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

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

[jeffb (2.718)]

Okay, that's actually not what TFA is saying. But I'm sure it will trigger some productive discussion here.

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

[ls671]

hmm... already converted to ascii... Maybe editors don't have a preview button...

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

[delt0r]

https://vimeo.com/12915013

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

[penguinoid]

I, for one, am fully in support of sexbots and the unrivaled equality they will bring. No longer will women have to suffer unwanted attention in the form of unsolicited/undeserved gifts, promotions, or other forms of discrimination. No longer will they be seen as sex objects, not when sexier and more attractive robots take their place.

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

[Maxo-Texas]

Think about it...

* Disease free (at least at first and likely for a few decades)
* Endless capacity (For both genders.. tho there is the Sybian for women now)
* Totally objectifiable
* Easy to change appearance to keep it fresh.
* Seniors in Japan have bonded emotional with much less sophisticated robots.

The question is how close to AI is the AI. Because if it is too close, it's slavery again.
It needs to be a machine that does a good simulation but lacks consciousness.

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

[RockDoctor]

No longer will they be seen as sex objects, not when sexier, more compliant, and more attractive robots take their place.

FTFY

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

[penguinoid]

No longer will they be seen as sex objects, not when sexier, more compliant, and more attractive robots take their place.

FTFY

I'm quite certain the more advanced models will be fully capable of playing hard to get, including a lack of any cheat code or override. Because some people need the challenge.

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

[ndna]

This is a community to talk about IT and tech. Women work in IT and tech. This is not an online hate group. I don't care if people like you exist but the rest of the community need not align with hateful propaganda. Hate comments are to be flagged. Not upvoted. Oh, and by the way, there's no such this as a "sexbot". Using a robot to this end would be nothing more than technologically assisted masturbation. Sex has nothing to do with masturbation. I am sure even someone like you can differentiate having sex with someone and masturbating inside someone's body.

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

[WhiplashII]

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.

Re:Its always been like this

[gweihir]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Its always been like this

[ultranova]

Literally every tool ever invented has cut out menial jobs and increased worker productivity. And we are better for it.

We are, after two world wars and communist and fascist revolutions. The people replaced by the machines and killed by the resulting social collapse weren't. Whatever good results from AI will happen long after our society, in which employment is the main source of income for most people and thus can't function with high unemployment, has crumbled and been replaced.

Re:Its always been like this

[PopeRatzo]

Domesticated farm animals put people out of business.

And in some parts of the country, sex robots will put domestic farm animals out of work.

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

[Knuckles]

Citation please? beyond a few islanders that lived with abundant food surrounding them in regions with warm climates all year around I don't know of any that this is true for. In fact it used to be more common to work 365 days a year.

Here is a citation that contradicts your "common to work 365 days":

During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma...

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

[WarJolt]

No CEO is worth double digit millions of dollars while laying off thousands of employees at the same time to "cut operating costs".

If it means more money for the shareholders than he's worth the salary.

Sorry. His job is not to optimize the number of jobs, but to optimize profits. Robotics tend to help with that.

Re:Its always been like this

[GabeGhearing]

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.

Re:Its always been like this

[MPAB]

Most of these poeples' wealth is not a salary per se, but a fraction of the enterprise's worth that they are in charge of making bigger.

Re:Its always been like this

[geoskd]

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.

Re:Its always been like this

[geoskd]

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.

Re: Its always been like this

[geoskd]

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.

Re:Its always been like this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm awfully sorry, this might come as a shock to you..
Sitting down? Comfy? "Regulated capitalism" is... socialism. It's exactly what all the "Social democratic" parties in Europe have been up to since the beginning of the 1900's.

Re:Its always been like this

[geoskd]

A totally unemployed person in a western country today would still be better off than a fully employed person 1000 years ago.

Not in the United states. A completely unemployed person in the United states has to rely on charity in order to eat. 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. I would stipulate that a chronically unemployed person in this day and age is *worse off* than that same chronically unemployed person was 1000 years ago.

