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Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI Is Going To Decimate Middle Class Jobs (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines. Automation will, "in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world," Hawking wrote. "The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive." He frames this economic anxiety as a reason for the rise in right-wing, populist politics in the West: "We are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent." Combined with other issues -- overpopulation, climate change, disease -- we are, Hawking warns ominously, at "the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity." Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges, he says.
"Hawking warns...Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges..."
So, in other words, you must cure humanity of the pure unadulterated, narcissistic greed that has created the chasm between the elitists and the rest of the human race.
Fat fucking chance of that shit happening.
If people don't work, they can't afford to buy things. So who is going to buy the things that get created? Robots?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Very simple programming jobs like the ones your capable of can easily be automated.
"Secretary" used to be the most common job according to some interpretations of BLS reports. The Word Processor made that role largely obsolete and now self-service:
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...
So nowadays it's "Truck Driver"... wait a bit longer until autonomous vehicles make those delivery jobs go away. Wouldn't call those middle-class jobs, though.
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
I'll chalk this up as a poor interpretation of what constitutes 'middle class.' Most of the jobs automation would impact might creep into the low end of that range, but not very many.
However, as the wealth disparity widens and more automation in general comes into common use we will eventually have to find a solution. Guaranteed Income and the like may not be the right answer, though it's certainly the common thought right now. We definitely have to look into the issue further.
Well, the guy is the first victim of automation : a machine is speaking for him...
And what happens when one no longer needs humans to do the work since they provide so little value? The usual solution is is to gain more skills, but that is increasingly difficult since most peoples costs have a pretty hard floor (housing, food, transportation), and acquiring skills usually requires one to gain such skills independently, as employer refuse to train, or provide much in the way of assistance of increasing the workers skill (why would they, just hire someone else, or automate the person away entirely). Its becoming a catch-22: To increase your financial resources, you must acquire new skills, which require financial or time resource to gain, which you didn't have to start with, hence wanting to increase them to begin with.
Being unemployed will be the new occupation.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Automation is killing lower class jobs... starting with the cotton gin.
We get it Stephen, you've got an opinion on everything. Why exactly do we keep treating yours as definitive when it's clear you're way out of your expertise?
Since when is common fucking sense way out of his expertise?
It hardly takes a genius to figure out that greed created the financial chasm driving cost-reducing solutions such as automation and AI, and a 12-year old can grasp the fact that greed isn't an element in society that is easily controlled by any means. Not law. Not policy. Not taxation. Not anything.
Not being able to live, is.
In a perfect world, no one would HAVE to work if there was a minimum support for everyone. There's absolutely nothing wrong with machines doing more and more mundane work. The problem is that the increased profit goes to the wrong people.
Translating a set of requirements into code is something we can automate. One day we'll be able to have one programmer that is able to do the job of 20 programmers.
Also if the middle class is out of a job and not buying gadgets, then I'm pretty much out of a job as a programmer.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I wrote you didn't I?
Oh wait, you are a very very simple shell script... Kind of explains why you are unstable and can't get a job or make friends.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
You know you're right. I guess it's easy to convince everyone that a 10-hour workweek for humans is plenty of effort to pay a living wage.
Let's see how well Welfare 2.0 works out, 'cause Welfare 1.0 breeds such fantastic examples of living...
Most of my work lately is writing code that writes code.
Compilers are software that writes software.
Siri/Cortana/et.al. are lowering the bar for input to the point where they can take it from people who don't even know they are interacting with "a computer." When you describe to your phone that you want to go to the theater, and it provides you driving directions based on current traffic conditions, down to the level of detail of lanes to take, turns to make, and guides you to available parking, who will be programming who at that point?
Why do they have to remain though? What happens when we just don't need that many people working in jobs that pay sufficiently well to qualify as "middle class"? Manufacturing is up in the USA, but manufacturing _employment_ is way down.
Incidentally, Friedman also supported the most reasonable solution to the problem we'll be facing - a universal basic income. When you get past the initial fact that it's handing money out to people (via Government), it's actually a surprisingly libertarian/capitalistic solution. No need for huge bureaucracies overseeing multiple different benefit programs, just someone to sign and send out the checks. No more need for a minimum wage - the market can freely price human labor at appropriate rates, because nobody -needs- their job to survive.
People won't stop working, either. It's just not in our nature. Look at the military, where people can retire with a significant paycheck as early as 38. Do they stop working and play video games all day? Some might, but most just get a new job in the civilian world and combine that pay with their retirement. You'd see people go back to school, or maybe stay home to take care of kids (which is itself a full-time job, just not a paid one).
Most importantly, basic income would keep the economy functioning in a world where most of the productivity was generated by machines, by maintaining the supply and demand signals.
Well not yet, but machine intelligence will be able to program itself eventually, and they'll do it better than you or me. You think your brain is anything more than a biological machine?
That's all beside the point. It's not the automation or the AI that's causing all this unemployment pain - it's the system surrounding them. Mechanization, automation, AI - these things can all be used to solve every human problem we've ever faced, yet, all we get are warnings of impending doom from our visionless "leaders". Give me a break.
We should be discussing how to configure our political and economic systems to distribute the benefits of these things in some fair way, rather than just trying to scare people senseless. We should also be discussing how to create machine intelligence that won't try to kill us. Both of these things are possible with enough imagination and vision.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Economics has never had to deal with this level of AI before, and Milton Friedman died 10 years ago, so I doubt he had much to say on the topic.
In a world where robots with AI can do just about every blue collar and almost all white collar work better, faster, and cheaper -- what do you propose? AI is even replacing most clerical work and has begun replacing tattoo artists and surgeons.
Seriously, who would hire a human being to do any job if they can have a one-time-purchase AI to do the same job that is literally superior in every way?
Ask the rust-belt about all their manufacturing jobs that went to Mexico after NAFTA and to China as well... but, which now are moving from China to Ethiopia or are being replaced by robots. That's right -- China has been cutting thousands of jobs and replacing them with robots... b/c it's cheaper than even the pittance they paid the Chinese labor.
Have a look at the 2 million 18-wheeler driver jobs and the additional 5 million delivery/taxi jobs in the USA. When vehicles become fully self-driving, that's 7 million jobs gone over the course of just a few years to replace the drivers. It'd be one thing if people had time to prepare, to learn new skills, and to find a new job that a robot with AI wouldn't threaten. Thing is, the AI is taking over jobs in all fields. There's even a robot pharmacist dispenser at my local hospital -- sure, it's stocked by a real pharmacist, but it basically does their job and multiple pharmacy tech jobs in one.
The Industrial Revolution made it so that people could do more work. The Information Age made it so that people could do more work and do so globally instead of just locally. The AI Revolution will make it so that few people can find work... b/c the AI is made to REPLACE people, not to help them do more work. Sure, those displaced workers could try to find work in an area that an AI just can't do. But what would that be? Software coding?
No matter the subject, as AI grows, its capabilities will become exponential. There's no job that's truly safe from its encroachment.
I will only use technology from the 20teens. No more than 8 cores. 4g is enough gs. No robots more complex than a roomba. We are but a simple people. Now excuse me, I am late to a McMansion raising. Tis a gift to be simple.
And walking... err rolling.
Compilers are software that writes software.
100% Wrong.
Compilers are core that translates one computer code to another.
Here I am, in America, trying to reach third world poverty level, and you're telling me those third world farmers wish they had it as good as I?
What he is saying is not really new, it's something many thinkers have considered through the 20th century. The Technocracy_movement predicts that a price system based society must eventually be replaced as the multiplier for work an individual can do increases to a point that only a few people are necessary to cover the production needs of the entire world population. That has deep cultural implications as to how we may change how we consider the value of an individual to society. And this particular example is about 70 years old, so not a new idea by a long shot.
What is new is that the change may happen within our life times, maybe not Hawkings. He's only 74, and maybe he'll be with us for another 25 years, but I think most of us can agree that this isn't going to directly affect him.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
....That Started Several Decades Ago" for five-hundred, Alex!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Agreed, but it's much worse than that.
Starting with entry-level education, students learn useless shit and if the right wing Evangelical Christians get their way, we'll be teaching Creationism instead of Evolution; anti-climate change, bigotry and misogyny and nationalism.
It's a lost cause for America, anyway.
We lost the middle class a long time ago and we're not going to get it back.
Globalism is out of favour in the future, so we can't even feed into other country's middle class.
Rome burned and people still live there.
The USA is on the same track.
Re: Brexit
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
And for a long time it was the working classes that usually had to retool every generation or two from the start of the Industrial Revolution. The big change of the last few decades is that it is those middle income earners whose jobs are increasingly at risk.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Translating a set of requirements into code is something we can automate. One day we'll be able to have one programmer that is able to do the job of 20 programmers.
Also if the middle class is out of a job and not buying gadgets, then I'm pretty much out of a job as a programmer.
To do that you would have develop a very precise requirements language... in fact you might say higher level code is a requirements language that translates specific requirements into machine code via a compiler.
I am honored the Mr. Hawking agrees with me as I have ranted about this for a couple of years now. In the US the solution is social and legal changes taking place at a faster rate than automation. Putting a dullard in the White House is exactly 100 % backwards in that regard. We have before us a strong proof that capitalism is not a system that is fit to survive. Many of our moral and ethical codes are also unfit. For example, the idea that people have a duty to support themselves is backwards. It will no longer be possible to work for a living. Further, ever higher population numbers means less and less freedom for individuals. For those that don't understand that reason it out this way. You enjoy playing your tuba. You have a tiny 5 acre pot of land and your music never reaches your neighbors when you play your tuba. Now imagine you are in an apartment house surrounded with units right at hand. Now your tuba playing will be restrained by your neighbors or the building management. Your freedoms are lessened by the size of the population near you.
Because the public does not believe or want to believe these things, no politician dare address the real problems and the problems get worse and worse. Now the Trumpenstein monster will do nothing but make it worse. He is not mentally able to foresee what will occur.
We've been there before. Every time there is an innovation in infrastructure, it brings about those who profit from it and those who lose the work of supporting the obsolete (or less essential) infrastructure. It also decimates those who were doing hard work which was trivialized by the new infrastructure.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Hawking wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing". Ignoring the obvious "that word doesn't mean what you think it does" regarding "decimate", he's right.
Automation HAS reduced the proportion of people who work in manufacturing, after it did the same in agriculture. That's happening now, just as it's been happening for 250 years. There was a time when most people worked to produce food and other necessary agricultural products. Automation by machines such harvesters meant that people could stop spending their time trying to produce enough food and move to building convenience items, such as dishwashers, electrical ovens, etc. They could also spend much more time doing R&D to invent radio, TV, airplanes, etc. Once we had machines doing the physical manufacture of products, we spent our time creating an entire new sector of the economy; neither agriculture, manufacturing, nor service. Humans started spending our time creating the *information* sector, building web pages, etc. I'm excited to see what we create next, and I'm glad I don't have to till the field today.
The problem with "visionless leaders" is mainly they are in the pockets of large moneyed interests like corporations, who want to make sure that they receive the vast benefits of automation, but do not see their overall tax liability increased. That's why they love politicians who talk endlessly about corporate tax cuts (heck, I've seen some people argue corporations shouldn't pay tax at all, and now you know why), but at some point, automation is going to mean corporate tax bills are going to go up. At the moment, sending jobs to cheaper jurisdictions has been the solution, but automation is going to put all the Asians and Mexicans out of work too, and probably in the next few decades.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Both Brexit and Trump can be seen as the final stage of neoliberal economics: it ends in a populist revolt.
It's not as if labor is just now facing the threat of automation. But nobody in the US - not the unions, not the companies, not the government - is solving the education gap that might help future workers.
Bruce Perens.
Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
The problem with "real" economic theories is that there are so many to choose from.
Here's a different economist who extends our current economic system to its logical conclusion, and also presents a viable alternative. It's very readable and a quick read - well worth a few moments if you want to see where we're headed.
It's clear to anyone who studies economics as a math problem that our current system is untenable going forward. In the limit of extremes, automation will supply all of humanity's production needs, while employing no one.
A fine situation, but in that scenario who will have money for purchases?
We're already feeling the pinch here in the US due to globalism. Real wages have been stagnant (against inflation), good jobs are increasingly hard to find, and people are forced to work multiple mc'jobs to make ends meet. Automated vehicles and drone delivery systems will put perhaps 10 million people out of work in the next 10 years.
America can stem the tide a little by stepping away from globalism, bit it's a temporary measure. Ultimately, AI will take over more jobs than it generates, people will tighten their belts and reduce spending, and this will continue until our current system collapses completely.
Something has to change, and we pretty-much know *what* has to change, but no one has any idea or plan on how to get there.
Traditional economics is religion, not science. It never predicts what will happen, only why something *did* happen. It makes conclusions by building a model to fit past data.
If you want to fix the economy, you have to look to the future.
Real economists don't do that.
