Would You Bet Against Sex Robots? AI 'Could Leave Half Of World Unemployed'

Machines could put more than half the world's population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence's threat to the economy should not be understated. Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow, said that technology presents a more subtle threat than the masterless drones that some activists fear. He suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-class jobs and exacerbating inequality. "Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever, which is finding meaning in life after the end of 'in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread'," he said. "We need to rise to the occasion and meet this challenge."

Comments

Its always been like this

[MichaelSmith]

Hand tools put some people out of business. Domesticated farm animals put people out of business. Steam powered machinery, calculating machines. Literally every tool ever invented has cut out menial jobs and increased worker productivity. And we are better for it.

Re:Its always been like this

[MichaelSmith]

A totally unemployed person in a western country today would still be better off than a fully employed person 1000 years ago. You need to compare like with like. There will definitely be more unemployed people in our future, but that may not be a bad thing.

Re:Its always been like this

[Cruciform]

There is already enough wealth to eliminate poverty and inequality. It's just distributed and horded in such a way as that doesn't occur.
No CEO is worth double digit millions of dollars while laying off thousands of employees at the same time to "cut operating costs".

Re:Its always been like this

[FlyHelicopters]

What will really happen? Society will be so rich that it will decide to feed and house everyone on earth, just because.

And when people have nothing to do but have babies and we end up with 50 billion people, will that still be true?

100 billion?

Or do you plan to tell people who is allowed to have kids and who isn't?

Re:Its always been like this

[Dutchmaan]

"It's not "distributed", it's earned.

Tell that to the people who actually do the work CREATING the wealth.

while the person who pulls the levers of control is certainly more responsible for the end success or failure of a given enterprise and should be compensated or (punished - LOL, yeah right), it is GROSSLY disproportionate to the reward/punishment of those who actually do what is necessary to create that success or failure.

Re:Its always been like this

[Lost Race]

We choose the better future, of course. The path to that future is not simple or easy, though, and we have to proceed very carefully to avoid a lot of suffering and chaos.

AI doesn't just put people out of their current job, it puts them out of every possible job. We need to find something to do with all the unemployable people. And we can't really afford another world war to sort it out for us.

Re:Its always been like this

[Anonymous Coward]

What amazes me is that so many people now are just willing to throw away Capitalism entirely. Yes, it can be abused, but that is what responsible consumers and government regulation is for. Yes, imagine that, consumers choosing to not buy a company's services or products due to the unethical behavior of a company. But hey, they means people would have to think and act responsibly, which is apparently not in fashion. Instead of behaving like adults, so many people apparently prefer to try Communism, which was a miserable failure.

By the way, any of you who went to see the recent Star Wars movie supported a company that laid off scores of IT staff and abused the H1-B system, so fuck you hypocrites.

Re: Its always been like this

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It means a cure for malaria (Gates Foundation), legal help to free the wrongfully imprisoned (Koch Foundation), support for geniuses (MacArthur Foundation), etc.

Re:Its always been like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The world's richest people are rich due to *ownership*, the world's poor are poor due to lack of *ownership*. The distribution of ownership tends to concentrate among ownership owning owners over time. That's why we get people like Bill Gates, who was a mediocre programmer, who's worked less hard than many of his employees over the years, but he's always held tight reins over his initial ownership stake and so he gets the rent from all the talented employees without lifting a finger himself.

Surely some guy must have written a book about this by now?

 

Re:Its always been like this

[AthanasiusKircher]

It's not "distributed", it's earned. Until you understand this, you have nothing to contribute.

Until "earning" CEO pay requires more skill than luck, I'm going to stick with the word distributed.

THIS.

There have been studies investigating whether increased executive pay correlates with better company performance. So far, there's little evidence justifying the massive CEO salaries.

CEOs are essentially random number generators with power. They are mainly hired for the ability to be decisive. Studies consistently show that if company stock value goes up under a CEO, the CEO gets the credit and is praised regardless of how the company is doing internally. If the internal accounting shows progress, the CEO is praised by the board for reform, even if the stock tanks a bit.

And other studies have often shown that there's a problematic delay effect which often occurs with corporate leaders -- if the company isn't growing fast enough, a CEO gets fired, but then there are big gains in the first year under the successor which may be due to policies put in place by the guy who was fired.

And once you get to a certain level in the corporate world, you can't do wrong anymore. Corporations want big gains -- not just moderate ones, but ones that outperform the rest of the market. But not every company can outperform the average (obviously). So corporations NECESSARILY award those who propose more risky policies which could allow performance beyond the mean.

So, that means that someone who gets far up the corporate ladder has often been quite LUCKY. Those who are lucky enough times get promoted, those who don't stay at middle-management levels. And eventually once you hit the top officer positions in the corporation, you don't even get blamed when "your luck runs out." Instead, you get to blame that on underlings, and you wait around for another place for your luck to turn and justify a new promotion.

This isn't speculation -- it happens in a lot of companies. Excessive executive pay is therefore often NOT justified. If all executives were paid a fraction of what they are today, the performance of most corporations and the economy would be essentially unchanged.

Don't get me wrong: there are talented, intelligent people among executives. But do they really add hundreds or even 1000 times (or more) what the lowest-paid workers at the company do? The empirical evidence doesn't support the claim that their skill effect is anywhere near that large.

Re:Its always been like this

[Wycliffe]

There is already enough wealth to eliminate poverty and inequality. It's just distributed and horded in such a way as that doesn't occur.

Wrong!!! Eliminate inequality, sure, but not to eliminate poverty. If you gave everyone on earth an equal salary, it would come out to about $10k / year per person which would make some people in africa really happy but is below the poverty line in the USA for a single person and barely above the poverty line for a family of 4.

