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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?'"
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.
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.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
Exactly!
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.
What will happen if we are super productive as that professor claims? Have you seen the Jetsons? that is pretty much what will happen: you would work 2 days a week for 5 hours / day. Your job would not be canning tuna, but making sure that the machine that does it gets maintenance. We would spend our time, doing art, music, entertainment, or any other leisure related activity/job.
Consider this: we don't have to work to get air. All that it means, is that we can use the labor to produce something else. If we had to work to get air, we would simply switch some of the labor from their current occupation to air production, but we would not get the benefit from what they are currently doing.
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.
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?
I predict we'll get in a lot more trouble, but I for one like to believe I will get some time to do all the fun projects I have to put off now. Maybe things that now seem impractical or prohibitively expensive will get done. The egyptians showed us a large amount of cheap labor can produce wonders that still boggle the mind, what about large amounts of educate, dedicated labor?
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.
That's the point there will be no resource wars because supply will always outstrip demand. That is why no one will have to work. Your such an ingrained slave you cannot even imagine this concept.
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.
That's what you'd think isn't it?
The reality is somewhat different:
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/130305161550-chart-productivity-hourly-compensation.gif
I'll leave it to the educated reader to deduce what happened to *40 years worth of difference between productivity and wages.
*It's not labeled, but the lines diverge in 1973
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You realize that the direction AI and human interaction is moving, we're way closer to getting rid of programming as a career than weeding gardens or building houses with machines. We already have sufficient AI to hack together a reasonable program from a flow chart of requirements and operation. I bet Watson can bang out some nice C++ code, probably much better quality than most humans, just not at a rate that compensates for it's electrical cost.
I made a nice post about it a few weeks back... the idea that the ultimate goal of computer science to to reach the so-called singularity at which point we have an AI capable of writing software and similar human tasks, thus putting the computer scientists and programmers out of work (at least all the ones who aren't at an intellectual capacity to move to some novel field of computation).
How do you pay for the content you use on the internet? You don't, because the marginal cost for the content you consume is so close to zero that it's not worth it to charge for it. The same will be true of items produced by robots.
There will be resistance to this at first, but then home 3d printers will improve to the point that you can print many of the things you want or need easily. Things that need to be assembled from printed and commodity parts will be assembled locally, while still being very low price. Like, cheaper than shit from China.
Eudaimonia.
Labour at zero cost is a scarce resource, that doesn't preclude jobs above subsistence cost being scarce too ...
Why would the bosses hand out Jetson's job to lots of different people working 5 hours for 2 days out of the week ... much more efficient to have someone there longer, less shift hand overs means less room for mistakes. Unless the law demands it, the jobs won't be spread out across the entire population.
Labour can't pull itself up by the bootstraps either, since natural resources ARE scarce ... there is no more land to homestead.
What do you mean by "trivial work"?
I have a fried who was born into wealth. While his income isn't much higher than mine, he's always dressed fashionably - because he has a fashion consultant - his apartment is beautiful - because he uses a decorating service - and he never spends time shopping for mundane stuff - because he uses a personal shopper. I realized recently that I could now afford all of those services, and they would make my life better, but they're still a bit pricey for the value they'd bring me.
Technology revolutions bring stuff that used to be only for the rich into the realm of the common man. If those personal services were a bit cheaper, or all the other stuff in my life was cheaper, I'd use all of them. I think that's where we're going: an explosion of such jobs. Home theater consultant/installer has become a new field. Having groceries delivered is no longer just for the rich. The trend is established, really, just flatlined through the recent downturn.
Eventually it wouldn't surprise me if most everyone had such a job: a specialist in whatever aspect of life they most enjoyed making better, providing the consulting/legwork service of making it better for others. Heck, even if home 3D printing reached Star Trek replicator status, there would still be specialists in helping others decide what to make to be in fashion this season, or help suggest just the right program for the sexbot, or whatever.
It's work that most people would like doing, that is done better face-to-face, and that would provide a lot of social interaction and reasons to chat about what you like best right now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
As a professional who develops in these kind of systems, I find it hillarious that you think it removes programmers. All these flowcharting tools that "business" users can use are essentially akin to a giant mechano or lego set. Yes, a "business" user can build a house out of lego blocks, you can even have a little sink, and hot plate and all of the other lovely bits and pieces.
But who makes those bits? Developers.
What happens when some highly intelligent business user goes and puts the hotplate underneath the shower? Well... you have to protect against that.
At the end of the day, we are no longer developing software, but developing software that develops software. The reason business wants to bring this in, is speed to market. They don't want to have to run a new SDLC to correct a spelling mistake, move an image to the left a few pixels, or to create yet another new form that takes 6 months to analyse, develop, QA and release.
It's actually more work at the end of the day for developers, less rubbish work for both developers and the business, and a higher level of value.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck