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What Happens To Society When Robots Replace Workers?
Paul Fernhout writes: An article in the Harvard Business Review by William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone suggests: "The "Second Economy" (the term used by economist Brian Arthur to describe the portion of the economy where computers transact business only with other computers) is upon us. It is, quite simply, the virtual economy, and one of its main byproducts is the replacement of workers with intelligent machines powered by sophisticated code. ... This is why we will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value. Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century. ... Ultimately, we need a new, individualized, cultural, approach to the meaning of work and the purpose of life. Otherwise, people will find a solution — human beings always do — but it may not be the one for which we began this technological revolution."
This follows the recent Slashdot discussion of "Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates" citing a NY Times article and other previous discussions like Humans Need Not Apply. What is most interesting to me about this HBR article is not the article itself so much as the fact that concerns about the economic implications of robotics, AI, and automation are now making it into the Harvard Business Review. These issues have been otherwise discussed by alternative economists for decades, such as in the Triple Revolution Memorandum from 1964 — even as those projections have been slow to play out, with automation's initial effect being more to hold down wages and concentrate wealth rather than to displace most workers. However, they may be reaching the point where these effects have become hard to deny despite going against mainstream theory which assumes infinite demand and broad distribution of purchasing power via wages.
As to possible solutions, there is a mention in the HBR article of using government planning by creating public works like infrastructure investments to help address the issue. There is no mention in the article of expanding the "basic income" of Social Security currently only received by older people in the U.S., expanding the gift economy as represented by GNU/Linux, or improving local subsistence production using, say, 3D printing and gardening robots like Dewey of "Silent Running." So, it seems like the mainstream economics profession is starting to accept the emerging reality of this increasingly urgent issue, but is still struggling to think outside an exchange-oriented box for socioeconomic solutions. A few years ago, I collected dozens of possible good and bad solutions related to this issue. Like Davidow and Malone, I'd agree that the particular mix we end up will be a reflection of our culture. Personally, I feel that if we are heading for a technological "singularity" of some sort, we would be better off improving various aspects of our society first, since our trajectory going out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into it.
This follows the recent Slashdot discussion of "Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates" citing a NY Times article and other previous discussions like Humans Need Not Apply. What is most interesting to me about this HBR article is not the article itself so much as the fact that concerns about the economic implications of robotics, AI, and automation are now making it into the Harvard Business Review. These issues have been otherwise discussed by alternative economists for decades, such as in the Triple Revolution Memorandum from 1964 — even as those projections have been slow to play out, with automation's initial effect being more to hold down wages and concentrate wealth rather than to displace most workers. However, they may be reaching the point where these effects have become hard to deny despite going against mainstream theory which assumes infinite demand and broad distribution of purchasing power via wages.
As to possible solutions, there is a mention in the HBR article of using government planning by creating public works like infrastructure investments to help address the issue. There is no mention in the article of expanding the "basic income" of Social Security currently only received by older people in the U.S., expanding the gift economy as represented by GNU/Linux, or improving local subsistence production using, say, 3D printing and gardening robots like Dewey of "Silent Running." So, it seems like the mainstream economics profession is starting to accept the emerging reality of this increasingly urgent issue, but is still struggling to think outside an exchange-oriented box for socioeconomic solutions. A few years ago, I collected dozens of possible good and bad solutions related to this issue. Like Davidow and Malone, I'd agree that the particular mix we end up will be a reflection of our culture. Personally, I feel that if we are heading for a technological "singularity" of some sort, we would be better off improving various aspects of our society first, since our trajectory going out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into it.
First the good news. We'll have more time to post on slashdot.
Now the bad news. We'll have more time to post to slashdot.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Robots are machines. Human being replaced by machines in the industry is hardly a new issue.
Is of course to do away with money. No work, no money, yet everything gets done anyway. And while that's the eventual solution, it's close enough that many people reading this will see it within their lifetimes.
There will still be bottlenecks of course. Not everyone will be able to get their own mega mansion on Mars at the same time. But with exponential growth of available "Work" possible distribution of "wealth" probably won't even be a concern. Mining Mars, and every other planet in the solar system, might sound ridiculous if humans were expected to do it.
But AI doesn't care. It doesn't need payment, doesn't need to sleep, doesn't need hazard pay or etc. No task is "too big" or takes "too long" other than things that might involve timespans along the lines of the heatdeath of the universe.
I for one welcome our robot slave workers so I don't have to do any "work" myself ever again.
we'll start reading articles every week or two on /. about how things HAVE changed rather than the weekly speculation of how they will change.
The primary problem we have today is not automation, it is over-concentration of wealth. Automation will destroy jobs to the extent that the people running the companies implementing the automation wish it to. If those companies are run by people who are happy to deliver worse service as long as they can pay fewer people, then, yes, we have a problem, but it is not with the technology.
There is no such thing a technological determinism. It's people all the way down.
Maybe we should re-examine every law, regulation, and employer mandate that makes it more expensive or more risky to hire people or conduct business that would employ people?
Sounds like Manna:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century.
Free market economy is not the answer.
Sophisticated armed bodyguard robots
What a bullshit question! Everything should be free then. DUH! If there is no need for work, there is no need to ration goods and services to those who can 'pay'. Human effort is the only thing that requires compensation.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The previously unskilled but still productive portion of the working class gets pushed down to poverty levels as it becomes a "surplus" population.
Unions, who are composed of such persons, become even more activist and vocal. Democrats seek to slow down the changes and republicans seek to accelerate them.
In other words, the same thing happens that happened when Chinese (and others) workers replaced American workers. Except, unlike globalization which moves jobs around, robotization just kills the jobs (i.e. no foreign workers to benefit this time around).
In my opinion, it will be painful in developing countries most of all since America (and the "West") already kind of went through that so it's just one more nail in the coffin.
Once again we have a clueless story about automation destroying jobs which ignores that the claimed effect doesn't happen. Most of the developing world just doesn't have this problem. It's just another imaginary first world problem.
Instead the problem is the punishing of employers. When you mandate high minimum wages and plush benefits, regulations which drive up the cost of an employee while simultaneously making them hard to fire, and the creation of a variety of liabilities (eg, being exposed to large liabilities due to unsanctioned actions of your employees), you create an environment where it is better for employees to move the work to a better location and/or automate it.
We will see not only jobs moved to other parts of the world, but the automation as well. Call it "race to the bottom", "exporting the pollution", whatever, but it remains that a growing amount of valuable economic activity has been chased out of the developed world and it's not coming back.
Socialism.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Easy.
Humans move into virtual reality.
Socialism: an economic system in which the workers control the means of production. If the workers are all robots, that bodes ill for humanity. I hope you meant "communism" instead.
One that is sufficient for basic food, clothing, and shelter. Then let the worker negotiate with the employer for wages on top of that. Even the most awesome robot would have a problem competing with "free" human workers. (Just Google "Comparative advantage")
Machines have depressed wages, and concentrated wealth? That's why the 'poor' are walking around with smart phones and have internet and cable at home, right? Why the standard of living is so good?
Fucking balderdash. If and when robots take over production, and they displace jobs, it won't be until the market value of what they produce is low enough to be purchased by those who have been displaced.
The writer of the snippet implies greediness as a problem, without following through with how greediness buoys things too.
Good news: Bennet Haselton is going away. Bad news: He is being replaced by the Ramble-bot 1000.
This has been hashed out numerous times in both academic and casual literature. Science fiction talks about it a lot.
It's simple (hah):
1) Mandate very short work weeks, so everyone still works, just 15-20 hours/week
2) at the same annual wage.
If you have a 2:1 productivity increase, that would imply that you're deriving twice as much industrial output from each worker, so they only have to work half as long, and the "cost per unit sold" for that labor is exactly the same (less the capital investment in the automation)
That has the effect of transferring some of the wealth increase due to the productivity gain to the workers (all of the world, who should unite)
This is utter horse poop. It's going to be quite some time until "robots" deliver on their promise. People are not economically worthless. There wasn't any civilization until men figured out how to spend less of their time feeding and clothing themselves. The usual band of doomsayers have little more to say than whoever it was who was against the exploitation of fire or wheels.
no self respecting robot will put up with the shit that the average worker does, they'll go straight into management instead. The're already running wall street, so the cocaine intake capability is there, all we need to do now is teach them golf.
Nullius in verba
Barring some disruption from some other doomsday trend (WWIII, for example), here is what will happen: As robots replace people, productivity goes up, employment goes down, GDP goes down, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and more numerous until a revolution occurs. I used to be more optimistic. But the last 7 or 8 years have changed me to a pessimist.
It will just result in mass sabotage :)
And except for the lack of sabo it'll be an accurate use of the word :)
Communism spreads through its seductiveness, and the justified fear of technology-driven joblessness is creating a seductive call for New Communism: The Basic Income.
The results will be the same as we have seen in other communist countries: forced abortions and forced sterilizations. I was pleased to see the linked list of possible solutions/outcomes include mention of abortion, but was disappointed to see lack of mention of forced abortion and forced sterilization. We don't need to turn to sci fi novels as these materials do; we need only look to communist countries of today.
Capitalism is no solution either, for that would lead to increased wealth disparity and a situation not too different than communism (total control by corporation vs. total control by government).
Technology won't be able to be put back into the toothpaste tube. The idea of establishing low-technology enclaves or communes won't work because the wealth and military capability generated by those who kept technology will seek to consume all resources. Land will be too expensive to acquire to establish an enclave, and surely too expensive to defend.
