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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!
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
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.
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
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!
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.
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, 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.
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.
Over the past few weeks, it seems like some evangelist comes along every 10 minutes to let use know that salvation is right around the corner.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Yea because the average lifestyle is exactly the same now as it was 100 years ago or even 1000 years ago. Maybe I'm missing the sarcasm, but I read your post as if you actually believe it.
Did I hear something?
???*Woosh*???
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Because long term prosperity for all never works. There are finite resources and thus people have them or don't. To think otherwise is just trying to rehash communism in a prettier light, People do not want to be equal they want to be better than each other. This is basic ingrained mating behavior to a large extent.
No sir I dont like it.
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'
I find Black Mirror's view of humans generating energy with bicycles more appealing.
I may be giving the professor too much credit; but my impression was that he was predicting a situation where advances in automation made robots more cost-effective than humans for essentially any task... Not that that would necessarily lead to especially pleasant outcomes for the redundant humans.
People who think that the benefits of increased automation will magically accrue to everyone are... questionably balanced... but the notion that an increasing number of tasks will be sufficiently well automated that even literal slave labor can't beat machines on price seems much harder to dispute.
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.
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.
Yea because the average lifestyle is exactly the same now as it was 100 years ago or even 1000 years ago. Maybe I'm missing the sarcasm, but I read your post as if you actually believe it.
Did I hear something?
???*Woosh*???
Hmm... Let's see.
5000 BC: Iraq, Samarra. About the only thing we know is they did pottery. Beyond this point, there aren't any reliable records.
4000 BC: Mesopotamia. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
3000 BC: Mesopotamia. The Sumerian hegemony. A few wealth people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 BC: Egypt. The height of the Old Kingdom. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
1000 BC: China, Zhou Dynasty. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
0 AD: Roman Empire. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
1000 AD: Europe. Middle of the Dark Ages. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 AD: United States. A few wealthy people, and a large number of worker-slaves.
Have I made my point yet?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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
as i understand it the original idea was to have the humans act like processing units but that was thought to be to confusing for the masses so they changed it to people as batteries. I think this make more since, as the human brain is a massively more powerful than any of our current computers is thought to be able to store anywhere frome 1Tb to 2.5 Pb, is much smaller, produce very little in the way of waste heat and requires very little power to run. i mean really why would you use people as batteries we produce very little in the way of electricity and heat and it take much more energy to maintain a human then they would ever generate as a power source.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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."
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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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.
It's cheaper to enslave other people to achieve that "good life" than it is to build the technology to elevate us all.
Some have argued that slavery is a factor of energy production. When the net energy production of the whole world drops below a certain threshold, that's when people start enslaving each other. Supposedly when energy is abundant and cheap, slavery won't be an issue.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
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.
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."
Not much, even a crude furnace is far more efficient at converting biomass to usable energy.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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
Of course that "worker-slave" distinction you like to put in there as some overly pessimistic pronouncement is living so far above the few wealthy of the prior era that it is almost completely uncomparable.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I think you've misinterpreted this notion of a more robotic labor force as some sort of idealism, altruism, prosperity, instead of simple economics. He seems to want to say that robot labor will be cheaper than human labor; and here, your thesis is correct. Humans very often seem to value short term gain over long term gain, and more importantly personal gain over utilitarian gain. If a manufacturing company recognizes that it can make a bundle of profit off of laying off 90% of its human workforce in order to 'employ' machines, it very well might ignore the fact that this will put a lot of human beings out of work. This already occurs in outsourcing human labor in one country to cheaper human labor in another country.
This is not necessarily a Utopian idea to say that the undeniable rise in machine intelligence could possibly result in an incurable rise in human unemployment. There won't necessarily always be something for uneducated, unskilled workers to do in order to scrape by and make a living. We see more and more that higher qualifications are typically required for not so difficult work. College education instead of high school education is becoming a norm these days; how long until one must receive a master's degree in order to be considered economically competitive? This isn't to say that I know for sure that machine intelligence will entirely make obsolete human labor, but it seems rather plausible that if there is a cheaper (more consistent, safer) alternative to human labor, then companies that are admittedly not altruistic entities will not hesitate to make changes that will negatively affect the humans that depend on them for employment.
The question then would become, yes, what will the world look like at that point? What if we really do see consistent 25% unemployment? How do we support those people who could not help being replaced? Will we be expected to and will we even desire to rise to that new challenge? Will it be necessary, or will abundance of resources support that burden? ... What happens if unemployment continues to rise even higher than that?
I'm not sure its moronic to ask these questions in a serious and critical way. In fact, I think there is every reason to. Worst case scenario, we're wrong. Best case scenario, we've had thoughtful discussion on a particularly meaningful and potent topic in development of human economics and the capitalistic concept of earning one's keep.
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.
actually i would put the worker slaves as living the same way as they did in ancient times, except the worker slaves are in countries like india.
Uh ... sit at Starbucks with their laptops?
You missed out the motivation. People want to be better than others, so anyone with resources will use them to advance over their associates without. Repeat until the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's human nature.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
There are finite resources and thus people have them or don't.
Except for those pesky infinite resources which actually make Earth habitable in the first place. Woe is me, too many people means we're going extinct. There isn't enough sunlight and dirt for everyone. All we have is the distributed brian-power of billions of people. We're so doomed!
Regardless of what happens, you need a way to promote accomplishment. I can be of a much different nature than financial success, but if your entire system has no meaningful (as in no consequences for failing at) ways to encourage personal growth, what you will end up with is a rapid destruction of whatever brought us to that Utopian state.
If there is no real cost to being a lazy, despicable idiot and no real advantage to being an active, curious and well balanced person the path of least resistance will ultimately prevail. Competition doesn't have to be about crushing rivals (even though it is often reduced to that due to the path of least resistance), it can merely be about wanting to reap the advantages of being better at whatever you do.
I'm hoping that a situation where labour becomes obsolete does not equate a situation where productive output becomes obsolete. If the shift makes us focus mostly on creative/intellectual output, fine, but there needs to be a benefit for being good at that and a cost for failing lest the progress of mankind come to a screeching halt. Also: The better the rewards for being productive, the less humans reproduce, something to keep in mind as long as we work with finite resources.
Mind the frickin' laser...
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.
I predict flying slaves! http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-thought-wed-have-flying-slaves-by-now,27000/
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
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.
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
While I do not necessarily disagree with your premise you are making sweeping generalities about societies based on an incredibly limited number of actual slave societies within those time periods. For example, in Ancient Egypt there is historical proof of some slaves, possibly war slaves existing in specific dynasties but no widespread evidence for a society based on slaves. (Sorry the story of Exodus) In addition slavery in Antiquity was very rare in general and instead societies more commonly used levied peasant labor which cannot be called slavery and weakens the word and your argument by confusing the two. Even if we accept your premise you still have the issue of slave classes that held a great deal of power and rights. Such as in the Ottoman Empire where slaves actually came into power and ruled the Sublime Porte for hundreds of years through the Janissary System. In other slave taking societies in Asia, such as with the Mongolian Hoard slavery was often a form of advancement which could lead to wealth and prosperity. While slavery can be evil, it is NOT necessarily evil. Therefore if we hold your premises as true as well we could conclude that your theorized system of minority wealth vs majority 'worker-slaves' will occur in the future BUT slave rights, health, security, and power will improve to a point where the slaves might just be better then the masters. You have not made your point at all; you instead have weakened it by confusing alternate forms of slavery, by misunderstanding the power dynamics of slaves, and finally by glossing over the complex subtly of the past and replacing it with outright ignorance.
And a much smaller % of the population as a whole. And in places like India they are moving out of that class very quickly.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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
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
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?
While I do not necessarily disagree with your premise you are making sweeping generalities about societies based on an incredibly limited number of actual slave societies within those time periods.
Would you prefer a breakout every 500 years, 100 years, 10 years? Yearly? I can point to every dominant society and show that there was a small "elite" class and a large "working class", at just about every sample point. Yes, there are some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of the time, that's how it plays out.
And the description "worker-slaves" wasn't meant to say they were a bona fide slave labor class, but to point out that they work hard for limited benefit to themselves, but a large benefit to the elite classes. If the resources were not being diverted so that a small number of affluent individuals were not taking the lion's share of the resources, then people would need to work a lot less to achieve similar increases in their own relative standard of living.
This equation doesn't change whether you're in the Bronze Age, or the Internet Age. The technology may be better. Your health may even be better. But you are still reaping only a fraction of the available benefits and resources compared to the amount of work, and when you die and are buried, we can examine your body and based solely on that examination, determine whether you were an elite, or a worker, in your own time.
While slavery can be evil, it is NOT necessarily evil.
The fact that every now and then a slave is freed or achieves wealth is not a validation of slavery, nor is it evidence of the magnanimity of the slave owner. It is evil, through and through. To subjugate another entirely to your own will is never moral, never ethical, it is a fundamental debasement of that person's humanity.
You have not made your point at all; you instead have weakened it by confusing alternate forms of slavery, by misunderstanding the power dynamics of slaves, and finally by glossing over the complex subtly of the past and replacing it with outright ignorance.
