, when he certainly didn't want to. They don't have money, but they do have stuff that can be taken away to the point where you can't support yourself anymore?
I would attribute that to a plot hole or maybe McCoy was just exaggerating. I would think the futuristic utopia of Star Trek would have resolved the whole gender problem in a more equitable way instead of one spouse taking "everything" and the other destitute.
Gee, It's nice to know that I am 30 years ahead of my time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There goes my retirement income.
Cant we just tax the people who own the robots and give the money to those displaced from the work force?
One simple reason why this will never happen - humans like company. Take a look at how the automated lines in grocery stores have barely hung on and that's something super simple! People like interacting with other people, it makes them feel comfortable to have someone around. Who are you going to ask questions too? Now, that's from a retail environment, but what about manufacturing? That I fear will be staffed by those who can control, operate, and repair the automated systems. The price of pretty much anything hand-made has already jumped up biog time. Especially furniture.
Just when the robots are ready to take over...we'll run out of cheap energy. So the new jobs will be to run in giant hamster wheels to power our robot counterparts.
And the story goes on and on and on...
for centuries folks have postured on what will happen in the future.
Some things do indeed come true, while others do not.
Keep in mind that when farmers were first told they would no longer
need to manually tend to their crops with labor, when the tractor came about
there was a ruckus. The same will occur as different areas shift to
technology of any sort.... just as long as we always realize we should not ever replace
humans - otherwise, everything goes away.
A common theme in si-fi novels. And seldom in a positive light.
you are safe. 20+ years of federal civil service taught me that.
You'll still need humans to monitor, command, control and coordinate robots
Casteism
What *may* happen in 30 years is all US citizens will be out of work and destitute (i.e. not living the life of Riley). While the rest of the world will chug along just fine.
So, with no income from employment, how will the economy function? It is bad enough today that we are encouraged to be consumers (backed by still massive offers of credit) rather than producers - and increasingly, consumers of throw-away tat, just in order to keep the economy's wheels turning.
The current economic model already requires a large, ideally subservient, class of consumers with enough money to feed the machine - employees of companies producing tatty goods and services in turn themselves buying tatty goods and services. With no vision of public goods, investment, quality of life, or a serious critique of the current dominant supply-side economic model, the professor's words are just a quaint fantasy or an opportunity for the idle rich to become even idler
The scammer percentage (75%) of people on disability mostly work under the table.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've been talking about it for 25 years, and trying to start a conversation about it, and no one wants to pay attention.
For example, if you're having trouble getting a job right now, because so much has been shipped offshore, consider what it will be like when the folks offshore, like the women who died in the factory collapse in Pakistan, can't even get a job, because robots do it.
And when everywhere is worse than Spain's current 27% unemployment, and more like the Middle East's 70%-80%, who do you think will hire any of you to do diddly squat? What income will you live on?
And once we get over *that* hump, what will you do with your life, assuming you're not pushing a shopping cart down the street - sit on a couch and watch TV or YouTube for life?
mark
I'm glad you read the 50 other comments with this same post.
If your job is your only sense of purpose, man do I feel bad for you.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Going to become obsolete. Here is my little rant.
Where is the retainment camp so my personality fills out appropriately for those publix applications? For public entertainment. Can you make an introvert dance a pole at a strip club for the rich elite?
Part of keeping a healthy society is looking after the fringe individuals that don't fit in. And yes I'm going to specifically ask for entitlement here. I think I deserve it for trying the Military, getting an honorable discharge. And finding that I don't fit in well, just about anywhere. I'm an INTJ. But I find scholastic endeavors boring and demeaning. Why should I work harder at a specific career because I am ill suited for the wage slave roll in modern society.
And I would take almost any high risk security job as long as I was given decent benefits and the work was fun and morally good. I can guarantee you I am better then any security camera you can run surveillance with. I can even respond to emergencies, and provide first aid, and communicate effectively in a team. I am an expert strategist. I routinely lead Player vs Player conflicts. I know what real life stress and trauma is. I would be a a slave if it meant getting to use my brain, vision, and kinesthetic sense in ways that were fulfilling.
I know I have marketable skills. But the fucking draconian society we have has virtually no use for my talents. Not unless you want to be a slave serving a certain political and economic agenda in a 3rd world country getting mocked by a country that does not deserve my protection because its citizenry is corrupt and up-holding fascist pigs for leadership.
I don't even expect to be given power over others. Just some job where I can use my talents and take enjoyment in what I am good at. No guns. No law enforcement. I can do and enjoy a bit of labor and maintenance duty too. But they don't hire people like me for labor jobs and the workplaces are usually unfriendly. I have been successful in everything I ever did. I would like another chance and to be compensated fairly for my value to society.
I think we should strictly regulate compensation for work as a whole society and get together and use our best sciences and thinkers to help us determine what individuals are worth. And that the worst should be at least afforded a chance at life. And the best should be rewarded for their merit.
Marshall Brain was onto this about a decade ago.
