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If I Had a Hammer
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tom Friedman begins his latest op-ed in the NYT with an anecdote about Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner who, when asked how he'd prepare for a chess match against a computer, replied: 'I would bring a hammer.' Donner isn't alone in fantasizing that he'd like to smash some recent advances in software and automation like self-driving cars, robotic factories, and artificially intelligent reservationists says Friedman because they are 'not only replacing blue-collar jobs at a faster rate, but now also white-collar skills, even grandmasters!' In the First Machine Age (The Industrial Revolution) each successive invention delivered more and more power but they all required humans to make decisions about them. ... Labor and machines were complementary. Friedman says that we are now entering the 'Second Machine Age' where we are beginning to automate cognitive tasks because in many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans. 'We're having the automation and the job destruction,' says MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson. 'We're not having the creation at the same pace. There's no guarantee that we'll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that.' Put all the recent advances together says Friedman, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. 'But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability.' 'We've got a lot of rethinking to do,' concludes Friedman, 'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace.'"
Enough said!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Why shouldn't machines eventually take the jobs humans currently do, but could be done better by a computer? Wouldn't that leave everyone with the option to use their minds rather than muscles for those things humans are best at, such as true creativity? I personally think robots at McDonald's would be far superior and everyone's life will be so much richer there won't be the need for the concept of minimum-wage and grunt-work jobs. Except for those who really prefer the grunt part.
'We've got a lot of rethinking to do,' concludes Friedman, 'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace
Or maybe we're just in a recession-induced employment slump.
Seriously, extreme claims require evidence. If you're running around saying, "This time is different!" after we all found jobs that weren't farming or factory work, tell us why you think it's different. Because there are plenty of counter-examples from history saying you are wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In sci-fi novels written around the "Gee Whiz" period of cultural history, where science was going to 'save' us, the idea generally accepted was that as robots and computers take over mundane tasks, the resulting free time would benefit humanity.
At least in the utopian novels, anyway.
Of course, in our reality, we use offshore slaves instead of robots for the most part. But the result in the Capital remains the same; the jobs turn to poo.
But the rent on your apartment still needs paying. As does the mortgage on your neighbor's house. And they aren't any cheaper today than before automation and mass enslavement.
As work and compensation decrease, these artificially inflated bullshit expenses become even more starkly set against the backdrop of society.
-And it should be recognized that most apartment rents are actually just interest payments in disguise.
Banks are evil. That's what we need to take a hammer to.
...and invest in robotics/automation. You won't need a job.
Some people need to dedicate a second to imagine a world where one person's work can support a hundred thousand. Centuries ago, the end of the era where 90% of the population had to work in the fields to feed everyone didn't create 80% of unemployment.
There is no limit to the total amount of possible "work" to be done. Just as we went from production to services, we'll go maybe to science, or to entertainment, or to space exploration. Most of the proletariat will also probably reduce their daily working hours, increasing the demand for entertainment and other services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Computers and automated systems are not replacing any cognitive tasks soon, at least not economically. Sure, if you throw in a team of engineers, several years of research and a couple million euro/dollars, then you can build a computer that can defeat a chess grandmaster. But until engineering companies are actually laying off their engineers and designers and replacing them with computers, I am not worried.
Computers are likely to replace the more simple jobs (as they always have). Driving a lorry or car is not exactly a highly skilled job, and I would be delighted if that is automated.
"labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity"
We need to get away from this way of thinking. I don't know about you, but my job does not define me. It is *only* what I do to earn money, so I can fund and pursue my hobbies and interests.
Sounds like hard work. Can't we get a computer to do it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There are two basic approaches to handle this:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The issue is not that machines are taking the jobs away, they are taking it back. Humans had taken jobs away from machines because they were more economical. Now machines have become economical so are taking their rightful place.
If we look at most of the work people do, these are purely mechanical, require no creative/intelligent input and suck the souls/minds dry. These jobs help fuel an inflationary economy which does nothing for the people doing the jobs. Most such displaced workers could not dream of "enjoying life" or the "fruits of their labor" till they have made/saved enough of their earnings - mostly after having spent 75% of their lives in such thankless work. Most the jobs computers and technology are taking away are actually the blue collar equivalent in a service/information industry. These are not white collar jobs.
The human population is too large to be sustainable for an environment where most of the mechanical/manual/non-creative labor can be done by machines. We have too many people who would not be useful in other ways because they were trained and maintained to fill the roles taken by the machines.
There will be conflict, there will be war, it will not be pleasant for a long time.
Computers replacing human's is fantastic, it frees us up to do what we want to do.
Well, it would if it wasn't for the fact that the monetary system is designed in such a way that unless we all work like dogs the economy goes to shit and we end up with a vast uneducated, depressed and criminal underclass.
There is a way out of this, but it involves stepping off the money-is-debt forced march that humanity is on at the moment [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Grip-Death-Destructive-Economics/dp/1897766408], otherwise the 1% we will end up having to exterminate the 99% [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm]
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Companies need a system to decide who gets retrenched first due to automation improvements: Those who use self-scanners at supermarkets get laid off first. It's only fair! :-)
:-(
:-)
But how will these newly unemployed cope?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135284/How-cheating-checkouts-turning-nation-self-service-shoplifters.html
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/coles-to-combat-selfserve-thieves/story-fni0dcne-1226746394342
Problem solved!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/big-y-self-checkout-machines_n_980886.html
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/06/are-self-service-checkouts-on-the-way-out/
who has programmed a computer understands that computers are only good at linear decision making based on rigid, mathematical criteria. If X then Y, if not X then Z.