Look, if you want to nitpick over history I can get right down in the mud and examine the influence of post-summerian pottery on Chinese adoption of animal husbandry, but it's pointless. I'm trying to make a point quickly, and concisely, not write a fucking thesis about the subject matter. That isn't "glossing over", it's "summarizing", and it's something anyone who's ever wanted to scream "Get to the point!" at another person can immediately understand the value of.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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!
You've missed the point, I don't know about made it. The parent asked about lifestyles; you replied with a list of class divisions throughout history, with the usual hyperbole crap about workers being slaves. Tell me, how do the lifestyles of the "worker-slaves" of the United States compare to the those of the "wealthy few" of Mesopotamia?
Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather be a "worker-slave" in contemporary America, where I can work a five-day week, own my own place, travel the world relatively cheaply, communicate at light-speed around the globe, raise a family in relative security, and most likely live to a ripe old age, than at any other time in history, where I would have been worked harder, seen fewer rewards for my labour, had no ability to travel far from my place of residence, let alone the world, see my young family die due to sky-high infant mortality rates, and die myself of disease or injury before I hit 50.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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..
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."
rational planned economic system
BZZZZT!
A "planned economic system" is not rational, it is political. See the 20th century.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
. . . . standing in VERY long lines. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Tell me, how do the lifestyles of the "worker-slaves" of the United States compare to the those of the "wealthy few" of Mesopotamia?
Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather be a "worker-slave" in contemporary America, where I can work a five-day week, own my own place, travel the world relatively cheaply, communicate at light-speed around the globe, raise a family in relative security, and most likely live to a ripe old age
Umm, aside from light-speed communication around the globe, the "wealthy few" of Mesopotamia actually had those things.** Actually, they had them better, since they didn't have to work a five-day week, because they had plenty of others working to support them... just like modern wealthy folks.
I think you actually helped prove GP's point.
(**I'm not sure light-speed communication around the globe is something that significantly improves anyone's lifestyle -- it just gives us instant access to information about things that mostly have little to do with our lives. Oh, and travel around the known world in the past may have been expensive, but it would have been relatively "cheap" for the wealthy.)
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.
Yes, just because simply skimming the thorium off of the seabed would produce more energy than a googol of human bodies. But that's no reason to ruin a meme.
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.
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."
why would you use people as batteries
Spite? The AIs seemed fairly emotional, and not very forgiving. Of course by the end of the second movie Neo proved that the "real" world was yet another Matrix anyway.
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......
Well, for the automated greenhouse there are some commercial ones, and on a small scale there're Aerogrow tabletop gardens (but I don't think their fertilizer usage is sustainable (search for ``peak phosphorous'')
I've thought for a while that FEMA should develop a concrete block for disaster relief which could be poured on site and filled with:
- window greenhouses for food
- rain water collection system and filtration system
- small sink
- composting toilet
- solar panels, LED lighting and a bicycle connected to a generator
- fold up sleeping pallets which double as seating
Once the disaster was over people could build a house around it.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I think you forgot to put in that whole "industrial revolution middle class-y thing." I seem to be not wealthy, having my enemies driven before me while I hear the lamentations of their women, but I also don't seem to be toiling in the dirt under constant fear of the lash. Hmmm....
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
...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.
They didn't travel the world, because the world had not yet been discovered, and the technology for long-distance travel wasn't available. If they did travel any distance of consequence, it was a long, slow, dirty, dangerous process, even for rich people. And while the wealthy may not have been as vulnerable to disease as the underclass, they were still a helluva lot likelier to die of disease than we are now - as were their children.
Looking through the kings of Babylon (among the earliest Mesopotamian kings we have accounts of):
Cambyses II: Suicide after losing his thrown
Smerdis: Assassinated by his brother
Darius I: Natural death at 64
Xerxes I: Murdered by his bodyguard
Artaxerxes: Unknown
Xerxes II: Murdered
Sogdianus: Killed by his own military
Darius II: Unknown
Artaxerxes II: Natural death at 86
Artaxerxes III: Disputed - some say natural causes, some say poison. One of his brothers was murdered, one suicided, and one was executed
Artaxerxes IV: Poisoned
Darius III: Killed by one of his satraps
Of the ones we're fairly sure of, two died natural deaths, and one of those much younger than we'd expect to in modern times. Of the rest, most were killed by someone they trusted. Sign me up for wealth and power in Mesopotamia!
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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.
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.
The worker-slaves are doing a hell of a lot better today than 6000 years ago. Grocery Stores, Media, and Cars. Not that it makes our social structure right, but it is different.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Yes, societies stratify, but hardly anyone in the developed world dies of dysentery anymore. I have central air-conditioning and central heat. I can talk to people on all seven continents instantly. Not too many years ago those would all be science fiction.
