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Humans Need Not Apply: a Video About the Robot Revolution and Jobs
Paul Fernhout writes: This explanatory compilation video by CGP Grey called "Humans Need Not Apply" on structural unemployment caused by robotics and AI (and other automation) is like the imagery playing in my mind when I think about the topic based on previous videos and charts I've seen. I saw it first on the econfuture site by Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel. It is being discussed on Reddit, and people there have started mentioning a "basic income" as one possible response. While I like the basic income idea, I also collect other approaches in an essay called Beyond A Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics. Beyond a basic income for the exchange economy, those possible approaches include gift economy, subsistence production, planned economy, and more — including many unpleasant alternatives like expanding prisons or fighting wars as we are currently doing.
Marshall Brain's writings like Robotic Nation and Manna have inspired my own work. I made my own video version of the concept around 2010, as a parable called "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income." (I also pulled together a lot of links to robot videos in 2009.) It's great to see more informative videos on this topic. CGP Grey's video is awesome in the way he puts it all together.
Marshall Brain's writings like Robotic Nation and Manna have inspired my own work. I made my own video version of the concept around 2010, as a parable called "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income." (I also pulled together a lot of links to robot videos in 2009.) It's great to see more informative videos on this topic. CGP Grey's video is awesome in the way he puts it all together.
If you have an all-robotic workforce, who's going to buy the products they produce?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Robots increase productivity. We've had massive increases in productivity since the 70s. Yet people work more hours now than before all these productivity improvements. All the gains from the increased output has gone to the top.
It's been time for a basic income for decades!
https://medium.com/@RickWebb/t...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The main issue with robots, is that they effectively replace human utility with a capital asset. Up until now capitalism has sort of worked because every human was born with a valuable asset that could not be owned or controlled. That is changing fast and our political system is not set up to handle this. It is very sad but capitalism only made it this far because it allowed individual self interest to slightly benefit everyone. This will change that equation and return us to a time where self-interest serves the needs of those who control the wealth.
We need to push full time hours down with forced OT pay or say a 80k-100k + COL to have where you don't have to pay OT.
Start by makeing full time 32 hours a week and maybe X2 OT at 60-80 hours
Those who still have utility value to the economy. In most cases either the very talented/creative or the rich. We are already seeing this in the way that large swathes of population have been effectively excluded from the economy since the recession, while highly skilled sectors are in huge shortage.
Automation is allowing us to abandon people out of the economy with alarming speed.
Maybe it's time for the human race to stop working, and start playing.
Apropos:
http://www.thevenusproject.com
For once that meme is actually on topic!
I think something like basic income is inevitable. We have it now, it's called Section 8 and food stamps. And as joblessness increases those programs will steadily expand until, well fuck it, just give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing and be done with it. There's no reason for anybody to go homeless or hungry in America. We pay farmers not to grow food and we have more empty foreclosed-on houses than we have homeless people. There's got to be a way to match that up.
"But teh socialisms!!11!one!1!!" Well, the alternative is teh riotz!!!1!!
The transition is going to be ugly but it's bound to happen. In the meantime, we computer programmer types will be fine until the singularity, and it'll still be quite awhile before robots can fix a busted water pipe so the trades can still provide a living. But transportation? Gone. Manufacturing? Gone. Knowledge work? Gone.
The future will be awesome or terrible.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Halfway through the video I was wondering why the background music was so obnoxious, and I got my answer before the video finished - robots suck at being creative.
The sky is falling and there isn't a damn thing anybody is going to do to change it... if you have one of the top 45% kinds of jobs, too bad so sad... you're just going to have to starve, because unemployment insurance will not be able to support the massive numbers of people that will be jobless.
Granted, he doesn't come out and actually *say* that... but I honestly believe that may as well have.
The video would have been served well by spending a few minutes at the end of it making practical suggestions about what people might do in the changing world to keep themselves relevant, but the way the video stands right now, it just seems like needless fear-mongering about the future. Maybe he's entirely right, but even if he is, what good will it do us today to worry about it, since there doesn't seem to be a damn thing that actually *can* be done?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, really, whores. As bad as it might be to stick your pink bits into a complete stranger's body rather than some sex-bot, that'll pretty much be the last profession as well as the oldest.
Now, one might imagine that automation eventually makes sex bots so cheap as to compete with the 20 dollar half and half, but simply on material costs alone I think you hit a constraint.
We should all become energy producers instead of having jobs. Energy is the basis for all the productive work we do. It's the only currency that can't be counterfeited. It loses its value as you spend or transfer it, but that's why we need to keep producing more.
It will first go the opposite as businesses that employ humans attempt to compete with robotic workers.
He's wrong about one thing, there will always be "luxury class" items that are made by human hand using classic tools & classic methods.
Machine learning engineers, robotics engineers, project managers, pimps, prostitutes, and politicians.
I know...
Prices should have been going down all these years, but we let the financial markets drive the economy. It's like a rain forest canopy of money, all flowing over our heads with barely a trickle down
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In the view of CEOs and super-richs:
The world will be populated by a hundred (or slightly less) of super-rich people, surrounded by thousands and thousands of robots. Around them you will see billions of bones of those who failed to buy private robotic armies to protect them.
But this will be temporary, because shortly after that hundred will turn against each other, after all greed has no limits . They will kill each other as greed commands, and when the last survivor die of old age will be left only the robots.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I think Dice is going to sell Slashdot to Reddit...
It's nice knowing you all, thanks for being my friends over the last 15 years...
You socialize the production, give people 3 day workweeks, and give them robotics to assist in their lives.
As with many overly-optimistic/pessimistic navel-gazes, there are numerous factors which were excluded from consideration in the video.
Beyond the simple fact that we're still quite far away from this post-human productivity apocalypse, considering the current state of the technology, the simple fact of the matter is that it will take a LOT of human physical and mental labor to bring it about. Even then, there will still be a need for humans to plan and make decisions, as well as deal with the exceptions that the machines still won't be able to cope with as yet.
So, while the video may be an interesting take on the subject matter, and it is something that we /should/ be mindful of going forward, I do not believe it is quite the existential threat the video makes it out to be.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
While I'd love the extra time off, reducing human employee's productivity & increasing their cost will only re-enforce the case for replacing them.
At the end of the day, it is humans that control the bots. So unlike the cited example of horses, we are not going to be replaced. All of our jobs may be replaced, and a great many jobs have already been replaced. That is my main concern.
Now this isn't a concern about people having a place in society. We can do that without defining ourselves by our work. Rather my concern is about what we do.
A great many people will find constructive things to do. Think of our hobbies. Many will find neutral things to do. Think of passive consumption. Yet there will also be people who find destructive things to do. There always have been, and always will be, that type of person. The problem is that the bots will free up time for those destructive self-indulgers. How are we going to control that? Then again, maybe that's a job for robocop.
Anyone think that perhaps the most recent spates of unemployment have more to do with bad forsight, planning, and some theft rather than the fact that we've made ourselves obsolete? When's the last time you went out to eat at a sit-down restaurant? Just how many of the staff there had been replaced by technology?
(Maybe an accountant, if that)
Of-course humans need not apply, the mob votes in politicians that routinely increase cost of buying labour and of-course this is what happens as a response. Governments made humans extremely unproductive, I am explaining this in my comments, of-course getting moderated to nothing, but hey, probably the messenger needs to be shot in the economy where this message is unacceptable because the only acceptable messages are those, that put the blame for the complete failures of centrally governed economies on the free market capitalism.
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The automation is not a problem, the problem is that there are not enough new businesses that are created. In 2014 in USA more businesses shutdown than were created for the first time probably since the foundation of the Republic. The reasons are of-course politically incorrect and have to do with the destruction of the US dollar by the government and the Federal reserve and the growth of government (all the spending, all the welfare state nonsense, the business regulations, the taxes, and of-course all the wars).
Many of the jobs need to be automated away to allow human resources to be allocated more efficiently. However many of the jobs cannot be automated practically and their automation only becomes a possibility when the cost of labour exceeds the cost of automation in the long run by a wide margin, which is what is actually happening with all the government rules, laws, taxes, welfare, wars.
You want to solve the problem? YOU DO NOT STEAL MORE with nonsense like 'basic income', you allow people to be free from the mob to create new ideas and start new businesses and there will be no shortage of jobs.
Singapore has less than 1% unemployment, there is no minimum wage but the per-capita wages are highest in the world.
You can't handle the truth.
We are already seeing this in the way that large swathes of population have been effectively excluded from the economy since the recession
"since the recession"? The recession hasn't ended just because a stock market bubble has been created by monetizing the debt.
In any case, the current economic problems are an entirely artificial creation. Get the power-hungry, comand-and-control collectivists out of office, elect free market proponents and the economy will sprint forward with increased job ops and increased income for just about everyone.
As usual, government (basic income, planned economy, etc.) is not the solution to the current crisis. Government is the problem.
I'm sure that the same things were said when the Cotton Gin, steam engines, Cars, automated harvesting, powered looms & computers were becoming commonplace. I doubt many in society would claim their existences was a determinant to society today. I'm sure there will be difficulties associated with the change. But just think if as a species we had scoffed at so many of our accomplishments in automation? We'd still be building earthen buildings by hand (no sawmills for lumber or brick/metal plants) and harvesting grains by ripping them out of the ground (the Cradle Scythe alone freed 10 people for other tasks).
You want $15 an hour?!! FUCK YOU is what you get!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Last I heard, reducing poverty pretty much universally reduces violence as well. You want to stop people engaging in destructive behavior, the first step is to give them a society that is comfortable to live in, instead of constantly stressful.
But do you real want bob to be working 0 hours and have jack working 60-80 all the time?
when you can have both bob and jack working 30 hours?
and lets say they are in job that you can't make into an robotic workers or that is a long way down the road.
Those who still have utility value to the economy. In most cases either the very talented/creative or the rich.
With every industrial revolution new kinds of jobs come to exist. It won't just be engineers and creative geniuses with jobs. Robots can make things, and perform menial labor. They don't provide entertainment, and can't do any sort of work requiring any creativity.
As "things and menial labor" become fully automated, they simply become a small part of a very large economy, an economy that has shifted farther up the hierarchy of needs. We'll all be employed still, helping one another solve our "first world problems".
Don't like the way your apartment is decorated? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap. Confused by all your choices for wall screens and theater-quality sound systems, and don't know how to hook them up? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap. All the spa/beauty services that are luxuries today? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap.
There's already a very broad array of non-menial services available to the rich. As with every previous tech revolution, stuff available only to the rich becomes available to everyone. A century or so ago automation didn't destroy the world, because everyone could suddenly afford shoes and tableware and chairs and all sorts of stuff that used to be luxuries. After this revolution we'll all be keeping each other busy providing non-menial services to one another, not as servants but peer-to-peer (much as the culture of Lyft/Uber is different from traditional Taxis, though that particular job's life is limited by coming automation).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
... all the non-whites, who have invaded our countries over the past fifty years, since we now no longer need them 'to do the jobs white people won't do' (sarcasm) ?
Are Africans building their own robots too?
Oh, wait...
This all assumes unlimited fossil fuels to build the bots, and the chip factories to make the chips to run them, and the transportation infrastructure etc. I would guess we'll run out of the needed fuels long before we are all replaced by bots. My guess is as fossil fuels become more expensive and scarce, it will be more cost effect to go back to human and animal muscle. But the next 10 - 20 years will be tough. I'm not worried about bots. And to another posters point, Even Henry Ford realized he needed employees and to pay them a decent wage, just so there would be people to buy the cars.
This comes up nearly every year on slashdot. And very year I post this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Like all Vonnegut, this is a great read BTW.
Perhaps next year a robot can post this for me? Or maybe just a plain bot would be simpler without the 'ro'?
On y va, qui mal y pense!
A really BIG world-war, with die-offs in the millions. Once that's done, we won't need to worry about a post-human economy. Everything will be right-sized... whether we like it or not.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
They don't provide entertainment, and can't do any sort of work requiring any creativity.
If you watched the last part of the video, you would understand that creative robots can be made.
However.... the technological singularity approaches.
By the time the robots take over the economy We will be the robots; the essence of what makes us us will have been stored on computer media.
The robotic and cybernetic forms of humans takes over. Cybernetic in the form of: robots, with a small amount of biologically-inspired elements.
Once this happens.... the biological form of the human race will have been the only species to obsolete itself, thereby causing its own extinction.
The sun may very well be setting on the times of natural born biological humans, and rising upon the new mechanical humans.
We know enough now to understand we should call it SI.
That distinction reminded me of the Butlerian Jihad from Dune. The backlash against thinking machines caused humanity to destroy them and forbid their creation.
I always wondered how you draw the line between the two. Seems like the video is no advocating drawing a line at all, but instead just accepting that this will happen and planning for it, because "economics always wins".
Hard to argue with the prediction that most humans will be unemployable at some point in the future.
Just another proletarian malcontent.
My comment wasn't based on what I want, just the impact of taking that approach. 70 hour weeks, on a consistent basis, are a waste no matter what. Few people can stay productive for that time. Some businesses have figured that out.
This was already supposed to have come to pass during the dot-com boom. Computer programs were going to replace all information workers and there would be mass unemployment. While this continues to happen in some areas, the number of jobs created in this process as well resulted in a vast net increase.
Automation will increasingly be utilized for tactical roles, it will increase the demand for jobs working on more complex problems, some of which haven't even been conceived yet.
We are already seeing today that the key to survival in the information age is continuous education. Relying on a skillset acquired in a different age didn't work out well for the dinosaurs, but a few were agile enough to adapt and thrive as birds.
And this video is yet another example... Reminds me of Henry Hazlitt's wonderful book "Economics in One Lesson"
reducing human employee's productivity & increasing their cost will only re-enforce the case for replacing them.
How about a "fine" for reducing the number of workers doing any particular job?
For every X workers you have doing job Y, no matter who you fire or hire, regardless of reason, you are expected to at least meet or exceed worker count for the job; if the 12 month rolling average of workers doing this job TIMES median salary OR total number of workers doing a certain job decreases by 10% or more workers (or workers X median compensation) from what the average was 12 months ago, then you pay annually on a recurrent basis, until corrected, 0.5 times the decrease times the median annual compensation as an extra tax/unemployment insurance penalty during that year, plus an additional 1 time penalty of 75% of the median annual compensation payout decrease for the Job amortized over 2 years.
If your average number of workers doing job Y increases and your average value of number of workers X annual compensation increases 10% or more, then there is a tax credit for 20% of the amount extra being paid to workers.
Or maybe if people stop thinking they need to hoard money and trinkets, we wouldn't constantly be burning ourselves out looking for more stuff to do.
So, you've written a nice neo-Socialist manifesto, but are too shy to self-identify it as Socialism. The sticky wicket is defining "need" - we humans are very good at pursuing satisfaction of our own, and very bad at defining application of the concept for others. Notice that Marx put it in the passive voice. He didn't assign no owner...but from the lab, the result of those judgments has always been bound and inverted scales of repression, withdrawal and violence...followed by ultimate recognition the system sucks and should be abandoned, followed by fading memory of that recognition and a renaissance of the original philosophy. It's kind of cool...you're part of the experiment! My gentle recommendation is that you noodle on the following implications and build a truly novel manifesto: Who should define your need? Why shouldn't it be you? As humans have proven terrible at the discipline collectively (for example, we got an 'F' in Collectives), wouldn't it make (supremely ironic) sense that a robot or an algorithm based on analytics of 'similar' patterns (where you are an instance of a pattern) govern the determination? Are you willing to pledge unwavering subservience to an imposed assessment of your need, especially one based solely on quantitative measures? If you introduce a qualitative component, isn't it poisoned by the risk of subjective bias? Can you get everyone else to do the same thing without force or elimination of dissenters? What about the troubling implications of mob rule or the tyranny of the majority? Practically speaking, if it's not you that controls that definition, won't QoL reducing scenarios quickly emerge? Won't you start to cheat a system you deem inequitable? I RTFM. Kudos to Ford for having the courage to broach and analyze the topic. Jeers to him for failing to produce a coherent framework of scenarios and faltering on credible presentation of the implications. Goal kick...
I agree it seems we should be seeing the rise of more "indulgence" and customization, but for some reason that is relatively stagnant. The middle class is too pressed to start that trend. We need some kind of force to kickstart both salaries and consumption.
Table-ized A.I.
Get the power-hungry, comand-and-control collectivists out of office, elect free market proponents and the economy will sprint forward with increased job ops and increased income for just about everyone.
As usual, government (basic income, planned economy, etc.) is not the solution to the current crisis. Government is the problem.
I can't tell if this is satire or not. It sounds like a parody of a Foxnews host.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
We've already tried that. Hoover after the 1929 crash let the free market work on its own. After 3 years of worsening depression, the people wanted a New Deal.
Before, in 1837, van Buren continued Jackson's policy against a US Bank. Again, a prolonged recession led to his one-term presidency.
The free market is the problem. It does not care about the General Welfare. The market is quite happy to let poor people suffer. Government is mandated to provide for the vulnerable.
"new kinds of jobs come to exist", but they are middlemen financial jobs that don't produce any real value, instead simply moving money around and profiting from arbitrage conditions that game the system, like borrowing from the Fed at 0% and buying T-bills at 3%.
Can you provide any evidence for a reduction in productivity that corresponds to a reduction in hours? Most research I've seen shows that there is no real productivity loss when going from 40+ hrs down to 32-35 hours. EU vs USA productivity numbers show this in pretty clear detail.
I rant frequently about the issue of automation-robotics. The elimination of human labor is not a bad thing. But the shock we are about to go through must be moderated. The depth of the changes about to take place is too deep to be understood. Do not assume that their are tasks that machines can not do. Obviously current investments tend to cause development in areas where huge savings can be seen. Fast food workers are a serious target for a robotic wipe out. Imagine keeping one or two very pretty young girls to smile and great the public while all other tasks are automated in your McDonalds. We are about to see notions such as capitalism vanish. Ideas such as buying stocks and bonds will also be so convoluted as to remove them from human involvement. The real cross over is not when the machines can do all the work. It is when machines become self funding and begin to acquire ownership that we will see a massive change. Imagine that even right now a wealthy person could set up a computer as if it is a self owned, living entity and load it with programs that cause it to buy and sell stocks on its own. At regular periods a portion of the profits could be used to buy more or better computer equipment as dictated by the machines profits and needs. The human responsible could not stop the machine or its money so to speak. So the designer of the system could only observe the build up of wealth by the machine. The machine could even pay taxes. The effect would be that all money earned is removed from the wealth pool of humanity. Concerns for down stream effects upon humans would not be a consideration. Now imagine a large number of these machines running various AI programs and judging which programs are fit to keep running. No label the computer THE COMPANY and allow it to form smaller companies under it each having the ability to invest and sustain itself and grow, Imagine machines capturing all the worlds financial markets. After all, these machines do not have to support human expenses.
I will be impressed when you can show me a robot write an original, funny joke. But can you run an economy on jokes and poems and songs? Maybe.
Then again, how original is most anything? There was a story on slashdot a year or two ago about a guy who wrote a book describing the exact formula that 90% of Hollywood movies follow. Like, page for page. I wonder if one could train a neural network with scripts to every sitcom, every movie, identifying humor, tension, the range of emotions each scene is designed to inspire and then let it go. Could a computer write an entertaining movie? A sitcom? I wonder.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The New Deal didn't work either.
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/cl...
Resorting to fines is not a solution, its battling a symptom that won't change the fundamental trend. Some people enjoy working their asses off, they should reap the rewards. Controls and incentives have their place, but they are more often tools to manage, not to solve problems.
France has tried the reduced workhour thing, its not working.