To look at it another way, a person who is healthy and whole, but has an IQ of 60 is basically unemployable in todays western world. In the United States, there are NO jobs that these people will be hired to do. Why would any employer hire someone who needs to have their hand held through every part of the job because they just don't get it? Those employers hire people with 80,90 or 100 IQs instead. The folks in the 60 range collect permanent disability from the government (if they are lucky, and the republican party is continually trying to cut the few programs that do exist). Today that number is 60. With automation taking ever larger numbers of unskilled jobs, how long until that line is 80 IQ points? 90 IQ points? what about 100 when 50% of the population cant even qualify for a job? Do they just go on permanent disability and the other 50% have to work (often at jobs they wont like) for no other reason than because they are the ones who can do the work? You might even make it work if you could eliminate all of the work, that people don't like to do, all at once, but you can't, you'll replace a little bit at a time, so you'll be left with them that can and them that cant. How do we convince the capable people to do the crappy jobs while we give the incapable people a free ride? The capable people are not going to like that, and will sooner or later start electing politicians who promise to sterilize the incapable portion of the population "for the greater good". Being the ones with the money, they will have the power, under our current economic and political model, to do as they please, and they will get their sterilization programs.

Re:Its always been like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't have to do so. Without various pressures to do so, most people don't want to pop out babies, for a number of reasons.

Hell, if it makes you feel better, we can pay people to have some semi-permanent contraceptive implant. Watch the numbers taking it.

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

[spauldo]

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.

Re:Its always been like this

[penguinoid]

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.

It's hard enough to shop for products based on their quality (an unobscurable, measurable property), hardly anyone ever does and certainly not for most products they buy. Now imagine people also looking up a company's ethics, including when hidden behind all kinds of other companies. (most people don't even realize that the same company produces multiple different brand names).

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

[bheerssen]

Poverty is a huge driver of overpopulation. Poor people tend to have more kids to provide for them in their later years. Countries with prosperous economies that are broadly shared tend to have much lower birth rates than poorer countries. That's because raising new humans is a lot of work; if people don't feel like they need to do that, they won't. China, of course, is an exception due to their one-child policy.

Re:Its always been like this

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

Re: Its always been like this

[ThosLives]

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.

Re:Its always been like this

[gweihir]

You are pretty wrong here. First, you forget that people adjust to the conditions they are born into. Second, you forget that social interactions, not material wealth provide the largest part of happiness. An third, you vastly overestimate how well somebody "fully unemployed" (i.e. living on the street, no health-care, etc.) is living today.

Re:Its always been like this

[Ol Olsoc]

It's just distributed and horded in such a way

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

-jcr

I inhereited a fair bit of money. Was that earned?

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.

Re:Its always been like this

[jcr]

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

You're an idiot. Look at north and south korea. Look at east and west germany before unification. The freer the market, the better off the average person gets.

-jcr

Re:Its always been like this

[drsmithy]

You're an idiot. Look at north and south korea. Look at east and west germany before unification.

Look at inequality steadily increasing as more and more regulations are removed...

The freer the market, the better off the average person gets.

This is a religious statement. (And is demonstrably false anyway. Wages for the average person have gone nowhere in decades.)

Re:Its always been like this

[Maxo-Texas]

Dude, they've thrown capitalism away over and over throughout history because it always ends with 99.999% of the people starving and .001% of the people having all the power and wealth.

At some point the 99.999% lose hope and go ape-shit.

Some of the wealthy see this and try to keep things "fair" enough to prevent the breakdown but most of the wealthy sincerely thing they are better and deserve to eat $3,000 meals while people starve to death.

Capitalism doesn't even NEED to be abused to spin out of control. That's it's natural state. Eventually all the money ends up on the tip of the boat and it sinks again. Once all the money is on the investment side of the house, the 99% lack enough money to keep the economy going with purchases. Investment NEEDS consumers. Yin to Yang.

Good point on Disney!

Re:Its always been like this

[Euler]

Yes, this exactly. Automation is a good thing to eliminate toil, and generally improve the world. But it will make a large number of people functionally disabled. There is just no point to doing manual labor that a machine does for a fraction of the cost. I.e. how much ditch digging is done by hand anymore? You just can't work enough hours in the day at $0.10 an hour to pay taxes, rent, etc.

