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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The last four jobs:
Machine learning engineers, robotics engineers, pimps and prostitutes.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
Restaurants may not have replaced their employees with robots yet, but it's coming: http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/2...
Yes, and if supermarket automation is any guide, what it will really mean is that you will have to bus your own tables.
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!
So just because someone doesn't have a solution, they shouldn't attempt to raise awareness about a problem? I bet you're a manager.
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
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%.
I heard that the human body produces more bio-electricity than a 120V battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Perhaps we could use that to power the machines. We might get bored, though, sitting around letting our bio-electricity and body heat be absorbed, so maybe we could hook in to some kind of simulated environment to keep us occupied.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
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.
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.
Same user, backup account. Typed on the phone, so there have to be some writing errors there somewhere.
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I am getting USA worker productivity numbers from real unemployment numbers, including those who gave up looking, those on disability and early ss and the 500 Billion USD/year trade deficit USA has been running for the last 20 years. I am gettinv more worker productivity numbers from monthly non farming payroll numbers, which show non existing manufacturing, fairly small mining and large service and government sectors, all of which are the reason for negative productivity. Americans are incapable of producing enough for themselves or to repay the foreigners for the stuff that comes from abroad, the 40-50 billion usd a month trade deficit is the proof of this simple concept. All of you exports, including all exported services are not enough to pay for the imports, that is your negative productivity. Americans are exporting the difference in inflated dollars and bonds, which are proving to be the theft of foreign productivity, since all the trillions that the foreigners hold for you raise their prices, while Americans have been spared the full wrath of inflation they are creating. Of-course inflation in USA is a number of times higher than the official numbers, it easily exceeds 10% per year as is clear from all of the asset bubbles that the Fed is creating and the rising cost of living should be obvious even to you, unless your buttler does the shopping.
A productive economy creates what it consumes either directly or in enough exports to cover all imports and then some. Americans lost that ability when they defaulted on the dollar 43 years ago.
The fact that the wealthy Chinese are buying up your houses is the exact opposite of what you believe. It shows that they have thd productivity and that to get rid of their dollars they have to go all the way to the USA to dump them, bringing the Fed generated inflation right back to you. They will buy the houses that your inflation allowed to be built ( the Fed created inflation to pump up the asset prices, they have been doing it since the default on the dollar). They are and will continue buying up all of your still productive assets too, companies, lands. Your welfare state will turn all of your welfare recipients into beggars on the streets, their only saving grace will be foreign companies hiring them at lowest labour prices, since they are made by USA government so unproductive, due to complete destruction of the capital, that you lost all of your factories that mattered and cannot be hired by other Americans. The part time jobs in the service sector will only get you as far as the foreigners will let you go, and they are tired of subsidising the unproductive Americans.
There is no capital without savings and people with savings do not lend to people that allowed themselves (and indeed cheered themselves) into this situation, where productivity is punished by regulations laws, taxes, inflation and generally anti-freedom ideology. Ideology of government taxing, borrowing and inflating (printing) to spend is ideology of destruction of the real economy and you are right in the middle of it, which is likely why you are blind to it.
As to business cycle, it does not need a solution, it is a normal process, where excess spendings are restructured back into productive capacity. The Fed trying to 'solve it' creates much more violent recessions and of course depressions, which are taking down your economy. The spending that needed to be stopped hasn't been, the unproductive were propped up for decades with all this money printing, while savers and the productive were chased out of town with laws, taxes and the inflation. The resulting lack of proper cleaning procedure (restructuring of misallocated resources) was delayed by the government and the Fed and now has enough potential energy that when it turns into kinetic will wipe out whatever remains of your centrally planned economy (and it is all centrally planned, that is your Fed and government with all the printing, taxes and laws that destroyed the dollar and the frer market).
Enjoy whatever limited time you have.
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