Puzzles like chess are therefore easily mastered by a computer, once it is instructed how to win by a programmer.
Where computers fail, however, is intuition: a skill which is universally superior in human beings. Instead of traversing the entire probability matrix, human beings can accurately discard huge numbers of possible outcomes nearly instantly and arrive at the best possible option.
A good example of this the Battle of Midway. Had Admiral Nimitz been a computer, he would have lost both Midway and the Aleutians without a fight, and opened the U.S. west coast to invasion.
Instead he intuitively gambled that the Imperial Japanese Navy would be unprepared for a counter-attack and managed to cripple four capital ships while driving the Japanese offensive back over 3000 miles.
That's why computers cannot replace human beings. They are tools. Nothing more.
Donner isn't alone in fantasizing that he'd like to smash some recent advances in software and automation like self-driving cars, robotic factories, and artificially intelligent reservationists
Except most likely Donner isn't fantasizing about any of that.
I doubt very much he's opposed to any of those.
He just doesn't like computer ruining his illusions of chess as a game of unfathomable human talent.
Computers are replacing labour the same way steam engines made all of us lose our jobs and make life miserable; i.e. not at all.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
BTW this dude self-scanned $100 worth of groceries at Coles, got charged $62. He feels bad that he doesn't feel bad: http://www.vice.com/read/i-dont-feel-that-bad-about-stealing-from-coles-but-i-feel-bad-about-not-feeling-bad http://www.news.com.au/finance/money/shady-shoppers-stealing-millions-using-scanner-trciks/story-e6frfmd9-1226514344385
A) The same thing happens that has happened every time machines have made jobs obsolete: We develop new jobs, and more of them than before.
B) We really get rid of the majority of jobs and being unemployed loses its stigma because it applies to almost everyone - except for a few freaks who insist they are so damn important that they need to be paid to da something.
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening,
All over this land.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
... the majority of humanity is not creative or particularly smart. And if there are few jobs for them to do because machines do all the grunt work what exactly do you expect them to do? I can tell you what they WILL do if the majority of the population is unemployed - riot.
It can be a good thing,
I no longer Hunt to feed my family
I no longer work in a field planting corn
I no longer work in a chip factory extracting burnt potato chips
I run a small armoury making custom gothic armour 14th - 16th C, I make a good living doing something I enjoy.
I agree with your tirade, AC...there's no rational reason not to advance as humans and take advantage of the automation we can achieve today.
There IS a reason...it's not rational but it is always in play when it comes to any capital resource or essential service: artificial scarcity.
A human engineered economic shortage in some way, a shortage that would not exist in a natural free-market scenario.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Historically, technological revolutions have eliminated large categories of jobs. Many manual jobs are now performed by machines, even skilled manual jobs. An economist might say that these former manual workers are now free to retrain, and do other things - (or just grow old and die, and be replaced by youngsters who have never known the old way, and have learnt the right skills to get along in this new world whilst growing up).
The question is, what happens when literally everything of economic value that a person is capable of doing, can be accomplish more efficiently by a machine? More and more resources come under the complete control of fewer and fewer people, and for the rest of the population, what is left?
I believe that once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies, a form of democratic socialism will become the preferred way to run society. Resources owned collectively, with broad decisions made democratically, but organisational details left to machines to optimise and execute. People would be provided for, because it is easy to produce enough to do it.
If machines took all the jobs, and there were none left for humans, this would just mean that all the work was being done by machines. If machines are doing all of the work, then there is nothing being left undone, no task that is not already being completed, for if anyone needed anything else done that the machines were not already doing for them, they would attempt to hire someone to do it, which would create a job opening, which would then contradict the original premise that computers had taken all of the jobs.
Ok, jobs in manufacturing have been greatly reduced over the past century and the individual productivity sky-rocketed. The consequence was consumer goods became dirt cheap and few people work at producing them - at least in the western world.
Now things start the same with knowledge jobs and some services. With a diagnostic tricorder, automatic blood analyser and self-service MRI, the doctors and many specialists at the labs will have a good part of their work disappear or be replaced by a friendly unskilled worker telling you where to place your hand and hand you the print-out. Another set of jobs on the way out are train-drivers, truckers, taxi-drivers and pilots, they have a big chance of being replaced by computers in the near future.
What will be the consequence? Will the world end? Will the mschines rise and Skynet take over?
One of the first consequences will be, that the value of the service rendered will be greatly devaluated. In the end, we humans pay manly for three things: The value of the raw materials, the necessary investments for the production site and the time spent by a human to create the product. If the latter two drop significantly, the second because the productivity of the machines go up and the third because of automation, then simple we won't be willing to pay as much for the product and spend out money elsewhere. This elsewhere is where the jobs for humans will be.
For one, personal comfort services are very often hard to automate. Hairdressers and make-up stylists will be be hard to replace by computers. As another consequence, the organisations will fill with pointless jobs which keep each other busy. We see that today with all the consultants, controllers, marketing departments, safety and security people, quality assurance, project managers, application owners and so on. Those are nearly totally unproductive or, the few that are good at their job, cost only a little less than what their work saves. This is the negative aspect, but the same also exists in positive. Skilled people are able to spend more time doing things not possible before. Today, many illnesses have been identified that before didn't have a name because people died of other things first. And for many of those illnesses, cures have been developed.