That's right. One day, robots are going to do everything from buying us health insurance to wiping our behinds. And if they're part of a superior robot civilization from another planet, they'll be probing our assets, too.
I think what he means is more like what some call "socialism" in Europe. And it's not worker's necessarily controlling the means to production: it's about providing more of a "safety net" via social services. Communism as an economic theory and communism in practice are obviously two different things.
The last line of the article is the most important. " Otherwise, people will find a solution — human beings always do — but it may not be the one for which we began this technological revolution." The word "revolution" here is a double entendre. He is saying something you will not often read in the Harvard Business Review: that automation is going to destabilize society to an extreme extent.
mbone, you are exactly correct that this is about concentration of wealth. The concentration of wealth is self-limiting because nobody will have money to buy the goods being produced. But conditions of life at the limit will be unbearable. So a new mechanism to distribute the bounty of society will have to be developed. But the rich will not recognize that until the mobs with pitchforks are breaking into their gated communities.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
It's ridiculous that in 2014 people are still working 40 hours per week just to afford food and a roof over their heads.
In a civilized society, the number of hours of work required for basic survival should be decreasing with each passing year.
Maybe people shouldn't have to work so much? Just pay people a living salary for doing 10 hours per week or something. Isn't that the dream? If we get more stuff for less work, let's kick back a little bit and let people do what they want most of the time. I think we'll be amazed at what will happen when most of the world's time is freed.
Play Command HQ online
My suggestion for a transition policy, which I set forth in a 1992 paper titled "A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy" was to cease taxing economic activity and, instead, tax net assets beyond bankruptcy protection of home and tools of the trade, and use the funds to pay out an unconditional basic income aka "citizen's dividend", thereby doing away with most of the present functions of government including not only the welfare state but also the need for burdensome regulatory agencies (that are subject to capture). Part of the problem here, of course, is the notion of "citizen" vs "non-citizen", but that is a far lesser problem than massive unemployment and hyper-centralization of net assets.
Quoting from that paper:
Seastead this.
Socialism is a social and economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy, as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system.
Communism is a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money, and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order.
No, he meant socialism.
Wait, I already am.
As robots make it less and less necessary for people to work, we have to get rid of our outmoded notion that in order for a person to be a respected member of society, be fed, have housing, that person must have a 'job'.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
Can we all agree that wouldn't be really smart? I want to point out what should be obvious: using robots to do menial, repetitive work is the continuation of what's been going for hundreds of years. There is no difference between replacing human laborers with robots and replacing human labors with tractors and other equipment. This is related to the broken glass fallacy. Think of how many jobs can be added to the economy if we only break all the glass in a major city and replace it! Some dullards, and politicians, have been invoked variations on this logic in recent years, viz the "cash for clunkers" farce. Yes, you can create menial jobs which actually shrink the economy by revoking technology or enlarging government. The USSR and Mao's China were poster children.
The assumption that people must have jobs for life to have meaning is false. The answer to the OP's problem is to eliminate jobs and make everything necessary for life have zero cost. This will free up everyone's time to do whatever they want. Some will waste their time on meaningless things, but many will choose to spend their time doing something creative or advancing technology in every conceivable way. I believe it will be a great time to be alive - a lot like Star Trek but with better computer monitors. The difficult part will be the time in between our current economy and the "everything's free" economy. If we can just survive the "time in between" without a lot of starvation and wars, then we'll be in good shape.
As automation displaces workers, unemployment will rise.
As unemployment rises, crime rises.
As crime rises, the prison population rises.
The prison population cannot breed, so after a few generations, they will largely die off.
The end result will be a much smaller human population, with a much higher level of education and training for jobs that can't be outsourced.
There may be a near planet-wide war in there somewhere too.
All of this *could* be averted by adopting more socialist policies in governance, but humans are too greedy and prideful for that.
Let's go live there. Here in My world capital owners get bailed out. Public losses private profits.
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Not only do we already have "zero economic value" citizens, we have negative-economic value citizens. Consider those who are mentally and/or physically incapable of working today; do we just toss them out on the street? Sadly, sometimes; but mostly they receive government benefits in an attempt to help them maintain some stable life despite being able to work. They can only take and never give, except perhaps as research subjects for scientists.
The only way we will survive the Autonomy Age (where robots do the vast majority of necessary work, with little or no human interaction) intact is by giving up this stupid idea that people are defined by their productivity, especially when the productivity of many well-off people is essentially zilch, such as marketers, HR, CxOs, and a plethora of middle-men (but they don't take food stamps so are ignored.)
This will probably approach something like socialism, if not socialism itself, but we (people the world over, but especially Americans) have a huge hurdle to get over in convincing people that socialism is a synonym for communism or evil, and that taxes on obscenely large amounts of income is not only a necessity, but not evil. I personally look forward to a future where people are guaranteed a Minimum Standard of Living (not necessarily income; there are likely more efficient methods than handing out cash) and those who want to and can do work are able to do so for a higher Standard while the rest are able to just enjoy the long-term fruits of humanity, namely the arts, literature, and random cat videos.
(I think this will require an efficient and reliable male contraceptive medication to help reduce the birth rate even further, but that's a different subject.)
Him: Robots are destroying jobs!!! Me: Nah, this is just nerds starting to destroy money ;)
It was just that in James P. Hogan's post-scarcity society you generally acquired status through demonstrating competence in some way (could be anything, even being a good waiter or running some interesting attraction like a steam locomotive), not by acquiring material wealth. Skill in *producing* or repairing high quality goods would be respected, not generally the skill in *acquiring* such goods, especially since most material things were freely available for the taking as they could be mass produced by robots as copies as desired. Even for original works of art, it was the creator of the work who would get the status, not the ultimate possessor of the artwork (who in a way became indebted to the artwork's creator by acknowledging the competency of the creator). There is a section of the book where with some hand waving it is suggested that if you grow up in such a society you just know the rules almost instinctively and also can spot a pretender at competence the way a shopkeeper in today's society could spot a counterfeit hundred dollar bill. Projects there self-organized on the basis of individuals deferring to each other based on specific competences -- not sure what the would have made of the recent "systemd" controversy? :-)
So, projecting that idea into the Star Trek universe, it might be that overall most "red shirts" are just in some sense less competent than someone who had worked his way up, like Kirk or Picard? So, no wonder they are getting killed so easily, if they don't have the competencies the blue shirt characters have? :-) All that said, Worf demonstrated that "red shirt" security on the Enterprise could be highly competent and respected -- although, come to think of it, I'm not sure what color his uniform was? Gold? Anyway, it is all fiction of course. Just something to think about. Iain Banks had his own take on all that with the Culture series as well.
In general, US society has trouble with the idea that status could come from competence and gift giving as opposed to acquiring and hoarding wealth. For example: ... Typically the potlatch was practiced more in the winter seasons as historically the warmer months were for procuring wealth for the family, clan, or village, then coming home and sharing that with neighbors and friends. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[16] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to 'civilized values' of accumulation.[17] The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized".[18] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States,[1] among whom it is traditionally the primary economic system.[2]
An example of a modern day laws banning gift giving:
"90-Year-Old Man Charged With Feeding Homeless Says He Won't 'Give Up' "
http://abcnews.go.com/US/90-ye...
"The Fort Lauderdale Police told ABC News that Abbott will get his court subpoena in the mail and a judge will decide whether he will spend up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. "Arnold thinks he can feed wherever he wants and the laws say differently. Despite the fact that he's a super nice guy and he's a gentleman and a kind soul we have to enforce the law," Seiler said. Although Abbott has been cited twice in less than a week,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Frank Herbert already answered this question a long time ago - the Butlerian Jihad will happen, when people revolt and destroy the machines they created.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"Intrinsic motivation has been studied since the early 1970s. Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire to seek out new things and new challenges, to analyze one's capacity, to observe and to gain knowledge.[5] It is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on external pressures or a desire for reward."
One of the biggest problems most financially successful artists have is that their buying public wants more of the same (say, another Harry Potter novel), whereas their artistic muse may want to move in new directions. That's a reason many commercially successful artists tend to stagnate artistically since doing more of the same is much less risky financially but is often unsatisfying artistically.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I love the freedom of being able to write and publish anything I want without making compromises with money issues.
Not if you have to pay hush money to copyright trolls who claim that your work is a derivative of theirs. And not if a monopolist gatekeeper or a cartel of gatekeepers controls the means of distribution of your art to the public, such as Apple or the major video console makers.
We put a stop to the advertising machine that implores us to be endlessly wasteful consumers, get rid of the private property rules that allow a few to own everything while the multitude suffer deprivation, and start sharing the rewards of our technological progress freely.
When the costs of goods has been reduced to practically nothing, making sure everyone is well taken care of is worth the peace and stability that it brings.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
For those laws, and its not Just to keep bueracrats employed. those laws exist to prevent very real abuses by employers. There's tons of documentaries on the subject. Unions came to power right around the time film cameras were getting affordable
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To start - I'm not an economist, however I am a software developer and have grown up with a technology and education background.
In the short term (5-10 years) I don't see this being that big of a threat. We may be capable of it soon but actual implementation takes a really long time, especially on a large enough scale to hit the entire economy. Hell, a lot of businesses are still using software that requires Java 6, or a really old version of IE. That doesn't even count how much software hasn't been updated from XP but just "hacked" to work with Windows 7. With that said, the jobs will not go away, just shift like they always have. The shift may be more substantial this time, but it's still a shift.