Well, I'll be retired a bit before then....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Since when is slightly higher than lower income "middle" income?
I watched an old Twilight Zone episode on Netflix the other day (1966) which was about a factory where all the workers were being replaced by a computer and robotic system. They have been saying the same thing for 50 years. How many jobs today were not even imagined in 1966?
In a world where robots with AI can do just about every blue collar and almost all white collar work better, faster, and cheaper -- what do you propose?
Mind uploading. Then we unemployed humans can become the robots.
And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
If hardly anyone is working where does this magic money come from?
Are you going to take the few people making a LOT of money 3/4's or more of their income to give handouts to everyone else?
At some point, people get pissed they're working for something, and all their money and incentive to work is taken away.
Hell, if you took and confiscated EVERYTHING the top 1% currently owns...it would not pay the rest of us anything for even a full year. What do you do after that?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
First, economists are little more than apologists for whatever the political class wants to do with the economy. Economics is far more voodoo than it is science, and especially in it's current culturally enforced scarcity constraints. Second, Milton Friedman was an especially harmful apologist. Third, it would great if machines did all the hard work, so we could have more leisure. I'm all for it. Fourth, you are right! We would still find things to do, but we wouldn't necessarily have to deal with the abuses of markets when we don't have the artificially imposed scarcity constraint any more (which will look increasingly silly as machines produce so much excess), which in the long thousands of years of history of mankind aren't that old anyway, and aren't even all that great, having been criticized even by the ancients like Plato and Socrates, who had no love for that particular method of wealth distribution.
All of this is to say he's even right - iPhones are still mostly made by hand...
http://www.unfocus.com/
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
I disagree. Companies will do what they need to do to profit.
For example, software companies have moved to monthly fee models where you rent their software instead of buying it. The AI software of the future will likely move in this direction. I expect that the hardware will also evolve in the same way. For example, companies will either be allowed to rent the automation hardware or will be forced to buy "maintenance contracts" that generate the necessary level of income to support the companies that design and sell the hardware. As the software and the hardware will be quite complex, it will keep jobs active for lots of hardware and software engineers.
Automation is supposed to take away the boring and repetitive jobs. This is the goal. We don't have people digging holes with shovels at construction sites anymore... they are using excavators. The problem is that a lot of the replaced workers are not continuing their education to the point that they can get the design jobs. This needs to happen.
I know that in many cases this is a socioeconomic issue, but for others it is simply a personal choice. The US political parties need to stop lying to people and telling them that it is possible to bring these jobs back to the US. The only way this will be possible is if they tax the hell out of imports and no politician will be able to stomach that decision. In reality, the only solutions are to retrain the workers to do more complex tasks, to give them welfare forever, or to ship them off to China/India/Vietnam.
Currently, I'm the only person writing any code for my project.
20 years ago when I started my career, this project would take around 20-30 people to code. I'm not 20-30x better than they are. Instead, a whole lot of what I need is "automated". I don't have to write a network stack. I don't have to write a server or client. I don't have to serialize/deserialize the messages between the services. I don't have to write the deployment, monitoring and automatic recovery software. I don't have to write most of the testing code. And so on.
It's going to continue to get easier. So about the time I'm old enough to think about retirement, I'll probably be doing the work of 50-70 1990s-era programmers. If I'm still needed.
A near drag-and-drop "programming" interface for a typical business CRUD application would not be all that hard to do today, except for handling all the day-to-day edge cases. Add in a general-purpose AI, and suddenly you can handle those edge cases too.
And then the "programming" will be done by a relatively unskilled business analyst, except for the very, very, very few computer scientists working with AIs to produce the next version of the framework.
Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
Senior System Engineer/Architect
And what makes a code monkey's opinion on the matter any better or worse than a famous theoretical physicist?
You DO have access to the Internet, don't you?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Everyone with an open mind and a basic understanding in economics will come to the same conclusion. New automation technology will increase productivity quickly and faster than economic growth. In consequence there will be less jobs.
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
The relevant question is whether that is its only meaning or likely to be the meaning inferred within the context it is used.
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/09/does-decimate-mean-destroy-one-tenth/
If you are going to be pedantic, at least be correct.
Concepts of ownership don't have to remain they way they are now though. These concepts in the history of the human race are actually quite young, and capitalism is barely a zygote. For most of our existence, we didn't have such nonsense restraining us. What happens if automation leaves us with no more scarcity?
http://www.unfocus.com/
Because why? Are only people who majored in political science aloud to have political opinions now?
GP states that Milton Friedman believed in UBI, but that is not true. Friedman said that it may work as an alternative to Welfare under certain conditions. For example: Friedman believed in Welfare with an incentive to get off Welfare, which we have never had in the US. He also stated that Welfare was doomed to fail without tight immigration control, because it incentivized the least productive people immigrating and dis-incentivized productive people. Why come here to work if you pay 50% in Taxes, yet if you don't work you get Food, Housing, Transportation, and clothing from the State?
UBI is a Utopian fantasy, not a reality. Facts are dismissed when debating people propagating this fairy tale.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
It literally does but feel in to the same misuse as literally.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
You make the argument.
Stephen Hawking is not an expert on many of the issues not in his wheelhouse any more than any other celebrity.
It doesn't take a genius, expert, or celebrity to understand these predictions or the likelihood of them, or understand how hard it would be to utterly remove the greed that is driving all of this, and will ultimately change the face of human employment forever. This concept isn't new, wasn't first predicted by Stephen, and his predictions aren't weirdly obscure as compared to others who have analyzed this.
We should also remember that when George Orwell's 1984 was first published, most humans likely thought it was utter bullshit that would never come true. Perhaps we should be careful to criticize, since automation nor the greed driving it is hardly a work of fiction.
New automation methods will drastically increase productivity, while growth is not expected to go through the roof top. In essence you need less jobs.
Please do not compare this with the industrial revolution, as we had a labor shortage than. Also automation applied in the 1980s with robots cost jobs, but growth was bigger (at least in Germany) so more new jobs were created outside the factories. Now the situation is different, as all jobs in offices are targeted and in addition, drivers, nurses etc.
I'm pretty sure Stephen Hawking knows what "decimate" means, and his use is absolutely correct.
Either definition is true. Automation has already reduced a large percentage of the jobs in manufacturing (def. 1) and has at least replaced one in ten workers in traditional manufacturing (def. 2).
That Stephen Hawking. He think's he's so smart, amirite?
You are welcome on my lawn.
AI even has begun replacing tattoo artists
Thank god
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
People won't stop working, either. It's just not in our nature. Look at the military, where people can retire with a significant paycheck as early as 38.
Thank you for the lols. A great way to start the weekend.
Most of my work lately is writing code that writes code.
No, your code generates code, or outputs it, or produces it. It doesn't "write" it, and provided you actually do write some code, this should be beyond obvious to you.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Plus, he's still angry at God for his physical ailment. That bitterness is tainting his comments.
227-3517
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
That is what it means in Latin. That is not what it means in English.
Instead, they will want nothing more than to satisfy THE 1%'s values.
FTFY.
You are absolutely correct. As one trained in economics, business, and sociology (and math and physics) the shape of the future society will be in a response to a post-scarcity world. It is up to all of us to shed the puritanical viewpoint of 'productivity = self worth' and embrace the future.
Will it resemble socialism? Absolutely. Is that bad? Only if it is perverted to serve the cause of dictators .
It's not common sense at all, and is in fact rather short sighted.
We're driven by evolution to want to do as little work as possible as a matter of survival, (this mainly comes down to food energy conservation) and that inevitably extends to spending as few resources as possible.
Thus, the desire for automation comes naturally. Hell, just the other day I was asked to make a small change to a ton of network devices that should have taken all day, but instead when I was given the task, I just wrote a script to do it that took me all of about 10 minutes. How is that supposed to be greedy when nobody asked me to do it that way? I just didn't feel like individually shelling into each device one by one, and this way guaranteed that I didn't make any human errors in the process.
That's not greed at all, it's called technology.
You neglect that a) not everyone has the ability, skill or desire to just jump into programming b) programming can be automated too and c) the US government woefully neglects any attempts at job retraining, unlike European countries, mostly because every effort we've done towards job retraining since Carter was president has been cheap bandaid attempts rather than bottom up serious efforts.
You also gloss over that all of the farmers who were cast aside by automation were absorbed into the very factories we are now discussing being automated into non-existence. Also, simultaneously, millions of people employed in the trucking and taxi industry, including Uber, are facing the extinction of their jobs as automated cars take off. No, there will not be a rise in jobs servicing these cars either, as it's just as easy to develop an automated garage the cars just drive themselves into for service.
You can pretend all you like that new jobs will just pop out of the woodwork for these people but you're delusional. It's taken us 9 years to get back to the job growth we had before the last recession, our economy is not nearly robust enough to absorb the kind of jobless numbers we'll be seeing as automation really gets going.
The problem is not that it isn't common sense, but that additional weight is given to the premise when it is expressed as the opinion of a certified official Smart Person (tm). If Stephen Hawking happened to mention that the sky is blue, a certain sort of people would hold it up as divine wisdom simply because he said it.
What is relevant is the total production/supply of goods and services divided by the total population.
As production goes up faster than population growth, then the average standard of living goes up, regardless of who or what is generating the production.
Equitable distribution is the challenge, not imagining how to accelerate productivity - that is taking care of itself.
In a world where robots with AI can do just about every blue collar and almost all white collar work better, faster, and cheaper
Show me the gardening robot that's cheaper than whatever flavor of immigrant is in your local area.
Show me the construction robot that's cheaper than whatever flavor of illegal immigrant is at your local Home Depot.
Show me the plumber robot that will wrestle your turds and other unspeakables as well as a grizzly looking plumber.
Show me the robot that will be held accountable when it decides to approve an exception on form II-37 without the standard documentation under section B because it determined via a phone call to the person overseas that there were grounds for an exception.
Show me the software licensing agreements and prices for any of these pie-in-the-sky "AIs" or "Expert Systems".
And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
How long is your attention span. It's specifically there in the title and has been mentioned several times already.
The automation/machines are doing the job. That means that they are producing the value regardless of if humans are involved or not.
If the *magic* money weren't created there would be no need for UBI but since that money is created without people working the money has to be distributed based on something other than how much work the non-working humans put in.
The other alternative is to not implement UBI. That was tried during the industrialization and led to revolts and some not very successful attempts at implementing communism.
Would you rather try that again because that is what the people who have been replaced by machines is going to attempt again if we don't try UBI instead.
Yes, but unskilled workers in rich countries are a large and influential voting bloc, as a certain US political party recently discovered a little too late.
It doesn't take a genius, expert, or celebrity to understand these predictions
It also didn't take a genius to understand these exact same predictions when they were made in the 1700s, the 1800s, the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s. It also doesn't take an expert to see, with the benefit of hindsight, that all of those predictions were wrong. What DOES (apparently) take an expert, is to see that they are wrong this time too, for mostly the same reasons.
If you think that productivity improvements cause poverty, you are not an "expert".
And yet, somehow we still keep coming up with new jobs that begin to exist because of the increases in technology.
There may be an inflection point when needs required by new technology can be fulfilled by technology itself, or fewer people due to advances in tech. I think we are seeing the latter already, and it will steadily progress to the former. There is no turning back.
History can teach us many things, but we can't ignore that some events are unprecedented.
If no one is paying humans to do the work, then there will be no humans that can afford to purchase the things that automation creates. You can't have one without the other.
Languages change over time anyway. This is why we speak modern English, rather than Old English, Proto-Germanic, or Proto-Indo-European. And there is nothing you or any other pedant can do about it.
Because we have seen socialism work in so many other countries around the world? Sorry, but that is simply bullocks. Do you honestly believe that if the Chinese citizens could own guns that they would not overthrow the oppressive regime in charge?
The only working example of Socialism worked until immigration was allowed, and now that example is no longer true either.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Given how many failed software development programs there have been, you must be a bundle of joy in the brainstorming meetings.
> a) not everyone has the ability, skill or desire to just jump into programming
And 200 years ago, not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to move to the city and just jump into manufacturing. 50 years ago not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to just jump into operating the new electronic machines.
> b) programming can be automated too
Farming was automated, manufacturing was automated. When manufacturing was automated, we got consistent, controllable quality. Maybe as programming is automated we'll gain the ability to have consistent, predictable quality in software. That would be awesome.
> You also gloss over that all of the farmers who were cast aside by automation were absorbed into the very factories
That's quite the point. When people no longer had to pick the cotton (making raw cotton less expensive), they could instead work making things with the cotton, a higher paying job. When the looms were automated (making textile products less expensive), people moved again to higher paying jobs. As the factories were automated, even less skilled people moved into office jobs - data entry, secretaries, customer service, etc. As secretarial, data entry, etc. was automated (making data-centered tasks less expensive), the entire information economy was created.