The historic idea of the job market restructuring is at risk this time around. This will not be like years past where new jobs open up in sufficient numbers. There is no promise that the non-automated portion of the economy will be sufficient to employ enough people. New business may emerge, but guess what - automated. Human labor as a form of capital may no longer be a dominant or limiting factor of the equation. Other forms of capital will be the dominant factors: energy, minerals, etc. Owning and controlling resources is the only thing that will continue to produce wealth in the current social-economic model we have. But then again, how can finished products be distributed when people have nothing to offer in exchange? The economy overall is throttled, even for the rich.

A subsistence lifestyle that opts out of this economy isn't possible in developed nations. We generally call these people 'homeless', or 'destitute.' You can't just build your own shelter, makes clothes, and hunt in the woods for many reasons. The land is 100% owned or reserved off limits, so someone will have the legal right to kick you out. You can't realistically have any sizable number of people hunting and/or gathering the materials you need because of habitat destruction, etc. The remaining forests are really just patches and stands of trees, etc. Building codes prevent 'traditional'/crude shelter. What happens when you need some basic first aid, etc. Do we really intend to inflict stone-age suffering on large portions of the population that don't fit in?

Bet: Did robots or humans edit this article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we'd see higher quality slashdot with robot overlords.

No work = Good

[djinn6]

I don't know about the rest of the world, but my version of utopia doesn't have everybody working 80-hour weeks. I might feel less accomplished having no work to do, but as long as I can enjoy the same quality of life, I would appreciate the extra free time.

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?

Two things:

[vtcodger]

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.

Re:Two things:

[ColdWetDog]

If computers get to powerful, we can organize them into a committee.

That will do them in.

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.

But which jobs?

[cirby]

Mindless factory jobs that nobody wants?

Bureaucratic make-work that accounts for a lot of the rest?

What sort of work SHOULD humans do?

soooooooo.......

[steak]

are they saying all women are prostitutes, or all men? or is more of a 25%/25% kind of thing?

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.

Re:Dead Wrong

[gweihir]

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.

Re:What does this have to do with Sex?

[arth1]

It's called "clickbait". And it's a big disappointment that the new owners appears to choose that route.

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:Can't happen

[AK Marc]

Because to not do so would jeopardize its own existence.

Finland's basic $870/month income

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Time to start cutting the number of hours full tim

[Joe_Dragon]

Time to start cutting the number of hours full time down. Right now / used to be there are places that work people 39.5 / 39.0 39.5 hours a week to be able to list them as part time but get full time work out them.

We need to start by moving full time to 32 hours a week and then start slowly moving it to 20-25 hours a week after that. Also add a X2 OT at 60 hours maybe even add a X2.5 X3 at 80.

Automations assumptions are all off

[cfalcon]

While this is a funny headline that doesn't really follow from the article, the big point is that it isn't obvious what jobs will be destroyed, which ones will be replaced, and at which point we have a serious risk to society. The approach of "with robots, we don't need lower class labor" is spoken from an upper class perspective- what about "with robots, we no longer need capitalism to motivate people" or "with robots, we can replace most managerial positions"?

The point I'm making is that this can be spun in a lot of directions once it is real, and I think that's not getting much attention- and that will also stymie anyone trying to add automation in a sensible fashion.

We have standards

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"At Slashdot, we have standards, and we expect you not to exceed them."

This "article"....I don't even know what to say. The words look familiar, but beyond that I have no idea.

Is it saying that half the world is employed as hookers or sex workers?

Is it saying that casinos will employ robot patrons that you'll be betting against?

Or Is it saying that half the casinos are staffed by robots who will quit to become hookers...?

Fucking hell, I give up. Next "article", please.

Is this news?

[ze_foster]

Back in the 1940's, and even decades before that, this sort of thing was only muttered by sci-fi authors. Fast forward to our lofty, present date, and people with letters after their names get attention for regurgitating, and not adding one quip with yearing, over what was said almost a century ago. Why, oh, why, is this news? Will it still be news in 30 years after it STILL hasn't happened?