One thing you can do is allow part of people's social security to move to ownership of companies (stocks) and so they can reap the benefits of high profit margins created by the trend.
agree it seems we should be seeing the rise of more "indulgence" and customization, but for some reason that is relatively stagnant.
How else would you describe all the 3D-printing hype?
The economy is crawling out of the worst recession in most /.ers' lifetimes. Give it a bit.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Technotopian gobbledygook.
Execubot 1: It will play in Peoria
Execubot 2: (rolls dice) More Game Shows!
Execubot 3: It's funny, but will it get them off their tractors?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"new kinds of jobs come to exist", but they are middlemen financial jobs that don't produce any real value,
That, and low wage service jobs created to cater to the middlemen financial types.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Maybe, just maybe, the universe doesn't need quite so many people.
Paraphrasing Tom Morello, "Freedom is the freedom to starve."
A very interesting Sci-fi book "By Light Alone" by Adam roberts takes this concept to the extreme... Basically, the invention of photosynthetizing hair that makes it mostly unnecessary to eat, quite unexpectedly needs to a pretty scary inequality dystopia, and part of the issue is exactly that people no longer need to work to not starve. Also a really good book in my opinion driven by some interesting characters.
We have not had 'industrial revolution' for all that long, so assuming that everything will work out and new jobs will be created is not that safe. The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones. It also pointed out that the 'new economy' jobs that have been created over the last few decades make up a small percentage of the workforce while the largest job types right now are ones that people are trying to develop automatic systems to replace them.
It should also be noted that historical cases did not go very well. They tended to produce a certain number of middle class benefits and significant upper class benefits, but with each leap forward poverty becomes a bigger and bigger problem. While the middle class dominates forums like this, we are not the whole population and stuff that benefits us can have consequences elsewhere... and every year there are fewer and fewer people in the middle class. So in the next big leap, a non-trivial percentage of us middle class people will end up dropping below the poverty line. A few will move up into upper middle class or even upper class, and they will look around and talk about how wonderful things have gotten, but others will not be so fortunate.
About the article tl;dr
You already have robots worth of 150 slaves doing your work. Do you really think 151 would change the world?
But do you really want bob to be working 0 hours and have jack working 60-80 all the time?
Well . . . if bob is incompetent and turns out shoddy work, and jack is excellent at what he does, I'd rather hire jack. Certainly any /.er has seen the debates about the 10x programmer; we all know people who can't cook and people who can, or people who can make music and people who you would pay to stay silent. I used to carpool with a woman engineer who bought inexpensive clothing and re-tailored it so that she looked 1000% couture; I, on the other hand, can just about fix a button on my shirt. There's a bell curve in every skill, and at least 50% of bobs and jacks are below average.
It's good to see this discussion becoming mainstream. Back in 2009, Alan Cox wrote in the Atlantic, "One sometimes wonders, in this era of Market religion, where the skeptics and freethinkers have gone". There's been an assumption in recent decades, since the USSR went down, that capitalism is the only possible system of economic organization. That's starting, cautiously, to be questioned.
In the Great Depression of the 1930s, all sorts of "isms" were proposed. Communism, socialism, technocracy, and others now forgotten had substantial followings. WWII ended those discussions, and the postwar boom made them irrelevant. Now, few people even know that alternatives to capitalism are possible.
The "strong safety net" countries (the Scandinavian countries, some EU countries, and Japan) have done reasonably well. The production side is mostly capitalist, but taxes are higher and the consumption side is partly socialist. This works if international competition is limited to stop the "race to the bottom" in wages. The current Doha round in the WTO is stalled because many countries now want more protectionism.
One thing to consider though is that even if a robot can not handle parts of the creative process, it can significantly reduce the number of people needed to produce and distribute content. This is partly a good thing since it opens up opportunities for people who could not have afforded to strike out on their own before. However, media gets saturated pretty quickly. If you take a team of 10 people and reduce the labor required to only 1, you might end up with 10 people producing entire chains, ,but consumers can only absorb so much so 8 or 9 of them are going to experience a significant drop in standard of living while 1 ends up doing much better. While not an absolute 'there are no people' problem, from an economic perspective that is not a good situation and eventually results in a lower total size.
You're welcome to take some initiative with that sentiment and off yourself. Just sayin'
The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones
People have been saying that about automation for centuries now, and they just keep being wrong. People don't want some fixed amount of goods and services. People want more. No matter how much is provided cheaply by automation, people will keep wanting more and different goods, services, entertainment, education, whatever. How much we each have is only a function of how much we each create. There will always be demand for everything made by robots plus everything made by people - at least, until fundamental human nature changes.*
tended to produce a certain number of middle class benefits and significant upper class benefits, but with each leap forward poverty becomes a bigger and bigger problem.
Sorry, but that's pure, unrefined ignorance of history. You simply have no idea. 95% of Americans live better than 99% of people who have ever lived. Most Americans are so far from real poverty they have no idea what it really is (heck, almost no one actually starved to death during the Great Depression, and food was still expensive then) . That's the victory of automation!
So in the next big leap, a non-trivial percentage of us middle class people will end up dropping below the poverty line.
The rich barely consume more stuff per-capita than the poor. In this century, how much does money limit the number of beers you can drink? The amount of food you can eat? The number of cars you can drive?
All that stuff that robots will be making? There will be enough to go around. It won't pile up in warehouses unsold. It can't possibly be consumed entirely by the rich (if the top 1% consume twice as much, no one will notice). The robots that make the stuff may even be in your house (cue 2000s memes) by then.
* And, hey, if fundamental human nature changes, maybe communism will work?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And only the top 0.01% will control the robots.
...I didn't get the story from Slashdot before sharing elswhere. This video is worth sharing by the way. No one is protected from automation. Even where I work, we are being replaced and not sure if I'll have a job next year (no joke). The real question that needs to be asked is, if everyone has no living wage job, then who will buy the milk (yes, a pun on fat cat drink milk while poor babies starve which is the reason why Democracies fail and why our Republic is the best form of government we can have on God's green earth)? :)
Could a computer write an entertaining movie? A sitcom? I wonder.
No real reason to believe it cannot be done or that it won't be done eventually.
However, one sitcom entertains millions of people. There is only a limited appetite the population as a whole has for entertaining content.
The demand certainly isn't sufficient for the jobs needed by this one sector of the business arts/entertainment to gainfully employ a significant percentage of the population.
I propose a negative income tax.
Simply put...
Poverty level - AGI = X
X / 2 = Credit amount
Must be 22+ to get it.
If 18-21, must be living away from relatives.
If under 18, must be emancipated and living away from relatives.
$5k cap/person, which would only affect individuals, not 2+ "family" sizes.
Imagine homeless people collecting into rentable houses or apartments living on a share of this. Imagine people getting out of prison having a guaranteed source of income for that year.
Assuming 20% of people are in poverty, out of ~300 million people, that'd be 60 million. At $5k max per person (poverty level for a single individual is $11.5k anyways), that's no more than $300 "b"illion per year.
Hopefully this would cut down on crimes of poverty too.
For people who have jobs, but don't earn much, it gives a safety net if available work slows.
Isn't that stuff already produced using marketing and economic algorithms?
Maybe you guys haven't been paying attention, but there was a vast layoff of "middlemen financial types" at the end of the financial bubble.
You might also not realize that there are plenty of service jobs that pay quite nicely. I used to work with a guy who switched from well-paid developer to home theater installer, and was making considerably more last I heard. Low wage service jobs are the unskilled sort that will also be done by robots soon enough. Skilled service jobs are exactly the sort of thing people spend money on once their basic needs are met.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hoover after the 1929 crash let the free market work on its own. After 3 years of worsening depression, the people wanted a New Deal.
Between increased inflation, new public works projects, the Federal Farm Board, immigration restrictions, tax increases, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Bacon-Davis Act, the Home Loan Bank System, pressure enacted on the NYSE to block short selling, and various other examples of interference from 1929 to 1932, I don't see how you can possibly say that Hoover "let the free market work on its own". In hindsight the New Deal was really Hoover's creation, not Roosevelt's.
Laisse-faire had been the policy prior to 1929. It's no accident that 1929 is remembered as the start of "The Great Depression", in contrast to previous events such as the depression of 1819, the Panic of 1837, and the depression of 1920-1921. The Great Depression is the first case where the federal government tried to end a depression by decree and regulation and public spending rather than taking the hands-off approach. The result was a disaster, from which they seem to have learned very little.
America's Great Depression
The free market is the problem. It does not care about the General Welfare. The market is quite happy to let poor people suffer. Government is mandated to provide for the vulnerable.
The free market may not operate under a mandate, but it has the effect of improving the general welfare. Government, by contrast, has the mandate, but is incapable of carrying it out. Interference by central planners just makes matters worse. This is a case where principles and pragmatism are in perfect alignment.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
what about that jack was willing to work some OT off the clock and one week bob put in 45 hours on the clock and got canned and now jack is working 60-80 only being pay for 40 all the time?
Hoover hired Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who believed in the "leave it alone" approach. Hoover may have had the sense not to follow that advice, but hiring Mellon indicates Hoover's underlying philosophy.
Hoover was also too attached to balanced budgets (as was Roosevelt). In fact, as Reagan has proved, deficits don't matter.
The Fed also chose to defend the gold standard rather than supply needed liquidity. In the absence of Fed action, fiscal policy should have provided liquidity.
You cite the Panic of 1837 as a success for "leave it alone" economics. Yet van Buren was not re-elected, because the economy was still bad.
The free market improves the welfare of a few. For those who are left out, it has no compassion. Government has the ability to provide for the General Welfare; it can use fiscal policy to bypass central planners, and simply give everyone a basic income.
The New Deal didn't work as well as it might, had Roosevelt not been distracted by trying to balance the budget.
Luddites have complained for millennia that machines were replacing people and putting workers out of work, denying their rights to income. It's all a farce. What is a machine? What is a robot?