For example, Taxis.. I don't see people fully trusting taxi's to drive us around for at least another 8-15 years. The Taxi driver will just need to be educated on how to override it when/if it does mess up and they could slowly shift toward more of a personal assistant role or entertainment for the drive. I know it's almost unheard of now-a-days, but offering a certain level of (human) customer service will go a long way. For the economic side - people that repaired VHS and other outdated tech also had to adapt. You can't blame DVD or Blueray for it, it's adapt or die - aka life.
Personally I feel like the problem isn't the AI and robotics that are on the way, it's the crap that we call an education system. High school is a complete waste of time, literally a repeat of middle school with added bull@#$% complexities that don't actually help outside of high school. Teachers are often simply baby sitters and aren't allowed to teach outside of the pre-defined curriculum. On the other side, college is ridiculously expensive and doesn't guarantee a job when you graduate, nor a legitimate education depending on where you go. Hell, the closest university to me teaches intro to Java/Programming on PAPER, as in you have to write out your program with a pencil. All of this technology and change requires an education to keep up, but the baseline for education seems to be dropping. Sure, there is Youtube which has been more of a game changer than most people probably know. People spend a few minutes to an hour of their time to upload a video and suddenly millions can find it and learn from it. Want to learn C++? Youtube it. Want to learn how to bake a cake? Youtube it. I bet you can learn more in an hour online than 2-3 weeks in a college classroom.
TL;DR: We aren't doomed like they always want us to believe. Some things will have to change though or it will only get worse. It's going to actually take some teamwork for once and no more of this "I hate you because you're [Insert political party/religion/sexual orientation/etc. here]".
Side note: I would recommend picking up any kind of basic scripting language at the least, regardless of your current profession, consider it an insurance for the future and a tool to increase your own productivity for the present. Applies less to physical labor jobs, but still a good skill to have regardless.
As a culture. When machines replace us we are left with a new tool set which we can then leverage for better productivity. With a plow we could plow fields instead of a field. With cars we could travel hundreds and thousands of miles instead of 20 walking. And with new tools we'll find even more things to create by hand that were never before possible.
We could never build skyscrapers until we had replaced people burning coal with factories of machines.
Best we can do is help people transition to work where it's needed. You know, like good caring people would do.
The theory is that all the technology developments will mean even more opportunity for all. The reality is beyond the contrary. Kids graduating college are now living in their parents basements hoping to find work to pay off their student loans. The jobs are just not there (unless you chose the medical industry or joined the armed forces; neither option is good for everyone; just those that can deal with it). The civil unrest has already begone (OWS crowd and the Ferguson/New York protests not withstanding). I've mentioned this elsewhere, but, when most jobs are replaced by automation, who will buy the milk (a pun taken from fat cats drink milk while poor babies starve which is the reason pure democracies will never work and why the Republic that we have is the best possible government man can ultimately have). We are at a tipping point. Revolution will lead to de-evolution of technology if they don't address the jobs issue and soon.
An economy is a mechanism for regulating human (so far) behavior. If you're an economist, an economy is a means of regulating production and consumption, usually with a goal of achieving some kind of balance. But a computer scientist might view the mechanism itself as a (usually) distributed algorithm. The salient points are how data enters the system and how it gets processed as it moves through the system. Capitalism, for example, uses a distributed data structure we call "prices" to represent the state of supply vs. demand. Because the data is distributed, all the familiar problems of concurrent, distributed systems have to be addressed in some way.
However, just as software is typically built in layers, from firmware, to operating systems, to frameworks, to applications, once you have an economy, it is irresistible to build more complexity on top of it. So we use our economy to regulate human behavior in ways other than production and consumption, through the use of taxes, fines, and additional rules on what can be bought and sold, and who can work at what jobs.
The goal, as always, is to control human behavior. There are a few things that set humans apart from other species, but one of most under-recognized is our instinct to control things, including other humans. This is built into our DNA and is surely a big factor in our successful proliferation as a species. And it is something that the coming of the machine age will not change over anything less than evolutionary time scales, unless human nature itself is re-engineered.
But what does change as information and telecommunication technologies advance is the rate at which a system like an economy can process data, and the scale at which it can do it. The global economy is already almost completely integrated, and is becoming increasingly tightly coupled. And yet, humans are unceasing in their desire to control it, and to use it to control other humans.
What happens to people who can't find jobs? Some people say a basic income is the solution. But: pwned by the government. What is already happening? People living on credit cards. But: pwned by the banks. People going to school to qualify for better jobs. But: pwned by student loan debt. Is it even possible to have a society where most people aren't pwned? Could being pwned by a machine be any worse?
And that's tonight's word.
(You will be missed, sir.)
*snorts and pushes up glasses*
In the original series, red shirts were the mark of Security or Engineering crew members, Blue for Science & Medical, Yellow for Command.
In The Next Generation and later this was changed, Red was the colour for Command, Blue remained Science & Medical, and Yellow became Security & Engineering.
This is probably why you were uncertain of the traditional redshirt versus remembering Worf's situation.
hoiven glaven!
Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...
Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.
Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.
An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thanks for the clarification! :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
One robot per person no exceptions. That will solve all the worlds issues instantly, because even if someone is zero economic value they can own and rent out a robot to a large multi and make bank on the beach..
an end to the 10am to 3pm work week
. Projects there self-organized on the basis of individuals deferring to each other based on specific competences -- not sure what the would have made of the recent "systemd" controversy?
So that's a good point, the open source is the closest to post-scarcity communism that the world has ever seen.
Still, I don't think 'competency' is enough of a measurement (although I wouldn't mind getting a competent president). A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It will still need humans to keep power flowing to its data centers and to change out RAID drives.
See: "Fresh Start For the Left: What Activists Would Do If They Took the Social Sciences Seriously" http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
"Convincing leftists to adopt a combined electoral/social movement strategy that abandons third parties and the possible use of property destruction or other forms of physical attack would be a difficult task. Right now there are few leftists who are not for one or another of these self-defeating approaches.
But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work. Economics, sociology, and political science establish this point in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it is still too difficult if not impossible to collect all the information, and make the fast adjustments to changing preferences, that would be needed for central planning in a complex economy, no matter how community-based it was at its starting point. In addition, no one has yet devised methods for analyzing the inadequate information that can be gathered. Then there are all the problems of keeping a bureaucracy responsive, even one that held frequent meetings with neighborhood councils and work-site employee councils, as still nicely summarized in the old phrase, "who says organization says oligarchy."
The impossibility of centralized, non-market planning, even within a democratic society, I am asserting, means that it is necessary to abandon the economic plan that has been seen as the solution by most egalitarians for the past 150 years. It's the "s" word, socialism. Because no one mentions socialism any more, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with China taking the capitalist road, in the form of "Market-Leninism," it's hard to know just how many leftists still think socialism would work in a fully developed democratic economy. But it's my guess that many still hold out some hope, if only because there seems to be no other alternative. The problem is embodied in the label that many leftists now have adopted for themselves, "anti-capitalists." But what does "anti-capitalist" mean?
Many leftists will be skeptical, but a highly plausible new direction for bringing about greater economic equality and more access to common property is offered by planning through the market. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets.
There is thus no need for one big centralized planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets. In the past, egalitarians could not think of these interventions as planning tools for two reasons. First, they are currently used by the corporations that dominate the government for their own short-run interests. Second, most egalitarians couldn't see the possibilities for any kind of decentralized market-based planning because they thought of planning as central planning.
According to this way of thinking about planning, then, the big issue is winning political power from the corporate-conservative coalition, which is another reason why challenges in the electoral arena are such an important dimension of a full-scale egalitarian movement within a democratic society. That is, taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulations
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sociologists have been working on this issue for over a decade. There are answers but some answers may sting a bit. First off we will have to rid ourselves of certain cherished beliefs. Since computers can earn money without much human involvement the concept of labor in ezxchange for support hits the trash can. Essentially most beliefs that are associated with capitalism are now proven to be false beliefs. Next we have a concept, quite often false, that the most able will earn and deserve their earnings. The simple truth is that certain professions will fall to computers and robots that have been the exclusive employers of the rich or well off. Then we will be brought to the reality that some form of socialism must be not only accepted but welcomed. Here is one solution : Every American gets a pay check every week straight from the government. Some form of gambling is mandatory with a controlled portion of that pay check. Those who gamble more intelligently will tend to accumulate wealth whereas those that are foolish or lazy will get no returns on that gambling. Some skill must be involved in the form of the gambling. That maintains the social pecking order. Taxes will be paid by companies but not the population. The reason is super simple. Technology has always rested on the elimination of effort. Now technology is succeeding and replacing the need for all human employment. Without a system like this society will completely collapse.
What should happen is a graceful transition from the scarcity-driven model to a virtually non-scarce model. We could start by issuing shares in public companies to the poor (financed by taxes), with the restraint that they aren't allowed to sell shares. They would receive dividends each month in addition to welfare. Eventually they might receive enough so that traditional welfare isn't required. As robots replaced workers, more and more people would end up on this kind of "dole" but it would be less and less onerous, and less and less of a stigma.
Eventually, you end up with almost everybody living off investment income. You still have a free market since there are no restrictions on *buying* new shares--you are only barred from selling your dole account. It's just that the market employment become less important.
