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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?
They already do 90% of the jobs that were done by humans 150 years ago.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
They already do 90% of the jobs that were done by humans 150 years ago.
There is no limit on the work that could be done. Even if machines did 100% of the work done by humans 150 years ago, we'd still have plenty to do.
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another? Why can't more books be written? More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
Would it be so bad to live in a world where there is 0% NEED to work and everyone just decides whether they want to be a medic, or an astrophysicist, or a script writer, or...
Only amazingly lazy people believe everyone would stop "working" if it was voluntary. Even if the only payment was respect by the society, joy, or simply to fight boredom, most people would do something.
Only if the wealth is shared.
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The problem with the goal of not having to work because the machines do all the menial stuff, is that pesky concept of Money.
Everyone still needs to find a way to convince someone else that the latter will better off if they give the former some of the money they control.
If too many tasks are automated, a huge number of people will lack the skills required for that age-old civilization arrangement.
Which leaves the others either the choice to subsidize them for nothing, eliminate the concept of money, or eliminate those unable to earn it. Not highly appealing.
While this has always been true, the path of innovation is such that it's no longer the lazy, the sick, or the idiots (in the medical sense) who find themselves unable to rejoin the workforce. Most people cannot fathom how to "recycle" the millions who are about to lose their jobs to ever-smarter machines, because the threshold for valuable work keeps rising, while the basic jobs keep shrinking.
In the end, which is far from tomorrow, you end up with either a police state or a revolution, while those who either control the machines or have not been replaced yet try to hang on to what they have.
It *IS* the goal. The problem is that we are apparently not mature enough as a society to not turn a potential utopian dream into a dystopian nightmare where the world is divided into a few haves and a huge number of have nots.
If we were mature enough, we wouldn't have former middle class people joining the ranks of the long term unemployed while wall street makes record profits and retailers screech about how they must be open on one of the few national holidays we still observe.
Those that think the first time around was easy and trouble free forget that it took the very real threat of global communist revolution to get the capitalists at the top to make the necessary concessions.
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."
I agree, and I think one of the major problems in this is, when a robot replaces the workforce at some company the money (salary) that once went to many now goes to a lot fewer. The money shifts towards the people in 'higher' positions. So in the long run we need to reshape the economy, because continuing with the current model won't end well.
Because we have no economic framework that could accommodate such a situation. It doesn't matter if machines can do all the work is there is no means to ensure access to their produce. Economics as we practice now is entirely centered around the labor market: People work for wages, use the wages to buy things, and producing those things pays wages back to the workers. Money circulates, everyone gets fed and clothed.
Take away the jobs, and what are you left with? A few factory owners swimming in food and products they cannot sell because no-one has any money to buy it, and a load of ex-workers who have no money to buy even the essentials of life.
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.
I think you'll find that 99% of the populace see work as the only way they have to get the stuff they need to live (and the stuff they want to make life enjoyable).
No, money is mot the problem. The problem is the way we distribute money. The current money distribution system is based on the basic premise that humans need to work in order to keep society running. If that premise falls down, the system simply doesn't work any more.
And I also disagree that, as the article states, "labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability". What is needed for that is having an accepted place in society, and having an income you can depend on. In the current system, labour is generally a way to achieve both. But nothing says it must be.
I've one read a very insightful comment: If you look at any depiction of paradise around the world, they have one thing in common: People all were out of work.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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 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.
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another? Why can't more books be written? More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
With the exception of helping others, I think the real problem is that the remaining work to be done requires significant training, natural talent, or high intelligence. Most people don't possess these skills and are incapable of obtaining them with any amount of effort or drive. As sad as it sounds I very much believe we are reaching the upper limits on the capabilities of humanity as a whole.
We see it plain as day in the software industry. Probably 8 out of 10 software developers or business analysts are completely incompetent and even with years of education and multiple certifications seem to be unable to not only be productive, but instead be a net drain on productivity and quality of software as a whole. Many of these people are doing this job because the demand for even mediocre software talent is so high and the lack of mindless blue collar work forces people into IT fields that they have no natural talent or ability for. Fifty years ago many of these people would be pushing brooms in a steel mill.