Early man grubbed in the dirt with his hands to dig up a tuber to eat. Then along came the rock and stick for easier digging! Egads! People were digging up more tubers faster using this new machine! This put some people out of work as tuber diggers. But wait, some of them became story tellers, potters, shaman, etc and society and the individuals were all better off.
The potters made vessels for carrying water which reduced our labor freeing up more people who discovered flint napping and made better spears. Suddenly we were able to hunt better, eat more protein and lipid rich meats that kept more people alive through the brutal winters letting us expand northward despite the ice age. Dam those flint knapped machines that threw all those rabbit stranglers out of jobs - of course they liked being able to catch bigger prey easier.
Later the wheel came along and let us carry more than we could on our back. Voila! People were out of work as transporters but those people found new work mining iron ore and the next revolution was born. (Pun intended.)
Each advancement of machines has let us move forward to new heights. Yes, some people get upset. Some inventions aren't so great too. But over all, over time, it works out. You may be out of a job when the floor sweeper machine takes your post but maybe you can do something new and different. After all, like the cockroach you are a survivor, right?!?
Hoover hired Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who believed in the "leave it alone" approach. Hoover may have had the sense not to follow that advice, but hiring Mellon indicates Hoover's underlying philosophy.
Nonsense. What Hoover actually did while on office indicates his "underlying philosophy", which was far from "leave it alone". In any case, regardless of any philosophy, the fact is that he intervened to an unprecedented extent, with predictable results.
You said that Hoover "let the free market work on its own". Hiring someone who believed in that approach and then proceeding to ignore their advice does not constitute letting the market work on its own.
There are varying accounts regarding the Panic of 1837. Quoting Wikipedia:
Most economists also agree that there was a brief recovery from 1838 to 1839, which then ended as the Bank of England and Dutch creditors raised interest rates. However, economic historian Peter Temin has argued that, when corrected for deflation, the economy actually grew after 1838. According to economist and historian Murray Rothbard, between 1839 and 1843, real consumption increased by 21 percent and real gross national product increased by 16 percent, despite the fact that real investment fell by 23 percent and the money supply shrank by 34 percent.
So van Buren wasn't re-elected, but that may simply be due to unfair perceptions and public sentiment in spite of the recovering economy, rather than any real problem with his policies. In any case it didn't turn out like the Great Depression, where the economic downturn dragged on for over a decade.
The free market improves the welfare of a few.
History says otherwise. The free market improves the welfare of the vast majority. A few benefit more than average, and a few benefit less, but the effect on the median is positive.
Without the market most of the people alive today would be dead of starvation, with the remaining few engaged in subsistence farming. The only people who aren't better off are those very few incapable of participating, in general due to a severe physical or mental handicap. Even those considered very poor are better off with the market than they would be without it.
Government ... can use fiscal policy to bypass central planners
Fiscal policy is central planning. It amounts to price controls on money, which have far-reaching effects throughout the economy.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The future will be awesome or terrible.
Or just as mediocre as it is today as the system adjusts to not have absolute devastation but does not permit universal utopia.
Hello,
This is maybe inevitable but it is going to take a while. I work in computer vision and machine learning. These two fields have improved by leaps and bounds over the last few decades and are crucial to many tasks overviewed by the video, but are not quite there yet in terms of replacing humans. In fact the areas where robots are economically successful at present are those where both (a) vision is not necessary and (b) machine learning is simple. Example: the coffee dispenser of the video or the dumb welder robots in the car factory. For the rest the jury is still out.
In some cases automation can definitely do better than humans, and in face one realizes that for many tasks humans are not that good. Personally I can't wait for the current political circus to be replace by a bunch of algorithms. nonetheless taking over a huge swab of the economy as hinted by the video will take some time and a lot of concerted effort, mostly by researchers.
However I'll agree that the 21st century will be a watershed. Nonetheless I'll be more worried about running out of energy and not fight each other to death in the next half dozen of decades or so. If we can manage that we are good to go.
I used to work with a guy who switched from well-paid developer to home theater installer, and was making considerably more last I heard.
I know a guy in a similar circumstance - used to write software for banks, now he does ultra-high-end home automation installs in penthouse suites around the nation. If I could handle that much travel, I'd be in on it myself.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
But do you real want bob to be working 0 hours and have jack working 60-80 all the time?
If he's Bob, of course!
If he's Jack, of course not!
If he's hiring Jack, of course he wants to hire Jack to work 80 hours a week in an overtime exempt position so they don't have to pay two people to do the work one person can do.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Over the past 100 years many many jobs have been automated. We have been vigorously automating almost everything for ages. Yet you look at the US unemployment figures over the past 100 years, you see it fluctuates up and down, but there is no overall increase in unemployment. That is despite it now becoming normal for a household to have two parents in full time work instead of just the man. No doubt in the past a women in work was seen by some as 'taking a mans job'. So why don't we have 50% unemployment rates? The flaw in the logic that is often repeated, both by idiot futurists, and xenophobes is that "they" are "taking our jobs" It is a fundamentally broken line of thought. There are not a fixed number of jobs that get 'used up', never was and never will be. The only effect is that people in specialist roles that cannot adapt to new environments may go hungry. The horse drawn carriage driver has had to find a different way of making a living. Automation is not the problem, but sometimes too rapid automation (like the influx of many immigrants over a short period of time) can be a painful transition for certain groups of workers, but it has no effect on overall employment prospects. Never has, Never will.
Yeah right. Not everyone is an all consuming scumbag. Its cute but mostly disgusting how you export your cultural myopia to humamity.
I've heard this argument in a million ways for many years. It is an appeal to history and while the points are usually true (because it's easier than making stuff up) it alone is not the full argument. The fallacy being made each time is one of false analogy; or over simplification. A classic debate between judgement calls on the validity of analogies. Often a slippery slope fallacy gets used (by either side!)
As TFA...TFV points out that this is fundamentally different than all the other technology changes so it is illogical to make the traditional analogy. The outcome is not certain; however, one can't simply appeal to past arguments because the similarity. As far as future technology prediction being along the lines of flying cars, a lot of that stuff is not unrealistic but the problem is the outlandish stuff is more entertaining to "report." He addresses this as well by pointing out CURRENT technology. Like Windows upgrades, it takes years before adoption is widespread... meanwhile newer iterations are under development.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Did you have an argument to make? Do you understand the hierarchy of needs?
You don't have to be an "all-consuming scumbag" to desire a better life. As material wants become non-scarce, a better life will be about entertainment, arts, education, hobbies and so on. There are labor-intensive elements to all of those.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
According to the rest of your post, your thesis is that you can always drink more beer, eat more food and drive more cars. And when you have one car for every day of the year, you can put your cars in trucks so you can drive both of them at once (cue 2000s memes).
Not at all. That would still leave everyone out of work. The point is that people will want other things, further up the hierarchy of needs, as they have following previous automation shifts.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'll start with the last: the Constitution expressly grants the government the power to coin money, and regulate the value thereof. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
The market does not lift everyone out of poverty, even when the surplus produced allows it. That is when Government should step in to create money to help people in need.
As for Hoover, he didn't do enough. Addicted to balanced budget fetishism, he raised taxes in a depression. Expansionist monetary policy was needed, or fiscal deficits. Hoover was ideologically opposed to such measures. Roosevelt went a little farther but his reticence on spending probably caused the Depression to drag on.
That the government could sustain deficits was proved by World War II.
Your wikipedia quote does not present a neutral point of view. It's an ideologically-inspired rewrite of history by shameless libertarians. Wikipedia editors, please take note.
"there was a vast layoff of "middlemen financial types" at the end of the financial bubble."
Aw, did they get their multimillion dollar bonuses first at least?
Carwling out? Who is benefitting? Is it the people who lost their houses when they lost their jobs? Is it the workers at WalMart? Who?
AFAIKT, those benefitting are an extremely small proportion of the population. Most of my friends are benefitting, at least somewhat, but, e.g., one of them makes his living installing customized wall paper in mansions where the patter must match all the way around the room. And the wallpaper often sells for $100/yard. OTOH, my wife is depending on my retirement. She normally teaches music and art, but nobody can afford that in this area right now. So instead she's essentially donating her time (the pay usually covers the material expense) teaching at the city rec center. Another is a landscape architect, and business is currently EXTREMELY slow. I guess their customers aren't upscale enough to be beneficiaries of the recovery.
I don't see any general recovery at all. I see isolated pockets of partial recovery...and they often don't look as if they're going to be able to maintain their recovery.
What it looks like to me is that certain areas of businesses have had a significant recovery. Others are hanging in there. Others are significantly depressed, and show no signs of recovery.
FWIW, this seems exacerbated by several governmental policies, but the primary problem (aside from automation) is the increasing cost of energy. This doesn't mean that automation isn't a real problem, but to me it seems as if, at least locally, that's not yet the major problem. This doesn't mean it's not a problem, and a growing one at that. But it didn't cause the recession, and it's only slowing the recovery. Give it a few years before it becomes the major problem.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The universe doesn't need ANY people. It never did. It never will.
What's your point? You mean the planet is overcrowded? I agree. We're killing off species at an unsustainable rate. But the universe doesn't care about that. I'm the one that cares. And perhaps you.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Perhaps you would care to identify some of them? I admit that I'm at a loss, but then I don't even want most current consumer gizmos.
FWIW, I think we would be much better off with a social restructuring that reduced the work week, initially, to 24 hours/week and hired more people to fill in the jobs opened up. This should be accompanied by free public colleges for those who want to take classes, with the class schedules set with the assumption that you won't study in class for more than 12 hours/week, with homework counting perhaps another 12. This is for those who want to improve either themselves or their careers. While anyone who desired should be allowed to enroll, the classes should not be required to admit those who are unruly and disruptive. (We really need a better way to handle grade schools, too. Perhaps many of the "jobs" created could be as teacher's aides. Ideally there should be no more than 15 children/adult on the average.)