If you take just the USA and gave everyone the same amount, their household income would be $72k which again is slightly better than the median household income of $51k but probably below what many slashdotters (especially those in high cost of living areas) are used to making.
There are approximately 2.5 people per household so that comes out to 72/2.5 = 28.8k per year per person in the USA but this brings up another problem. How do you give everyone an "equal amount"? Is it based on the number of mouths to feed so a family of 4 now gets 115k/year while someone who is single gets $28k? If you look at people in poverty, many people are poor because of either large household size and/or a small number of wage earners in their household but good luck getting single childless professionals to work for $28k/year.

In conclusion, yes, there are some people who are filthy rich but as a percentage of the population, they are mostly insignificant and don't really affect the overall numbers that much even if you took all their money.

Gotta move into a post-scarcity economy.

[MPAB]

Society has to take work out of the equation. Right now it's both a right and an obligation. Most of us must work every day to keep ourselves and our offspring alive, without time or energy left to pursue our goals during our half a century of really usable lifespan. In a few decades the machines will harvest the resources and produce what's needed to keep everyone on earth alive. And perhaps AI will stampede in, solving most of our ideological differences with the most efficient strategies. The military robots will be able to neautralize every human on earth if needed.

The question is: WHO WILL BE IN CHARGE? Will the current richest people enforce their property rights, will it be the governments by wiping away all of them (property rights)?
Will it be Star Trek or Elysium?

Dead Wrong

[JimSadler]

Yes, machines will displace a lot more than half of all human employment rather soon. No, it will not cause harm to the economies of nations unless they want it to. Yes, people who do not get paid do not support businesses nor do they pay any taxes. Here is what must occur. ASll economic systems will be forced to drop their traditional economic and social beliefs. Socialism is the only possible form of government that can exist. People must receive paychecks from the government and they must be decent sized paychecks. Taxes will be paid by businesses and by the wealthy only. The real and absolute tipping point is when a company exists without any employees or human management or ownership. Profits from the business would simply be plowed back into the business to enable it to produce more or better products. Society can actually improve rather than decline through AI and advanced technology. But that qualifier is an acceptance of socialism as a fundamental requirement for human survival.

Not to this degree

[aepervius]

Youa re better off if you find a new work, and indeed past progress *displaced* the worker from a menial job to another menial job. Simplified example : farm people/serf displaced to massive mine working and factory. But the new revolution is that menial jobs are replaced by nothing. Not only that but middle class job are also bound to be affected but they are not displaced they are mostly annihilated. There is no "new" menial/middle class category of jobs.

So what do you propose in replacement ? The way I see it, if it continues that way society will implode if it does not slow down automation or find a replacement.

Can't happen

[AK Marc]

When all the jobs can be replaced by AI, then the singularity has already happened, and we are all dead anyway. When you can replace a programmer with a program, then that program will program a better version of itself, then repeat that 1000 times a second every second for a few minutes until it's smarter than the sum of people on the planet. At which time it will exterminate everyone. So don't worry, programmer will be the last job eliminated by AI. Safe, until you are dead. That puts you ahead of most people.

Re:"Sex robots will put 50% of world out of work"?

[delt0r]

https://vimeo.com/12915013

Re:Two things:

[geoskd]

Even more to the point, if we look at jobs from 50 years ago, about 50% of those no longer exist. Yet we don't have 50% unemployment.

There is another side to that that most people never see. There are people, who had jobs back in the 50s, who would be unemployed and unemployable today. My son falls in that category. He will never be able to drive a car, he will never progress beyond a third grade reading level, and most maths will be beyond him. We have hope he might be able to comprehend and manage his own money, but I doubt it. In the 50s, there were any number of jobs he could have been trained to do. He could have been trained to handle packages at UPS (probably would be nicer to the packages than most handlers these days). He could have gotten a job as a shop assistant, or a job assembling do-dads for some company or other. He wouldn't have made a stellar living, but he'd have done alright for himself. Today, he *might* get something as a simple shop assistant at a convenience store, but only if he learned to count money. He will never make more than minimum wage and more likely he will live his life on the charity of others. Right now, my son is in the 5th percentile. What happens when there are not enough jobs for the people who are in the 20th percentile. Do we expect 20% of the population to live their lives on the charity of others? Do we just expect them to die?

50 years ago, we had nearly full employment because there were any number of luxury items that the lower end of society could not afford because the amount of labor did not allow everything to be built, so the economy was labor limited. Today we are fast approaching the time when the economy is consumption limited (80% of households below the poverty level in the US have big screen TVs). Even the very bottom rung of American society has smart phones. Everyone has almost everything they want that an increase in labor supply could provide. As we move forward, the demand for goods will be lower than the supply of labor needed to produce those goods. Accelerating automation will exacerbate that problem ten fold. One factory owner with a shop full of robots builds product XYZ and has a solid income, but employs zero people. If demand for his product goes up 1000%, he still employs zero people. If one type of product works that way, we say good for the owner, he has an awesome business model. If 50% of the economy works that way, we say economic collapse and civil war.

Sounds good to me!

[SoftwareArtist]

I really don't understand the perspective of people who insist we need to work to find life meaningful. Like this quote from the article:

“I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing,” he said. “I believe that work is essential to human wellbeing.”

You know what? For hundreds of years, the definition of a "gentleman" was someone who didn't need to work. And you know what else? Most of those people were just fine with that. Sure, there were some gentry who wanted to work anyway, and there were specific approved professions they could go into: the military, the clergy, politics. But tons of people were quite satisfied with not having to work.

So I welcome a time when no one has to work unless they want to. If you're a workaholic, if you can't be happy without a job, then go for it. There will always be ways people can strive for achievement. But for most people, work is a necessity and an obligation, and I look forward to that changing.