In the end, humans will go on pushing the envelope, being that with discovering new cures to make life longer and better or be that by spending more effort on hairdos and the next fashion in legging-design. Automated tasks will just become a commodity, no matter how complicated it is. If you don't believe me, just look at that mobile phone of yours and look around how many designer cases are floating around. People are willing to spend 25% of the value of the phone on a piece of printed plastic with some designer-scribbles on it.
This short story explores this concept as artfully as an Asimov story.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Luddites fear technology advances, news at 11
I was getting withdrawal symptoms having not seen a Hugh Pickens DOT Com article for a few hours.
I was really starting to fear for his wellbeing !
So If we lower the human population of earth the problem isn't nearly as bad. It may be painful but essentially that's a solution.
So the worlds oldest profession will also be the last one as well!!
Why did I waste my years studying...
I apply the Friedman Postulate: If we can just stay the course six more months ad infinitum then the problem will go away.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
The Moustache of Understanding...
They are everywhere. No other country I've visited has so many police and security forces. I was terrified. Security in schools, security in grocery stores, security on parking lots, gates and guards on entrance to neighborhood. Cameras everywhere, cars flashing blue lights every couple minutes.
This is North Korea or USA. These countries have so much in common.
Ask a computer to discover a novel (true) axiom from which the continuum hypothesis could be derived. Ask a computer what is truth you idiots. AI is a 50 years old scam laden with droll charlatans. Gödel came before that faggot Turing.
War.
Saying "because labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity" is not only not true it is also quite backwards thinking in the face of talking about a "second machine age". It is not a job that actually matters to people, it is their pay to sustain their lifestyle. Without the need for that, people do not need "a job" but they desire something "to do" which is quite different from "a job" you do for the pay and maybe, maybe because you are one of the lucky ones who actually enjoy what they are doing.
A "second machine age" should free people up from having to work for a living and allow everyone a stable life so you can focus on doing what you actually enjoy and what really matters to you.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." - Orange Catholic Bible
Why are people so desperate to be wage slaves? Don't they have anything better to do? http://robotswillstealyourjob.com/
The sincerity in this argument is an admission that, in reality, the 1% that make up the wealthiest of human beings consider the rest to be slaves, be it to labour, or interest rates or just putting food on the table.
Consequently, the externality from their pursuit of automation is making more and more people slaves so that we are always competing with one another for a dollar instead of the market competing for our labour, which drives labour prices up. As long as there is a steady rate of unemployment around 10%, every person will fear for their job and be a subservient slave, too afraid to attend to matters of democracy or society. That's what that 1% want from their win-win situation.
However I think it's 50's thinking that drives it and the fear. Technology is a gift that will either enslave or free the human race and most people can't comprehend what it means to them. So too many of the people who devise the technology. To me automation means I kick back a work for an hour or two while my automation does the work for me. That's because I control the technology I deliver and the reason I control it is because I have educated myself to do so. So the automation allows me to educate myself more - improving my life.
We have to ask ourselves what happens when the Western worlds labour becomes obsolete in a world that is competing for resources and corruption is inherent in every political system in the world. Personally, I want technology do better for people not profits, however it was my own naivety that blinded me to the fact that those who control the deployment of technology en-mass, aren't even people any more - they're company boards legally obliged to make a profit.
Our role as technologist's is also changing with the automation. You can bet that people will begin to cast blame on those who devise technology so unless we are prepared to push back and be cognisant enough to take a lead role in society and educate them about the choices they make the consequences of that fear will be played out on us hapless geeks.
If the cost of education goes down as the price of energy goes up we stand a chance to find a way to reduce our slavery and perhaps live better. My old mentor used to tell me 'You bleed on the cutting edge of technology' and, like a knife it will be used like a tool and a weapon to sculpt or subjugate our entire society.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The majority here reacts from 2 basic feelings : jealousy and resistance to change. ... Money is just the medium to interchange these needs with each other, nothing more and nothing less.
* Jealousy :
- The jealousy about intelligent entrepreneurs making more money by automating jobs is very obvious. It's not new, has always existed, and again it is called "obscene", which only shows the ignorance of most posters here.
- Every single person can become an entrepreneur, and even a very rich one. Diploma's or grades are totally irrelevant, you just need ambition and an open mind (and not be mentally retarded).
* Resistance to change :
- Anyone who writes a sentence like "there won't be enough jobs for everyone" is beyond stupid. OK, if you want to type on a typewriter instead of using a word processor, you won't be able to get a job. If machines can make shoes 10000 times faster then you can, don't become a shoe maker. If cars are driven automatically, don't become a taxi driver.
- Change, that's what you Obama voters like don't you ? Adapt to a new situation, and stop pretending that you care about your fellow workers, while you are just too lazy to move your ass to the next level.
- There is always an endless demand for work to be done. Every single company constantly wants more people to do more work, to grow, to create new added value. All governments want the same. There are so many unfulfilled needs in the world, in every single industry imaginable, in every corner of every single street, everywhere you look you see free people creating new markets for new stuff, services,
* Conclusion
- Automation means that goods become less expensive (because labor is freed for other, more useful things), which is a good thing for society. Food, clothes, buildings, computers, services of all kinds are nowadays available to the large majority of the population. Even compared to 10 years ago, the world has significantly changed.