For some reason paying teachers and their aides seems to be very difficult for our current society to do. I'm not sure why, as it is perhaps the most important single job in society.
Money, ah yes. There is the big problem. Somehow this must be paid for, and those who control the power and wealth are reluctant to release control. Yet much of this could be paid for with the cost of a few disfunctional weapons systems. Say a moratorium on aircraft carriers and new designs for manned fighers. (Drones are going to be the next generation of fighers anyway, so it's a clear waste of money.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry, no. It's opening the government spigot that turned a recession into an ongoing malaise. Just like it did in the 1930s (must have been another huge era for robots, cough). We never learn.
I know you don't want to hear that though, so mod me down and blame robots.
That's utter bullshit; the so-called poor today are better off than the rich were a century ago. There is no absolute poverty in the US today by 19th and early 20th century standards.
They don't have to "create new jobs", they can simply reduce the number of hours worked by everybody.
The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones
People have been saying that about automation for centuries now, and they just keep being wrong.
Actually they've generally been right. The Luddite period was the beginning of 80 years of chronic underemployment, generations of people with horrible lives of poverty. The saving grace was expansion, stealing other peoples land and resources and giving it away to the poor and the capitalists, think of the States, expanding west throughout the 19th Century, giving the poor land to be not so poor with millions of people coming from Europe, tons of resources that were easily harvested and used to create jobs. I recently read that 6 million Italians came to America at the end of the 19th century, they came because their were no jobs where they lived.
Once that came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century, workers started to be removed from the workforce, kids first, put into school. This is still happening with more and more education being required for most any jobs, people are expected to spend close to 1/3rd of their life in school now. Many women also were taken out of the workforce about the same time with the idea that they would stay home and be homemakers.
When that didn't work, well there were windows to break, we call them world wars. The first WW consumed a lot of labour, and after we fixed the windows there was a major depression so we had another war which also employed a lot of people replacing windows. Afterwards we've had to fall back on cold wars and various other wars including the current war on terror, all basically breaking and fixing windows (or stockpiling them) to avoid the unemployment that comes with automation.
How many people are employed in the various security fields needed by the war on terror? And is this really a positive way to employ people? Soon we can all be employed at jobs like airport security or plain old informants.
Then there is removing people by jailing them (1% of adult Americans currently in jail) and declaring them unemployable afterwards. Also creates security type jobs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Resorting to fines is not a solution, its battling a symptom that won't change the fundamental trend.
Since the change is economically driven... the government is quite in a position of changing the economics of the situation.
Imagine a required 'permitting' and 'taxing' process for certain commercial uses of fully automated cars and other drones that changes the Cost/Benefit and Risk/Reward ratios of putting robots in the job instead of humans.
For example: a requirement to calculate "wages" for every robot as if it were a human employee, including witholding taxes, remit the entire amount to the government as a tax for "Commercial operation of a robot or automaton working on a task traditionally conducted by humans", and the "wage" must be no less than 120% of the minimum wage TIMES the work volume done by the robot per day DIVIDED by the work volume a normal human would be expected to do per day, for each robot or automaton.
Once the robots cost as much as or more than a human worker, then the perverse incentive to get rid of humans and replace them with robots goes away.
Carwling out? Who is benefitting? Is it the people who lost their houses when they lost their jobs? Is it the workers at WalMart? Who?
You're describing the downturn. The worst in living memory. The economy is headed firmly upwards now, but it's got a long way to climb before it reaches "normal". Give it time. The economy is always cyclic.
I don't see any general recovery at all. I see isolated pockets of partial recovery...and they often don't look as if they're going to be able to maintain their recovery.
And that's what the start of "recovery" looks like. Unless you're somewhere like Detroit, of course - there are a few places that are simply doomed. I see help-wanted signs everywhere now in the Seattle area, signs that weren't there 6 months ago.
What it looks like to me is that certain areas of businesses have had a significant recovery. Others are hanging in there. Others are significantly depressed, and show no signs of recovery.
Well, no line of work lasts forever, I'd stay way from industries that were all the rage 100 years ago.
doesn't mean that automation isn't a real problem
How exactly is it a problem? If robots made all the stuff for basically free we'd all have ... less stuff? How would that work exactly? Where would the stuff the robots make go? Buried next to the ET cartridges? I just don't get how the doomsayers picture that economy working.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Perhaps you would care to identify some of them? I admit that I'm at a loss, but then I don't even want most current consumer gizmos.
I have, somewhere upthread I think. Gizmos: again, automated manufacturing, plus a few engineers. What services would you need if you could have any "stuff" you wanted, but didn't know what you'd like? If you could easily afford a decorator, a home theater installer (well, assuming you were the kind of person who calls the nearest /.er to help with such things), and so on, I think many people would. I spend an increasing amount of time broadening my education - I'd like it if I could easily afford undergrad-level individual instruction. Skilled person-to-person services.
FWIW, I think we would be much better off with a social restructuring that reduced the work week, initially, to 24 hours/week and hired more people to fill in the jobs opened up.
Oh, I agree, but you can't force social change. And be careful we don't repeat the mistake of the "40 hour week", otherwise known as "now I have to work 2 different 30 hour jobs and commute between them".
For some reason paying teachers and their aides seems to be very difficult for our current society to do. I'm not sure why, as it is perhaps the most important single job in society.
Teachers are well paid (amazing how many teachers told me otherwise growing up), typically around median income for their area, plus a hefty retirement package. But you don't get paid based on how important your job is; you get paid on how easy you are to replace, and lots of people are willing and able to be teachers at the current pay.
Money, ah yes. There is the big problem. Somehow this must be paid for, and those who control the power and wealth are reluctant to release control
Money is just an intermediary for barter. If you spend X hours working, and want X hours of personal services from others, it will all work out (assuming basic needs are met by robots).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
actually it did. we still live with it today. and it was strengthened by LBJ.
the only things standing in the way of it were republicans who sabotaged, and then screamed "see? it doesnt work". Just like they do with government in general (excepting of course the military, police, CIA, homeland security, etc)
the results have been a dramatic decrease in the overall rates of poverty, especially among the elderly who used to comprise the majority of those in poverty and experienced a nearly 50% rate of poverty as a group. Now only about 10% of them live in poverty, and they make up less than 10% of those in poverty.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Uh, you do realize that those liberals you want to remove are the reasons we havent had a major crash since the 30s?
That the cause of the crash was irresponsible behaviour by the big corporations, behaviour only made possible by deregulation?
it has nothing to do with anything you said.
in short: fuck off troll.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And that's the problem.
We stand on the cusp of the post-scarcity world.
But the transition is not going to be seamless or quick.
And between then and now there is going to be much strife as people are pushed out of the economy.
If there aren't strong solutions, which will have to be in the form of social safety nets, this will lead to conflicts for as long as the economy is based on scarcity and the trade of labor for resources.
This is after all one of the most popular/common themes and sources of widespread conflict in scifi, the transition from a society of 7 billion+ people who have to work to eat, to one where work is largely optional (and realistically, even the utility workers will be marginalized as the machines learn to repair, or more likely replace, each other).
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Horse. Shit.
I really like CGP Gray's work - many of his other videos are spot on and edu-hilarious! This video however points out a handful of trends that are the culmination of decades of background work - and ignores both the huge amour of work that got it there, and the breadth of possibilities that these trends open up.
Take Autonomous Cars - yes they are here today - but far from popular and not even available to anyone outside Google's inner circle. They have driving Mountain View mostly figured out, I did drive past two of them on the 280 freeway today, but you won't see them free-driving around San Francisco any time soon - too many pedestrians, bicycles, crazy drivers, and a maze of streets that only make sense to locals. Even when they've gotten much better and become available to corporations as car fleets (individuals don't need a car that never needs to park or rest - makes much more sense to get one with a pool of friends or coworkers), it will be many more years of many people's hard work before the legal system, the American love of cars and driving start pulling human drivers off the road, even bad drivers. The current A-Cars seem to drive exactly the speed limit - legally a good idea - but clearly a disruption to the normal flow of traffic which is cruising along ten - fifteen miles an hour faster. The amount of design, engineering, programming, manufacturing, testing, assembly, parts acquisitions, and much more to build an A-Car - even one that is based on an existing platform is really an enormous human effort. I do not think that when all these jobs are fully automated that there won't be need for a newer different model, or a complete traffic rules change when A-cars become the only thing on the road - I doubt strongly that the automation of the automation of the automation will be flexible enough to not require some very creative and deep thinkers to keep tuning things up.
The procedural music generation programs are interesting, but like electric sheep - become most much more interesting (to us humans) when there's some human selection in the feedback loop. Pointing to a (human programmed) computer generated piece of music that was trained on human generated seeds, and then selected by a human as an example is like saying the Mona Lisa is a great example of what any system could do if it had the right brush. That programs can reconstruct new hybrids of style, and crank out endless variations on every tune known to man is fantastic, but likely (for now) without some human picking out the best results - it quickly ends up like modern trance music. Also, the fact the author of the program has been working on these programs since the 1980s (probably with help from other humans) is a bit disingenuous.
There's still lots of work for us humans, and every one of these new technologies open up even more possible work for those of us that are flexible skill-wise and can still use our brains.
I'm looking forward to my new job as underage A-Car passenger baby-sitter, or brain-activity-monitored music listener - or maybe both at the same time!
Senator blasts Microsoft for hb1 push and firing 18000 workers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kedfVAbXNy0&sns=em
and here is a petition to stop the hb1
http://www.petition2congress.com/7637/abolish-h1b-visa-program/
you didnt watch the video.
this isnt about the replacement of physical labor.
its about the replacement of mental labor as well.
you're right that stuff SHOULD become more available....but if people cant work, with what will they buy it in an economy still based on scarcity and the trade of labor for resources? that's the point: we're approaching the point of development where there WONT be adequate new labor created. Even the last time around not all lost jobs were replaced with new ones, but only a fraction of them. Every time industry goes through an iterative cycle of this it happens, but people still say "its ok, they'll all just get new jobs tending the machines". But we're approaching the point where the machines wont need minders, where they will mind themselves, and each other.
if you watch the video he's talking about 45% of the entire workforce jobless, TODAY, with just the tech that already exists today, between the driverless cars, automated checkouts, etc. That's an absolutely HUGE market disruption. I dont think you comprehend just how dramatic that is. there is a limit to how much saturation your peer-peer economy, just like a creative economy, can tolerate. its very small.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
> Could a computer write an entertaining movie? A sitcom? I wonder.