More than half the population didn't work not too long ago. Between housewives and children less than 50% of people were employed, but a single person could provide for their family on an average wage. Wages have been depressed heavily since then so that a couple with children both need to work.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Robots can't build real estate. Fundamentally, there's still a big problem of scarcity, no matter how much automation there is: even if all labor is automatable, there's three things which are scarce: raw materials (perhaps some of them rare, such as lithium, tantalum, etc.), energy, and real estate. The first two can be mitigated: we could build automated mining missions to mine asteroids or the Moon for more raw materials; and we can build better energy-collection systems to gather more energy (such as orbital photovoltaic stations). However, one thing you can never fully mitigate is the cost of real estate. There's only so much land area on the planet, and some of it is much more valuable than other parts. Everyone wants to live in a picturesque coastal location (or mountain location, etc.). No one wants to live in the middle of the Sahara, or in Fargo ND. And as the population expands, the demand for real estate rises and the value goes up. So money can never be obsolete, at least until the environment is wrecked and we all have to resign ourselves to living in pods in the Matrix.
Babies! Or, robot-miners that have already been paid for. Each generation builds on the last after all.
In all seriousness the issue is Demand side for this problem. The price of labor per widget declines as the capitol cost per widget increases. That means that labor can buy fewer widgets per unit of labor even though the price of widgets may be falling. The demand for widgets declines as effiency increases, curtailing demand for more widgets and further depressing the need for Labor. The unit price of Labor declines. The iron law of wages would leave us to belive that the value of labor will move close to zero, and that is only if there is a method of employment. The barriers to entry climb as capitol requirements increase, preventing workers from migrating into job creators. There isn't an equalibrium if the price of Labor is zero and you keep a free market economy.
So we either:
a. Throw progress in reverse. - Insane and futile to attempt.
b. Develop new things that people need to do to get compensated as Labor. - Looking at the trend in STEM wages, I'm guessing that direction isn't working so well.
c. Develop a ways to share the benifits of the increase in return on Capitol. - Widely seen as theft, and amoral by the right.
d. Curb population to decrease the Labor pool - Genocide is looked down on, generally.
e. Accept that 98% of the population (in the US, EU and GB) is going to do worse then the generation before them, and the next will do worse then them. - Sad, but most likely outcome.
f. Revolution! - It doesn't solve anything, but people really like a good revolution.
Except that they have nothing to lose by doing so. All it would take is a single person sharing their robot robot-builder. Money would be obsolete.
And those who control the money and derive their power from it will fight to make sure that doesn't happen. Our situation is not the way it is by accident.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
With the exception of helping others, I think the real problem is that the remaining work to be done requires significant training, natural talent, or high intelligence.
or interest! believe it or not 95% of people don't WANT to devote their lives to exploring the sciences!
We've also tried capitalism - that didn't work out as well as it did on paper either. And we've tried it a lot more often, and it always seems to break down in much the same way, so the evidence suggests that it's a systemic flaw rather than any implementation details (or feature, if you're one of the 0.1% that reaps most of the rewards).
Communism works great on a small scale, and in fact is usually the default economic system for personal households and many tribe-sized social organizations like monasteries, etc. We've only tried a few times on a large scale and the results are heavily mixed - The Soviet Union didn't do so well, China on the other hand has incorporated a few capitalistic principles as well and seems to be doing quite well, though the proof will be what happens once it can't profitably siphon wealth from richer nations.
And we have never, ever, even had the option before of trying Communism supplemented by a massive robotic workforce without desires or needs beyond energy and routine maintenance. We can say pretty certainly though that Capitalism will be an utter failure in such a scenario - a man can't survive in a capitalist society without some kind of capital of his own - take from him even the value of the sweat of his brow and he will starve to death.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.