- In the last decennia, billions of people have been added to the global work force. Before people in the West will substantially grow their incomes, people in the developing world will grow theirs. It's unstoppable, you will have to adapt to that situation : low growth in the West, higher growth in the developing world. That is if you are not an entrepreneur; an entrepreneur sees the opportunities this creates and will make money on it.
- Basically you will have to adapt, and yes there are companies that have high profit margins because competition isn't perfect instantly. Understanding that, and taking advantage of it is exactly what distinguishes an entrepreneur from an intellectual : knowledge of the real world vs. reading books. Time to stop being a student, and start to live in the real world.
...what the others are here for, I have no idea. - W H Auden.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace.'"
And we have been for 50 years, which is why we have visionaries from the 60s talk about the change in work culture and a possible human future where robots do 99% of the work and humans - find something more interesting to do with their time.
But society refused to change. We still live in a work-is-mandatory culture.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is ridiculous. The capabilities of man + machine will always be greater than the capabilities of a machine by itself, so we're not going to run out of intellectual jobs just because machines can do smarter things. Machines, including computers, are just power tools for the brain. (And I say this even as a full-time AI researcher with a PhD in the field, developing new AI algorithms for my day job at a major tech company.)
I don't want to disrespect grandmasters. Not even lesser chess players as I think their mental capabilities are impressive. But jobs consisting of repetitive actions are the ones we need to get rid of by all means. Shovelling coals requires physical strength and endurance. Playing chess requires a huge mental container to consider many moves ahead but no particular level of creativity. Creativity is the main property/virtue that creates added value. Acquiring creativity is much harder than than using sheer mental power in learning facts from books. It requires a peculiar combination of a laissez faire attitude (to brood over concepts) and determination in grasping concepts. Overdoing the "laissez faire" bit inevitably will backfire and hence creativity comes at a high risk which in its turn must inevitably translate into higher earnings and appreciation.
The question now is what we will do when everyone is out of a job. There's no clear answer but we can assume a few things. One is that society fares better when people are employed. The second is that values shift and that we pay more for property and services that are scarce or that are a nuisance. So how will employed society look like in 30 years? War and other instabilities hurt business and therefore new activities will appear in order to prevent these. So which ones will come? I don't know but I'm sure there will be. Perhaps working on a way to extract desert heat and to bring water to it in order to allow crops to grow and humans to live. To me such ideas seem easier to entertain than say smart phones 100 years ago.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Seriously, extreme claims require evidence.
Friedman speaks ex cathedra.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
honestly i love seeing this shit people who've had their fscking noses in the air thinking they're ass is immune to replacement are finding out real fast they are just as disposable, it happend to where i worked years ago first they went through the plant axing jobs and the folks up front snickered, wasnt too godamn funny when the axe came down on them - dont paper cut your ass on a memo on the way out.
The solution, up to this point, has been busy work. Based on my experience, 90% of the work being done today is unnecessary. Almost all of the paperwork being done could be replaced by competent automation (though a lot of it has been replaced incompetently and actually lead to more work), most service sector jobs are entirely unnecessary but provide some convenience to those with money. Many engineering jobs are just repeating work that's been done before (but the information was lost, kept secret, or poorly maintained), a lot of the work that is necessary is done very inefficiently. Basically, the only reason most of us even have jobs is the greed or incompetence of some moneyed person or politician or criminal.
... money! In large parts of even the developed world, no job means no income means no house, no food. Even where state handouts are sufficient to live from, there are still big differences in life's enjoyment, but also for example political influence. More and more people get disenfranchised through no fault of their own. To talk about identity when the elephant in the room is money feels very, very disconnected from the reality on the ground.
I'd wake up my neighbors pounding out a rhythm all about you.
Like a post-post-modern man!
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
There is no robot that can clean a bathroom, paint a room, unclog a toilet, fix an hvac system, and on and on and on and on.
We are nowhere close to the point where automation is creating permanent unemployment. Nowhere close. Not in the next ten years, most likely not in the next twenty. And honestly, I think there will always be work to do. If people stop working, our economy will be smaller. We need a big economy if we want to support stuff like NASA and medical research. I know everyone on /. wants those things.
If we ever did get there, there is a simple solution. Guaranteed income. Hell. We could afford guaranteed income today if we ditched the welfare state that spends $60,000 for every family on welfare. The problem is that most of that goes to bureaucrats and not actually helping people in need.
There is one job that robots cannot replace - as a target of humiliation. Ordering around robots and controling robots does not create as much satisfaction as ordering around and controlling humans. Although sex-replacement technology already exists, sex trafficking is flourishing. How can you reinforce your feeling of superiority as an "entrepreneur" if you can only hurt robots, not inferior people who don't have as much money as you? (More appropriate to say they are inferior people because their parents don't have as much money, since sex trafficking ususally deals with minors.)
Those jobs will ONLY exist if people who control the resources want them done. Suppose 1% of the people control the resources. How many hairdressers do the 1% need? With 99% of the people competing for the jobs that the 1% still needs done, how much d'you think with that much labor offered, labor will be worth?
--PM
The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to grow... that's the way of the world and it's getting worse. Capitalism allows individuals more power than goverments so society needs to work out what to do.