"There apparently exists, somewhere in Los Angeles, a computer that generates concepts for television sitcoms. When TV executives need a new concept, they turn on this computer; after sorting through millions of possible plot premises, it spits out, 'THREE QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT,' and the executives turn this concept into a show. The next time they need an idea, the computer spits out, 'SIX QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT.' Then the next time, it spits out, 'FOUR QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT,' and so on. We need to locate this computer and destroy it with hammers."
- Dave Barry
> That's utter bullshit; the so-called poor today are better off than the rich were a century ago.
Really? You want to argue that these folks are better off then Carnegie and Rockefeller were in 1914?
There is definitely the smell of bullshit in the air.
> The universe doesn't need ANY people. It never did. It never will.
LOL. The people ARE the universe. The whole concept of the universe needing anything is useless, my LEGO pieces don't NEED the house they were forming, they were the house.
99% of people used to work in agriculture. Now it's less than 5%. We're at the tail end of a similar cycle for manufacturing, and just starting a similar cycle for unskilled labor in general. It won't be the end of the world. It might be disruptive, sure. (OTOH I have little sympathy for someone currently getting paid less than the robot that could replace them who demands that they be paid more than the replacement robot costs. No one can sustainably be paid more than their work is worth.)
But right now, this year, help-wanted signs are everywhere around me. There are no lack of workforce-entry jobs, driving jobs, construction jobs, and so on. Skilled blue-collar jobs have had a labor shortage for a couple of decades now, and robots or no, no one's going to go broke as an AC repairman in Texas.
there is a limit to how much saturation your peer-peer economy, just like a creative economy, can tolerate. its very small.
As long as people want more than what robots can do, there will be jobs to provide that - how else could it work out? Why would there be any bounds on the size of the peer-to-peer economy, if robots meet all our basic needs. This isn't just hypothetical - you can see this play out today in some retirement communities, where the only work anyone does is peer-to-peer, but there's a robust economy there, often with homebrew currencies. But I expect this century will be the end of unskilled labor, and of much semi-skilled labor.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
tl;dr Employing robots and AIs overall to do almost *anything* may soon be cheaper than employing most humans, similar to how we junk old computers because they use too much power per MIP even when they still "work". Also, the demand for market-supplied goods and services is limited as people move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and want to do more things for themselves and want to do creative things of a (generally) less materially-intensive nature. Thus mainstream capitalism is about to face divide-by-zero errors.
=== Two key assumptions of mainstream capitalist economics
Your insightful comment really gets at the heart of the controversy (from a mainstream economics viewpoint) and so deserves a significant response. I agree that we can see many of the material aspects of US society today as a "victory for automation". Still, as your post implies, mainstream economics includes two assumptions, and if either of these assumptions becomes false, mainstream economics will falter (although it may press on anyway at the cost of great human suffering).
These two assumptions are:
1. The assumption that most human labor will always have significant exchange value in the market regardless of advances in AI, robotics, and other automation (as well as other trends like voluntary social networks, accumulation of infrastructure and know-how, cheap energy like from fusion power, and so on). Significant means at least enough value to purchase at least the bare minimum to survive (given almost all the land has been privatized or otherwise enclosed preventing subsistence through hunting, gathering, and gardening). Further there is the assumption nowadays that the exchange value of labor in the USA by most people willing and able to work is high enough for more than subsistence to achieve at least a "middle class" US life or better.
2. The assumption that demand for goods and services is infinite for any given population (or at least demand grows faster than supply over the long term), thus ensuring there is always a need for more labor no matter how much automation can meet previous demands. There is also the assumption this excess demand for goods and services beyond supply will be great enough to prevent a race to the bottom in wages through competition regarding supply and demand of human labor. In short, without major government intervention like a basic income, a capitalist system as we know it needs to continually expand to be viable for human survival if most humans require employment to survive.
Let's see if either of those assumptions can be debunked. It only takes debunking one to show how mainstream economics is failing in the 21st century. Debunking either would mean there would be zero wages for most humans or zero new net demand, and some mainstream economic equations will blow up with divide-by-zero errors in such a case.
== Assumption 1: Most human labor will always have market-place value
Debunking the first assumption about human labor always having significant exchange value is what the video is mostly about. And it is enough to invalidate mainstream economics as we know it in the USA. A similar point was made in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964, although for various reasons I mention on my site was ahead of its time in its predictions. As an analogy, many Slashdotters have older computer around they don't use anymore. Those older computers are generally turned off because compared to later computers, they are slower, are noisier, consume more power per MIP, can't be updated for newer security threats, have limited memory, may have more complex UIs or maintenance procedures, and so on. It is easier in most cases to just run VirtualBox on a multi-core machine with a task-specific VM or to use small cheap recent dedicated hardware for functions like routing or firewalls or file serving. Or Slashdotters might just do more with cloud computing that others maintain. The CGP Grey video is about the trend towards most humans becoming like old computers as far as employa
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
There's a flaw here in comparing the 45% number to the great depression. If those jobs went away quickly, it could cause something worse than the great depression. However, if they go away slowly, people have time to migrate to other types of jobs. We've seen this already - and it's contained in the video itself. In one part of the video, they talk about how automation has allowed the percentage of people working in agriculture to shift from 90% of the economy to a few percentage. In other words, a millenia ago, you could accurately have said, "agriculture makes up 90% of our economy. Automation will reduce the number of people working in agriculture to a few percentage (let's say 3%). That gap between 90% and 3% means that 87% of the workers will be unemployed. It will be vastly worse than the great depression!" The problem is that it didn't quite happen that way because the transition happened slowly. Admittedly, there was some unemployment as a result of automation, but at no time was there any vast levels of unemployment - nothing near 87% at any one time.
Historically, the wealthy owners have always attempted to pocket the entire benefit and throw the workers that helped make them wealthy to the wolves. The re-adjustment you speak of only happens after a great deal of union activity either threatening revolution or actually carrying it out.
It might be better to be proactive for a change.
OK, let me put it this way. 200 years ago someone said "The Freedom of the Press belongs to the man who owns one." Can you generalize from that? Perhaps in 200 years everyone will be able to afford their own factory, but I expect some really rough patches before then. Low end "3D printers" can only really turn out toys and junk. It takes the ones that can print in multiple metals to create something worthwhile. And even they aren't that good yet. The most practical home robot so far is the Roomba. But we've got apprentice robots working for the military. They aren't really good yet, but they're improving rapidly. But they aren't cheap. You don't buy a "Big Dog" to carry your shopping home for you. Not even if you're confined to a wheelchair.
Robot make stuff that basically for free to the person who owns the robit. (Well, plus cost of materials, shipping, handling, accounting, etc. Which are also robotized, but which still cost.) So the production cost has decreased substantially. But who is earning the money to buy that stuff? Only the guy that owns the robots or delivers the merchandise...but robot truck drivers are on the horizon, and robot warehouses are already here.
If prices drop by 50% and the mean wage stays the same, but the median drops by 60%, what does that mean for the average person being able to buy what they need? (Hint: The minimum wage possible is zero, but there is no upper limit.)
Now IF the government actually intended to promote the general welfare, then I would be happy and confident. This would look like the opening of a golden age. But I have seen VERY few signs that the government even considers the general welfare. So I don't feel happy about it at all.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's quite an "egocentric" viewpoint you have. The universe doesn't need people, it allows them to exist. If they choose to. Or the species can comit suicide. The universe won't care. It may even hit the planet with a "large enough" asteroid. But it won't be malice, it will be, perhaps, indifference. Except that "the universe" isn't sentient enough to even be indifferent.
OTOH, that's just what the evidence I've seen says to me. I'd be quite open to any actual evidence that I'm wrong, but I'm afraid that an assertion doesn't count.
P.S.: There may well be some non-evidential thing that does care. As specified that is neither evidence for nor against it.
P.P.S.: Here's my take on "what the universe is" if you want to go with a non-consensusal definition: The very concept of the universe was defined in terms of what is plausible given available evidence. This is why what it means changes when the evidence changes. Once upon a time it didn't include "dark matter" or "dark energy" (whatever they are). Then evidence for their existence was detected, and then the universe included them. Before the evidence appeared, nobody had even THOUGHT of them. They are still both big question marks, basically just markers saying "Here there be dragons", but not specifying much about the nature of those dragons.
P.S.: There ARE giant sea monsters. The ones large enough to worry about in a modern ship, however, aren't animals. They're things called "rogue waves", and we're just starting to understand them. Perhaps there are still others we haven't identified yet. If so they'll be quite surprising, and very rare.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Employing robots and AIs overall to do almost *anything* may soon be cheaper than employing most humans, similar to how we junk old computers because they use too much power per MIP even when they still "work".
Any day now, we'll have the Singularity. Sure we will. Along with fusion power, flying cars, and some sort of sane calendar and spelling.
Our current economic system produces a huge amount of goods and services but has trouble distributing them in a healthy way.
Goods and services are pretty nearly evenly distributed, for all the whining and envy. Money is not. Control of the means of production is not. But goods and services are.
we are perhaps already at the point where a significant percentage of the US population would not be able to feed themselves from jobs because their labor has little economic value in our competitive economy which included many desperate out-of-work people willing to work for low wages
Or, you know, people could learn a skill. There's no inherent value in work - just because it's difficult doesn't make it worthwhile. You have to do something that someone finds useful (someone other than yourself, for trade). Automation raises the "noise floor" there, but if we reject the Singularity BS, it doesn't do so alarmingly. Over the next 20-30 years at least, there's good pay to be had in the skilled trades. There's been a shortage of welders, plumbers, electricians, etc for a couple of decades now, and those jobs pay well. There was a brief downturn during the housing collapse, but there's been a big "help wanted" sign up at the construction site next to me for weeks now, and the market in my city is booming.