Some people are really getting hosed compared to others, but they've probably got indoor plumbing. The world is a better place for almost everyone.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
Exactly, think less Jetsons more Player Piano.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
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
Well... don't forget the influence of... Ancient Aliens (history channel doesn't lie!)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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?
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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.
Steve Jobs is dead of cancer. Bill Gates can't buy an iPhone 6. Louis XIV died of gangrene, despite having some gold furniture.
Wageslaves in America tend to waste their non-wageslave hours watching Game of Thrones.
Eat right and try to spend as much time as possible in Flow.
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?
Some of us mediocre bastards have just been patiently waiting for the species to evolve and make use of us other then for our "productive" qualities.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
Promoting accomplishment could be as simple as saying, "what you just did, is good. On a blog site. The message will be global instantly." But if a machine is doing it, wouldn't being a craftsman be more of a stubborn reaction to conditions?
What I find amazing is that in about 10 years, hard drive sizes will be at the Pita-byte size, and work on Exo-byte storage will start to emerge.
...we'll go to work building robots, and then building better robots. That's already what is happening to the labor force.
...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.
In your response you make three bad arguments:
The first is based on a claim of universal morality even across temporal periods. You make a claim "To subjugate another entirely to your own will is never moral, never ethical, it is a fundamental debasement of that person's humanity." that is based on western conceptions of freedom that do not translate across all borders and certainty not along temporal ones. This is quite a claim and most modern thinkers, even humanitarians still argue that historical norms are very different than modern ones and it is incredibly difficult to judge the moral actions of past states. In some societies giving up ones "will" to the greater good has not merely been the accepted but has been the highest moral goal. Would not forced conscription fulfill your claim, certainly the type of soldier in antiquity at least? Yet the levied peasant classes of Greece served and attained great personal honor to die for their city and for their city elites. Heredity systems also remove will and choice by forcing heirs into responsibilities they have no choice over, yet we in the West have embraced hereditary systems of inheritance gladly and see attempts to remove it as attacking our freedoms (which is ironic because inheritance removes our freedoms). My point is that your moral definition of slavery cannot apply across temporal gaps let alone borders, you are imposing your will on other societies and enslaving others to your own moral code. There is no evidence that other societies or peoples uphold those views nor that they should be considered universal.
The second bad argument deals with your claim "The fact that every now and then a slave is freed or achieves wealth is not a validation of slavery." Yet the cases I looked at were not outliers but rather common occurrences in eastern societies. Slavery is a function of a society and all functions of society can ebb. Slavery can ebb towards the evil and ebb towards the good. If you deny this you once again make bombastic moral claims which weaken your argument. Slavery can be made good and societies often try to make slaves, the poor working class lives better and can achieve even the highest of prosperity.
Thirdly you made a claim about "every dominant society and show that there was a small 'elite' class and a large 'working class'." Here you are simply wrong there have been a great number of societies of equals. These cities of farmers or clergy or thinkers or peasants over time have made both regional powers and even small nations (Tangier, The Amish, Singapore, Sweden, etc) but since your thesis rests on only looking at supposed nations which you can't even name you are guilty of selection bias and your argument is unfounded.
In the end it is not that I am nit-picking, it is that you are picking ONLY what supports your argument and ignoring all else. I am asking you to consider that your cases are wrong and you are telling me that you can go and pick different cases. This does not make your argument stronger, it weakens it by showing your inability to defend your case selection. You have made sweeping generalities about morality, failed to recognize the prosperity associated with some kinds of slavery and absolutely misunderstood your own chosen cases.
The middle ages was NOT "a resources boom". You clearly have either never read anything about medieval europe or entirely failed to comprehend what you read. The middle ages was a sufficiently lengthy period to not hold up well to such generalizations (even if it were true of part of the period).
The early middle ages suffered extensively from attempts by the ruling class to be what they thought roman patrician was. Despite this, and wealth hording (by 'kings', but increasingly dominated by the church), trade did manage to develop which resulted in the creation of the so-called middle class. The term applied to the middle ages does not mean what it does now.
Middle class in medieval europe meant a merchant, specifically one who accumulated wealth (as opposed to a common shop keeper who basically subsisted) but was not titled. Some of the middle class tried to become upper class (purchasing titles) which practice was thoroughly disliked by the aristocracy. Artisans (people who produced for a living) were lower class.