It's a shame the real issues like this are not really discussed regularly on the news or other TV shows... instead we are interested in celebrity and fashion. So things continue along the same path.
I still feel people need to work for their money but there is no easy solution to sharing out wealth, especially when there are fewer jobs as they are being taken up by robots... I mean where does it end as it seems there is very little that can't be automated now - using sensors and the necessary inputs.
Dear PhD AI worker,
How come you're not being paid 2x what you are now? Yes, 2x. Productivity of the worker has gone up 2x in real terms since 1973. Yet your pay is less than that, even YOURS, Dr. AI worker.
Suppose most jobs are automated, and the few remaining jobs have many highly qualified people who need that job. What happens to the price of labor? Market forces push wages down--people underbid you just to work. THAT is why your pay doesn't match your productivity. And the trend is accentuating.
Those high paid high level creative jobs you like to imagine? They ONLY exist if there is market for them, i.e., if the 1% (or whoever controls the resources) decides to allocate resources for them.
And they're not, hence the depressed wages ACROSS THE BOARD. I've got a PhD too, doing creative non-automatable work, and I SURE WOULD like to be getting paid 2x as much. But I'm not, and it's flatly because the rest of the labor market is depressed.
I'd sure love to keep doing creative non-automatable work, but I can only do that if it pays, which in turn depends on how many creative non-automatable jobs the 1% wants to devote resources for. And guess what: the 1% is apparently deciding that research and technology investment needs to drop because it is a "cost". Government investment is declining too. So capital (the 1%) thrives on productivity increases and everyone who must labor, is, frankly, slowly starving to death.
At least in the USA.
--PM
cause communism is so scary
He's a self-absorbed hack who's only real accomplishment is getting on TV talk shows to flog his breathy, home-spun, aphorism BS for book sales.
He can stick his Olive Tree *and* his Lexus up his backside.
Another idiot who thinks that we'd all do much better if only we could do our jobs less efficiently.
... a bigger hammer.
On the serious side, since all this technology is supposed to make our life experience more enjoyable, otherwise why are we doing this (greed of the few or competition mindset???) I want to know why our paid vacations are not getting longer.
Oh wait, there is a growing number of Americans on long vacations, sort of..... its called unemployment.
Maybe we really do need a bigger hammer.
... they can always sell a spare kidney or rent their wombs out. But how big is the market for such things? That would up end the terms of "maker" and "taker" would it not?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or we'll run out of easy energy and we'll be back doing every miserable job by hand.
Why do more people not join community agriculture projects such as Urban Roots in Detroit? Efforts like these are in many of our cities now, and it always bothers me that more people do not jump in with these projects. If I found myself staring up the wrong end of the economic ladder, that's what I would do in a heartbeat.
We have vast numbers of unemployed (20%? 30%? Who knows?), and simultaneously a vast need for localized community agriculture and food sovereignty. Why do these not combine?
After all, food stamps can buy seeds.
If I had a hammer there would be one less folk singer.
No brain, no pain.
Friedman has made a career of making poor, conjectural arguments which have no factual support but which appeal to your emotions if you don't think too hard about them. His articles read like a last-minute college essay that mentions many things but fails to address them in anything close to a complex way. He is a waste of time, and a waste of the Times.
Perhaps he is angling to become an example: his columns might improve if done by machine.
I have ranted myself blue about a total failure of people to catch on to what is going on. Maybe it is because people are so frightened that they do not want to notice the problem. We are about to replace humans in the work arena almost totally. There will be less and less jobs available. In itself that could be either wonderful or a total calamity depending upon how we adapt our beliefs and policies to a new situation. Consider the situation much like the rising sea level issue. Most people simply do not want to confront what rising seas will do to our society. It is semi-deliberate blindness. Again the answer is simple. We simply must pay people well who do not work. No, I do not mean we should elect them to congress. After all congressmen do nothing and are well paid all the time. But in order to spend we must have money. Therefore we must put money in the hands of all people. Businesses will pay taxes that equal those checks. Now one odd effect is that the highly skilled and the unskilled will both be replaced so the new situation is that they are now equals. Being equals their pay should now be equal. Another oddity is that a robot that can work on a roof driving nails may be more expensive to create than a robot that can act as a school teacher, lawyer or doctor. We may begin to realize that people with manual skills are more advanced than people with intellectual skills as the difficulty in replacing them with machines can be measured in the relative costs of replacing them with machines. This obviously means that anything vaguely resembling capitalism will be displaced in society. And if we learned anything from Darwin the failing of capitalism and the first industrial revolution proves an inferiority in that doctrine. The US and Europe have both become much more socialist as the decades roll by. I suspect that Australia has as well. Even China has shifted towards socialism and away from communism. So the second industrial revolution is now under way and we will see a drama in which the round eyed devils build machines to try to compete with machines built by the slant eyed devils. That will be true even on the battle fields of the world. I can only hope that we use a very gentle and kind method of keeping the unemployed healthy and happy but considering the US in the past I sort of doubt it.
The lackluster jobs reports have almost nothing to do with automation and worker replacement. Big companies don't hire in the mass needed to move the unemployment stats much more than a few tenths of percent. This is because they already have hired people. They've been hiring people for years as the grow. At some point you can decide to get a little more out of the people you hire by pushing them a bit, or maybe making their jobs a little more productive. But either way, the last thing a modern business wants to do is hire a bunch of people they'll have to layoff down the road.