But getting a degree in "X Studies" with a minor in crushing debt, and then working retail? Yeah, not much future in that.
Essentially, there is a law of diminishing returns for more goods and services for any *healthy* human
This is why goods and services are reasonably evenly distributed. No matter how rich you are, there's only so much beer you can drink. But we tend to focus on the stuff that's scarce-yet-practically-available, and ignore the stuff that's not scare, or not practically available, leading to the false assumption that that narrow band is the only possible economy. But instead, that band between "too scarce" and "too available," where (most) jobs happen, just moves up.
The number of people employed as maids or gardeners today is unbelievably high as seen from 50 years ago. The middle class? With servants? Impossible by definition! But as manufacturing was replaced by automation, stuff got cheap enough (and economies of scale kicked in) for a wide swathe of Americans to afford to pay someone else to mow the grass and clean the toilet. Now of course, it's those jobs that will soon be done by robots, along with all the other unskilled labor in the next few decades.
Well, if everything provided by unskilled labor, plus food and manufactured good, were all available for next to nothing, what then would we like others to do for us that we just can't afford today? That we can't imagine being affordable because the economies of scale haven't kicked in? There's a lot, I think.
Another aspect of affluence is that everything we own also owns us because it has to be maintained and stored and worried about ...
A study discussed a couple years ago on Slashdot suggested that in the USA money was closely correlated with happiness -- but only up to around US$75,000 a year. After that, more money did not make much of a difference.
That's all "things". There won't be any jobs making "things" anyway, other than in customizing them or inventing new things, so it's not like that sort of affluence would drive many jobs to begin with. (BTW, different people have differing utility curves - for ju
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Robot make stuff that basically for free to the person who owns the robit. (Well, plus cost of materials, shipping, handling, accounting, etc. Which are also robotized, but which still cost.) So the production cost has decreased substantially. But who is earning the money to buy that stuff? Only the guy that owns the robots or delivers the merchandise...but robot truck drivers are on the horizon, and robot warehouses are already here.
Again - why are these robots making this stuff (assuming you scenario is still pre-Skynet)? Either half the people lose their jobs and all these factories go under, or at least sit idle, or people still have jobs. It's not like the rich are going to be buying that much more stuff - nicer stuff sure, but heck that probably means less robot-made stuff in wealthy households.
There are almost no agricultural jobs now, and life kept getting better. There are no almost no manufacturing jobs now, and life kept getting better. Soon there will be almost no unskilled jobs at all, and few low-skill jobs. Life will keep getting better. No one doing demanding manual labor all day? That's a better life. No one scrubbing toilets all day? That's a better life.
The simple answer is: we will be doing skilled labor, or we will fail as a nation due to our inability to educate our workforce. I believe almost everyone is smart enough and motivated enough to do the work, and demand for skilled services will spike as "things" become non-scarce. Yes, our educational system was optimized for producing unthinking factory workers, and is doing a terrible job of turning out people with a mindset useful for modern work, but it's not like change isn't underway, and it's not hopelessly bad today (except perhaps in the doomed cities).
There's already a serious shortage of everything from welders to OB/Gyns, (with the exception of lawyers, which there was a horrible glut of, and I suspect anything "CSI" related is facing a similar oversupply right now, but that's fads for you). Most people will never have the talent to be an entertainer or engineer, but for work that doesn't scale so well the bar is lower. Everything blue collar has serious shortages, and the skilled service-based stuff is growing faster than that labor supply.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Historically, the jobs have never come back. It's gonna steam engine when it's steam-engine time. There was fighting for better wages in the new industries, not the old ones! And the new industries started off paying vastly more than any other opportunities of their day.
What people are trying to fight for today is Luddite-ism: trying to stop the progress of technology. That never works. Trying to hold on to jobs that can be done cheaper by robots? Losing battle. Trying to change your jobs which currently pays less than a robot would cost to force your employer to pay more than a robot would cost? Short sighted at best.
If you have a job that automation could do, it's best to face reality, and learn a skill. That's what we as a society need to do better as well, of course! Fuck protecting outdated business models, or demanding more pay for unskilled work, that's just abuse of power. We need to provide a clear and affordable path for unskilled workers to become skilled workers (without gaining crushing debt in the process). The university system is entirely unfit for this purpose, of course, I'm mostly talking about trade schools.
There's a real shortage in almost every skilled trade, and a real oversupply of unskilled workers. Doesn't that sound like a solvable problem?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You link to an essay written in the 1930's. I'm curious if any analysis has been done on the topic since after the New Deal's implementation.
The whole idea of Basic Income is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward–Piven_strategy
However the link to Basic Income doesn't mention anything about Cloward and Piven. It's just another socialist utopian dream that sounds great on paper but fails in practice. Shame on the author of http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html for leaving out this simple fact.
Hey if you want equal opp. jobs, equal pay, free housing, free medical/dental, free clothes, free food, there's already a socialist utopia for you, it's called PRISON.
Sure, the old jobs don't come back. TYhe new jobs tend to be crappier than the old jobs due to employers taking advantage of desperation (a form of rent seeking)
Training programs and strong unemployment benefits that actually support the displaced workers while they learn a new skill would be one aproach, but it would need careful controls so it didn't take part in pushing workers into crappier jobs.
The basic income is probably the strongest approach. By taking poverty off of the table once and for all, the workforce gains sufficient bargaining power to render a lot of other employment laws and regulations unnecessary. It would also allow us to eliminate food stamps, welfare, social security, and various programs for the disabled and their expensive and often demeaning means testing bureaucracy and the perverse incentives that go with it.
The Luddites came into being because they knew there were no social programs in place to help them once their jobs went away. They had no real power to force Parliament to help them, but they had the power to sabotage the machines meant to replace them. Not much has changed there. If you want to get rid of the Luddites, give them good reason to believe they can transition painlessly to new and better jobs In fact, they might voluntarily sign up to lose their old jobs.
Keep in mind in your calculations that the union victory on the 8 hour day and 40 hour week had a lot to do with getting people employed as well.Some of those new jobs came about because it was too expensive to work a smaller staff on double shifts.
Sure, the old jobs don't come back. TYhe new jobs tend to be crappier than the old jobs due to employers taking advantage of desperation (a form of rent seeking)
People flocked from the farms tot he factories during the industrial revolution in the US because those jobs were better. Exactly the same was true in China much more recently. Early manufacturing jobs paid very much better than anything else around. Sure, they were very exploitive by today's standards, but so was everything else at the time. It was only as time went on that workers wanted more (generally it was more about working conditions than pay early on).
Training programs and strong unemployment benefits that actually support the displaced workers while they learn a new skill would be one aproach, but it would need careful controls so it didn't take part in pushing workers into crappier jobs.
Sure, in fact I have a hard time imagining how it could lead to crappier jobs, unless we brought back indentured servitude (aka, non-compete agreements). When you have no skill, you're completely replaceable so your employer has all the power. When you have a skill, well, ever try to get a plumber in a hurry? You know who has the power there.
The basic income is probably the strongest approach. By taking poverty off of the table once and for all, the workforce gains sufficient bargaining power
Complete disregard for human nature. The basic income produces Chavs, not skilled workers. The experiment's been repeated many times: people who don't have to work don't work, and produce a culture of "work is for suckers" that's quite difficult to escape. I spent many years living in what passes in America for poor areas, and the patterns that kept people in poverty were clear once you started to know your neighbors - either a firm belief that "work is for suckers," or a hard worker coupled directly to a leech (and somehow it was also the woman busting ass and the man laying around all day). Causation is just my opinion, but the patterns were self-evident.
Giving people money for not working is a social death trap. Giving people education to become skilled workers also gives them lots of power. (Seriously - try telling a plumber the kind of shit that developers get told about what tools to use or whatnot, and see how far you get! Skilled blue collar workers are less replaceable than skilled white collar workers - though of course we should provide education leading to either sort of job to all.)
give them good reason to believe they can transition painlessly to new and better jobs In fact, they might voluntarily sign up to lose their old jobs.
No argument there.
Keep in mind in your calculations that the union victory on the 8 hour day and 40 hour week had a lot to do with getting people employed as well
Have you never been poor or worked shit jobs? There is no 40 hour work week - you work 30 hours at each of two jobs, and have to add a second fucking commute to your already-long day because some goddamned do-gooder thought there was a 40-hour work week!
OTOH, if we have a social change, a change of common expectations of people, that 30 hours was a good work week (or 40-50 hours in your 20s, but 25-30 once you master your trade), that would be great for everyone I think.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure, in fact I have a hard time imagining how it could lead to crappier jobs, unless we brought back indentured servitude (aka, non-compete agreements). When you have no skill, you're completely replaceable so your employer has all the power. When you have a skill, well, ever try to get a plumber in a hurry? You know who has the power there.
It's easy to imagine how the job gets crappier. Fire 50K low skill laborers (unskilled labor is a myth, just watch the highly skilled CEOs on Undercover Boss bumbling around ineffectively at 'unskilled labor'). Teach them a new skill and guess what? There's a glut and so the pay goes down and conditions get worse. In general, real income has been falling since the late '60s. That is, jobs are getting crappier.
Means testing produces Chavs. Why get a job when you'll have less money than you do now AND have to worry about getting laid off? (working more to have less IS for suckers) The actual basic income means that getting a job directly leads to having more money roughly in proportion to the amount of work you do.