It goes back far beyond 250 years ago, too. The invention potter's wheel meant fewer people needed to be working on creating pottery, heck the wheel itself meant far fewer people were needed for MOST jobs. The result of that, always for thousands of years, is that the output of those tasks becomes less expensive, having been produced by machine. That allows people to do cool new stuff with it - the material is cheaply available and they have the time to do something new with it.
but there are two things I can't answer:
1. Who's gonna pay for it? Yeah, I could write a few paragraphs on this topic, but they're not gonna make folks feel good about paying taxes to fund things like single payer health care, basic income, free public university, etc, etc.
2. The Puritan work ethic. Folks get _really_ uncomfortable with the idea that somebody is doing OK and not working their ass off to do it. There's an intense amount of resentment for it. It's not fair they have to put 40 hours of misery in and somebody else stays home eating steak and lobster and bon-bons. Hell, 'not fair' is one of the first concepts children learn. It's deeply ingrained in us.
Unless somebody figures out what to do with those sentiments we're gonna just keep giving everything to the upper class because we can't bear the thought of it going to anybody else...
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I watched an old Twilight Zone episode on Netflix the other day (1966) which was about a factory where all the workers were being replaced by a computer and robotic system. They have been saying the same thing for 50 years. How many jobs today were not even imagined in 1966?
There are lots of new jobs, most of which are either beyond the capabilities of the people being displaced or which require several (5 or more) years of retraining during which time the displaced worker is starting over, earning nowhere near a sustainable income.
If so many are out of work, who buys the stuff that automation creates?
So when confronted with a real challenge to your ideology you can't defend yourself and stoop to personal insult. Intellectual infancy at it's finest.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If AI is going to put so many out of work, who is going to buy the stuff that AI creates?
> What you call the information sector was only enabled by technology simultaneously becoming available.
Yes, the technology called "electricity" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
Next, the technology called "electronics" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new , higher-paying jobs.
Yes, the technology called "computing" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
Before any of that, the technology called the "steam engine" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
Before that, the technology called the "wheel" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
What DOES (apparently) take an expert, is to see that they are wrong this time too, for mostly the same reasons.
Can you find me such an expert? I'd very much like to understand what kind of gainful employment the blue-collar workers of today and white-collar workers of tomorrow can look forward to in our future AIs-and-robots-do-all-the-work-better-and-cheaper-than-humans-can paradise.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
and wipe his butt?
(I work in eldrar care rather than the disabled, but the same skills are needd.
Hawking reached his Peter Point several years ago. His opinions have as much value as Newton's on religion and the occult.
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Generations suffered in grinding poverty due to the industrial revolution. That always gets glossed over. The people who lost their jobs weren't back at work within a few weeks. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Productivity keeps going up, demand is going up less. Of course we're not going to be able to maintain full employment if there's just not enough work to be done with workers working 40 hours a week.
If people would work, say, 36 or even just 32 hours a week, we could maintain our standard of living, and at the same time get rid of this nightmare where some people are working themselves to death while others are desperate to find jobs.
Share the burdens more fairly, and share the rewards more fairly. It's totally possible, but of course you do have to let go of the business-knows-best, regulation-is-evil, government-is-always-the-problem-never-the-solution kind of orthodoxy.
Seriously, who would hire a human being to do any job if they can have a one-time-purchase AI to do the same job that is literally superior in every way?
It's worse than that. AI will be a cloud-based service, and each time anyone needs to use it will cost 35 cents.
Breakfast served all day!
Obviously, the concept of worth is far beyond your comprehension.
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Brake the machines on the way out and get a free DR in prison. Also room and board is free as well.
Too many heirs of wealth are busy destroying the wealth of others. We call them politicians.
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I, for one, would much rather get economics advice from an astrophysicist than an economist...especially Milton Friedman.
We don't have "saltwater" and "freshwater" physicists.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
People have been saying the same thing for the past 150+ years, and most economists alive today agree Hawking has no idea what he's talking about. Every single time automation has simply resulted in greater productivity per person and in turn a greater standard of living for less work. Yes each person will have less to do, but goods will be cheaper and there will be an even greater demand for goods and thus a greater need for employment. Every time people have bitched and moaned about people losing their jobs, the result was more people employed earning more for their labor. Maybe someday there will no longer be any scarcity in labor, but a scarcity free market would be a good thing.
And I want to puke every time I hear about how the income gap is growing. So what? The gap in real standard of living is the smallest it's ever been - do you seriously think anyone in the middle or lower class would be better off living 50 or 100 years ago?
But seriously, I can suggest quite a few economic texts that explain why the populist crap Hawking is spewing is absolutely wrong.
AI drivers will not phase out truck drivers for a very long time, but it will decrease their workload. The AI will handle the long haul portion on highways, with a human in the cab ready to take over for portions the AI fails to handle. Does this mean there will be fewer truck driving position? Yes, one driver will be able to handle more hours (although don't underestimate the power of unions to maintain hourly limits). There will also be job openings for AI R&D, repair, and the myriad of automated solutions they'll come up with for corner cases (automated refueling? automated loading and unloading? automated non-automated toll payment?).
Why do we end up with people whose skill set limits them to being a fry cook at a fast food restaurant? If that's the best you are capable of, your problems in life aren't starting with the AI revolution. And if society hasn't done anything to lift those people up already, (assuming they want to be lifted?) it isn't going to now.
And when everyone is unemployed, who is going to buy all the crap that AI produces?
It may seem like common sense, but it's flat-out wrong. If you study history, you will see that similar concerns were raised about the printing press, the industrial revolution, electricity, etc. And yet, somehow we still keep coming up with new jobs that begin to exist because of the increases in technology.
Right, because none of those things could flip a burger as well as a human could. However, now we have machines that can do things better then any human can. My job is to automate you out of a job, and if I do my job right then you are obsolete unless you can educate yourself to do something more complex. However, the cost of education is on the rise, so most will not be able to afford to educate themselves. We have a catch 22.
The solution to this problem is free education and a basic income. We should start with a grant for 60 credit hours of community college and a basic income at 60% the federal poverty level.
Other jobs will replace the disappearing jobs. One possibility is an explosion of original artwork and fine craftsmanship. There may be an increased market for live music. When you have a nice house and want to make it better, there's more demand for carpenters, plumbers, electricians, decorators, roofers, painters, etc.. Use your imagination.
If there's some way to make your life better, that's a potential job opportunity for someone else.
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Ignoring the obvious "that word doesn't mean what you think it does" regarding "decimate"
It is you who ignores the obvious: languages change. See decimate "properly" vs "generally". What does the word really mean? Not so obvious. If you want to come across as anal then by all means uphold the "proper" (or ancient) meaning. But if you wish to be understood, consider accepting the generally understood meaning.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Why doesn't someone just use one of these astonishing AI programs to figure it out for us?
Seriously, if the AI is going to do all the work for us, why don't we also let an AI figure out how to transition people to post-scarcity society without massive bloodshed?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Historically, the population of any species is limited by it's reproduction rate. There;s no reason to think humans should or will continue to breed like rabbits.
Decimate is an English word. Perhaps you meant "that is what it means in the context of ancient Roman military discipline."
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Except it can't, really; the universe is bound by physics and can't support exponential growth that way.
You can't exceed Carnot efficiency.
You can't defeat the square-cubed law (for things that involve getting resources/waste into/out of a particular volume (including heat - where do you think this AI is going to get all the energy it needs to do all this stuff?).
So while AI might be able to do certain things efficiently, it can't grow without bounds - the universe just doesn't allow it.
Now, that said, AI will probably indeed handle most of the deterministic things in the world - it will probably equalize a lot of sub-optimal things.
But we aren't going to have AI playing sports, we aren't going to have AI taking all creative jobs, we aren't going to have AI "replacing" tourism - you can't "AI" a trip to the grand canyon for instance. You can't "AI" having a family.
So if we let the AI figure out how to distribute all the resources it creates, rather than letting people do it, we'll all be fine. But that is going to be the trick - actually letting the AI do it.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
in US any one can get a student loan to pay for being retrained and some schools say you have to start over as none of your credits will transfer.
You're right of course. We'll swiftly invent new jobs catering to a new height of luxuriant consumerism. That way we can avoid having to actually reduce anyone's working hours. God forbid we allow those evil AIs to grant us any free time!
How will it work if you have 90% unemployment? Simple, it won't be that way for long. You will have massive unrest, and all of the horrors that would entail.
And what are then eventual results of that unrest? Laws to ban robots so that low-paid humans get to do all the menial work instead, forever? I suppose that's a possibility, but the other (more sensible) outcome would be laws to tax the robots to fund training and/or subsidize employment for humans, so that the humans can find work in other (less-menial) areas that robots are not so good at.
(And the end-game of that, when robots and AIs are finally better than humans at absolutely everything, would be that the training/employment programs would end up supporting humans in "jobs" that are really hobbies; e.g. dance instructor or pottery making. And that would be a fine outcome IMO)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm pretty sure I've heard this stuff before, concerns about capital becoming more important and ultimately marginalizing laborers. In fact, I think I heard about it in 1848, written by two Germans named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
If hardly anyone is working where does this magic money come from?
Corporations, you can start by taxing them more. Perhaps we could go as far as banning for-profit corporations, all companies could be public-benefit corporations.
And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
From taxing the profits of companies who have successfully used automation to drive their costs down to near-zero -- with negligible labor, their only costs are input materials, maintenance, and the electric bill.
The one good thing about a vast army of robot workers is that they can provide their owners with fantastic 24/7 productivity at low cost, and thus generate vast material wealth; the only question is whether that vast wealth will accumulate in the savings accounts of the 1% while everyone else starves, or whether some mechanism will be found to allow that wealth to benefit the rest of mankind so that civilized society can continue.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think this Friedman quote still has relevance though:
Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.
Does it really serve a purpose if you make it harder than it needs to be? And self-driving cars will be a benefit to everyone else. I can go down to the store and get a liter of milk for next to nothing because of milking robots and other automation, if I had to pay a living wage for someone to pull a cow's teats it would cost a *lot* more. All those stores who transport goods will get cheaper. The money people don't pay on taxis will be spent on other things. Everyone can spend their commute watching TV instead of wasting home time. It'll be more practical to live further from the office. Elderly might get around more and live more fulfilling lives. Large groups of people would have the benefits of a private driver, previously a rare luxury. In ways perhaps even better, since you get total discretion and it's always at your whim 24x7.
Assuming you can still find a job, of course. But we've been pretty inventive about creating new needs and services once we could afford to. The burger flipper might be on the way out, I doubt the chef is. A robot vacuum cleaner isn't scrubbing the bathroom or dusting the furniture. The electric lawn mower doesn't do flower beds or trimming the hedge. The washing machine doesn't pair my socks or iron my shirts. Of course you might say that one day we'll have a "I, Robot" assistant that'll do absolutely everything a human does cheaper and better but that's not in 10 or 50 years. Neither is self-repairing, self-replicating and self-evolving robots that work almost by themselves.
Real wages in the US has been flat for quite some time now, but at the same time you've had a massive influx of cheap labor on the global market depressing wages. You don't get a zillion Chinese or Indian employees working for a pittance anymore, when you look at the whole world workers are getting better paid. If it keeps going up, sooner or later it will return to growth in the US too because US wages are normal wages and not super expensive wages anymore. There is no magic that makes Americans stay far ahead of the pack forever, even though that how it's been in the past with the old world destrroying itself with world wars and an illiterate, primitive third world. There are smart people other places too, when they get the opportunity.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
ok, enough with this highly publicised idiot. He literally hasn't got a clue about the mystical / metaphysical aspects of the universe and the reasons it (and we) exists, yet he's all over the place yapping all kinds of nonsense about what the universe will bring to us. Every time I listen to him, I'm reminded of his narrow-minded (or rather, narrow-cultured) intelligence. He must be promoted by scientology or some other like-minded folks out there, for sure...
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Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman.
Although I generally respect economists within their domain of expertise, they do have a habit of blithely extrapolating from their models to the unknowable, or even the impossible. For example once I was at a symposium on limits to the Earth's carrying capacity. A physicist pointed out that since life is eventually sustained by solar energy, there are at least thermodynamic limits to the number of people you can support on a single planet. The economist on the panel contradicted him, claiming that the carrying capacity of the Earth was infinite. His justification was that all past attempts to put a Malthusian limit on population growth had run afoul of human innovation.
Now he's correct about summarizing the situation *thus far*, but that's only from a few centuries of economic experience that covers an insignificant fraction between the status quo and infinite population.
Now the real problem with futurism, aside from simply getting things wrong (e.g., the counter-intuitive link between higher wealth and lower birth rate), is judging precisely when something that's bound to happen is going happen. If we *do* continue to increase population, eventually we will reach the point where we won't be able to grow it any farther. But we won't know the precise moment we're going to hit the wall until we actually do.
Likewise unless you take a mystical view of thought, eventually computers are going to get better at it than we are. And when that day comes, we'll be obsolete as thought-workers. However we're very far from that now. What I think will happen is that the nature of work will change so rapidly people will find employment to be unstable. I believe what we'll see increasing levels of intractable structural unemployment: square pegs trying to fit themselves into round holes because the square holes have been filled in.
