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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.
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?
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!
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.