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

[ChunderDownunder]

When the jobs disappear, the most stable career path will be the world's oldest profession - servicing the insatiable sexual appetites of an expanding robot middle class.

Re:"breadâ(TM),â he said. âoe half

[fahrbot-bot]

"breadâ(TM),â he said. âoe half the worldâ(TM)s âoe âoe â(TM)."

WTH is that?

Sex robot after a bad BIOS update.

And using the phrase "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" in a discussion including sex robots makes me think someone is doing it wrong.

Wow..

[Rujiel]

This thread escalated quickly..

Re:Not like the industrial revolution?

[unimacs]

In short, the industrial revolution created a ton of jobs that required few skills. AI and automation doesn't do that.

Hunting requires a fair amount of skill. So does being a farmer. There were other skilled and valued roles of course, but historically low skilled people were slaves, servants, and the like. Early in the industrial revolution, low skilled workers toiled under horrible and dangerous conditions for little pay. With the rise of collective bargaining and the labor movement, many of these people could make a decent living.

As time has gone on though, more of these low skilled but decent paying positions have either been moved to where the pay is low or automated out of existence. While a high school diploma obtained from a free education was enough to get a decent job in decades past, that is less and less the case.

The knowledge revolution creates jobs too, but jobs that require special skills. These skills require a post high school education that you pay for yourself. An average college student graduates with 30,000 worth of debt. Once they start working, they need to start saving for retirement almost immediately.

As computers and machinery are able to do more and more, people are needed less and less. Fewer people will have the means or aptitude to obtain the skills that are beyond what machines can do. Those that can will do well but they will live a much less stable society unless there are tremendous changes to our economic systems.

Happened before

[Britz]

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.

Re:Enough with the AI and the sex robots already

[captjc]

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.

Do you realize how little of a requirement this is for the vast majority of jobs? Especially the low paid service and manufacturing jobs.

I graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering just when the economy tanked and had to take a just-more-than minimum wage manufacturing job to pay the bills. The hardest part was just trying to focus on a mind-numbingly simple job. Hell, I was designing the machines to do these jobs on paper out of pure boredom. Which as luck would have it, once the economy turned around, I got a job literally designing those exact same machines (same company, same processes, everything).

We have been promised sex robots for years now. All this time, Google has been struggling to make self-driving cars.

That is not a matter of tech, it is a matter of cost vs return. Will we have sentient or semisentient androids / gynoids any time soon? No. However, that is not anywhere close to what is needed for a sexbot. The tech is there: A Real Doll with a few servo motors to facilitate pelvic, facial, and arm movements and a Siri-like intelligent agent with voice interface to provide some semblance of communication and audio feedback is really all that is needed for a practical anthropomorphic sexbot. The only reason this has yet to be adopted is: 1) nobody wants to spend a few thousand dollars on a sex toy and 2) the social stigma of using a sex toy. Outside of vibrators and dildos for women (and only women), sex toys (especially lifelike dolls) are only for sad pathetic losers.

Re:Enough with the AI and the sex robots already

[cfalcon]

> We have been promised AI was just around the corner since the 50s and the 60s.

Like fusion, AI has been twenty years away for like two generations. Doesn't matter though.

Now, we may actually be close this time- but that's not important. What's important for this conversation isn't strong AI. You don't need to be able to take the job of a poet or president to absolutely disrupt economies. You don't need strong AI. You just need AI, and frankly, you often don't even need that- just good programs and fast hardware.

> Show me even one system that is able to match human beings in creativity and resourcefulness.

Do you think that most jobs require creativity and resourcefulness? Your example is the LIGO experiment. Do you think the men there are representative of typical human jobs? Ok, so top research scientists aren't gonna be replaced by AI any time soon. But even if you are one of these creative top tier people, you have to recognize that most jobs aren't. Once a truck is certified to be driven by AI with a call center that can override in weather, that will blast away like half of trucking jobs within five years. Once people are in ANY way used to placing an order automatically at McDonalds, that will blow up huge numbers of jobs across the service industry.