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Yes, but the farmers that got automated out mostly just went poor, they were not the ones that got the new whizzy jobs building washing machines, it being too far out of their comfort zone. People don't automatically find other ways to spend their time profitably when their job gets automated away.
Suppose long haul trucking gets automated away as seems likely to happen. There's very little chance those drivers are going become programmers. The truck stop waitresses won't either.
Another effect is that in the past when jobs got automated away, there were still many low skilled jobs for the majority of the people. That's not happening with the middle tier jobs that are going bye-bye. That and the scale of automation is much greater today than in the past.
Put quickly, just because that tree over your house hasn't yet punched a hole in your roof is no guarantee it won't tomorrow.
The technocrats had some interesting ideas...some terrible ones too, most notably a belief in the possibility of apolitical leadership. But some interesting ones.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, your code generates code, or outputs it, or produces it. It doesn't "write" it, and provided you actually do write some code, this should be beyond obvious to you.
But he is writing much less code than someone would have had to write 20 or 30 years ago to get the same results. Now he can get the same amount of functionality implemented by himself that would have taken a whole team previously. Thus his company didn't have to hire so many programmers.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Want to bet Hawking can think deeper than a code monkey...on any problem?
I don't profess to have any crystal ball into the future, or even deep understanding of the ever-evolving world of economics, but I do understand that people need jobs. Despite the increasing capabilities of today's machines, we're a long way of from sitting back and letting technology take care of our needs.
I believe in trying to help in little ways. For example, I don't use self-checkout machines at the supermarket, even if it means I have to stand in line. I don't want to help eliminate someone's job. I have similar feelings about self-serve gas pumps, bank machines, and cleaning up my own table when leaving a fast-food restaurant.
Are my efforts misguided and futile? Perhaps. Nevertheless, I believe that just because a thing CAN be done, that doesn't mean it SHOULD be done. I don't want to see wider replacement of human workers unless something else develops to mitigate further impoverishment of the working class.
10% doesn't seem too bad.
...our robot overlords but, in the last few decades, how many jobs were lost to them and how many were lost to lower-paid workers with no rights, healthcare, social safety net, etc. in developing countries? I wonder how Stephen Hawking would feel about being replaced by a small team of underpaid but very smart guys in India or China?
I see that Hawking is continuing the tradition of world-renowned physicist commenting on things they have no specialty in.
Well, why shouldn't he? Everyone else on this thread is doing the exact same thing. Commenting on things you aren't an expert on is something just about everyone does, on a daily basis.
The only difference is that when we make a brilliant (or stupid) post to Slashdot, it doesn't get picked up by any news agency. If you find that troublesome, you ought to blame the news agencies, not Hawking.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Take the Google AI that beat the world's Go master, feed it the Linux kernel and the GNU code tree and ask it to make it secure, smaller, faster or build a new application that does XYZZY. So much for software coding. Until the last year or so, I thought the plumbers and electricians would be safe jobs. I now doubt that someone starting in either of these fields will be able to find/keep a job for the next 40 years. YMMV
Why just middle class jobs?
We've reached a point where AI in medical diagnosis is more accurate then human doctors. Why just wipe out manufacturing when you can also wipe out "higher" and "knowledge" jobs as well? If AI doctors are can out perform human doctors, why not AI lawyers? No human can memorize every single trial case, let alone know about it as it happens thus being able to argue precedence in real time. This seems simple to automation.
Doctors, Lawyers, drivers, manufacturing.... what's left?
Apparently Hawking hasn't read "Homo Deus". Yuval Harari sees a grimmer future for us low class trash: extinction. We still lose jobs to machines. But the super rich start having bio-engineered babies; literally a have-it-your-way, "intelligent design", faster "evolution revolution", leading to a new, self-designed species, and the end of us homo sapiens, among other things...
The difference is that the rate of automation is still increasing.
Nope. This is a myth. The rate of automation is slowing down. Most easily automated jobs are already automated. Most workers today work in services, which are proving harder to automate. So workers today will likely have more time to adapt.
Isn't it strange that the very thing invented to enhance human productivity, AI, is going to make a large section of people non-productive. The problem is not AI but that the fruits of productivity is limited to a small section of people. The world will need to evolve to accept concepts like Universal Basic Income to share the fruits of AI with all.
Right, because none of those things could flip a burger as well as a human could. However, now we have machines that can do things better then any human can.
Because no-one has ever in history designed a machine that could...
* operate switchboards better than a human could
* compute ballistic trajectories better than a human could
* transcribe documents better than a human could
* assemble electronics better than a human could
* sort mail better than a human could
This stuff has been going on for a couple centuries now displacing lower-middle class workers. The only difference now is that it is beginning to affect upper-middle class workers who thought they were safe because they had eeked out college degree, but ended up in a field of work that didn't actually need a college degree, but they worked their way up a corporate ladder because they had some penchant for managing lower-middle class workers and they had some pedigree attached to their "college-attendance". Without these lower-level workers to manage (because it is all automated), what career prospects do they really have?
The solution to this problem is free education and a basic income. We should start with a grant for 60 credit hours of community college and a basic income at 60% the federal poverty level.
The community college thing isn't gonna really help anyone in this new labor-less economy. There isn't a corporate career path in management anymore (even, low-level foreman/supervisory roles). The economy can't really support enough jobs in the "overhead" rolls either. Think of what happens when we get a "boom" cycle of startup companies, there are still only a few winning companies and lots of losing companies. Which companies do you think many of these newly minted freely over-educated citizens will end up?
Sadly the future is likely that the whole idea of a "career" which is kick-started by formal higher education as way to make a path through life is probably reaching a turning point. Historically the whole idea of a "career" launched by formal higher education was really an artifact of the rise of governments and large corporations that needed to hire warm bodies en-mass and were looking for easier ways to sort potential employees.
If corporations eventually get smaller (because they don't need to hire as many people to scale), we are trending back to the artisan era (where people are often evaluated more by their portfolio of work, not their formal education and where apprenticeships are often more valued than training).
Of course an alternate path that is shown by history, is that corporation can also get large and subsume the role of government altogether such that employment in these mega-corps will become simply a new form a citizenship. In this alternate reality there is no need for free-education and basic income, these mega-corps will (as they have historically done) provide it to all their citizens (aka employees) and even provide them jobs in new startup ventures that they want to expand their reach into. I don't know if this is the ideal path preferred by all the basic-income promoting folks, but suspect not. In many ways these mega-corps are almost like a typical military organization.
Either way, a "free" education provided by the government doesn't seem to be worth the cost/benefit in a post-labor economy...
> Another effect is that in the past when jobs got automated away, there were still many low skilled jobs for the majority of the people.
It's not that there were *still* jobs. When electricity became readily available, machines started doing many jobs that previously had been done by humans, and that same automation that took over some jobs created many, many more jobs. There were a LOT of low to medium-skill jobs created by popularity lf electrical machines. I'd bet the MAJORITY of people currently working for less than $20/hour are doing jobs where they use electrical machines - automation created their job.
Later, electronics automated many jobs, and created many more. Then computers automated many jobs , most secretarial work, bookkeeping, etc. At the same time, the availability of computers created many new jobs. It's not that there were still jobs "left over", most of us do jobs that didn't exist 200 years ago; our jobs were CREATED by automation. What do you do in your job? I bet your job is to supervise and control some machine that automatically does the hard part for you.
> That and the scale of automation is much greater today than in the past.
It was in the late 1800s to mid 1900s that most jobs were automated in the sense that a machine does the actual "hands on" work while the human supervises and controls it. In the farmer's field, the combine lifts the harvest from the soil, while the farmer sits at the controls. The pilot sits and waits in case the autopilot needs to be switched to a new route. Workers at the dam and power plant watch screens, ready to push the button which causes the system to open and close gates thousands of feet away, if the system determines that it's safe to do so based on all sensor inputs. Very few workers use their muscles today. Rather, they monitor, control, and R&D tyre machines that do the real work. The pace of that transition peaked around 1941.
The most recent peak was 75 years ago, but this has been happening since the invention of the wheel. The3 availability of wheels meant that machines could be built to do things. That eliminated many jobs and created many more.
Yes economics is a difficult subject for which our theories are not very successful. But they are not apologists. The problem is they don't have first principles to work with, so they can only study what humans do in actual situations and so their theories are rooted in existing power structures. There are theories that clearly explain why Marxist, authoritarian, and other non-market economies usually fail. You should check you utopian idealism about leisure from machines doing the work and markets being harmful against history. Humans don't cope well without meaningful work. They also don't cope well with non-market organization of economic activity. Name a successful economy that wasn't mostly market based. There are of course different levels of central planning, regulation, and intervention, but the left wing dream of human harmony in a post market economy just never works. If you are convinced you have solved the age-old problem of how to untie humans in harmony without them competing economically in a market economy, please demonstrate your ideas in some voluntary utopian community.
I'm hoping that will be considered taboo.
And 200 years ago, not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to move to the city and just jump into manufacturing. 50 years ago not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to just jump into operating the new electronic machines.
Skill? Most manufacturing jobs were deliberately reduced to easily repeatable steps that an average below high school educated person could accomplish. Just the sort of jobs to fit hordes of ill educated farmhands. Hardly the same as expecting someone to jump from a repetitive GED level job into college level computer engineering skill.
That's quite the point. When people no longer had to pick the cotton (making raw cotton less expensive), they could instead work making things with the cotton, a higher paying job. When the looms were automated (making textile products less expensive), people moved again to higher paying jobs. As the factories were automated, even less skilled people moved into office jobs - data entry, secretaries, customer service, etc. As secretarial, data entry, etc. was automated (making data-centered tasks less expensive), the entire information economy was created.
"Some" people moved up. The majority have shifted into whatever part-time McJob they can find to try to make ends meet.
Anything that gives you enough income to purchase your own home seems to qualify as "middle income" these days.
If your household annual income exceeds 40% of the cost of a basic home in your area, congratulations, you've joined the middle class.
Until your household annual income exceeds 100% of the median home cost in your area, don't even think you're approaching "upper middle class" - like John Lennon (and later David Bowie) sang: "You're all fucking Peasants, as far as I can see."
How many jobs today are simple "made up work" - little companies that try to innovate, and fail - consuming speculative investment money, big companies that are so heavily regulated that most of their personnel cost is absorbed in generating documentation to C their As, keep the regulators from shutting them down, and prevent successful lawsuits from being brought. Oh, and then we can talk about the entire legal system, and the insurance industry medical industry black hole of man hours.
I watched an old Twilight Zone episode on Netflix the other day (1966) which was about a factory where all the workers were being replaced by a computer and robotic system. They have been saying the same thing for 50 years. How many jobs today were not even imagined in 1966?
There are lots of new jobs, most of which are either beyond the capabilities of the people being displaced or which require several (5 or more) years of retraining during which time the displaced worker is starting over, earning nowhere near a sustainable income.
One view says that the intelligent will get their retraining before they lose their old jobs and be rewarded for their foresight. That view probably doesn't take into consideration how difficult it really is to make informed decisions about such things while working 50+ hours a week.
Another view might say that the industries that are automating and displacing all these workers should in some measure bear the burden of retraining... but that would require corporations to actually pay taxes, and we all have heard how that might spell the end of civilization.
> And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
Where do you think the wages come now? Well, it's from the same place.
> If hardly anyone is working where does this magic money come from?
If anyone is working hardly where does the money come from? Because we wouldn't be in such a mess if people would be happy with their pay.
> Are you going to take the few people making a LOT of money 3/4's or more of their income to give handouts to everyone else?
How are these people making a lot of money? Do they really work that hard? I don't mean the guys who can easily buy a house. I mean those guys who can easily buy a jet. What do these guys do? Are they genius? Do they do any task which yields crops or products for millions? Because if you're paying them for a job well done, OK I suppose; but if you're paying them because they invest their capital, I'd say that's not a pay -- it's interest. There's no merit or incentive involved. It's basically ROI. And it's too high. There's no morals involved, like money hard earned or "from the sweat of their brows". It's just financial, just a return.
It's just business as usual, they're not blessed by the Lord and they don't have any kind of blue blood in their veins. They're just getting a too-good-to-be-true ROI.
> At some point, people get pissed they're working for something, and all their money and incentive to work is taken away.
Nobody said nothing about that. Basic income surely won't be enough for a life full of pleasures. There will always be enterprises to undertake and awards to be sought for those with the energy to go further.
If anyone gets demotivated because others have a simple life and are not dying of hunger, let me say that person is really scum. Maybe he also deserves a basic income.
> Hell, if you took and confiscated EVERYTHING the top 1% currently owns...it would not pay the rest of us anything for even a full year. What do you do after that?
