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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
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.
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.
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.
also need a single payer health care system
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?
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
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.
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.
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?
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
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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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
Too late; it's already been invented.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
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
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
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.
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"
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
...
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!