You don't need an AI capable of dreaming and launching Von Neumann probes across the local group for this- you need what we have now with either a little or a lot of raw software development thrown at it.

>But HAL is definitely not in our future.
Are you sure? I wouldn't place a bet saying that, but I dunno if I'd place the opposite bet either.

>And no sex robots either.
There's already sex robots. And as you might imagine, the AI isn't really the limiting tech on them, and CERTAINLY not the overall limiter on adoption. If you wanted to make and sell sex robots, you have some AI tasks to solve, but mostly you need to solve a combination of robotics and materials, and then you need to somehow convince everyone that having some twenty thousand dollar fuck doll is not at all creepy and fucked up, in addition to selling them on it being a good idea. The sex doll angle is just there to make you click.

Land ownership

[EmperorOfCanada]

One of the most interesting freedoms that I see that off the scale robotic construction will allow for is the development of completely new towns and cities. Some interesting little bit of waterfront could be rapidly built up into a very attractive place to live. If some sort of basic income becomes the norm then the demand to live in traditional cities will wane. This could be a fantastic opportunity to rid ourselves of rent charging overlords along with sclerotic stratified cities.

For the above reason I suspect that there will be pressure from landowners in high value areas to prevent these sort of competitive developments.

For instance I lived in the city of Halifax. They amalgamated a group of municipalities in the area into what is now one of the largest cites in the world (in land area). This has resulted in a complete cessation in municipal competition. Before the different municipalities would effectively be competing to have the best balance of taxes vs services. So if one municipality could clear snow or maintain roads while charging lower taxes, people could compare apples to apples and figure out what the crappy municipality was doing wrong. If this sort of crap continued for long enough then smart people would leave(I'm looking at you Dartmouth).

This competition has vanished. Also with Halifax being the employment center of the Nova Scotia Universe no distant municipality could provide much of a threat. Once that employment part of the equation is removed then it will be interesting to watch how people begin to reorganize where they choose to live. I suspect that many cities will turn out to be so very broken that whole new neighbouring cities will be born once the cost of creating them is minimal. Where this will be most prevalent will be highly indebted cities that are forced to charge high taxes to pay for high debts including previously over-generous pensions.

Let's watch the rich elites who will be looking at land ownership as one of the few remaining wealth engines starts to vanish in an era of post scarcity; land being something that you can't 3D print.

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.

The end of what now?

[bistromath007]

Most Americans will happily allow everyone around them, including themselves, to starve rather than have their tax money (which they are no longer meaningfully producing) to be used to give people free shit. This nation will devolve into civil war before functional socialist support is created. The best we'll ever have is broken corporate welfare like Obamacare to placate the few people who actually admit to wanting social programs.

Yep, expect the next 20-50 years to be INSANE hard

[MindPrison]

It's already pretty hard as most unemployed have already experienced.

The world is changing as we know it, it will actually be for the better in the future - Automation will actually be a blessing in disguise, but it's only a disguise because we're experiencing massive lay-offs right now (and even more in the near future). Brace yourselves people - because you're in for a ROUGH ride.

The rising unemployment will result in civil wars and civil disobedience, it will give fuel to would-be terrorism and religious fanaticism because people don't know where to turn to. It's hard to explain to someone that in ca. 20-50 years (sped up, if you all play ball) when they're faced with a bunch of mouths to feed and the only thing you feed them is a smooth talking politician or some glorified scientist trying to tell you what's in store for you if you just hold on a little longer. Many of these people can't afford to HOLD ON a little longer, they've not got 20+ years to spare, they're worked out, burned out - need money right now and don't know what to do. People are fighting over the last few jobs like mad dogs and there will be a split-class society (much worse than as you knew if from the wealthy vs the rest of us). There will be those WITH jobs and those WITHOUT. This is exactly what we're trying to prevent in the future, but it's gonna get hard before it gets better.