You're kidding right? It's not about their treasures... it's about the amount of money that flows to their vaults on a daily basis. And it's not about forbidding them to make money. Actually, with the Economy getting healthier because more people will be able to eat and buy things, they'll probably make even more money in absolute numbers (though perhaps won't have 20% of the total income in the US).
The point is, we have to undergo disastrous Socialist experiment after disastrous Socialist experiment until we finally get it right! I suppose "right" would be something on the order of not destroying the economy and/or not murdering a significant portion of the populace.
And before anyone trots out northern Europe as paragons of socialism, consider that socialists themselves disdain the blended systems of Europe, calling them (as usual) "not Real Socialism", which is even more batshit crazy than European "I Can't Believe It's Not Socialism".
Oh but there I go again, maddened by my alienation, and regurgitating capitalist commercial speech as if it were my own. Woe is me!
than modern American workers. There was 80 years of abject poverty and unemployment after the industrial revolution but we sorta skip over that (along with anything in opposition to a pro-capitalism narrative) in school. In the 60s women moved into the workforce not for freedom but to make ends meet as wages started dropping after the post WWII and post Union gains. Again, we ignore all that.
Nobody's saying we should go back to tilling the field. We're saying we should learn history and learn from it.
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The problem is that wealth creation is becoming more concentrated.
Let's say that I work for you and earn 1000EUR/month, while you (the boss) earn 5000EUR/month. You then decide to replace me with a robot (or a lower paid worker, maybe an immigrant), now I get zero, but since you save some money you now earn 10000EUR/month. It may be good for you, but I still will not like it. If the government asks me (as part of a referendum or an election) if I want to prevent you from using your current solution, I will vote for it. If it passes, you will have to take me back (or not earn any money at all) and go back to earning 5000 while paying me 1000. Our combined income (or GDP) is lower, but since I earn more, I like this situation much better than you earning more and me earning nothing.
there was 80+ years of massive unemployment after the industrial revolution. "Luddite" once had a meaning beyond someone afraid of technology. It was a political movement in response to job losses that our social systems didn't make up. Our society never did make those losses up either. We killed several million working age men in two World Wars, saw some technical advancements employ people in new fields and shipped our sweat shops overseas. What we did _not_ do is fix our social structures. Instead there was 200 years of general misery for no good reason.
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There is a difference. You wrote a script to save yourself from doing a tedious task (I also do the same). Good. You can spend the time saved by doing something else (to get more money from another client) or watching youtube (the client probably expected you to take all day to do it, so you might as well say you did).
OTOH, imagine that copying the configuration to all devices was your primary job - someone else creates a template and you now have to apply it to all devices. Some time later, the admin who creates the templates finally figured out how to write a script to apply them automatically to all devices. Now you are no longer needed in the company.
Now imagine two workers, Abby the Apple Pie Maker, and Betty the Basket Maker. Before the robots came along, Abby made a pie everyday, and Betty made a basket everyday, and then they traded a pie for a basket.
What if both Abby and Betty sold their products to other people and then bought food, paid their bills with the money and only sometimes exchanged their products with each other? Now that both their products are worth 10% of the original price, both of them will starve and be kicked out of their flats for not paying the bills.
How secure is your 'Senior System Engineer/Architect' job? Do you own the company? Can it be outsourced or offshored? You'd go from making $135K/year to... what?
Opinion stated as if it were fact. Hopefully you were being sarcastic.
... among other things: "Fatal Flaws in the Theory of Comparative Advantage" http://americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=3076
What, pray tell, do *you* base self worth on? "Just 'cause?"
Here's the thing: anybody who was in a physical condition that was good enough to work in agriculture, could switch to working at a factory, even weaker people could do it. As factories/mines got more efficient, the same people still worked there but were able to produce more for the factory owner.
However, not everybody working in a factory can switch to R&D, inventions, web page design, programming, engineering etc. You need to be more educated for any of these jobs than you do to work with a power loom. The problem is that not everybody can be educated (let's face it, some people are better with, say, math than others) and even if they were able to learn as well as anyone else, education is expensive in some countries, but they cannot pay for it because they don't have money because they don't have a job anymore and when they had a job, the pay was barely enough to survive.
The difference today is that the jobs left over are perfect candidates to go overseas. Before they had to be done by domestic workers.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I agree that socialism, when primarily characterized by the dis-incentivization of work, is eventually always going to run aground for the foreseeable future. However, a guaranteed minimum income (UBI or negative income tax) is NOT by itself socialism. You still get to keep it if you work, though it may get slowly taxed away as you earn more. Friedman subscribed to this idea too (cf. chapter xii in "Capitalism and Freedom). In fact, we discussed just that with him when was a guest lecturer in a class I took on Human Capital (under Gary Becker).
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
How will it work if you have 90% unemployment? Simple, it won't be that way for long. You will have massive unrest, and all of the horrors that would entail.
Or you will have high taxes and welfare for all those 90% (if give people bread and entertainment they are less likely to overthrow you). Which means that the investors and company owners will be paying the other people for watching TV all day instead of paying them to do useful work.
not in his wheelhouse
Do you need to visit PC principal ?
Unlike the prior eras, there are not enough new jobs to replace the old jobs in the time needed to train or retrain.
Economics cannot explain away this one.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Hawking is wrong about which class of jobs are threatened, and wrong about the consequences. Lower class jobs are set to be wiped out AND the results of that will be far worse than Hawking estimates, but he is right to be concerned about overpopulation and so forth.
Take an average youth looking for their starter job. Today, they might flip burgers or work a cash register or some other similar entry level job. But in the near future, a lot of fast food jobs are going to be automated. And self-checkout continues to spread.
What will the average youth do for work? There won't be a lot of options. And kids who have no jobs and no hope of getting one often fall into crime and other habits that impact society. We could easily have mobs of kids roaming cities because they have nothing else to do, and if they end up irate or angry, it could result in riots, looting, fires, etc.
It gets worse.
As we automate cars and trucks, we won't need a whole slew of other jobs. Automated cars won't crash as much so we won't need body shops and mechanics, insurance agents and related workers (this goes right into white collar workers too). Police won't write as many tickets which will directly impact many towns that depend on that revenue. Likewise lawyers and courts will suffer reduced case load from car accidents and personal injuries that don't happen, so clinics and doctors geared toward that kind of care will have fewer patients paying them.
Meanwhile, automated cars will make it far less likely for people to make impulse stops such as for fast food or snacks at gas stations. And automated cars might go refuel themselves in the middle of night to take advantage of down time or empty roads. Or they might be plug-in. In all these cases, there will be far less need for people to work at places where drivers make those stops. You won't need gas station clerks. And yes automated refueling is possible. There have been prototype robot gas stations in the works for 20 years. Only the fact that labor was cheap has kept it from becoming an option.
The net result of all these changes are a LOT of lower class people who will have no job options. And nobody is slowing down having babies. Populations are soaring. There won't be jobs for all.
Does society owe anyone a job? Probably not. But we have to realize society will demand something be done about mass unemployment and youths running rampant in the cities and towns. We'll want it fixed. Jobs are one way to try to do that. Of course there needs to be some kind of job to do. I don't see anything on the horizon that promises to employ the number of people we have now much less in 20 years.
Hawking is absolutely right that this is the biggest threat humanity has faced. It is itself a huge, dangerous issue. And one way societies have solved over population and unemployment problems is by having wars. Which is not going to be fun for anyone.
Sig for hire.
But WAIT A SECOND, while the pies and baskets have each fallen in value by a factor of ten, a pie is still worth ONE basket. So Abby and Betty can just continue life as before. The robots changed nothing.
The just-so story is pretty, but it's hard to take it seriously as a prediction of the future when it doesn't even predict the past accurately.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before ("the foreign workers changed nothing"), because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc). But that isn't what happened, is it? Instead, many people lost their jobs and ended up either unemployed or working at less-desirable unskilled service jobs afterwards, because they were unable to compete with the cheaper/more efficient new foreign producers who didn't need to hire them.
Abby can just switch to making baskets
Can she "just switch"? Does Abby somehow already have the skills to make baskets, or the time and resources to learn those skills to the point where she can perform them at a commercially viable level? Switching to a completely different skill set is not without cost; not everyone can afford to spend months or years without any income while they retrain themselves. That's why so many previously-high-earning people end up "switching down" to something like Walmart cashier after the industry they trained for becomes non-viable.
So the most likely scenario is to put [the "losers"] on some sort of welfare until we can get riot control robots perfected
And here is exactly where the core of the problem lies. As the skill level of available automation rises, the pool of "losers" (i.e. people who aren't sufficiently skilled or adaptable to economically compete with cheap automation) gets larger every year, and eventually includes most (if not all) of the human population.
Dismissing that issue as a negligible corner case is ignoring the problem entirely. The fact that you think "riot control robots" are the endgame suggests that you do also see the problem; you just refuse to label it as a problem because you lack sympathy for "those people".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Remember the "paperless" office, how computers were supposed to eliminate paper? Yeah right! Sure, there are some paperless offices, but that is not the norm. Most offices go through more paper now than they ever did. That paperless office was supposed to be a reality back in the 90's. So much for that!
The role of paper has changed. It used to be the primary, permanent storage medium for information. Now it's more of a temporary medium to store text while it's in process. After the process is complete, the paper is often destroyed. Still, paper hasn't gone away.
Similarly, it's going to take much longer than anyone anticipates, to replace office workers with automation. And similarly, the role of office workers will change, and might even grow.
It's a lost cause for America, anyway.
Only for leftists bent on screeching "Hate! Bigotry! Shut up!". For the rest of us, it represents a second Reagan-like morning in America.
bigotry and misandry and globalism.
All things that the left teaches, and to do so violently towards non-leftists.
Besides, nationalism isn't a bad thing after all.
Rome burned and people still live there.
Unchecked moral decay caused Rome to burn.
Evangelical Christians get their way
The country is more than just Liberty University. On the other hand, it'd be nice to see university rioters get the Gov. Reagan treatment again.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's why they love politicians who talk endlessly about corporate tax cuts (heck, I've seen some people argue corporations shouldn't pay tax at all, and now you know why), but at some point, automation is going to mean corporate tax bills are going to go up.
It would be interesting to offer corporations zero tax if they are then exposed to the *full* liability of their decisions. Unlimited liability.
The corporation only got limited liability because they served a purpose in the community, for example to build a railway, because it is what the community wanted. Over the years they were afforded other benefits like "personhood" and the ability to expand their charter.
That corporations have a legal obligation to create a profit for their shareholder make it impossible for them to do anything that does not benefit it's profits. Expecting them to behave differently would be asking the board to break the law because even if they want to address community concerns they are obliged to put shareholder profits first. For that reason it is a parasitic legal construct whose structure and purpose in society should be evaluated.
Consider this: A corporation is a legal entity driven by people to make money. Look at how destructive humans have been driving this flawed construct which is destructive because *WE* make it so. Now imagine the same thing being run by a set of co-operating AIs. It is not the AI that is destructive, it is the legal structures *WE* have created that make destructive behavior.
If we are going to have AIs in our society we have to have moment of introspection about what sort of society we want to be, simply because AIs will amplify all human flaws. Technology is a gift that can work for or against us.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Obama got more people to work than anyone else ever.
Foreigners and diversity candidates. The rest fell out and are on assistance programs.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Specifically the part about the Butlerian Jihad, where Ludd's beliefs win on a massive scale.
Then question why you even supported automation as a replacement, not as a companion.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
No, the technology called "AI" took over about every old job and destroyed more jobs than it created.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
We've reached a point where AI in medical diagnosis is more accurate then human doctors.
Non-Watson-based citation needed.
I wonder what the (snark-free) medical symbol would be for communicating "AI Not Authorized for Medical Treatment/Human Treatment Only". I'd be more than happy to have one on me until AI is a strict companion, not a replacement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That was kind of my point. I guess I shouldn't have put "or worse".
What would happen to them is the same thing that happened to people that continued to weave by hand when automatic looms were invented. If you focus on the very things that machines excel at, you are not going to do well.
But they would only do poorly if there were OTHER THINGS that machines do relatively less well. If they did those things instead, they would benefit from the automation. Or do actually think people were worse off when automatic looms were invented? Because the situation is the same.
and what drives the reproduction rate?
as long as u can get food you'll make babies.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
Sure. Low-end manufacturing is not something where America has a competitive advantage.
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before
No. That is not at all what "my theory" is. That would only happen if the relative value of products was exactly the same. But that is not true at all.
because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc).
That is not true at all. The value of steel has gone way down. The value of cars has gone up.
I'd like to know why the goverments aren't investing in this high end automation.
What do the welfare people need? Shelter, food, maybe booze, TV/Internet.
Why doesn't the government build the robots to provide those things? With the output going to the people already demanding help?
Rather than demand the productive population work to care for the unproductive (whatever the reason) population, let the darn robots that want to take everyone's jobs do it.
Need to move them around? Free autodrive goverment uber access. Growing crops? There are already prototypes of fully automated mini farms. Build some robots to build those. This can't be an unsurmountable problem.