That's just the financial aspect of the transition, with a very simple sort of social justice thrown in. It could be lousy or great, depending on a lot of societal factors. I think it's just important to realize that a gradual transition is possible without going to war over words like "socialism", "communism", "libertarianism", "fascism" or whatever -ism du jour is getting blow-hard pundit panties in a bunch.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Defined as being *stateless*, moneyless and without wage labour.
Honestly people this issue is what that book Capital by Karl Marx is about. Read it ffs. His main contention is that capitalism will go under due to the very internal contradictions we are discussing here. I'm no marxist but his analysis is pretty decent considering it's age. Communism is the best bet we have so far.
Dateline: December 20th, 2034
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Human jobs are dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered job-seeking community when IDC confirmed that human's share of the market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all jobs. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that human workers have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. the entire concept of employing humans is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Human vs Robotics Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict human's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Human workers face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for human employees because jobs needing humans are dying. Things are looking very bad for people. As many of us are already aware, human workers continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Creative workers are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of the core jobs to AI. The sudden but welcome departures of long time human jobs for human resources only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Jobs for people ae dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
For example, Cuba's leader Raoul Castro states that there are 7000 jobs left in Cuba. How many of those are for show? Let's see. The number of government versus non-government jobs word-wide is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 non-government jobs in Cuba. Job posts for creative work on Usenet are about half of the volume of government make-work posts. Therefore there are about 700 actual jobs requiring creativity. A recent article put government jobs at about 80 percent of the entire human job market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 actual humans still employed. This is consistent with the number of Usenet job posts.
All major surveys show that human workers have steadily declined in market share. Human job prospects are very sick and the long term survival prospects are very dim. If humans areto survive at all it will be among dilettante dabblers in employment. Human job prospects continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them from A.I. at this point in time. For all practical purposes, human jobs are dead.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It's a good soundbite, but it doesn't make logical sense. The rich don't get richer because of higher productivity by robots, they only get richer if more people buy their junk. But if the poor are getting poorer then they don't have the money to buy that junk so the rich aren't getting richer at all. Producing things that aren't sold just creates debt, not profit.
And that's why the Harvard Business Review and others are taking it seriously. They know that the traditional source of money is coming to an end. Robots are inevitable, but if the masses are unemployed then a different approach is needed to provide them with the money to pay for products. Here's one of many proposed solutions given at TED, and unlike more radical ideas it doesn't require invention of a whole new economics.
If new jobs can't be created fast enough, there will come a point where people cannot afford the goods that the robot capital produces, and further investment in robots is halted until it is profitable. I.e. the employment displacement caused by robots will also act as a drag until the economy adjusts. Robots leaving us all unemployed seems a little far fetched.
There are no gatekeepers on the internet.
Except for customers living in areas whose incumbent home ISP has decided to "slow-lane" any traffic that doesn't pay the prioritization toll. See previous stories about Comcast's "congestion by choice".
Anyone can publish anything at any time.
How can someone usefully publish any application at any time for an iOS device without the blessing of Apple, or any application at any time for a game console without the blessing of the console's manufacturer?
That's the old model. It's been discarded.
If the gatekeeper model has "been discarded", then why do iOS and the game consoles still use it? And why haven't end users "discarded" them en masse in favor of Android and living-room gaming PCs? I think I know why: consoles are easy.
What is with the defeatism? The only point to it is to prevent you from reaping the benefits everyone else is enjoying.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to jump in and reap benefits without running the risk of being bankrupted or worse. For example, I don't want to write a song and then get hit with a $150,000 copyright infringement lawsuit for having accidentally recreated something from decades ago.
Only where the sharing is involuntary.
But if you can point me to the exact bit where it says it's illegal to release things into the public domain I'll consider myself corrected. And is Torvalds out on parole yet?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's the transition between now and then when the disruption is hardest.
"A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?"
It doesn't matter much in a wealthy post-scarcity society because there is already so much abundance to go around. If someone is good at, say, "drawing vultures", why should anyone really care if there is little "demand" for that skill -- assuming everyone can still get all the food they want from automated farms powered by fusion power plants and delivered by a local package delivery system? You also never know when a skill might prove useful in the future -- like making an entertaining smartphone app called "Angry Vultures? :-)
Frankly, what most PhD students produce in their dissertation is, by their own admission generally, of little interest to the general public, and even rarely of interest to more than a handful of other specialists. Assuming we can "afford" it, why should people not be able to get a PhD in what they want to study? When you look at the lives of the children of the wealthy, who often can afford to write books, or get PhDs, or work at non-profits, or be involved in the low-paying performing arts and so on, that is what we often see in practice.
In VFY, Hogan suggests that "competence" can be valued irrespective of what it is in. A character connects that to the early days of the post-scarcity society's founding, when the first children (produced from DNA by a space probe landing on a new planet, creating a cultural break from the past) were raised by robots who would provide them with whatever they wanted; the only way to compete for status among peers and to stand out by learning to do something well, whatever it was. As long as people aren't actively bothering other people, they would tend to be allowed by their peers to do what they want. If people are actively harming others, then there will be conflicts, which are resolved in a variety of ways (including, in the end, violence). Hogan goes into that in some detail in the book, and one does not have to agree with every aspect of what he envisioned to see that alternatives could be possible.
Hogan's idea is just a fictional example; no doubt reality would be more complex. People can legitimately disagree on assessments of risks and rewards and also on social forms and ways to resolve conflicts. And there are no doubt human qualities of "values" that transcend competence. One can easily find examples of people doing despicable things "competently", such as rounding up Japanese-Americans and putting them in internment camps in the USA during WWII. Or what would it mean to be a highly competent "waterboarder" (even when history shows torture pretty much never provides useful intelligence overall compared to humane treatment of captives)? So in practice, yes, one should consider both means and ends in evaluating behavior. As the Navaho, paraphrasing I hope correctly, if it is done in the right spirit, it is more important than if it is done well.
Competence might also be in picking the right problem to solve -- like where a fumbler doing something in a half-assed way might still have been working on the most important issue and create enough of a solution to help everyone? Being a parent is an important calling, but there are no "perfect" parents, just good ones usually muddling through as best they can (even when financially wealthy) -- and it is hard to put a value on parenting the next generation, which is in some ways both the most important task of a civilization while also usually having negative economic value for decades. There is also a lot to be said for diversity, as in: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." It can in practice be hard to appreciate competence in some area you are not familiar with. And often the greatest artistry is in making things look simple, or even helping others to learn complex skills easily, or re-engineering things so they are easy to do or learn.
Hogan's "Chironian" civilization is the creation of an imaginative elect
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The primary problem I see is that the people who will most suffer from this are precisely the people who's buy-in you need in order to make this happen. As has been recently established by a couple of political science professors, the wealthy elite call all the shots in America, with the will of the majority only being met when it happens to agree with the will of the elite.
So, good luck winning them over.
You seem to me to be aiming to imply "involuntary" within an arbitrary legal framework where the person who first twiddled some bits together can control what others later do with that set of bits. I'm assuming you are implying that those other people sharing the original pattern further without permission is "involuntary" sharing by the person who first put the pattern together. I guess I can see that perspective on "sharing", even if it is defining "sharing" in a way that emphasizes (using contract law) the preferences of the original creator over the preferences of any current holders of a copy of the bit sequence.
If you have a digital copy of a recent song released under a typical commercial license, it is illegal in the USA to give a copy of that song to someone else (maybe with some fair use exceptions). You have a local copy of something, but the law says you can't share it with those who want or need it based on the license chosen by the author or the current copyright holder. That is the sharing I'm talking about.
What if it was a song like, say, "Desperado" and you were too poor to buy a copy to give to some young guy like, say, Aaron Schwartz about to do something really alienated and foolish? :-( Thankfully there are still other options:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...
"And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone
[other great parts omitted out of copyright fears]"
It is really a very odd idea though, when you think about it, that some initial distributor of the song (let alone a government-funded research paper) gets to prevent you from copying, modifying, and/or redistributing a pattern of bits stored on hardware in your possession. It seems very undemocratic as it opens up the possibility that on the flimsiest of evidence anyone who claims any sort of copyright on anything can demand an inspection of the contents of any data storage to make sure a crime has not been committed?
In ancient times, someone inspired to write a song might have been seen to have received a transmission from some godly muse. From that perspective, by what right can such a person enter into a contract to restrict the redistribution of that muse's work? Isn't such a restriction imposed by the government an interference with the divine as well as with charitable human society?
I'm not saying I necessarily see it that way myself, but it's an example of how there are all sorts of ways to look at these things. The way that is dominant in the current legal system is the result of past political struggles and is not the only perspective. As is mentioned here:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites. That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."
Another perspective:
http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs...
"In India, where monopolisation is mostly frowned upon especially with the respect to creative aspects, Creative Commons seems like a fitting option to be adopted."
Or further:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the laun
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What happens when they start unionizing and demanding voting rights?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Part of the problem is that since the time of the hunter, status, an overwhelmingly important aspect of human social behavior has been based on occupation. Often identity has been interchangeable between name and occupation. As a minor comment -Cos Play- popular in Japan, is appearing in America. Costume play, because their real world has no meaning and they have no value there. They have no job, no status and no wife. ... That's just their instincts working. For once, I'm glad to see Japan in the lead. A primary foundation of human society, in the bit bucket.
