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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."
1. There are exceptions, but in general computers do simple things poorly and difficult things nowhere near that well. AI will likely be better in 30 years than it is now. But really has a LONG way to go.
2. Our primitive ancestors back in the 1950s thought lots of leisure was a good thing, not a bad thing. Perhaps having half or all of the human race unemployed will work out a bit better than the authors think.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Mindless factory jobs that nobody wants?
Bureaucratic make-work that accounts for a lot of the rest?
What sort of work SHOULD humans do?
This, a thousand time this!
What will really happen? Society will be so rich that it will decide to feed and house everyone on earth, just because. Those that want jobs will be able to make themselves almost gods. Those that prefer not to work will not starve, or get ill, etc, etc. To achieve today's standard of millionaire living, you will need to work at least 2 hours a week in the "gig economy".
Everyone will be better off.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Some cultures 1000 years ago or so needed to work 2-3 days a week and everything was taken care of. Seems to me we have massively regressed from that state. The problem is not that work is getting less. The problem is that work loses what remaining little use it still has as metric on how to distribute wealth.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We have been promised AI was just around the corner since the 50s and the 60s.
Show me even one system that is able to match human beings in creativity and resourcefulness. No, Deep Blue does not count: playing chess, or even go, is not the same as creating the LIGO experiment.
We have been promised sex robots for years now. All this time, Google has been struggling to make self-driving cars.
Don't believe me? Google "google self-driving cars shortcomings"... Turns out even the mighty Googleplex cannot make self-driving cars that handle, say, a bit of rain and snow. Or potholes and unexpected construction works.
And we are talking about cars, where the level of tolerance is about, say 15cm to 20cm.
Sex robots should be able to handle facial recognition, tolerance of a centimeter at best, a couple of millimeters at worst, not to mention level of... er... interaction that are way beyond even the most advanced stuff we have in labs now. And I don't want to imagine patching sex robots for the latest security exploits, when the "Internet of Things"(Gosh, I hate that fscking market-speak) is the cesspit of horrors it is right now.
Oh, and just imagine the bedlam if confidentiality of sex-robot ordering is breached, Ashley-Madison style...
Sure AI, or at least neural networks and expert systems, may replace a lot of white-collar jobs, and good ridance to them (Lawyers and Bankers, especially, better brace for a richly-deserved comeuppance). But HAL is definitely not in our future. And no sex robots either.
Feel free to mod me down now.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
People are not fact-oriented in their beliefs. That means they ignore solution that keep staring them in the face if they do not fit their restricted view of the world.
Hence it is quite possible that while capitalism loses most of its ability to sustain the population, it will get practiced to the bitter end nonetheless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm expecting Finland's basic $870/month income to be a success. After all, $870/month x pop of Finland is about $50 Billion, whereas they spend $70 Billion on "social security" right now.
Lots of people will have part-time jobs to increase their income. It won't be perfect, but it will probably work well enough.
Right. 62 people have more money than the bottom 4 billion today. 5 years ago that was 200. What this means is total police state and totalitarian rule
During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century)...
The late 14th Century in England would have been directly after the Black Death where half the population was killed...
The rest of the people looked at were pretty much in-line with the number of hrs/year worked in developed nations. They did work fewer days, but far more hours.
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.
Put another way, small amounts of money (less than $1M) are earned. Large amounts of money are distributed. Wealth accumulation is not stable, it is a runaway process under our current economic system. There is a positive feedback loop between having money and income. If we were to build any other engineered system this way, it would result in catastrophe (think harmonics in buildings and bridges, or god forbid, positive void co-efficient in nuclear engineering). Intelligently designing systems is all about negative feedback to limit excess and undesirable oscillation. For some reason we ignore all of that when it comes to economics, and the result is an economic model that can best be described as cyclical booms and busts. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. That kind of system behavior in engineering would require a redesign of the broken part because the original engineer failed to do their job properly.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
What amazes me is that so many people now are just willing to throw away Capitalism entirely.