Heck, tell companies that if they want to replace jobs by automation, the will need to supply a fraction of their automation to the goverment to be used for this purpose.
Humans want to succeed and have a successful lineage, they want to build things, they want to tinker with things, they want to learn things, and they want to do so without oppression. This is an instinctual set of principles which led to Humans becoming the top of the Food chain.
That doesn't mean our social systems make us the 'most fit' to survive ourselves.
This is not limited to today, but a historical normal. No opportunity for self and family advancements leads to unrest and revolt. Just like all other Utopian dreams, the dream of the lazy human doing nothing while robots do all the work will not succeed.
Just because people *can* be lazy doesn't mean they *will* be lazy. Lazy is boring and lazy people don't exactly make it to the top of the food chain. I work 8 hours a day to be able to work on my ambitions which is the other half. If I didn't *have* to work I would spend my time working on my ambitions, but I would have the freedom for a little more time for surfing and exercise.
How will it work if you have 90% unemployment? Simple, it won't be that way for long. You will have massive unrest, and all of the horrors that would entail.
Have you considered what happens if that 90% of people had their basic food shelter and medical needs provided and could choose any education they qualified for? What if we usher in a post-scarcity society with AI and that allows people freedom to start solving the problems humanity faces? What if it is 90% education instead?
How do we know how many Einsteins have died of starvation in Africa or are sleeping under bridges in any of our cities?
I'm not going to rehash the Nobel Prize winning economist I mentioned in my first post. Read them, study them, and learn from them. "Capitalism and Freedom" is a must read for anyone who wishes to discuss economic theory.
Economic "Theory" is based on 19th century understanding of thermodynamics and whilst I will read the book (and thank you for the recommendation) I think it is the fresh paint job on a house of legal structures that are falling apart. All of these systems have delivered failure due to their inherent susception to corruption. The rich and the poor are free to sleep under bridges.
We are at the end of the Industrial Age and Captialism, Communism, Socialism (isms everywhere!), left and right politics are all, therefore, obsolete concepts. Hawking internal prejudices are based on the parameters of a thinker extrapolating the conditional thinking imposed by the Industrial Age. An age that suppresses the ideas that drive human advancement using patents so that market advantages can be maintain. Complete corruption of ideas that challenge capital, THAT is the crowning achievement of capitalism.
The very fact that we are talking about an AIs place in society is the very thing that ushers in this new reality. It's part of the culture shock that people are experiencing fatigue from the empty promises the 20th Century isms. It's the 21st Century and that societal change can either be imposed or controlled but it cannot be stopped.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Stephen Hawking isn't an "expert" on anything other than some obscure areas of physics. He certainly isn't an expert on automation, AI, jobs, or economics. Hawking never even held a regular middle-class job in his life. Hawking's opinions on social and economic matters are about as relevant as Shockley's.
However, there is about 20% unemployed people in the US (well, at least according to your new President). I do not know how true is that, but if it is true, then the number is too high in my opinion. There were a lot of unemployed people in my country too, but recently they moved to countries like the UK to work picking tomatoes etc.
I may be soviet in my views, I try to do as much as possible myself. The only reason I do not change the oil in my car is that I do not have a garage with a pit or a lift (and I do not particularly want to lift the car on a jack and then crawl under it. I do, however, fix my own electronics as much as possible and fix my car as much as possible (for example, changing the rubber parts in a carburetor, replacing the radiator, headlight reflectors), I cannot weld or do other major work on the body (so, I leave patching the rust holes to specialists), and I paid for installing AC in my car (because it requires special skills/tools, pit/lift and a lot of time).
I personally consider hiring someone to do some job usually as somewhat of a failure of myself - either I am incompetent to do it myself or too lazy.
I prefer working with small companies and individuals over large companies. If I pay the mechanic to patch a rust hole in my car, most of the money goes to feed his family. If I bought a new car, most of that money would end up in the back accounts of stock holders, managers, but not the people who actually did the work.
I work as a sysadmin as my day job btw.
There may be an inflection point when needs required by new technology can be fulfilled by technology itself, or fewer people due to advances in tech. I think we are seeing the latter already, and it will steadily progress to the former. There is no turning back.
Don't be naive! We can absolutely turn back the clock on technological progress if necessary. If technology is driving humanity off a cliff, humans can and should limit technology. To do anything else is foolish and, in a word, insane.
As I see it, human beings are not lemmings. We are not living out our lives solely to implement technological progress. Therefore, we do not need to commit societal suicide because, "Ooohhhhh, shiny!" Technology is useful insomuch as it benefits society. If technology is not useful, or if it's counterproductive, we can most certainly say, "No."
Some people certainly were worse off when automatic looms were invented. However, those people could either work with the automatic looms at the factory (for lower pay of course) or work at some other factory doing some other simple job (maybe instead of weaving they now work at a spinning factory).
While the early factories obsoleted some jobs, they required new simple jobs, for example, somebody had to shovel coal into the furnace so the boiler can make steam for the factory.
If automation obsoletes most of the simple jobs (that is, jobs that do not require university/college education or many years of experience to do well) then there will be a problem. Most hand weavers could work with a power loom in a factory, or shovel coal. I am not so sure that most truck drivers can program, build web pages or design the new self-driving trucks.
You've got it all backwards. It's not about universal basic income. It's about universal basic robots. Why are you imagining factories like it's 1899?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Universal basic income? What a 20th century idea. Give everyone robots, not income. Think Jetsons, not Flintstones.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The solution to this problem is free education and a basic income. We should start with a grant for 60 credit hours of community college and a basic income at 60% the federal poverty level.
I think you're underestimating both the scope and the magnitude of the problem.
First, consider that the problem we're facing here isn't just going to affect only low-skilled workers. Artificial intelligence, automation and robotics will ultimately impact higher-skilled workers too. It's only a question of time. If IBM's Watson can already diagnose illness better than a physician with a decade of college and on-the-job education under their belt, than even doctors have something to worry about. Don't forget that we're at the point now where nearly 1/3 of all Americans already have at least a bachelor's degree. When the economy itself needs fewer and fewer workers to produce more and more goods and services, a few extra free junior college units isn't going to keep average Americans employed.
Finally, the end-game here is all-too obvious; with an increasing population chasing fewer and fewer jobs, a basic income at 60% of the poverty line isn't going to do anything but ensure grinding poverty in the future, likely for decades to come, as the vast majority of Americans will never be able to find work again.
Overall, after careful consideration of the problem, I think this plan sucks. We as a nation ought to be able to do better than that. A handful of the uber-rich presiding over a nation of hundreds of millions of perpetual beggars is what I would consider a nightmare scenario. It does not have to be this way. I pray that we'll find some way to avoid this kind of apocalyptic scenario. I suspect it will require a great deal of out-of-the-box thinking, and we'll likely have to abandon some of our cherished capitalistic principles.
For one thing, we have too many people who just aren't smart enough for college. I suppose we could do something about that with better child rearing, but that would cost a ton of money and require people to spend a fortune on other people's kids. In my neck of the woods we can't even get a .05% (not cent, percent) sales tax though to fund our schools. There where 45 kids in my kid's high school English. She used to come home tired from standing because there were no seats. She went to one of the best public schools in the city.
And all of this is before we talk about clean air, clean drinking water (Flint, MI is going to have a generation of problems from Lead poisoning, and Donald Trump will be cutting back on the regulations to catch and prevent that sort of thing..). Again, who's gonna pay for it?
And let's imagine for an instant we do get folks to pay for it, what then? What are we going to do with a planet of 6 billion highly educated people? We're gonna get 5 billion people with advanced training, not 5 billion Eisensteins. Are we really going to have jobs for them all? China doesn't, and they're desperately clamping down on their over-educated populace to keep them from revolting...
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so you can sit around and not work? What gives you the right to take my money to support somebody else? Maybe I don't want to give up my hard earned cash?
/. give me one either, and I've been asking on every one of these threads...
Unless you can answer those questions you're not going to get anywhere with post scarcity socialism. I've got answers, but none of them feel good. They're all very reasonable and logical answers and they all make people feel bad. Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and the American left have been trying to figure out what to do about that sentimentality for years and haven't come up with an answer. I haven't heard anyone on
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Seriously, this is not news or surprising. It also does not need true/strong AI (which is not even on the distant horizon, despite what non-experts like you claim). Simple automation with some dumb learning capabilities is quite enough. The problem is that many middle-class jobs do not require much sophistication.
Maybe you should stick to physics, where you have proven to be a brilliant mind, instead of saying redundant and frequently wrong things about a field you are not an expert in?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
via birth control if we let it. Look at Japan and the Netherlands. If anything under population will be a problem (not enough youngins to take care of the old farts).
That''s all solvable too, but I'm not sure we can keep a lid on the Christians and their Anti-Birth Control crusades. We just put a certifiable nutter into the VP slot. Basically, what happens next is entirely dependent on whether we can keep our religious minority from throwing human civilization under a bus like they did for a thousand years during the Dark Ages.
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You can sell the fruits of your labour if someone has the willingness AND the money to do so. If change is sufficiently rapid then aggregate demand can be curtailed such that even those that retrain to provide bespoke and human-oriented goods and services will find it hard to make a living, and severe deflation could result.
Ultimately human economic welfare is based on primary production and its efficient exploitation through the value chain so ultimately we, as Neil Kinnock said, "cannot make a living taking in each others washing"
It's going to be a challenge to make the transition, but if we find a way we can make things very pleasant for people overall, which is what I hope will happen.
Actually, he is probably less of an expert than a random person, because he does not realize he is incompetent. The Dunning-Kruger Effect also applies to highly intelligent and intellectually accomplished people when they venture out of their field of expertise.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not in a free capitalist society. In any case, it will require a socio-economic revolution to address.
You confuse automation and AI. AI worth that name might never happen, as it is not even on the distant horizon (i.e. there are not even credible theories how it could be implemented at this time). Automation is limited in what it can do. In particular, excluding brute-force effects, automation can generally only do less than its creators as it has no understanding of what it does. That does not make it useless, but the, say, 10% of all jobs that require the highest level of understanding and insight are completely inaccessible to automation. That is not really an issue, as many of the people doing these jobs would do them for free, if cost-of-living was provided to everybody. But for the average person, there will soon mostly only be jobs left that require a person to do it, because it is a service rendered to other persons. This includes things like teaching things people do for fun (where teaching is required, e.g. private piloting), and things like waitressing or cooking. These jobs will however not be enough to give everybody a job and most certainly will be unsuitable as way to distribute wealth. The other challenge will be what people that currently fall back to watching TV and drinking when they have free time will do with their lives. You can only drink and watch TV so much before it becomes problematic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A: Because he's heaps more knowledgeable about lots of things and has heaps better faculties of logic than your typical Slashdot AC troll who has no intellectual or any other sort of standing--AND manages to get out his mother's basement more often than the AC does, too, despite the fact Hawking's confined to a motorised wheelchair.
What do I win?
(My tickets for the winter holiday have already been purchased, but I can always use some extra spending money, so just send the cash. Thanks!)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You do not have to be a physicist or materials scientist to understand that, if you drop a glass from a 4th-story window, you'll very likely wind up with lots of glass shards scattered about on the sidewalk below.
My father--a retired physics teacher--confirms this.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Actually they cannot. Not even today, and it does not look like they could be anytime soon. The meaning of "programming" is changing a bit, admittedly, and it becomes a bit more high-level, but that is it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Would those be the Indians whose fertility rate is actually a bit *less* than the world average?
Just checking.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Well, it depends on what you think the average human is capable of.
The way our society works is that you exchange your work for money in order to survive. Your whole survival depends on how much your work is valued on the labor market. If the only thing you are able to exchange is physical labor, congratulations, it's already worth almost nothing and you might starve in a near future! If the only thing you can exchange is prone to automation (hint: at the moment everything that is on the labor market is prone to automation), you will not make a dime.
So actually, what you are proposing is that people should evolve skills which value is not going to sink due to automation. Which begs two fundamental questions:
1. What are those skills? You speak of information, but automated information generation is already successful. Automated creation is on the rise, and partly already successful. Or you mean we will discover that soon enough, and the people in college right now are certainly not being taught those next things.
2. Do you really think everybody can catch up? There's the trend: the jobs that remain are the highest skilled one, which by definition are reserved to the lucky few that are able to do them. I don't think 90% of the population can defend a PhD, whatever the domain they prefer. Maybe you think that 90% of the population can improve their skills so as to beat the machine, forever.
So it all boils down to this: your faith in what the average human is capable of that is not automatable and has value on the market. Long term trend, I think is nil. Short term trend, I think it's below 30% of the population.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
When people no longer had to pick the cotton (making raw cotton less expensive), they could instead work making things with the cotton, a higher paying job.