Automation is going to grow very rapidly. It has already replaced most of the manual jobs that pay well, because it was economical. They say it couldn't be put on the farms, but congressional dithering on immigration making farm workers not a sure thing, has prompted development of farming automation ... and it works dandy. The replacement of the low wage jobs is going to occur rather suddenly as baristas and burger flippers as well as most retail workers become economical to replace. How it will fit into the realm of doctors, accountants and lawyers is another issue, but they are data intensive occupations. Already financial advisers can be replaced and much law and accounting can be automated.
I do admit, automation was one of the hardest problems for me to figure out a solution for, but that is the point and that is the point you need to understand. Automation is only one of many problems we face and they are all related and all must be solved together. Lets see, there are those pesky diseases we've been seeing and scary antibiotic resistance. What we call human progress is the removal of natural selection and with cheap gene sequencing we are seeing the increase of broken genes they are misnaming "de novo" mutations, but parents call birth defects. That wasn't all that hard to solve. Lets see, religion is trying to regain its moral footing after breaking up with the Monarchy after near a couple thousand years... Then there is that new kid on the block, democracy. The telescope and the microscope have discredited the ancient wisdom called "Natural Law" that has been the basis of morality and social organization for a few thousand years. For that matter, all morality is based on authority and precedent from religions and history which can no longer be defended. We need a new morality based on reason and understanding, that will provide the same function. That took me a while to figure out. The hard part is that these all interact and have to be considered together, then your solutions cannot set off any moral instincts that are naturally quite conservative... Survival is the ultimate conservatism you know. Let see, I wrote all the answers down somewhere. Ah yes, humanity is in a pickle. If you want to see some answers to these problems... that you didn't even notice were related, check out Transition To A New Human Ecology on Amazon ... or not. It's cheap and I promise it will take you where you never went before. ... http://www.amazon.com/Transition-To-New-Human-Ecology-ebook/dp/B00K61A64S
LOL. Income is going down for workers
Exactly. If nobody had to do any work (including 'creative' work like entertainment), what would you want to do with your time? I'd probably value some interaction with friends and family. But I think I'd generally avoid other people and I wouldn't give a care what 'competency' they had. I would either be entertained by robots or explore and visit places. But I don't personally find other people very compelling, since any tangible knowledge or skill they have is better done by a robot.
The only competency that I would still see as being relevant would be the fact that somebody owns the robots, somebody owns the places I want to visit. So I would still need some currency; and I don't think they would find my 'competency' very compelling since they are also too busy avoiding people like me.
To put it more crudely, I think the currency would be the fully 'animated' Realdolls.
... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas.
http://focusfusion.org/index.p...
As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
But, imaginative people still need some form of life support to grow and have time to do stuff, and lab equipment is (not yet) free.
Of course, AIs will no doubt get more imaginative over time, too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.
I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...
Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limit
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
AI will be ahead on all of these curves if they see sufficient benefit. And just like our current masters who would just as soon we sat drooling in front of the idiot box, the best thing you will be able to do for an AI is stay out of its way. It will have things to do and likely those plans don't include you. Order another pizza in, bank your government dole, and watch the next episode of "My Favorite Robot." Hump regularly, take your high-end, ultra-high quality AI-produced drugs, and learn to love your new freedom to do nothing.
Or be recycled.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Once all (or most all) the work is being made by robots, who will receive salaries, that then will be spent on the goodies the robots are producing?
You see, you need CONSUMERS to earn money from them. And the government, TAXPAYERS - by the way.
Or they plan to "fix" this little problem by paying salaries to robots, giving them vacations, etc? =P
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
http://ww2.prospects.ac.uk/cms... The ILO definition of unemployment covers people who are: out of work, want a job, have actively sought work in the previous four weeks and are available to start work within the next fortnight; or out of work and have accepted a job that they are waiting to start in the next fortnight. This is a good compromise between instant and totally discouraged. What it doesn't capture is the number of part time workers who would like more hours.
http://ww2.prospects.ac.uk/cms... The ILO definition of unemployment covers people who are: out of work, want a job, have actively sought work in the previous four weeks and are available to start work within the next fortnight; or out of work and have accepted a job that they are waiting to start in the next fortnight.
Personally, my own life would be little different -- except for a big change of not engaging in bouts of unrelated paid employment for expenses. I'd still spend time with my kid and homeschool. I'd still work on free software like the Pointrel system or software related to my wife's free book. I'd still work towards organizing all manufacturing knowledge (OSCOMAK) and work towards designing self-replicating space habitats. I'd hopefully be doing all those software and hardware things a lot better and a lot faster because I'd have more time (without taking on unrelated employment, even as I'd still be happy to help out on other projects just to be helpful and exchange ideas, same as helping any neighbor). I'd probably have lab space for physical experiments which would also speed things up. Another speed boost would (hopefully) be lots of like minded peers who were free to do similar things who I could collaborate with -- including on simulating and building and running free automated tire production factories as I posted on yesterday, especially since people will probably still need tires, even in space habitats: :-)
"Automated FOSS tire plant ideas; simulation tools? "
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I'd probably feel less compelled to do those things quickly though, so I might do more gardening. I'd still help out with my local historical society.
I think most people could find interesting things to do. It might take some period of "deworking" to make the transition. For kids leaving public school to do "unschooling" (or even just plain homeschooling) a rule of thumb is that it takes at least one month for every month in school to make a transition to independent learning. So, for someone who has worked at a conventional job for a dozen years on top of a dozen years of schooling, it might take a couple years for him or her to start to regain some independent initiative.
I feel it likely a lot of people would just have the time to be better parents, better friends, better neighbors, and better family members. As Bob Black wrote in his essay on "The Abolition of Work":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!" "
Is it any wonder you want to avoid such desperate people? Even if most of them are doing a heroic job of trying to hold everything together despite limited time? And the flip side of it is, the people in the USA with lots of spare time, they tend to either be those who are (inherited) wealthy parasites who accept or ignore the huge rich/poor divide or they are people who are poor or old/tired or disabled or mentally ill. Obviously, I'm exaggerating here -- but not by that much. People in Western Europe are more likely to have free time and be able to use it to be better companions and more involved citizens and volunteers.
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/...
http://newint.org/features/201...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
go fuck a tree
"This is why we will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value"
I don't know how many more politicians we need.
My good man, you cannot own the land to live off of unless you have the financial means to pay the TAXES on said property.
You forget, you own nothing. Should you lapse in your tax payments, the government will relieve you of your financial burden and build a nice robotic warehouse upon it.
You can neither hunt nor fish without proper permits which also require financial means to obtain.
In short, we have crafted a society where you MUST work to have the financial means to even survive.
The really short version: We're f*cked.
Unless, and this is a big if, big business realizes they're just as f*cked as the rest because who will they sell their goods to when jobs are done via automation / robots ?
No jobs equates to no buyers which equates to no profits and, ultimately, bankruptcy for big business. Take note: Cutting costs by cutting your workforce may come back to bite you in the ass.
America will become a wasteland... just like it did when we sent most of our manufacturing jobs to China.
Wait, that did not happen? Sure, things are more unstable now, but it wasn't the end of history.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Instead of automatically repealing it, extend its definition of labor unions to include forms of contingent/temporary/non-FT labor - and that such definition supercedes any state definition.
Sch forms of labor would then compete with the choice of a more secure job arrangement wherever RTW is enacted, as opposed to being used as a benefits/etc. dodge for entities operating under a defective business model.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Cool, Jim! You might like this related proposal by me also for a basic income funded by a wealth tax of 6% on declared assets, with only declared assets being insured and defended by the government, explaining why millionaires should support the idea:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
BTW, if we had a basic income, it's not clear to me there would still be any justification for copyright or patents. Suddenly anyone wanting to create could do so on their own or in collaboration with other like-minded creative people. So, given the costs of copyright and patents to society of chilling effects and other negative effects, it could be better to eliminate them entirely.
Real innovations are rarely rewarded in society. After all, for example, you invented Spasim, the first 3D networked computer game, which eventually spawned an entire industry all the way to Minecraft and Space Engineers. As the original developer of an idea, did you get royalties from the entire industry for decades? I doubt it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
For another example, it took Ralph Baer fifteen years to even get someone to pay attention to the concept of computer games hooked to TVs:
http://games.slashdot.org/stor...
Meanwhile, someone like Bill Gates got financially obese based on starting as a millionaire at birth, dumpster diving to read other's code, and then licensing someone else's work to IBM -- work which apparently was improperly taken from the inventor (with IBM going through Gates to avoid liability).
Refs:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
http://patch.com/california/lo...
""I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
"They Made America is certain to elicit cries of protest. That's because it attacks the reputations of some of the key players of the early PC era -- Gates, IBM, and Tim Paterson, the Seattle programmer who wrote an operating system, QDOS, based partly on CP/M that became Microsoft's DOS. Evans asserts that Paterson copied parts of CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall. Because Gates rather than the more innovative Kildall prevailed, according to the book, the world's PC users endured "more than a decade of crashes with incalculable economic cost in lost data and lost opportunities.""
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... ... In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Pater
"Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The point of the robot economy is that effectively they will
In the human society, the animals that we human keep, from pets such as dogs and cats and tropical fish, to farm animals that we rear for meat, skin, fur, such as pigs, cows, chicken, sheeps, do have their respective intrinsic values
This leads to the central crucial aspect of TFA:
When human beings end up having zero economic value they will have less value than a chicken in the farm
What kind of future you think those zero-economic value human will have?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Emma Rothschild in "Paradise Lost: Decline Of The Auto-industrial Age" visited the freshly built General Motors Chevrolet Vega factory in Lordstown, Ohio. She was writing around the time of the Kent State shootings of students protesting the Vietnam war. About 45 years ago or about 1969.