Small business is where the growth in employment happens. Small business expansion is at an all-time low, and has been since the rise of stupid laws like Sarbanes/Oxley, that can devastate a small company while just adding to the accounting burden of big companies (who can absorb it or pass it along to their customers). Until the US becomes small-business friendly again, there's not going to be much job growth.
And what about all that automation? The whole point is that robots are getting cheap. That means it's going to be possible for small businesses and entrepreneurs are going to be able to buy them. What will they do with them? How about custom manufacturing everything? If you've ever remodeled a kitchen, you know that there's a lot of activity around building cabinets, designing the space, picking materials, etc. It's one of those things that produces a lot of activity and is expensive, but not so far out of reach that average people can't afford it. Now think about the automotive aftermarket, custom motorcycles, even additions to homes. All of these things are somewhat custom today. Imagine if those same ideas were applied to cell phones, where a designer could build a model of a phone just for you, have the circuit board made, 3Dprint the case in any color(s) you want, Assemble the phone in the back room and finally, gets you a detailed breakdown of the cost, which is surprisingly not much more than today's iPhone 5S.
Oh, and when you drop it, can easily fit a new glass cover on it because he knew you were going to do that.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Cognitive process completed. You have nothing to worry about meatbag of mostly water.
Just to say I strenuously object to the misappropriation of a Peter Paul and Mary lyric in discussing a Tom Friedman column.
It's the hammer of justice,
It's the bell of freedom,
It's the song about the love between the brothers and the sisters,
All over this land.
I am fairly sure we're going to be looking at two very different classes of machine: One, the AI, isn't going to be "owned" by anyone other than itself, just as you aren't owned by anyone. It may, or may not, have some obligations, but ownership of an intelligent being... probably not going to happen again. I hope.
Two, non-intelligent worker robots that have enough compute power to deal with cleaning your house, taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, that sort of thing, but not an original thought anywhere to be seen. I expect those to be in service to both humans and intelligent machines.
Well, we're not even close to AI yet, nor have service machines reached even a fraction of their potential. Lots of time remains for the economic system(s) to mutate such that human labor is not directly coupled to our ability to survive. I fully expect this to happen; we can see it already in smaller ways, as costs drop precipitously for what used to be high expense items and services. For instance, I have a Roomba, and it was *far* less expensive than hiring someone to vacuum. So far, the only after-purchase expense has been a minuscule amount of electricity. That's the nature of service robotics. Smart thermostats, lawn mowers, even things as simple as toasters remove our various concerns and replace them with well accomplished tasks. Presuming nothing catastrophic happens, there's every reason to think this trend will accelerate and grow -- I expect few would turn down economically feasible replacements for drudge work. And of course, in a system of plenty, free equates directly to economically feasible.
From TFS:
Assumes facts not in evidence. Labor produces money, and money is (presently) the key to a person's identity and dignity from society's point of view. That doesn't mean that your self image is dependent upon money (though it may be), just that where you can go, how well you are accepted, what you can own is all predicated upon labor and therefore earnings. If money is not a factor in your quality of life, as would be the case in a system characterized by "more than enough for all at all times, no labor required" then neither should money be a surrogate for your self-image. There's also a difference not addressed by the simple term "labor": The implication is that you're working for someone else. In an economy of plenty, you can work -- or play, for that matter -- for yourself.
For instance, I already work at home, having essentially retired, presently producing software for the amateur radio community (software defined radio stuff.) I don't charge for it, I give it away, getting my jollies, as it were, from the idea that 8000 or so people are using my software on a more or less regular basis, and also from using it myself, to be honest. My self image, I assure you, is just fine. Likewise, I take a lot of photographs, and I post them at full resolution and welcome anyone who wants to use them, print them, whatever. Doesn't compromise my dignity; doesn't erode my self-image. Finally, I write, and post my opinions and etc. for anyone who wants to read them; I enjoy responding to those who take the time to comment and again, perfectly happy to pursue this without monetary compensation.
All in all, I'd say that if people are not expected to work for others, then they will not suffer negative feelings about themselves if they do not, in fact, work for others. Instead, they can put that effort into improving their own lives and that of their friends and families. I'm rather certain that such undertakings will be quite good for one's self-image, dignity, and social status.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A guy brings a hammer and smashes the chess computer.
The IT team builds a more reinforced case.. this is met with a more vicious whacking tool and the next iteration has enhanced countermeasures.
This continues until BAM! Hello T-800!
Or as stupid; you see, it's all about the POV you approach it from. Ask me to go mountain climbing for no purpose other than to get to the top? I'd just laugh at you. Tell me you went mountain climbing? I'd either wander directly on to some other subject, or perhaps investigate (recreationally) why you feel it necessary to risk your family and friends losing you over an "accomplishment" that has no actual value to anyone. The world is not improved by your climb, no one is saved, and worst case, you may inspire some other fool to risk their life in a useless fashion similar or identical to yours.
Now, if there's something to be gained -- say, establishing a colony on mars, or discovery of new lands a la the old oceanic explorers -- I'm up for considerable risk. But bragging rights for having done a tough, risky climb to no worthy purpose? Pffft.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, for one, because this implies huge social friction, and humans have a well deserved reputation for responding to huge social friction with destructive means.