People are wiling to throw away capitalism so easily because a lot of people can understand at an intuitive level that capitalism coupled with the fundamental laws of nature will result in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Although most people don't have the engineering background to understand how the laws governing feedback loops, harmonics and system stability apply to macro and micro economics, the reality is that they can sense the wrongness of the capitalist economic model. The early attempts at a fix failed to take human psychology into account and consequently communism was born, had its run, and failed. In the mean time, we have regulated capitalism that has shown the most promise, but we have discovered that the less regulated it is, the worse it gets (more unstable, and less politically viable, think runaway income inequality). At the root of the problem is that money *is* power, and the more power any given group has the more they have the ability to modify the system to suit themselves. Any economic system needs two key components to be viable in the long term. First, it has to have powerful protections against modification to suit any particular agenda. This necessitates that the system be correctly designed in th first place, there can be no opportunity to "fix" it later, or you open the possibility of the system being gamed. The second thing it needs is a negative feedback mechanism to prevent runaway wealth accumulation. This is a tricky requirement as it appears to be 100% at odds with human psychology. It is this conflict that could potentially mean that human kind is fundamentally incapable of stable economic behavior.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Sorry. His job is not to optimize the number of jobs, but to optimize profits. Robotics tend to help with that.
Until recently, corporate goals and missions were to serve some social function. Companies were not in place for the purpose of making money, but rather making money was a necessary component to successfully completing their mission (hence the corporate mission statement). In fact, in the 18th and 19th centuries, submitting corporate filings with only a stated goal of making money, would result in the state refusing your company its corporate papers (in essence you would be refused permission to start the company), on the grounds that your company did not serve any social function that the state considered valuable. It was not until late in the 20th century that companies for the sake of profits only became an acceptable concept, and now we have the situation where a companies officers can actually be sued for not following the path to greatest profit. This situation is not at all how companies are supposed to work, and will be the ruin of our country.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Not disputing your point, but providing information:
1000 years ago, an unemployed person could still find wilderness and hunt their own food. Today that is not possible in *any?* western country anymore.
It's called the Freedom to Roam. A number of countries have it. It's considered a basic fundamental right in countries like Sweden and Finland.
Like most things though, it only works if only a few take advantage of that right. There's not enough wilderness to sustain everyone if we all decided to adopt the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
When you take the risks to start a company you can say what a ceo is worth.
Actually, no -- there are empirical studies looking at the effects of large CEO salaries and whether they correlate with higher company performance.
Basically, most CEOs are little better than random number generators when it comes to predicting better performance. No study has shown a significant effect based on higher CEO compensation. Estimates now are that increased CEO pay is perhaps only responsible for maybe 1% of company increases in market performance -- the other 99% is due to other company factors, random market influences, etc.
And in fact there are other studies which have shown that increased CEO pay often correlates with POOR returns for shareholders, since exorbitant pay often correlates with higher expectations, which means CEOs tend to take more risks (and thus fail more often).
So there are ways to determine empirically how much CEOs add to values of companies on average, and -- in the aggregate -- their salaries are NOT justified.
Hasn't this already happened?
Currently most people in developed countries work in the service sector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Most people neither build things (secondary sector), nor make food (primary sector). They provide services or rather work in companies that provides services. Most of them non essential to the survival of the human race. They are either for a better quality of life or simply for fun.
Machines putting people out of work? We are already there. What tipped the balance? The plowshare? The steam machine? Or the automobile?
The only thing that has changed is the speed at which this change is occurring. So people need to find new jobs faster now. Which may be a problem in itself. But a much different one than the one being debated in both the article and the discussion here on /., which is rather silly, IMHO, considering the number of people working in the service industry. Many governments in first world countries provide jobs by passing legislation that provides demand for more bureaucracy, for example. And since people don't want to lose their jobs, they will find any and every reason why their part of the grand bureaucracy needs to exist, once they sit comfortably.
What is much more interesting is the question if we can stop things like the drone war, the drug war or the mass incarceration, because a lot of people work in those jobs. But a lot of humans suffer, because of their existence. Much more than because of Wall Street bankers.
So many ideas along these lines...I don't even know where to begin.
Optimizing for profits only works in the long run if those profits are the result of real productivity increases (more output per unit work). Increased profits due to regulatory capture, monopolies, or trade imbalances harm society, not help it.
Assignment of the benefits of productivity to a small number of "owners" also may benefit society in the short term, while the non-owners still get many of the benefits of increased productivity. But as soon as benefits from increases in productivity do not make it "to the masses", then the ability to sustain such a system falters.
You only have these few options: A - the owners of means of production choose to produce goods and services and give them to non-owners, B - the non-owners force the owners of means of production to produces goods and services and give them to non-owners (taxes, making it illegal for individuals to own means of production, etc.), or C - the owners of means of production have enough power to withhold goods from the non-owners, and the non-owners cease to exist.
Now, reality is kind of a mixture of those things, rather than any one extreme. The whole course of human politics and history has been based around managing the balance between those things. In order to transition to a post-scarcity society, we're going to have to somehow modify that balance again, and it's probably going to have to be something more towards having less concentrated "ownership" of means of production.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)