Yep. It's pretty easy to imagine higher-paying jobs for slaves and/or sharecroppers.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Does he really equate humanism with "worship of humans"? I'm disinclined to read the book after learning this about the author.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Something in the use of "riot robot" suggest me it is a plain lack of empathy, and most probably a utter failure to see that it could happen to him too.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Most workers today work in services, which are proving harder to automate.
As Col Potter might say, "Bull COOKIES."
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
...is that the US is about to enjoy the greatest job producing president the world has ever known.
So nobody has to worry.
Not even applicable to the current discussion.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Less hours and more free time drastically reduces the value of your labor. Since MBA cost accountants figure overhead as fixed + variable costs it makes sense to fire you and overwork the other guy.
During the recession everyone worked 70 to 80 hours a week or 0. You just have one guy do the work of the laid off one or get rid of the secretaries and assistants or lead scouts and place the burden on the other guy ... And still expect same numbers.
Time is never reduced ever
http://saveie6.com/
Intellectual infancy at it's finest.
You'll be able to speak of others' intellectual *infancy* with less embarrassment once you've actually learnt the correct rules for punctuation (and capitalisation, too) that someone tried to teach you as a *child*.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Man, you are just an endless supply of slogans that sound like they actually mean something, aren't you?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You mean, "If no humans have any money...". You make the (unwarranted) assumption that the money must come as wages for work.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Legends speak of folks who've heaps more money than they can possibly ever spend...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Good for you. I'm taking steps to ensure that it'll be my mind that's uploaded.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Greed is great way to fuel progress, but only when contained within a set of rules which makes sure it doesn't destroy everything around it. Like rules which make sure companies deal properly with toxic waste.
New things are always on the horizon
It's not common sense at all, and is in fact rather short sighted.
We're driven by evolution to want to do as little work as possible as a matter of survival, (this mainly comes down to food energy conservation) and that inevitably extends to spending as few resources as possible.
This "evolution" this time around is driving humans out of employment permanently. Cash is still king in this world, and humans will still need to eat, sleep, and fuck. The population rate will likely increase out of boredom alone (look at pregnancy rates when a major city suffers an extended blackout), and thus more and more resources will be consumed.
The next generation will dream of doing exactly what when they grow up? Champion thinkers? Master debaters? We aren't looking to pay a few billion humans to do that today, and those we do pay for sitting around doing much of nothing (the Welfare State), aren't exactly living a dream life. If the greedy have anything to say (read: lobby) about it, they'll pay Welfare v2.0 as little as possible to sustain their ability to eat, sleep, and fuck. Think millions of humans earning far more than Welfare 2.0 will easily accept this fate? I fear the anger and violent backlash almost as much as the greed at the center of this issue.
Thus, the desire for automation comes naturally. Hell, just the other day I was asked to make a small change to a ton of network devices that should have taken all day, but instead when I was given the task, I just wrote a script to do it that took me all of about 10 minutes. How is that supposed to be greedy when nobody asked me to do it that way? I just didn't feel like individually shelling into each device one by one, and this way guaranteed that I didn't make any human errors in the process.
That's not greed at all, it's called technology.
Today, your skills and talents towards automation earn you a paycheck to pay for the things that sustain your life.
Tomorrow, AI will prove it can write your script 10 times faster, and will never need to stop to eat, sleep, or fuck.
In the eyes of the greedy elite who control this world, you tell me who's gonna win.
Greed is great way to fuel progress, but only when contained within a set of rules which makes sure it doesn't destroy everything around it. Like rules which make sure companies deal properly with toxic waste.
The 2008 global financial crisis was born out of eliminating constraints that were put in place long ago (Glass–Steagall Act, 1933) to ensure greed doesn't destroy everything around it.
And we've done fuck-all to stop it from happening again. Wells Fargo is a good recent example of greed and corruption remaining unchecked. Cost over 5,000 people their jobs while the CEO pulls his diamond-lined parachute.
Let me also remind you it was a Clinton who repealed Glass–Steagall, just to show how much we still love to embrace corruption.
Since when is common fucking sense way out of his expertise?
What he is saying is NOT common sense. Common sense would be believing that the current wave of automation will have similar effects as the many, many waves of automation that have occurred in the past: short term disruption, but higher productivity, wealth creation, and eventually higher living standards for nearly everyone.
Saying "this time is different" is not common sense, especially since there is plenty of evidence that this time is NOT different. Nearly everyone is benefiting from the current wave of automation. Billions of people are being lifted out of poverty in China and Africa. Only a tiny fraction of people are "losers": unskilled workers in rich countries. The other 95% of us are doing well.
The billions of people being lifted out of poverty is a good thing, but you fail to grasp the fact that they're being lifted from poverty to welfare, and no higher.
Let me know how the other 95% is going to feel or react as AI billionaire overlords become trillionaires, at the expense of the rest of us living in the Welfare State permanently.
Welfare 1.0 doesn't exactly create a life full of prosperity. Don't assume Welfare 2.0 will either.
"Greed", also known as people wanting to make a living, and sometimes they can use scarce resources more efficiently, and thereby do or make something cheaper than the other person. "Competition" for short. But moochers call it "greed".
Historically humans have often had more children than there was food to support as anything up to 50% died before 5.
sadly those who breed most prolifically are the least likely to contribute to society we are heading to idiocracy
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
> I personally consider hiring someone to do some job usually as somewhat of a failure of myself - either I am incompetent to do it myself or too lazy. ...
> I work as a sysadmin as my day job btw.
That was me up until about five years ago. Then about five years ago I started spending my time studying and getting some new certifications, which will also apply toward a degree. I now make four times as much money as I did five years ago, and I spend 25% of that directly paying people to do things I used to do myself. (For example renovating a bathroom last month.)
That leaves me with three times as much money (which I spend in ways that indirectly fund jobs for others), while the people I hire directly get paid as much as I used to make.
Economically, we're all better off if I specialize in what I'm best at, spending time increasing those skills, while paying other people to do what they're good at. I suppose that's the difference between a tribal economy where everybody hunts their own food and builds their own home versus a modern economy where professional construction workers build homes and professional farmers raise food for everyone. I suppose I'm ABLE to grow all my own vegetables, but that's wasteful of my time when I could instead be doing what I specialize in.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall was a recognition that banks had basically already figured out how to work around it, through money market accounts and similar products that fit either "investment bank" or "retail bank" regulation but effectively acted like the other. Even Sen. Glass realized (back in 1935) that the prohibition against mixing the two was harmful, but FDR and Congress killed Glass's efforts to repeal it.
At any rate, the repeal of Glass-Steagall had approximately zero effect on the formation or collapse of the housing or lending bubbles. It was a worldwide problem, Glass-Steagall was only law (and only repealed) in the US, the repeal was a long time before the collapse, and there were a lot of other factors -- like government re-interpretation of what constituted illegal red-lining -- that contributed much more.
Blaming the 2008-2009 recession on the repeal of Glass-Steagall is ahistorical and economically ignorant.
I had actually posted an other comment as a reply to mine, but it seems to have gotten lost.
It was something like: I should add this: one of the problems with the modern time is that through technological progress governments are now also competing with each other for the favours of the large international companies and smaller ones. In the hope it will help boost their country. In certain countries, like the US, this goes even further and leads to government capture where companies get (in)directly involved with creating the rules.
Which fits very well with what you mentioned.
New things are always on the horizon
Besides, nobody reads anymore. Who would? It's a big book, and Prof. Harari is on YouTube a lot talking about Homo Deus anyway, as well as his last international bestseller.
-----
"A riot is an ugly thing. Und I think that it is just about time that we had one." - Inspector Kemp, Young Frankenstein
Perhaps we could go as far as banning for-profit corporations, all companies could be public-benefit corporations.
And then watch the value and cash flow of those corporations plummet as their stock becomes worthless. No one will invest if there's no possibility of a return on their investment.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
What, no-one's posted a link to the over-simplistic and shallow short story Manna and been vapidly modded to +5 Insightful?
What is Slashdot coming to...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Um...not really clear on that, but I know that realistically speaking, my job as an engineer is to eliminate jobs through task automation and streamlining paperwork.
50 years ago puts us back in the mid-60's, when there was still plenty of good paying factory work to be had, and middle or lower class had more upward mobility, housing was still (relatively) cheap, education was cheap, pensions were still a thing, along with miniskirts and free love. I fail to see the downside here..
over to the factories.
:(.
1. What do you do in the meantime while the job losses are going on?
2. Once all that wealth and power has concentrated into the hands of the factory owners how do we get them to give it up? They're going to have automatic guns attached to their drones and no compunction about using them. In the past revolutions happened because even the military elite turned against the ruling class. That won't happen when the military elite is 5 guys watching over the drones and another 20 keeping them running...
Basically we need to do something now before it all goes to shit and we enter a 1000 year dark age, but I can't figure out how to get people to be willing to solve problems before they happen
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The government will have to absorb those people whose jobs will be replaced by automation. The government does not have the same 'productivity' requirements as the private sector. The choice will be between some form of welfare or public sector jobs that may in fact be welfare. Realistically, the government is already doing this. The military industrial complex is a form of welfare. Besides the people in the military we provide meaningful labor to a large swath of people across all states. If we were ever to pause and spend less, there will be a huge depression the likes of which we have never seen. Obamacare is another example. The government props up failed or unnecessary industries all the time. Imagine if the US went to a single payer system. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of health insurance related jobs will vanish. I am quite certain that is one of the reasons why things are not changing in health care. The powers that be see what the impact of such a policy would have at the scale of a country like the US.
There is a difference. You wrote a script to save yourself from doing a tedious task (I also do the same). Good. You can spend the time saved by doing something else (to get more money from another client) or watching youtube (the client probably expected you to take all day to do it, so you might as well say you did).
Most jobs that automation replaces ARE tedious. Name one manufacturing job that isn't.
1. Pick up panel A
2. Bolt on to panel B
3. Go to 1.
That's manufacturing in a nutshell. Other jobs are equally lame even without being repetitive, such as retail.
OTOH, imagine that copying the configuration to all devices was your primary job - someone else creates a template and you now have to apply it to all devices.
I've had jobs analogous to that, and they fucking suck. One that comes to mind is I had to fill sample jars at a chemical company. That job had a super high turnover because most people quit after their second week, and then they have to go train a new person. It only makes sense to automate stuff like that.
This "evolution" this time around is driving humans out of employment permanently. Cash is still king in this world, and humans will still need to eat, sleep, and fuck. The population rate will likely increase out of boredom alone (look at pregnancy rates when a major city suffers an extended blackout), and thus more and more resources will be consumed.
The next generation will dream of doing exactly what when they grow up? Champion thinkers? Master debaters?
Well, let's see: You just listed three things that people want that are quite profitable because there is a demand for them. One is much more profitable than the other two, and you listed them in the wrong order, which means you probably have a narrow understanding of what people want, much less the difference between a want and a need. And "want" is ultimately where economic growth comes from.
Tomorrow, AI will prove it can write your script 10 times faster, and will never need to stop to eat, sleep, or fuck.
Actually I wrote the script ten times faster than that; most of that time was spent building a test setup to make sure the script did its job correctly before I let it have its way with precious production equipment.
When the elephant craps on a haystack, finding the needle is even less fun. When the elephant deliberately binges on legumes and kelp and sun-ripened fish sauce for the sole purpose of defiling the haystack, this thread—so far as I managed to get— is the end result.
So thanks to the first ten posts I skimmed for tilting the payoff matrix so far towards rational ignorance and learned helplessness that even my three adult decades of burly and well-callused sanity is squeaking like a little girl, blubbering like a baby, and asking for a day pass.
It's official. I call "uncle".
You know truck drivers? Yeah, probably the last middle class job that pays well without requiring a college degree is going away really soon.
2.8 million people drive trunks in America. What's next for them once Otto passes trials and can legally operate?
Where does flour, sugar, shortening, fruit, reeds, and other raw materials come from? What you are describing only works if a trade economy exists between every pair of natural resources and human products, otherwise humans are just as priced out of the economy as before. You can't make pies if you can't afford ingredients, and you can't afford ingredients if you can't sell pies to anyone. But the biggest, most obvious flaw with your argument is that it doesn't depend on AI at all. If it were true people would *already* be trading this way to stay affluent. But instead we have a shrinking middle class.
We get it Stephen, you've got an opinion on everything. Why exactly do we keep treating yours as definitive when it's clear you're way out of your expertise?
Since when is common fucking sense way out of his expertise?
It hardly takes a genius to figure out that greed created the financial chasm driving cost-reducing solutions such as automation and AI, and a 12-year old can grasp the fact that greed isn't an element in society that is easily controlled by any means. Not law. Not policy. Not taxation. Not anything.
Are not the MBA courses teaching students that businesses thrive on profits, and the most important actions necessary are to protect and promote the business, irrespective of collateral cost? And then there is competition. If you can't compete, you die. Robots and automation are being deployed to permit the organization to compete.
One point, If you impoverish your middle class, they will not have the net-net (discretionary) income to purchase your products. So welcome within the next generation, the role of "the guaranteed income".