But look at it another way: If you have a huge field of corn, and two people, where's the need for either of you to sell corn to the other? If there's plenty, there's no reason for friction, nor any economic reason to require an exchange of wealth or surrogates for wealth (money.)
Service machines -- not AI mind you, but task oriented non-intelligent robotics -- can serve AI as well as us. No need for friction; no need to even consider "not giving" to one or the other. They'll create the plenty -- not the AI, and not us. That's why it'll work.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Future guy sez: What is this "buying" thing you mention? When I want a widget, I order one, and it is delivered. Consequently, I have been content. But I am curious about this "buying" thing you mention. Is it a way to improve a product? Does it improve a product's distribution? Does it educate people? Please, enlighten me.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh, we haven't forgotten it. There's a pretty good undercurrent of "let's get all our apples out of one basket" going on already, and we're still working, albeit slowly, on getting into space. The only question is, will we manage to do that in time?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The first thing that needs to be done is get ride of the idea of jobs. Yes that's right, stop thinking about working for others and start thinking about working for your own damn self.
The second thing that needs to be done is get ride of the idea of trade. With advances in automation, and biology everyone will be able to grow the raw materials and then 3D print virtually anything they want. Nano cellulose, graphene, organic electronics are just the beginning. Look up IBM's citizen grid & Harvard. Identifying low cost organic molecules for all kinds of functions will become very automated and therefore cheap.
The transition will utilize "extreme affordability" to create all the infrastructure at very very low cost. With sustainable self sufficiency the 80% of work not related to production (sales, management, accounting, legal, human resources ...) will be eliminated. Companies that used to produce products that are now being produced by each individual will go bankrupt, as will the owners of said business.
So everyone just needs to take a breath.
James Albus wrote a book in 1976 called Peoples' Capitalism. He proposed that the government create a mutual fund that invests in automated industries and pays dividends to every US citizen.
Eventually the fund's dividends would be enough to live on, so nobody would be required to work, and everyone would get a minimal share of the proceeds of automating everything.
Imagine that we had started doing this in, say, 1980.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
nm
They're just NOW starting to worry about this, now that it actually has a valid shot at replacing white-collar jobs???.... boohoohoo worlds tiniest violin for them. What do they think they put us guys in Manufacturing through? Yeah, some retrained, but most just disappeared.... and as always, the money flowed uphill.
C|N>K
No. It's false that 99% of the population are too stupid. We just teaching them badly.
I'd be considered a "math genius" by most of the world, and I'm well respected amongst mathematicians I know too, but I see in my own life how life changes effect work habits, with drastic consequences. I'm lucky enough to always enjoy learning, but not everyone got that training young enough.
All "work" must disappear eventually, presumably creating a basic income. We've seen basic incomes, and effective welfare, elevate poor people into more middle class though processes and educational attainment, both when the basic income was tried on a small scale in a Canadian city, and only a larger scale in Scandinavia. We've also seen pre-Thatcher U.K. style welfare create a culture of ignorance. We must make people want to be educated and do interesting things.
And education is hardest for STEM fields of course. Ain't hard to train over half the population to be artists who design their own art, clothing, etc. that 3d printers, automated sewing machines, etc. produce. We want them mostly doing STEM though because really the world doesn't need *that* many artists.
... and continued it in the post. That is obnoxious, and I am giving you a -1 Overrated for doing it. Have a nice day.
There's a market for such a straightforward expert system. Where's my ObamaBest iPhone app?
Just keep reducing the work week, while keeping salaries constant. Corporations will bitch; but these are the same corporations that are making huge productivity gains and paying CEOs millions of dollars to destroy companies. The've got the money. The salaried workers will take more vacations, helping the hospitality industry, or they'll invent new things on their own time.
Work week will be the new economic management tool. We don't know if the consequences of excessively short work weeks will cause other problems; but it's worth trying. It can't be any worse than the attempt to manage interest rates. The challenge will be to find a "sweet spot" for hours worked. We want a certain level of employment; but we don't want to create a labor shortage or social problems due to idleness.
When the robots really take over, that'll be the big problem--lots of people willing to volunteer for work, but no actual work, and lots of idleness. That could cause serious health and crime problems simply because people are bored. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it though. The current system requires people to invent stupid shit like apps that track other people and shove ads at them. You could argue that's already a case of people committing crimes because of the system. If those people didn't have to work, what would they do that might be better for society than some tracking ad platform?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I would point out that this argument feels a lot like a variation on Karl Marx's overproduction paradox in capitalist societies. Marx's focus on cause was a little different, he viewed that there would be too many goods ultimately driving down profits and triggering needs for efficiency, but the cycle essentially becomes the same - competition forces increased efficiency to produce products, but increased efficiency reduces labor required and thus fewer employed people who can afford said products. Then, companies are forced to become even more efficient to improve margins, but that just leads to further unemployment and greater numbers of people who can't afford said products. Those issues were partially offset historical circumstance (global warfare) and by the creation of new industries that can partially absorb some of the unemployed (tech boom), but ultimately, the trend seems to still be on the same trajectory.
are largely extinct now because executives are expected to be able to compose their own emails rather than dictate to a secretary who types out a memo. There's still plenty of clerical work to go around though.
Bus conductors were abolished (apart from a few routes using Routemaster type buses) years ago but there are still plenty of jobs for people wanting to drive pay-on-entry buses who now also do the same work that the conductor used to do.
