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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.'"
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.
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.
Only if the wealth is shared.
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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.
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There is no limit to the total amount of possible "work" to be done.
This is the crucial point. Remember right now we have people whose entire career is devoted, not to pushing a pointy ball across a line, but cheering for people who push a pointy ball across the line. And they work hard at it.
We have people who spend their entire lives painting other people's fingernails.
We have people who make a good living by painting art, not great, but good enough that people are willing to buy it at fairs.
We have people who live by playing live music
There are people who live by teaching chess lessons. And people who make a living playing Starcraft.
Since the computer was invented, and started taking over human jobs, the number of jobs in the US has more than tripled, absorbing a huge number of immigrants and women coming into the workforce. Where did all the jobs come from? If you can't answer that, then you'll have trouble predicting the job market over the next 20 years.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
The pace of innovation and automation is only going to speed up, but people's ability to retrain isn't going to speed up much. At some point, maybe not far away, we'll be eliminating classes of jobs faster than people can train for new ones. What happens if, by the time you've learned to do a new job well, it's likely to be obsolete? And then at some point we'll reach the situation where most people simply aren't capable of doing any useful job as well as a machine no matter how much they train.
It's ironic that both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing people believe the fallacy that people are endlessly reprogrammable labour units. Extreme right-wingers believe it because they want to believe people who aren't successful are lazy. Extreme left-wingers believe in a mythical world where every person is a special soul who can achieve anything if they're just given the right assistance.
Sharing the wealth doesn't mean handing out money to whoever holds out their hands, it means having all people who were involved in creating the wealth benefit from it. If a company only sees its workers as "human resources", then "what they are worth" is the lowest possible price it can hire those resources for. If it sees itself and the workers as participants in a social structure, it can give them a fair share of the income the company generated.
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.
Agreed.
A person requires two separate lives. Work life is but one and no matter how passionate about the subject I might be, it is primarily to earn money. You ensure you earn money and continue to do so in the future by doing a good, professional job of things, don't get me wrong. And you might well be passionate about your work. But it should not take over your life.
Fact is, if you told the average person that they'd never have to go to work again, they would NOT do the things that they do as part of their working life. You are not going to see these people walking into their work at an insurance brokers and trying to arrange policies. You might, just might, find a scientist or maybe a passionate person offer their services after such an event but, in general, across the various workforces those people don't have to worry about their identity or robots coming in to do their jobs for them.
There's a couple of countries that don't understand work-life separation and they are usually the ones where you can convince people with the "cheerlead" method of inspiration ("Woohoo! Let's go do this!") and not much else. But I'm not convinced that, even under the facade, this is a healthy option, or that over-dedication is rewarded.
My previous boss basically worked himself into hospital, such was his dedication to the workplace, but it was never adequately recognised and he calmed himself down and moved on.
Every employer I go to seems to want me, at some point, to prove I have a life outside work. Literally, they have application forms that ask about my non-work-related interests and specifically say things about it not drawing on your working skillset. They don't want mindless drones with a single interest. They want humans who are happy and have a life. And I work in IT!
I don't want to work with, nor do I want to be, a corporate drone. I work as a payment to do the things I enjoy doing. Fortunately, I enjoy the majority of my work too. But even among my friends and family, my work life is a separate, mysterious thing that they don't see (unless they come work with me, like my brother did just recently).
Work is not part of my identity - it's another identity that I assume in order to live my life comfortably. If it were not necessary, that persona would not exist. And if I ever find my work identity being all I have in life, I think I'd have to seriously consider what I'm doing with it.
These "experiments" did not really fail except in the sense that bosses and conservatives felt the employees and lower classes where having it too good.
In theory, you cannot be competitive with that number of hours. In practice, a lot could be gained by having employees that are less stressed, less sleep-deprived, and generally happier. But there is a sadistic streak running in those well off that refuses to see it that way.
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.)
... the amount of potential work is limitless.
Is it?
That's no easier to prove than the assertion that jobs are disappearing.
Us humans have considerable appetites, but they are not infinite. We only require so much living space, clothing, food or entertainment. If automation continues to improve productivity there will come a time when the labor of some fraction of the population is capable of fully satisfying every human being alive. The only question is at what point does that happen.
It will happen a lot sooner if you define it as "fully satisfying all basic needs". But if we ever crack real AI, the only constraining factor on what we can provide each individual will be energy, not human labor.
This tipping point may be centuries in the future or it may be a few decades away and we're seeing the start of it. It's impossible to tell until after the fact. But denying that it can ever happen isn't helping. Increased automation will inevitable lead to the redundancy of human labor if automation continues to grow unbounded.
There is, of course, the possibility that automation will stop growing for some, as yet, unknown reason.
TL;DR We can't know how much of an issue automation replacing human labor will be. But blithely ignoring the issue isn't helpful.
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.