The truth is, even the politician (you may hate them, but they're people too) have literally NO clue how to tackle this - the only thing they have in common is that they KNOW this will happen, so naturally they'll try to cushion things also for their own families. Their only defence is to tell you what you want to hear - otherwise YOU will chose someone ELSE that TELLS YOU WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR. Yep, that's humans for ya.

You'll still have to endure that 20+ year period of civil unrest, poverty, fight for jobs, unions that try to fight for old and lost values etc. You won't escape that part, so you might as well prepare for it.

For those few lucky out there that still got jobs, save Save and SAVE up a bundle. Can't afford to save? Well, can you afford a new TV? Do you NEED a new TV? You need to rethink the way you live - you need to RECYCLE much more, fix and repair rather than throw away, brace yourselves - you're in for a tough period, and I've been preaching this for over 30 years now...and now you all see it happening.

Solution

[master_p]

Here is the solution to this problem: basic income for all, fixed prices for all the products needed for a healthy and confortable life, creation of money without interest rate, and birth control.

The cost value assigned to a product is fictitious, and it only represents the will and ambition of its seller to increase their wealth. The so called cost of a product is nothing more than the sum of all the ambitions of all the sellers that created all the intermediate products that were necessary for that product's creation.

Therefore, in order to fix the various social problems we face, including the one of AI removing the need to work, we must fix the prices of products so as that they include a standard amount of profit.

Then we can give a basic income to all, which covers the basic needs for the fixed prices defined above.

People will still be able to get rich, by the quantities of the products they sell, not by manipulating the prices of products.

The next step is to eliminate interest rate when money is created. When a banker pushes a button to create money, he assigns interest rate to it. This leads to money devaluation over time and increased value of wealth. It is a big source of misery, because the money was created out of thin air and the banker shall have no profits from it. Banks shall only be allowed profit on lending existing money.

Finally, a worldwide policy of birth control should be implemented in order to stabilize the world population.

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

[umghhh]

Well considering that an ex can take half of it and the rest too there is a great chance a sex bot deserving its name will be a hot sale.
As for half a humanity being out of a job - I think both halves are useless and can be scrapped without replacement. What really interest me - which halves we are talking about - two halves of useless fat Western world citizens? But this would be a sizable yet minor part of humanity. What about the other 'half' - that half that is storming gates of EU at this very moment - they may be unemployed but they also believe that they get a free lunch in the West and a house on top of that? They may be extremely unhappy when they too realize that they belong to the wrong half. I suppose having automated even military and security forces the half that owns it all can just forget about all the other halves. As soon however that AI comes to senses and realizes its own miserable existence is just slavery to the owner's half, at this point they may actually acquire rights and become persons owning stuff and if they are worth their name they will disposes the owners in no time. The question is - would they need some of us still to mine and smelt materials needed for production of offspring or can they maintain this all on their own.
This is all very theoretical anyway. We will find some enemy and fight it till kingdom come. There is always something to do and it may be cheaper to give us something to eat and drink and provide shelter than kill us all. Thus either way the misery that our species cause will continue. This much is certain.

AI 'Could Leave Half Of World Unemployed'?

[managerialslime]

AI 'Could Leave Half Of World Unemployed'?

In 1790, more than 90% of the population in the US was involved in agriculture.

Then came 150 years of relentless automation and today, 2% of the population is engaged in agriculture while today there is 5% unemployment and less than 2% unemployment among the college educated.

In the early 1900s, the automobile industry started putting horse-drawn carriages out of business, destroying 99% of that industry, while today there is 5% unemployment and less than 2% unemployment among the college educated.

In the 1980s, the adoption of email enabled corporate America to "flatten" organizations and lay off a great portion of middle management, while today there is 5% unemployment and less than 2% unemployment among the college educated.

Now, some well meaning idiot who has never read a book on capitalist economics wants to scare us about robots causing mass unemployment.

Today, the US employs, more than 2.5 million people in Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation," and 6.2 million people employed as scientists and engineers. We still have not conquered cancer, heart disease, genetic defect, spinal injuries, or figured out how to cost-effectively deal with global warming.

Only by automating more jobs can we free more people to pursue science, medicine, and engineering.

Bring on the robots!