What job are you doing now? Chances are your job didn't even exist thirty, twenty, maybe even ten years ago. New technology might make some jobs obsolete, but it creates plenty more.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
This just in: humans' lives easier than ever. Humans outraged.
Tom Friedman begins his latest op-ed in the NYT with an anecdote about Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner who, when asked how he'd prepare for a chess match against a computer, replied: 'I would bring a hammer.'
Funny, that's how I'd prepare for a chess match with Tom Friedman, too.
It's sucked being a worker since about 1973, which was when wages per hour worked peaked in the US. That was also the year the auto companies in Detroit started requiring a high school diploma for new hires. It took decades for the "chattering classes" who write op-eds to notice this. Today, 14% of the US workforce makes all the stuff - that's manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture put together. That was 40% around 1950, and 90% around 1900. US industrial production is at an all-time high. There was a drop after 2008, but it's back up. The US still outproduces China, with 3x the population. (Not for much longer, though; China will pass the US soon, maybe this year.)
If you were an industrial worker from 1945 to 1973, your real income doubled or tripled. You probably had a union and a good pension plan. That's so over. In the US, anyway.
It took decades for the "chattering classes" who write op-eds to notice this. But now they have to compete with Demand Media drones turning out cheap filler. Not just for online content; the "fluff" sections ("Living", "Drive", "Food and Wine", etc.) of many newspapers are produced by Demand Media. A degree in journalism from Yale isn't enough any more. So we're finally seeing more op-eds about the terrors of automation.
The list of things computers can do is getting longer, rapidly. The list of things people can do gets longer very slowly. While it's hard to get a computer to do a job the first time, once it's been done, replicating software is cheap. When computing replaces another kind of job, deployment today is very fast. That's new. It used to take longer to crush a whole sector of employees.
Sounds like yet another hit piece. They are scrambling to put the failure of the Federal Reserve centered Inflatocracy economy on anything and anyone but themselves. Here the toadies have written yet another snore piece of neo-luddism. YAWN
Robert J. Sawyer had a series 10+ years back now:
The trilogy's volumes are titled Hominids (published 2002), Humans (2003), and Hybrids (2003).
Very interesting take on what the modern world would likely consider "socialist". Some of the "tasks" people (neanderthals) had was to be an exhibitionist. They would wander around interesting places and be akin to a talk-show host as such - given that their "job" was basically exhibitionist, their live-monitor-feed was always on 100%.
Albus is great, but there are more options. From my site:
----
Our society is facing a huge economic turmoil, driven in part by the fact that most paid human labor has less-and-less relative value in the exchange economy due to several trends including:
* the spread of robotics, AI, and other automation,
* increasingly better design and better materials,
* the accumulation of physical infrastructure,
* relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or
* the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics;
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and
* Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society. A central irony of our times is that our major social institutions revolve around the idea of rationing "scarce" resources, but the technology of the 21st century has the potential to make most resources very abundant. So, our policies relating to areas as diverse as education, welfare, healthcare, economics, infrastructure, research, urbanization, transportation, communications, copyright, patents, and agriculture are built on increasingly obsolete conceptual foundations.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
My computer beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
The more you use automation and technology the more significant education is.
Already in the USA, a nation that spends almost all it's taxes on militarization and murder of people in distant nations, we have the most people in prison precisely because we do not use that tax money for positive social contributions, like educating the public.
The future looks bright for nations that have figured out that huge numbers of citizenry in prison is unsustainable and not economical, and that money needs to be used to assure everyone has access to education.
The future looks decidedly dystopic for the USA and similar fucked up countries that exploit the public and essentially rip-off the public at every turn.
If you can't Join them, Beat them
The concern should not be whether computers take jobs from people, but what the people were doing in the first place. What are people FOR? To consume? No. Schroedinger covered this well in "Life is the Anti-Entropy". Living things take the raw materials freed by entropy and build order. Humans used to be part of that natural order, fitted randomly to a niche in their environment: both contributing to it and subservient to it. Civilization is the practice of isolating human beings from the environment they are dependent upon and then continuing to extract resources. Profiteering is the practice of using people below oneself to pass resources up the chain toward some imagined "greater deserving person", but the natural flow should be to use greater and greater abilities of thought to intentionally ADD to the natural environment so that it will be there for the continuation of life itself (our species being only one of many). The use of computers and technology to do so should do two things: enhance our ability to predict what is needed by our environment (and hence, our children), but also allow people to support the world with less risk and danger, freeing them to think and practice artful lives. The reversal of flow would also enhance the labor class, as they would be the ones closest to the receiving end of humanity's efforts, rather than the farthest, as they are now.
The opposite of consumption is not frugality: it is generosity. Think about humans from the perspective of the soil, the air and the water: "All they do is take, take, take! They don't even piss on us anymore to fertilize us!"
The problem with humanism is the "human" part. Humans are a tiny fraction of the potential of this living planet. We just tell ourselves we are more important than our own future, and the purveyors of shiny, noisy crap use that "individualism" to convince us it is OK to believe in things like Invisible Hand Jobs or Divine Destiny while they encourage us to commit species suicide.
The anti-technologists aren't any better. They fail to see the need for the technology to help us care for the world. It's the extraction that's our problem, not job displacement.
All of you!