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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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.

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.

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"

[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.

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.