After the black death. Without knowing the book, however I cannot say when this engineering revolution took place in the middle agess. But on to my original post. While a bit tongue in cheek (or tongue on metal cheek). The point I was trying to make is that an economy can work fine with a large part of the labor being performed without pay. Slaves required maintenance in the form of sustenance (as will our future robot servos). Over time Roman slaves even got a few more rights. Somehow I doubt that the world economy will fall apart when robots do most everything. Hopefully, those in command will use the increased productivity of the coming machine age to continue to improve the lives of those who have little. I am actually hopeful. Access to information and learning opportunities increase geometrically with the expansion and penetration of the information network. Ramanujan found one math book and it propelled him into a sublime realm. Amazing things are happening with cheap smart phones in Africa.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
doctors and machinists or at least Research and development scientists and more should have their hands full developing next gen space equip finding faster/better ways to get to space and planets and also enviroment cleanup and monitoring theres still tons of people jobs just means we will have to get rid of money and start sharing equally the basics
I don't see my job being gone until a long time after I retire (at 70+).
Hmmm, how many people do my job, worldwide? 1000 to 1500 ; about what I'd thought. That's not likely to be a good target for any automation project, not when there a plenty of million-plus unit targets.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
When you talk about "paid well".
If there are very few jobs and a LOT of out-of-work people, market forces dictate that the price of labor will drop very low. Lots of supply, little demand.
So, in the situation you describe, it'll be like today, except worse. There's been massive degradation in the reward/hour worked ever since 1973 for everyone except CEOs and other 1%-ers. Imagine when there are 1000 qualified people for every job, and they're all starving. You could pay minimum wage and get someone with a PhD.
Just like the PhD's who're driving limousines in Silicon Valley.
When most jobs are automated, there will have to be MASSIVE government intervention in markets or most people will just starve to death for lack of any way to make money.
--PM
Or if only the top .1% of people are sufficiently "creative" to be required in the role of "creative" work such that anyone would pay them?
For example, in entertainment, there used to be millions employed. Now, the top of the top entertain the whole planet, and there's no paying market AT ALL for anyone else.
And if only "creative" work exists, what do you do with all the people who aren't fit for that work? Disintegration booths? They won't be able to be paid to dig ditches anymore.
Also, what happens when there're jobs enough in the "creative" fields for 10% of the population, but 100% of the population wants those jobs? Those jobs won't pay much anymore. The people who own the robots will enslave everyone else.
--PM
I have been thinking recently about the question of would humans and autonomous intelligent robots trade. The first guess would be yes, since humans and robots would have different opportunity costs of doing different tasks, and therefore comparative advantage would apply.
From "The Shape of Automation", 1960, H. O. Simon:
"""The change in the occupational profile depends on a well-known economic principle, the doctrine of comparative advantage. It may seem paradoxical to think that we can increase the productivity of mechanized techniques in all processes without displacing men somewhere. Won't a point be reached where men are less productive than machines in all processes, hence economically unemployable? (Footnote in article: The difficultly that laymen find with this point underlies the consistent failure of economists to win wide general support for the free-trade argument. The central idea--that comparative advantage, not absolute advantage, counts--is exactly the same in the two cases. )
The paradox is dissolved by supplying a missing term. Whether man or machines will be employed in a particular process depends not simply on their relative productivity in physical terms, but on their cost as well. And cost depends on price. Hence--so goes the traditional argument of economics--as technology changes and machines become more productive, the prices of labor and capital will so adjust themselves as to clear the market of both. As much of each will be employed as offers itself at the market price, and the market price will be proportional to the marginal productivity of that factor. By the operation of the marketplace, manpower will flow to those processes in which its productivity is comparatively high relative to the productivity of machines; it will leave those processes in which it productivity is comparatively low. The comparison is not with the productivities of the past but among the productivites in different processes with the currently available technology. """
I can think of three ways (one was stolen from wikipedia) that comparative advantage would fail.
The first is if there is a scarce non-time resource and there is a substantial difference in the quantity of the scarce resource consumed. For example if A uses 2 tons of iron to make a car and B uses 1 ton of iron, and iron is scarce, then B can make more cars absolutely.
The second is that there is a wage floor (or utility floor). If the wage so low human cannot live on it, then the wage cannot get low enough to make trade beneficial.
The third is from the Wikipedia comparative advantage article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparitive_advantage , and is that the transactions costs can eat away the benefits from trade.
Basically, at some point robots reach the point where they make the decision of do they keep trading with humans. If there is no benefit for the robots (that is no point for trade from the robots point of view), will they keep helping humans, or will humans be once again on our own. I can't even think of any science fiction where independent robots trade physical goods with humans (in Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, the humans and artificial intelligences do give each other information).
I think, the professor in TFA is pretty much wrong. For a reality check, please look at this Wikipedia link. It describes the current research status in the field of object recognition, a typical task in computer vision. From the article, it should become clear that there are numerous approaches to the problem, but there is not one really capable approach that solves the problem. This is independent of computing power - we just don't know yet how to make a machine recognize non-trivial objects under real-life conditions, not matter how many CPUs it has. This fact currently limits the development of autonomic cars already.
They are predicting the same stuff since the 1960.
There ever were futurologist writing deep and brainy essays about the "Society of Leisure". To give you an example of what futurologists were busy at that time I suggest to read Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" (published in H. Ellison's famous anthology "Dangerous Visions"), here's a link to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_of_the_Purple_Wage
In any case, eve if you aren't interested in futurology the anthology is a good read (an excellent read I dear say).
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Ways to cope: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This article by John Quiggin in Aeon Magazine discussing Keynes' prediction of a 15-hour work week seems extremely relevant...
Man makes machines To man the machines That make the machines That make the machines Make a machine To make a machine And man and machine Will make a machine To break the machines That make the machines