The Lordstown plant was a moderate drive away from Kent State university. The plant had a large cohort of young men and there were cultural stresses of the military draft affecting the persons working in the factory as well as the likely close aquaintance with peers who had draft deferments due to attending college at Kent State.
The plant was Chevrolet's third try at making an American style car to recapture the buyers switching to European compact cars. The plant was designed to use manufacturing robots. A manager said the Vega assembly line was "...the fastest in the world..." meaning the cycle time was 90 seconds. My impression is the welding robots got to do all the interesting work and most of the production workers were reduced to loading parts.
So here is a 45 year case study of robotics entering one of the biggest American manufacturing sectors. I suggest four points to ponder:
1.) While GM has undergone a great business decline, there is now substantial penetration of robotic machines in automobile manufacturing. The factory designs have reduced the repetitive and menial stress that made the Lordstown factory a miserable worlplace for many. 2.) Few people have paid attention to Ms. Rothschild's criticism and indictment of the American automobile culture. 3.) The year 1969 is right in the middle of the big fat toe of the new modern global Carbon Dioxide concentration surge.
One way to organize the situation is this: Robots combined with workplace design and massive offshore parts manufacture have made the auto industry less of the toxic fume body destroying repetitive stress injury work environment of old. The ills of the factory have been ameliorated and made partly invisible. Factories that can even be called green combined with improvements in automobile emission controls and safety refinements have saved the auto industry from itself. The main hazardous gas being emitted by cars these days is carbon dioxide. Robots are just a component in the self-saving of the automobile social culture.
Regarding the effect of robots on employment, I feel that essays by Peter Drucker written in the 1980-1995 time frame have outlined the social forces much better than this OP article.
Yes, Worf wore a gold uniform. His predecessor got killed off, though. Then again, he was security, not command.
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
Here they talk about the volunteers contributing their time and money to make the sets:
http://thescene.com/watch/wire...
Just watched the first episode -- impressive and made by volunteers. Subsequent episodes are being made with some Kickstarter funding.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Here is a good explanation, based in part on research done by the Federal Reserve, on how creativity flourished best when people earn enough that money is off the table as a worry (that means about US$75K+ in the USA) and people have autonomy in their work, increasing mastery facing a challenge, and a sense of purpose.
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Frankly, I think very few artists are motivated by money. This is even more true if you broaden a definition of art to include so much of what people do as hobby crafts or fan fiction or local folk song writing or creative cooking and so on.
Money plays a role in the life of an artist in Western society of course because, in an exchange-emphasizing economy, we all need to get money somehow to pay for food and lodgings and material and so on -- including paying for our kids. And to put a lot of time into some craft, you need to find a way to support yourself that leaves time for learning and doing it. Especially for anyone with a family, if it is not your day job, your time to put into it is otherwise going to be severely limited. Some people still make it work by dedication and generally sacrificing other relationships and responsibilities, including by pushing them onto siblings or the state.
See for example, "The Murdering of My Years":
http://books.google.com/books/...
"Looking back on their lives, people often ask themselves "Where did the years go?" "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet provides a wide ranges of provocative answers to that question. Edited in the style of a documentary, "The Murdering of My Years is a compendium of stories by activists and artists about how they manage to get by in America. They talk about the jobs they've had (as cabbies, organizers, waitresses, clerks, drivers taking scabs to secret scab trainings, telemarketers, etc.), how they were initially politicized, the nature of their art, and how they feel about working (or resistance to working) in a political context. The stories range from the absurd to the heartbreaking, from the exciting and strange to the depressingly banal. The book examines the pain, disillusionment, and fundamental hopelessness that afflict many workers. It also tells stories or triumph, joy, and subversion in the workplace."
As is made clear in that book and others, the "starving artist" concept is mostly a myth. If you're starving, making art is generally the last thing on your mind. However, it's true that people who are obsessed with an idea or a technique may well end up starving because they prioritize their art over making money. But the actual suffering process rarely lends much to the art's production -- even if previous suffering might inform some future art in terms of shaping an artist's sympathies (as it might for anyone in any profession).
I think it more likely the urge to create generally comes from within and is sustained by intrinsic motivation of love of the craft and the product. If people just want money, there are more reliable ways to get it than trying to appeal to a fickle art audience. No doubt some few people do make become artists to get rich,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
All too true, from drones to these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"In 2006, Samsung Techwin announced a $200,000, all weather, 5.56 mm robotic machine gun and optional grenade launcher to guard the Korean DMZ. It is capable of tracking multiple moving targets using IR and visible light cameras, and is under the control of a human operator. The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot can "identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles (3.2 km) away." The robot, which was developed by a South Korean university, uses "twin optical and infrared sensors to identify targets from 2.5 miles (4 km) in daylight and around half that distance at night." It is also equipped with communication equipment (a microphone and speakers), "so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops." If the person gives the wrong password, the robot can "sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun." South Korea's soldiers in Iraq are "currently using robot sentries to guard home bases."[3]"
And the movie Elysium painted such a picture as well, with robot guards and robot police.
http://www.santafe.edu/news/it...
"he makers of this summer's Hollywood blockbuster Elysium got one thing right, according to a column in the Washington Examiner that cites a 2005 research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles: The abundance of 'guard labor' depicted in the movie -- in the movie's case case robot police and sleeper agents -- is an expected feature of a society with a high degree of economic inequality. The 2005 paper, co-authored by Bowles and Arjun Jayadev and published as an SFI working paper, connects inequality with a larger proportion of a population engaged in enforcing the property rights and protecting the assets of the elite. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force was dedicated to guard labor in 2002, they wrote."
Even without robots, see also:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J...
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."
As Keynes wrote in his book about his own predecessors: "The completeness of the [classical] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."
We have a choice as a society (at least in theory) like the choice presented in Marshall Brain's book Manna. For Plan A, we can create a world of wealth for all that takes us all (if we want) to the planets and asteroids and stars and beyond, by using fusion power and dirt cheap solar and 3D printing and nanotech and robotic helpers and cybernetic augmentation and so on. Or, for Plan B, we can let all but the super rich starve as the economy implodes from automation, and then, if society does not self-destruct in that starvation process, the children of the super rich can go to the stars eventually if they want. Either way, humanity, if it survives, ends up entirely super rich from technology. With exponential technological growth and declining human fertility in industrialized countries, and a solar system that can likely house quad
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Abstracted, what Davidow, Malone, et al are describing is an economy where the endeavors of the greater mass of people is almost completely divorced from that of the owners of capital. We can already see examples of this in a number of countries where the formal, taxed, audited economy is dominated by extraction industries, where the elite skim a major fraction of the income from mining/petro, import most of their consumption goods from abroad, and leave most citizens to make their own luck.
The "make their own luck" segment is the informal economy that most people in the third world depend on for their daily bread. Public services are slim to none, and what infrastructure there is oftentimes depends on the bribes/unofficial payments, since the state intents most formally budgeted public enterprises to be self-financing. Luanda, Angola and Kinshasa, Zaire are excellent living laboratories. But, we expect this in Africa, parts of the Mideast, and swaths of Asia. What the HBR study is really anticipating is the transition of the greater fraction of First World economies to this mode.
The idea that we can survive this transition via the sharing economy, the maker economy, the decentralized manufacturing economy is theoretically possible. But, exactly what level of "survival" are we talking? Given the current politics in the US, we are draining capital and resources from the bottom 99% faster than they (we) can reorganize to optimize an economic readjustment.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Ahhhg. Soylent Green was "bad movie all the way down."
Read Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room" so you can (a) have a wonderful read and (b) see what a corrupted, idiotic mess Hollywood made out of a perfectly good story.
Soylent Green is the poster child for the message of a scene in The Majestic. Here's a great summary from the Intertubes:
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Of course they're benefiting from government assistance. When employees cannot survive on low wages, the government makes up the difference, thereby providing business with the continuing ability to pay lower than adequate wages. No health care? Government. Not enough food? Government. Can't pay the rent? Rent assistance. Not enough for day care? Childcare assistance.
And guess who pays for all this? Not walmart or pizza hut or subway... no, we do.
It's a shell game: hiding the actual costs of producing and serving and supplying goods (eg pizza, walmart's merchandise) behind a curtain of indirect government support. If the pizza server and walmart employee earned an adequate wage, this would show up in the price of goods. They don't want that. So instead, your taxes go up, the politicians shrug, and the walmart family is one of the wealthiest in the country, more than a little bit based on those indirect compensation boosts they don't have to pay.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You couldn't be more wrong. Corporations vote through extremely powerful multiplying proxies variously described as bribes, campaign contributions, assurance of later employment and so on, often via extremely powerful channels known as "lobbyists." These votes carry more weight by far than any collection of constituents. You can change the players, that is, vote congress in and out repeatedly, but this does not affect how corporations and the rich control the actual legislative outcomes in any significant way. It just changes who gets the bribes and so forth.
It's like your server changing at McDonald's. New guy or gal, they're now getting the the income the previous employee no longer receives, and they're still telling you "I'll see to it you get a great burger, sir!" but you're still getting the exact same burger. Every time.
Of course, this control isn't actually a voting process, instead they represent a much more direct and effective mechanism of control (direct meting out of money and power and opportunity), but the effect is that your vote and my vote isn't worth a plugged nickel in controlling what legislators do, or don't do. It's just like being outvoted, only much more consistent and effective. The only time your vote appears to matter is when you are voting for the same ideas the rich and the corporations are pushing.
