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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!
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.
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.
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 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.
And who's gonna be paying you to spend your time doing art, music entertainment, or any other leisure activity?
That seems to be the mistake all the pie-in-the-sky thinkers make; they just assume that, with the elimination of work for humans, the elimination of a weighted financial system designed to separate us into differing economic classes will disappear with a magical POOF.
The more likely circumstance is that, as more and more people lose their jobs to robotic workers, endless riots and resource wars will become the new norm.
At least, until a significant portion of the population is killed off.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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."
Where are you getting your numbers? Among the white-collar class at least 40+ hours was fairly standard, and allowed a man to support his family comfortably. It's these days where 60+ hours is not uncommon, and typically both parents are working, so we're talking 100+ hours a week to support a family. Real wages have been falling for a long time. Yes all that technology has been making us more productive, but we're not earning correspondingly more, all the extra profit is accumulating to those few at the top of the heap, and they're not likely to start spreading the wealth around just because you ask nicely.
You offer a nice view of how extensive automation *could* play out, but so far I see little evidence that it *will* play out that way. The way things are going it seems more likely that most people will simply become obsolete and be fighting for a place in the welfare line. Because quite frankly most people aren't cut out for high-tech maintenance jobs, and if robots can do all menial and service jobs faster and cheaper than a human, what exactly are Joe and Jane Sixpack supposed to do to earn a living?
As for the reason this issue was brought up in the 30's, is that it was in fact imminent then. In the US at least it has in fact been *decades* since there's been any technological need for anyone to work more than a couple days a week to provide everyone with a comfortable lifestyle, the problem is that our economic model has yet to adapt to the new reality, if anything it's been going in the opposite direction. Current claims simply hilight the fact that things are likely to soon reach an critical level where they can't be ignored. Heck, factory robots are already becoming cheaper than Chinese laborers, and are beginning to take over service jobs as well.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.
That's what you'd think isn't it?
The reality is somewhat different:
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/130305161550-chart-productivity-hourly-compensation.gif
I'll leave it to the educated reader to deduce what happened to *40 years worth of difference between productivity and wages.
*It's not labeled, but the lines diverge in 1973
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!