If training programs were available such that you could acquire a real skill so that working would get you substantially more money than welfare and food stamps, more people might go for it. As it is, welfare barely meets basic needs. It certainly won't pay for tech school. Throw in actual basic income (no means test) and a great many will go to work. Yes, some (small) percentage will sit like lumps. there are a few people like that. Some will start out like that and then start working as they unlearn years of the wrong lessons from perverse incentive. Others might volunteer in their community. I have seen plenty of retirees who no longer have to work at all but choose to get a part time job just to stay busy.
The substitution of capital goods for labor is more appealing when interest rates are low.
Central banks attempt to keep interest rates artificially low -- at least for certain borrowers. (Guess who?)
Yet another way governments use central banks to screw over "the little guy".
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
There were people seeing this "menace" back in the 1970s, and offering similar "solutions". http://duckduckgo.com/?s=the.t... (I'm seeing the upside of becoming an old fart. Perspective. Spotting patterns of alarmism.)
There will still be need for people to make lace and stockings and cloth, after the machines take over, Mr. Ludd. (Whoops! Wrong iteration.)
There will still be need for people to do whatever it is that machines can't, or can't do at an competitive price.
"Can't" is a bigger category than technological infeasibility. People still commission oil painting portraits, after over a century of photography. There are still restaurants, and not a proliferation of automats. ("Automats"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) One-off tasks -- organizing a conference, for instance -- could be automated to a degree, but ultimately someone is going to have to conceive of it, identify key participants, convince them to attend, obtain sponsors, etc.
"At a competitive price". It may be possible to design a robot that picks up cigarette butts and other minor debris in every possible location and situation, or to do gardening of every conceivable landscape, but to do it well enough might just be too damn expensive. Centralizing pre-made decisions has proven damnably hard to do well, at any cost. It won't be any different when they are in software and about litter or about aesthetics and locally-suitable horticulture.
Moore's Law would not have made Soviet Union workable, and isn't going to help in many situations in the future. Not help enough to matter. Even free computing and data gathering and data transmission won't do it People on the scene are flexible, and have knowledge distant theoreticians don't even know to acquire. (http://duckduckgo.com/?s=I.pencil+ferrule+graphite )
The real problem will be the pace. Personal adaptability allowed some blacksmiths to become auto-mobile mechanics, and the rest were able to get by during the transition, sticking with the horses. The important skill in the future will not be a specialization in any area or guessing what skills will not automate (people will always need shrinks or whores or physical therapists or tactful portraitists or wine stewards or ...), but the ability to make transitions over and over, as necessary.
Hardly an original thought. As I recall, skeptics were offering it back in the 1970s. (And, I bet, back in the 1770s.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
We've already tried that. Hoover after the 1929 crash let the free market work on its own. After 3 years of worsening depression, the people wanted a New Deal.
But it wasn't a free market. The FED - the very concept of which is antithetical to a free market - deliberately crashed it.
what happens when everyone can get food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and weapons, from self-maintaining, self-replicating technology?
You haven't been keepign track of the advances in robotics. I'll give you OB Gyns, as most women would probably be reluctant to trust a robot. (Note that this isn't capability based, but trust based.)
You ask "Why are the robots making this stuff?" The answer is "To trade with other people who also own robots that make other stuff." Each robot factory will have multiple possible products. This will come at the cost of being less efficient at the manufacture of each one, but it will mean that there's no reason to just crank through as much as you can. It will generally be "bespoke trade", i.e., you get the order before you make the stuff. (Sort of like JIT carried to the next level.)
What skilled jobs do you think will be available, that robots won't be able to do better? In what year? (Part of the problem is that it's a moving target. It can take 10 years to turn a high school graduate into a skilled professional, and at the start of those 10 years, you don't know which jobs will be available at the end. Well, one can generally make a decent mid-course correction for the first 5-6 years, so if your general area of prediction is correct, you can adopt the most promising remaining specialty. But things become a lot less flexible as you get closer to the end of training. And if your career becomes obsolete two years after you finish training, you get to start back several years, if you can get a school to take you, only now you've already got a huge debt...or, at minimum, a huge sunk cost that you need to write off.
Currently I'm really reluctant to advise kids to go to college. If they don't want to badly enough that they would go against my advice, it looks like a bad bet. Being a welder might actually be a much better choice. The training is both shorter and less expensive. People tend to have really silly ideas about what skills a robot will have 10 years from now. They will range from nearly human down to insectile, and be priced inversely. But a huge lot of what we do isn't based on intelligence, it's based on organized memory, and while it might take intelligence to organize the memory, it doesn't take much to use memories that are already organized. And robots can copy memories easily. So you need one really intelligent robot to train to do something, and the contexts in which which action is appropriate. Then you copy it to thousands of robots that are a lot less intelligent, but a lot lighter and cheaper. And that's only 10 years from now. 20 years from now is a whole different ball game. And in between then and now things aren't going to be standing still, even if I can't predict just how they will be changing.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
computer write and animate (cgi) me a scifi story, with a russian female protaginist, semi related to the wild west, if you get stuck loosely base it on hamlet.
I don't believe in the singularity. The idea that a few rich people would own factories just building stuff for one another is dystopian fantasy - rich people deliberately making themselves poor by refusing to sell to others. Makes no sense at all. Robotic manufacturing just displaces the few people left in America with manufacturing jobs, making things significantly cheaper for everyone. I can see robots displacing unskilled labor next - fast food workers and maids and so on - which is a bigger pool than manufacturing workers, but IMO most people in those jobs are perfectly capable of skilled work, and in fact are usually still students or recent immigrants, already on a path that will lead to skilled jobs if our educational system doesn't fail them.
Watching all the construction projects happening around me, they're already seriously benefitting from (non-robotic) automation, to the point where the only thing really labor intensive is concrete pours (laying out all the rebar, mailing together the forms, smoothing the concrete as its poured), and that still is far less labor than 50 years ago. And yet there's help-wanted signs up at most of the construction projects around me. Modern construction equipment is amazingly productive, but you still need someone to operate it. Modern wood-framed construction is just nailing up prefab walls and other parts, but you still need people to measure and inspect, plus plumbers and electricians and the occasional welder. All of that stuff is skilled labor, none of it will be replaced by robots in the next 20-30 years, and there's a demand for labor for all of it.
Anything involving diagnosing and repairing problems with buildings/vehicles/equipment needs skilled people, not going to be replaced by robots any time soon, and has labor shortages today. We've had a big push away from blue collar jobs and into college by the educational system that hasn't served us well. Manufacturing is dead, blue collar work (work that pays pretty well, though it can be seasonal) is not.
Plus now we'll see growth in skilled services jobs IMO.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The fundamental problem with a basic income is that it only works if it's not enough to live on comfortably, just enough to subsist, and that's an impossible system to maintain in a democracy. Entitlements will always be raised by vote until that's all the government can afford to do any more, and a bit above that. We're already there. Parts of Europe have been there long enough, have gone so far over the edge, that only constant donations from neighboring governments (mostly Germany) kept them going through the downturn.
I don't understand what jobs you think will be going away that pay $50k today? If anyone makes that in a job that can be replaced by a robot, I have no sympathy, but I don't see it (other than the few lingering manufacturing jobs, but manufacturing by humans has been going away for decades and is already a small and dwindling % today).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Entitlements will always be raised by vote until that's all the government can afford to do any more
It hasn't happened in over 200 years of democracy, what makes you think it will happen now?
We're already there.
We are nowhere near there. Actual paid taxes are at a low point and we still have more than enough to blow trillions in Iraq, billions in the pointless war on drugs, untold gadzillions on the NSA, etc etc. The only time D.C. pleads poverty is when it comes to infrastructure and the social safety net.
Most of Europe got suckered into an austerity budget that is killing them. Most of the woes are due to the banking collapse. The few countries that have tougher banking laws and told the banks "gee that's a shame" rather than "Here, let us loan you a few trillion" are doing just fine now in spite of having far more comprehensive social programs in the U.S. If we can kick the war habit, get sensioble on drugs, and quit worshipping deadbeat bankers and other corporate ne'er do wells, we can do it too.
I don't understand what jobs you think will be going away that pay $50k today?
I said 50K jobs, not jobs paying $50K
... from 1932 echos part of your point: http://harpers.org/archive/193...
"First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earthâ(TM)s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example."
The key part agreeing with you being: "The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given."
You make another interesting point on equal distribution of material wealth in the USA essentially in terms of mass. To support your point, it's true that a lot of "money" controlled by the wealthiest 0.1% is now in the "casino economy" of the stock market and so on (FIRE sector) and so unavailable for use by most people to signal demand for material goods.
Still, I can doubt your point on equal distribution of goods and services is true overall, even if it is no doubt true for, say, beverages. I'd be curious to see more substantiation of that point.
It seems to me in the USA that wealthy people own a lot of land (and control corporations and politics, see: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa... ), they have in general better quality products and services (including education and food), as families they have more potential free time and self-determination, they have better access to medical care, and they face less financial precarity in their day-to-day lives. In general, they are not forced to take on risks that poorer people are (unsafe cars, unsafe neighborhoods, unsafe food, unsafe jobs, etc.). Those are enormous benefits towards a happier life. Still, as you point out, by strictly material standards, most people in the USA are better off than even the wealthy of 100 years ago. That is an important point. However, there is more to life that material goods. Things like face-to-face community, craftsmanship, general literacy, time spent by mothers with their young children, and time spent in nature and in sunshine seem to have declined per capita in the USA -- as have birth rates. A whole bunch of illnesses, including mental illness, seem to be on the rise.
There is a deeper issue here if we put aside the controversial issue that robots and AIs could do most jobs soon (and in a way, robots etc. just crank up a trend that has been going on for decades) . The fact is, most human labor is already not needed for use to live near to our current standard of living. Bertrand Russel pointed this out in that 1932 essay: "Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the produc
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It hasn't happened in over 200 years of democracy, what makes you think it will happen now?
Our government spends more money mailing checks to people than its revenue.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm going to need some citation for that. As far as I can see, if we cut out those things I listed above (that do not enjoy a lot of voter support), we could have a balanced budget now. We had just gotten there during the Clinton administration and so we can be there again.