Despite attempts to emulate the upper class, the emerging middle class (which was not as large as most moderns assume, possibly based on thinking it was equivalent to what we now term middle class) brought significant change and reform. (Some) cities became chartered. The upper class, whose wealth was often predicated on land ownership, were reduced in size by the middle class (purchase of land due to changing economies impoverishing some of the aristocracy) and the church (too complicated to describe even in a general way in a post this size).
The "boom" of the middle ages was not one of resources, but one of trade and the growth of a mercantile economy which served as the basis for what we have now. The mercantile economy came about *despite* a lack of resources (such as metal to use for coinage) or an increase in supply (I have no idea how you could think that medieval europe had a boom in production). If you want to be informed, there are books on the topic. If you aren't actually interested they make rather dry reading. I'm not at home to provide some suggested reading, but if you are motivated I am sure you can find some books -- it isn't like there's a lack of academic writing on the subject.
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.
Gee, It's nice to know that I am 30 years ahead of my time.
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There goes my retirement income.
yes by changing the definition of the poverty line, miracles are possible.
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.
A common theme in si-fi novels. And seldom in a positive light.
You'll still need humans to monitor, command, control and coordinate robots
Casteism
People who think that the benefits of increased automation will magically accrue to everyone are... questionably balanced... but the notion that an increasing number of tasks will be sufficiently well automated that even literal slave labor can't beat machines on price seems much harder to dispute.
Slave labor is free. Who's paying you to take their robots?
The benefits of increased automation will accrue to everyone because the technology increases productivity and makes goods cheaper. The average person today has access to goods that would have been decadent luxuries generations ago. Did someone wave a magic wand? Did someone pass a law to make goods available and cheap? No, but yet the outcome is plain to see.
Robotics technology is not going to mature overnight, and unless they develop human-level AI, there will be limits to what any robotic system is capable of doing, meaning that there will be something that humans can do better. Thus, no replacement of robots for humans for every task.
Since humans are running the robots (unless AI enables completely autonomous robots), we end up with humans competing with humans - that's no different than what we have now.
...
1000 AD: Europe. Middle of the Dark Ages. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 AD: United States. A few wealthy people, and a large number of worker-slaves.
Oh, those poor worker slaves in the US. Air conditioning, smartphones, Internet, cable TV, abundant and diverse food choices ... the inhumanity!
Slave labor is hardly free: You need enough coercive violence to keep them motivated(and away from your throat), they have the same subsistence requirements as anybody else, they need training suitable to their assigned function, and you either need to allocate additional subsistence expenses for non-working pregnant women and children(if you wish to produce replacement slaves in-house) or factor in the cost of hunting and enslaving replacements from suitable human populations.
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'
If you're going to punish people for saying apparently stupid things, you're going to cut off a lot of progress and ingenuity.
"You idiot, Altavista etc. have Internet search locked up. You can get a piece of the pie, but you'll be lucky to break even." "Jeez. Why would somebody want to own a computer?" "You dolt, this relativity thing just fails because of the screwy things it says about time." "You're going to bet the company on a new phone?" "Land at Inch'on? Have you seen the terrain? Are you out of your mind?"
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Exactly, when the poverty line moves from "has dirt floor" to "Doesn't have premium cable" it is a miracle.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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
Slave labor is hardly free: You need enough coercive violence to keep them motivated(and away from your throat), they have the same subsistence requirements as anybody else, they need training suitable to their assigned function, and you either need to allocate additional subsistence expenses for non-working pregnant women and children(if you wish to produce replacement slaves in-house) or factor in the cost of hunting and enslaving replacements from suitable human populations.
Versus the robots that run with no maintenance, obsolescence, energy requirements, or design flaws?
Of course that hypothetical robot will replace an "average" human being. It's fantasized to be perfect, infinitely capable, and despite all of that human design/engineering, cheap. (but not so cheap that anyone outside the 0.0001% can own them)
But before trying to restructure society on that notion, it should be noted that hypothetical perfect robot does not exist (yet?). What is a real world robot's potential? How far can it really scale before it hits natural limits?
"it is impossible to have a dignified life on the official poverty line draws our attention to the appalling living conditions of the Indian poor"
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/what-does-indias-poverty-line-actually-measure/
If your job is your only sense of purpose, man do I feel bad for you.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
My point is that if the cost of being a devolving drooling idiot becomes zero, humanity will head that way. Our behavior and evolution usually boils down to a cost/benefit analysis.
Mind the frickin' laser...
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
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
Tax the robots?
Fuck, now I now why they went berserk and created The Matrix
-- 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...
Even if 1% are sociopaths, then rewarding them for abusive behavior is a reward for them. And don't confuse a correct description of the world for my personal opinion or endorsement. Your logic skills have outed you as a professional moron.
Learn to love Alaska