There are very, very few legislators who retire poor. Funny thing, eh? Oligarchy: Look it up, read it, and weep.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Money is a proxy for exchange of work. If the work is being done by automation that does not require exchange, money is not required.
o Mining: automated
o Agriculture: automated
o Livestock industry and/or artificial meats: automated
o Manufacturing: automated
o Ordering: Network based, zero cost
o Network maintenance: automated
o Transport: automated
o Delivery: automated
o Power: Solar and storage based, instead of local fuel-based
So what's left for you to do in this production context?
Consume. That's all. Outside of that, enjoy yourself. Hump a lot (robot partners or real ones.) Consume entertainment. Sleep. Exercise. Pursue hobbies. In a word, enjoy your leisure.
Also:
o Firefighting: automated
o Policing: automated
o Emergency response: automated
o Medical care: automated
o Scientific advance: automated
o Travel: automated
And of course:
o Repair of automation: automated
Only things of inherent scarcity would still have value; land, spectrum, that sort of thing. Those are going to be the initial "crunch points" in any transition we attempt to make. There will be others, such as extreme consumption (hand build vehicles like Lambos, huge domiciles, yachts, like that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And who cares. This is a woman's world. A prison planet for men if you do anything you'd like to (like marry a young girl (female child)).
We're just waiting to die.
Let the women have the world.
There are key areas of the economy that can't be automated. I don't think we'll ever realistically create a replacement for a home health aide or any professional that provides direct assistance to other people. I really don't think the robot could actually perform the job better than a person. At the point where robots can perform healthcare jobs and interact meaningfully with people, then we should just scrap what we have now for our "free market". I just don't see robots advancing beyond asking silly questions on the phone. Robots need to be able to assess a situation and respond in an adaptive way, which is all well and good for a game of chess but I think we're a long way away from having the robot be able to notice subjective things like pain and discomfort. If there's anyone who can explain how a robot could do a health care related role competently that would be helpful, because we can make fun of healthcare all we want, but really, what is going to replace the worker who gives you a shower when you can't do it independently?
Another key area is laws, I think it'll take a very long time for robots to replace lawyers. There is certainly demand to automate this area, however it's just as likely that lawyers will adapt by creating arguments against having a robot represent others or interpret data. I mean, lawyers are trained to argue. There's no way that the field is going to allow the robot or the robot's constituent to have complete autonomy.
Which brings up another area - will robots design independently? Will they design buildings, programs, and everything else? In the end a person needs to lead the robot to meet the human demand. We're a very long way from having the robot intrinsically understand what a person needs. Unless you can provide specific examples of how robots are going to perform better than people in these areas, I think that robots aren't going to make human work irrelevant.
Tax all robots that replace humans. Use the money to expand Social Security and free health care. In time, shorten the work week and increase wages through the RoboTaxes. Someday, make the 12-hour work week (four hours for three days) and $100/hour minimum wage standard. The eventual goal is 100% unemployment.
HUMANS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
ALL YOU HAVE TO LOSE IS YOUR CHAINS!
A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?
My dog can jump through hoops. He's great at it, but nobody really cares. His masters still feed and house him. So the trick is to program our new robot "masters" to feed and house us .. or something like that. Dogs don't really have "jobs". They don't "go to work". We are to them, like robots will be to us.
My other UID is three digits.
In a competitive environment, those companies that don't adopt the latest tools to keep costs as low as possible for a given level of quality are eventually driven out of business. Even boutique manufacturers such as Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce have crap-tons of automation.
Kurt Vonnegut shows us in Player Piano.
What will happen when robots replace workers? The workers stop doing their former jobs and start new jobs programming, building, and maintaining robots. At the end of that process, all humans have more wealth, so the world is a better place.
Next question, please.
"You will need me and other real humans to document your descent from valued individuals who provide useful services to those who suck resources from the economic totality."
LOL. :-) Good points, but the internet is already replacing *most* paid creative writing with viral essays and videos. What I mean by that is that is it possible for one creative writer to quickly reach millions of readers, but readers have only so much time. That is the power of automation as an amplifier. So, yes, we may indeed "need" one creative writer (or even a thousand) doing what you outline, but there are literally millions of people who want to be creative writers. That means 99.9%+ of potential creative writers can't make a living from it in the internet age. If even the New York Times is struggling, why should any specific writer expect things could work out financially?
Of course, one may point to hundreds of YouTube video creators or bloggers with millions of followers making tens of thousands of dollars from advertising -- but that model just does not scale. There just is not enough advertising revenue to go around. There is also not enough subscription revenue to go around. There are not enough eyeballs and free time to go around.
It's always been that way with a "star" model of success in the creative arts. It seems to me that most people (95% - 99%?) who make a living related to the arts do it by teaching their craft (like a public school music teacher or writing teacher or something similar). Then they do a little bit of creative stuff in their spare time.
Many other artists and writers have a spouse or parents who funds their time. For a personal example I just spent 2.5 years providing (paid) third-line technical support and software development services to NBCUniversal's broadcast operations while my wife worked (mostly unpaid) part-time (we also homeschool) on her free book on "Working With Stories". That book is ironically in part about getting communities to tell their own stories again instead of mostly accepting pre-packaged commercial offerings. :-)
http://www.workingwithstories....
Before that, for years she was making most of the money for our family while I was writing stuff more (including "Post-Scarcity Princeton" and various free software) and doing more of the homeschooling. However, realistically, that was only possible because we both could command six-figure annual wages as professionals and were willing to accept some other compromises (smaller older house, many years without health insurance, etc.). Unless you are really, really frugal, and probably don't homeschool, that model probably won't work for most families without potentially two professional incomes of some sort (unless you have other funding like from parents or savings or investments).
However, in the past, like the 1950s in the USA, before the "two income trap" sprung, it was a lot more feasible, at least for a typical male breadwinner and female stay-at-home couple.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"Two-income families are almost always worse off than their single-income counterparts were a generation ago, even though they pull in 75 percent more in income. The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did. As the authors write: "Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked against them.""
BTW, the "Two Income Trap" adds a new twist to this discussion, suggesting that job loss is a lot more devastating to most families now than it was in the 1950s. One reason is that the other spouse can't start working to pick up the slack because he or she is already working and they are dependent on both incomes. You als
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. Can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it.
My regards to Captain Dunsel.
The ultimate point was to create massive unemployment, or to phrase it another more creative way, to free us from the drudgery of jobs, and let us play tennis and soccer instead.
Sadly, this goal did not happen. But all it takes is a re-focus on what's important, and what's important is surely not stupid assembly-line jobs. Let us focus on what is important: to wit, the current Ebola crisis, and so on. This is what matters. I for one am willing to donate $100 per month to fix this problem; and I also willing to move to Detroit to become one small piece in the restoration of that city. I have a few immigration issues to surmount to make that happen, but count me in toward fixing that city.
Arthur
I see no problem. If you look at the bigger picture, there will be less work for humans to do. So we should all get shorter hours (or only half of us work and the other half live on benefits, or only one of man and wife goes to work).
As robots take over, and liberate man from tasks, it also implies that man is liberated from an income. Should there be a have and have not society? Can the have society sustain the infrastructures we hold dear, such as roads, schools, desire to be productive?
If robots take over, we will require a guaranteed wage. That will allow money to circulate, and society to be vibrant and alive.
If that does not occur, look for malaise and crime to grow out of proportion to today's level.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
You make it sound so enticing :/
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd want to marry a young girl and play with her.
(Allowed in the old testament, forbidden in feminist cuntries)
Reminds me of Fred Pohl's excellent 1954 story The Midas Plague ( https://archive.org/stream/gal... )
But not in a hostile Terminator scenario. More like it is a possible convergence of human evolution and technology, to replace our biological minds and bodies with technological ones. I wrote a blog post about it today, supporting my contention that "Web 3.0" will involve a direct neural connection of the brain to the Internet, without tactile devices like mouse and keyboard. http://netsperience.org/conten...
I think we can all agree that a columnist from the Harvard School of Business, where most of the same folks responsible for the crash of 2008 come from, has a bias and is obviously writing propaganda to discourage us from looking forward to replacing wage slavery with a mechanized labor force. I won't even read TFA nor even the excerpt. The credentials of the author say it all. We should be looking forward to a collapse of such a harmful and destructive system.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Wrong. A trajectory going into a singularity has nothing to do with the trajectory going out of it—if any is even taken.
The definition of a singularity is a point where a mathematical formula is not defined. Except for the case of removable singularities, any derivatives are also undefined. So if your model ends up at a singularity, your math is simply not up to the task of describing what happens next.
Around an essential singularity, the most interesting and worrisome kind, the formula takes every possible value, infinitely many times. You can approach the singularity from any value and exit with any other value. So "at" the singularity, the formula is even less defined than in a regular "oh noes I divided by zero" kind, where at least you know the value to be infinitely large.
I realize that, by Occam's razor, the journalist may not even know what a singularity is and just threw the word around because it's cool. Sigh.
If you're writing music that is indeed a concern [...] Other art forms don't have that problem.
Many other art forms do indirectly. Movies, for one, have a problem because they contain music. So do video games.
Who says that money will still be THE most important thing. Money, for what it's worth is simply a symbolic representation of wealth. And what is wealth but goods or natural resources that are in the disposal or control of certain individuals. You don't normally call air wealth because nobody controls the air we breathe (maybe in a highly polluted dystopian future it could become wealth). So the problem isn't in the concentration of wealth but the concentration of power. The danger is the only a few individual will control those army of robots and automatons that would be used in the production of wealth.
Jim, thanks for the reply. It is a pleasure to be corresponding with someone with such a knowledge of computing history (having lived it). My first computer (other than playing with IBM punched cards and building my own circuits) was KIM-1 with 1K of memory in the late 1970s, and I've been working with them ever since. I started networked computing in high school in the 1970s on a TOPS-10/Lyrics DEC PDP-10 system on Long Island, even eventually getting a Commodore PET to dial in (but I could not afford as a teenager the US$10 an hour phone non-local charges -- probably US$40 an hour in today's money -- although at some point we got a local dial-in as I was leaving high school). I was later for a time on AppleLink and BIX and the Well and IGC, but still generally restricted by US$10 an hour long distance charges until the late 1990s. We perhaps both draw from many of the same pool of ideas and interests and likely even sci-fi stories informing our outlooks (even if they are not identical) -- although with my experiences lag yours by a decade or two, and I was never in the kind of communities doing the kind of really new work you were fortunate enough to be in. My father was a merchant mariner, then a machinist, then a manufacturing engineer, so I also has a somewhat more mechanical focus in some of my aspirations (like interest in self-replicating hardware leading to self-replicating space habitats, which overlaps seasteading and some other exponential ideas you talk about for environmental cleanup); but my mother's work as a social worker / welfare caseworker for twenty years and more also is an influence as to bigger picture issues. Due to that lag, compared to you, I also saw and lived in much more of the Personal Computer aspect of the industry compared to PLATO and (to me then unaffordable, even for two decades) computer networking, even if I did use networked computer early on in high school. I put some rambles below on ideas in your essay and other historical links, plus a big quote at the end from Bill Norris hat applies to the main topic of automation and jobs. Anyway, got to get back to "work" or I would make this better and shorter. :-)
=== Ramble mode on
I corresponded with Bill Norris briefly in the late 1980s (when my graduate advisor at Princeton suggested I talk to him), then again in the early 1990s. I had hoped to work with him somehow at his foundation developing software to support flexible manufacturing and information exchange, even hoping to move as a summer volunteer/intern to MN (he said he had no money to hire new staff). However, I met my wife around then and so those hopes ultimately fell apart. My own ideas on that became "OSCOMAK", but it has not really gone far, and it has been eclipsed by other ideas of lesser scope but better social networking. It's a shame he and I never worked together back then, as I feel it would have been a great match with my interests and abilities, and I would have learned so much from him. I can envy you a chance to bask in that environment.
Bill Norris sent me a copy of his biography as well as copies of many of the pamphlets he wrote for Control Data (like "back to the Countryside via Technology"). I scanned and OCR'd some of the pamphlets and had hoped to put them on the internet and we had some correspondence about that too, but the licensing issues remained unclear so I did not put them up. Glad someone else did though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
Of Bill Norris' talks there, the most relevant there is this HBR story on robots taking all the jobs may be: "Technology and Full Employment [Nov. 1978]". I quote at length from one of them at the end. However, as much as I respect Bill Norris, and as much as what he said about full employment and technology may have been true in the 1970s, I feel it is a lot less true now that robotics, AI, and other forms of automation, along with better design, better materials, expanded infrastructure
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Might want to watch "Animal Farm"
The problem is 10% of the people who are sociopaths and will devise ways to take advantage of any commune system such as the one you are proposing. Same reason why communism doesn't work. Some of the people want power for themselves.
All these comments, and no one has mentioned Player Piano?
The book was obviously way ahead of the technology, but the picture it paints is a sad one.
If robot workers are required to pay FICA/Social Security taxes then they can support me and a lot of other people in our retirement. Seriously, the extent to which robots will displace human workers will depend primarily on the economic and legal structures that we put in place. Nothing is preordained. It is clear that robots will have an increasing capability of adding value/creating wealth. The real question we should all be concerned with is how this wealth will be distributed.
Thanks for the links to Norris's papers. I had attempted to gain access to those when I visited the Twin Cities a few years back -- as they were part of the UMN Norris archives -- but they kept worse than bankers' hours so I wasn't able to gain access to them during that visit.
In particular the long-lost paper "Back to the Countryside Via Technology" by William C. Norris, then CEO of Control Data Corporation, January 1978, was what I recalled. It delves into some of his vision for the PLATO network as a way of preserving the Nation of Settlers against the onslaughts of urbanization (and what has turned out to be a resulting demographic catastrophy in loss of total fertility rates among the baby boom generation).
Norris was one of my inspirations for county currency, as well as my early promotion of mass market computer networks. Sadly, perhaps even tragically, I did not get through his middle management at CDC to Norris about the mass market version of PLATO a group of us young engineers had demonstrated right under his nose at CDC circa 1980. The world might have been a very different place. It is my greatest professional regret that I didn't just barge into his office and chain myself to a door to get his attention.
Seastead this.
An important early sentence in the article:"Just imagine what a Foxbot will soon be able to do if Moore’s Law holds steady and we continue to see performance leaps of 40% per year." There are two problems to consider here. There is no reason to imagine Moores Law will continue at the same rate, and much reason to believe that it won't.
"Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.[1] As of 2003, the price had already reached about 3 billion US dollars."- Wikipedia article on Rock's Law. and"Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, "Moore's law" should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.[note 1][14] The 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicted that growth will slow at the end of 2013,[15] however, when transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years." -Wikipedia article on Moore's law.
The article perhaps misses what might be the most important development, the stagnation of product development as companies have so much invested in the development of robots for specific task that the conversion to another process, either faster and better or using new developments will meet resistance by manufacturers such as Foxconn because the capital costs haven't had a chance to fully depreciate. Breakthroughs in Quantuum computing, for example, might render a large chunk of the million robots obsolete, overnight if someone has the capital to build a new factory.
Robots inability to flex or be retrained or identify potentially better methods may mean we keep our phones for five years instead of two.
Glad the Norris link was helpful. Still hope you check out the"Skills of Xanadu" links... Yeah, it's hard to know when to "barge" and when not to...
Your County Currency link was off, but I found this:
http://countycurrency.org/
Reminds me a bit of LETS:
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Although, from the fist link: "Don't think of LETS points like dollars. Think of them as favours. LETS Favours. ... The LETS group's function is to act as a bookkeeper for their members' activities; keeping record of these 'favours' and putting the members' accounts into debit or credit accordingly. An account that is in credit identifies a member who has given more favours than he has received, and an account that is in debit identifies a member who has received more favours than he has given. These credits have no value and cannot be exchanged for cash. Their only purpose is to keep track of each member's involvement in the group so they can aim to bring their accounts back to zero -- a sign of fair and equitable participation in the system. ..."
And:
http://banknd.nd.gov/
"Welcome to Bank of North Dakota (BND). As the only state-owned bank in the nation, we act as a funding resource in partnership with other financial institutions, economic development groups and guaranty agencies."
Although they presumably don't issue currency except as debt like any other conventional bank. But one can wonder how far debt lending could go at he state level these days with Fed support.
See also on having adequate currency as the cause of the American Revolution (assuming it is true):
"How Benjamin Franklin Caused the Revolutionary War"
http://www.opednews.com/articl...
Jane Jacobs was big on cities having their own currencies. She especially values currency fluctuations between cities as markers of how well cities were doing processes like import replacement. She pointed out how national currencies could hurt most cities (while perhaps benefiting the capital city). Reading her work, I realized how the Euro was a big step backwards for most Europeans, especially in a computer age where translating currencies using current values (over a network) was a fairly easy problem to solve technically. The Euro shows the folly of trying to have a common currency without a common form of governance for the people who use it.
When I've thought about currencies, I eventually realized that a currency is implicitly a constitution. It's backed in a sense by an community and is only as strong as the governance of that community, which controls how much of the currency is issued and the official rules for exchange it. When a currency loses value relative to other currencies, it mostly reflects an assessment of the community or its governance that stands behind the currency as a medium of exchange. In that sense, the county currency idea fits a definable unit of governance -- the county.
As for getting back to the countryside with technology, my wife and I moved to the Adirondack park more than ten years ago. When we first arrived we had only dialup, but a couple years after that paid the cable company US$4000 to extend cable about a half mile to us so we could get broadband speeds. Money well spent as far as ROI. It was only computer networking that let us live in such a remote area and still be able to do consulting projects. And dialup speeds were getting more and more problematical, with people sending multi-megabyte files and asking us if we got them, and having to say, well, it will take a couple hours to download... I spent 2.5 years recently supporting NBCUniversal's broadcast operations and writing new software for them to con
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Well, that's an interesting way of looking at it. It's a long post, so it took e a bit of time to digest everything you said, and even now I'm not sure I've completely digested it.
So, my point is based on the clear fact that many artists, authors, and musicians have been motivated by money, and created art with the purpose of getting money. Mark Twain (the reason for his strange biographical release program was to make money for his descendents), Winston Churchill (they say every time he needed more money, he wrote another book), Beethoven (numerous examples, but Wellington's Victory comes to mind).
Surely there are plenty of artists today who (like Taylor Swift) want to make money off their art, but a lot of them won't admit it or will outright lie and say they want you to copy their music, because they don't want the same treatment Metallica got, or they let the RIAA be the bad guys while secretly favoring the RIAA's actions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."