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
No where near 20% unemployment. Last new headline from the past few days said between 4-5%. 20% may include retired people or people who cannot work.
Humans want to succeed and have a successful lineage, they want to build things, they want to tinker with things, they want to learn things
Those are some rose-tinted glasses you have on. History shows that all of humanity has that potential and the best of us actually aspire to make the world a better place, but the majority of people are fk'n lazy and the only reason they act like they want to work is they want other people to think that they are important.
Don't confuse people wanting to be important and feeling important.
Don't worry, there is a good chance that we will have to become a Socialist civilization in order to reach a Type 1 or 2 civilization. Once nearly everything is in infinite supply, everything will be free. Let me know how your capitalist society will function in a free economy. But you make a good point, we should not force Socialism, only be aware of it and not fear it. We'll probably need some hybrid to transition.
True. We could just eliminate the excess 90+% of the population instead.
Only problem is that, once you do that, you only need 10% as many robots to do the work, and 10% as many technicians to maintain them, making roughly 90% of the remaining population once again superfluous.
Automation has been sold as "labor saving devices" pretty much since day one, but in practice it's mostly been used as labor-amplifying devices instead, so that everyone still does just as much work, but is much more productive. Unfortunately that breaks down once the automation reaches a level of sophistication that exceeds that of most humans. When 90% of the work done in a business can be automated, and only the most talented humans have anything to offer, then you have a major social and economic problem on your hands - and that situation is approaching rapidly.
Theoretically we could all move to service-sector jobs where "the human touch" is appreciated - but how many people will honestly want to pay 5x as much to be served by a slow, imperfect human, when a robot could do the same job perfectly in a fraction of the time? It's not unlike the situation that allows Walmart and the like to sell mountains of shoddy merchandise - at the time of purchase, price is an incredibly powerful motivator. And it's worse, because in almost every case, aside from the ephemeral "human touch", the robot service will be objectively superior.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Probably because that level of AI sophistication is going to be considerably more challenging to achieve than the level required to replace most human labor. Janitors and lab technicians will be replaced long before the likes of Einstein. We may get there eventually, but even if it only takes a few extra decades it will be far too late to do much good.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Have gnu, will travel.
Welfare 1.0 had (and still has) some really serious problems that made it incredibly difficult to escape from - As a gross oversimplification, every $1 you earn means you lose $2 in benefits - an extremely demotivating situation that rewards resignation and deceit (You only lose the benefits if you admit you earned the money)
Something like a universal basic income though doesn't carry those problems - you get $X amount of benefits no matter what, and every dollar you earn goes straight into your pocket. Early tests have shown that it may actually encourage people to work harder/more effectively, with virtually all work reduction being directly attributable to taking longer to look for more rewarding employment and/or pursuing further education.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Again, you confirmed the argument.
If I know, and you know, if we know, and they know, why the fuck do we need Stephen Hawking to state the obvious?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
>> 1. What are those skills?
How about prostitution?
The point is the n members of the group are on a ladder; ranked based on net-worth/money/power. A human with more power will buy the service of one who is lower in the ladder. This keeps going for a lower position person to someone still lower down. Even when someone has nothing to offer, the person higher in the ladder will provide under names like charity, feel-good, etc. So total collapse of society cannot happen -- the only way that can happen is when you block science and technology and spread superstitions (like the dark-ages in Europe) [leading to a shortage of essentials like food/water/medicine]
As it goes, in order to make a revenue, skills is not what will be required, but capital.
I usually do not like repetitive work (though sometimes I want to do it, say, taking a caddy out of a server, removing the plastic, installing a hard drive, putting caddy back and doing that 30 times). However, if bolting panel A to panel B was my job, I would do it and would not like it if somebody decided to automate it (because it would mean I no longer get paid). If I myself could automate it (and still get paid as if I have done that myself) then it would be great. In short - I am lazy and do not like repetitive work, but I like getting paid and food.
And here is exactly where the core of the problem lies. As the skill level of available automation rises, the pool of "losers" (i.e. people who aren't sufficiently skilled or adaptable to economically compete with cheap automation) gets larger every year, and eventually includes most (if not all) of the human population.
The final state where no human works is easy: everything is distributed for free. It's the transition to that state that's difficult. When you still need some people to work while others can't contribute anything useful. How do you motivate the (highly skilled) ones to work when others just live on welfare?
He said that the statistic was too low because if you give up looking for a job (and I guess decide to live off welfare), you are no longer counted as unemployed.
That's probably a sign to switch markets, i.e. work in an entirely different part of industry. You need to stay ahead of the development (change of demand) - keep the initiative - otherwise you'll end up on the sidelines.
Today's connected world makes it easier to acquire new skills and also advertise yourself (via LinkedIn - if you have relevant skills, the new job will find you). But you need to be smart, see where trends are going and keep the initiative.
Difficult question.
Trends in most developed countries show fertility rates going down, even below reproduction rate (i.e. leading to declining population numbers - see Japan, and many European countries)
and what drives the reproduction rate?
Netflix outages.Same as it always was, but with a different name.
I usually do not like repetitive work (though sometimes I want to do it, say, taking a caddy out of a server, removing the plastic, installing a hard drive, putting caddy back and doing that 30 times). However, if bolting panel A to panel B was my job, I would do it and would not like it if somebody decided to automate it (because it would mean I no longer get paid). If I myself could automate it (and still get paid as if I have done that myself) then it would be great. In short - I am lazy and do not like repetitive work, but I like getting paid and food.
Well consider this: If people became irrelevant for making stuff, then who is going to be able to afford to buy said stuff? And on the other hand, automation makes the cost of things go down. Historically what happens in situations like this for any given good is the supply/demand equilibrium declines and the price lowers to where even poor people can afford it. This has been true of practically everything, including luxury goods that were once exclusive to wealthy people, like cars and big screen TVs.
.Actually, the first part was in my thoughts, though I though a bit differently:
Humans become irrelevant in making things - prices of stuff drop - money for most people (who used to work in manufacturing) runs out - big problems.
Humans become irrelevant in making things - prices of stuff drop - money for most people (who used to work in manufacturing) runs out - big problems.
You're essentially arguing that, by necessity, they'll stop being consumers. That's just unlikely.
This "evolution" this time around is driving humans out of employment permanently. Cash is still king in this world, and humans will still need to eat, sleep, and fuck. The population rate will likely increase out of boredom alone (look at pregnancy rates when a major city suffers an extended blackout), and thus more and more resources will be consumed.
The next generation will dream of doing exactly what when they grow up? Champion thinkers? Master debaters?
Well, let's see: You just listed three things that people want that are quite profitable because there is a demand for them. One is much more profitable than the other two, and you listed them in the wrong order, which means you probably have a narrow understanding of what people want, much less the difference between a want and a need. And "want" is ultimately where economic growth comes from.
I'm going to assume for a moment that you are talking about eating, sleeping, and fucking. Understand I chose those specifically because they are all needs for humans and our race to survive, not mere "wants". Eating and sleeping are not optional for a human to live. Fucking is also rather critical for sustaining our race in the long run, thus also a need. And profitability does not magically shift them from needs to wants, but it certainly defines how these basic human needs are sustained today; with income driven by employment, which destroying the capability to employ a human is the crux of the issue surrounding AI and automation.
Tomorrow, AI will prove it can write your script 10 times faster, and will never need to stop to eat, sleep, or fuck.
Actually I wrote the script ten times faster than that; most of that time was spent building a test setup to make sure the script did its job correctly before I let it have its way with precious production equipment.
Actually, AI will write the script and test it across a dozen virtual environments running multiple scenarios before you can double-check variables driven by human error. Humans spend tedious hours building test setups. AI will automate that too, once it learns every imaginable scenario to validate against.
I think their position is a bit dated, very much rooted in the thinking of early 20th century socialist. As am example of how technology could be used for government, with today's technology, and maybe even technology from 40 years ago, we are capable of replacing most decisions the President makes with an electronic popular vote. Effectively replacing our head of government with a hive mind. I'm not saying that's a good idea, but if we were to chose to do it there would not really be any technical barrier.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
When one has almost no money, one usually spends that money on food and cheap clothes instead of TVs. If one has no money, well...
There are plenty of people that don't believe the things that Hawkins is professing. They think most of our jobs were lost "overseas" to immigrants, and just elected a narcissistic charlatan into office as a firm reinforcement of that belief.
Hawkins professing something isn't, in and of itself, admissible as any kind of evidence in evaluating their argument...but I'm going to strongly counter that it's plenty of evidence to listen to the argument in the first place. He is an accomplished intellectual, and we give him space out of civilized respect for said accomplishments. It's an insane world where Trump, or any of the god damn batman villains he's filling his cabinet with, are supposed to, somehow, be worthy of our attention or respect, given a total lack of said accomplishments. Make no mistake about it, we're certainly going to be debating their points of view, like it not. The problem with information, nowadays, isn't of evidence, but of preference and exposure. It matters - A LOT - what the actual opinions and arguments are that people are being exposed to in the first place, and this is a problem that precedes the veracity of said arguments. This is why we're stuck firmly in the fake news "make up your own facts and believe them" Trump era. People like Hawkins need to come forward with common sense arguments because we should give a shit about our intellectuals, in the public sphere.
This is because they've had a reputation of relying on reason, logic, evidence, etc. to establish arguments through the academic tradition. I disagreed with nearly every word that came out of William F. Buckley's mouth - but you can't deny that he formed coherent arguments utilizing reason, in an overall civilized manner. Nowadays, nobody but "YOU" ("you" being whoever is reading this) knows what the fuck they are talking about, and is is a total fucking idiot. That's basically "argumentation" for the modern age. It doesn't matter what a person's IQ is, bend over and take a huge rude shit right in their fucking face - because, after all, this is "YOU" we're talking about. You probably know better.
b) programming can be automated too
No, it can't. Programmers self-automate all the time, it's called abstraction.
Done right, it makes them more productive. Done wrong, well... it "creates jobs".
The only thing that will automate away programmers will be Strong AI - strong with a capital 'S'.
Not to mention that all the people talking about "those people" will actually *become* a member of "those people" when their jobs are axed.
It reminds me of people who romanticise medieval times and think, "Oh, how nice it would be to be a prince or a princess". Well guess what Mr or Mrs snowflake. If this was then, the likelihood that one would even BE a prince or princess is very very much not in one's favour.
It's the same situation now, except all these people are deluded into thinking that they would be the modern equivalent of royalty when in reality they are a frighteningly short step away from being down on all fours looking for "lovely bits of filth over here".
Of course an alternate path that is shown by history, is that corporation can also get large and subsume the role of government altogether such that employment in these mega-corps will become simply a new form a citizenship.
*raises hand* What history is this? The only time I have ever seen such things, have been in things like in the RPG Shadowrun, or movies like Robocop. And those were... less than ideal situations.
Except that, as many others have already commented, this is exactly what *didn't* happen. Or at least, there wasn't a 1:1 transference of labour from farming to manufacturing.
When manufacturing was offshored, what happened to all the factory workers? Some may have been able to move upward. The vast majority did not. Now these same people are basically working at less than minimum wage as walmart greeters.
And even then, they still had it better than we will now. Education costs have absolutely skyrocketed. If a person in their mid-life wants to go to university, they will most likely be dead before they've been able to pay off their school debt. And this is assuming they can even find a job because the job pool isn't growing at nearly the pace that the world population is.
The single biggest difference here is that we are in a position where *all* jobs are will be automated away. From Drivers to Doctors, *everything* is under threat. What do you hope to do when, even if it were possible to re-train to a more advanced field, *that* field has been automated away as well?
slew wrote:
> Because no-one has ever in history designed a machine that could...
> * operate switchboards better than a human could
> * compute ballistic trajectories better than a human could
> * transcribe documents better than a human could
> * assemble electronics better than a human could
> * sort mail better than a human could
>
> This stuff has been going on for a couple centuries now displacing lower-middle class workers.
>
But those technologies were not Turing machines and, most importantly, they were not Turing machines that are on the verge of being able to create other Turing machine that can do *any* task done by humans now or in the future.
To look at the extreme (and so far hypothetical case), suppose we do reach a point where an AI is created that can create other AIs to replace all existing human workers? If those AIs are owned by a small number of humans, then those owner humans will, progressively, obtain all wealth since they will own the work done by all of the new AI machine workers. Society and most human work is already owned by the Capitalists but in this hypothetical extreme case, there would be no need for all but a handful of Capitalist owners (let's call then neo-Kings). What reason would the owners, the neo-Kings, have to share wealth with the no-longer-working humans (the rest of humanity)?
Basically, this is the ultimate Capitalist end point. It can't be reached unless the humans (almost all humans) that no longer have work are given enough to prevent them from removing the owners and taking ownership of the machines and putting social mechanisms into place that assure a reasonable (to be defined) distribution of wealth. Capitalism would have reached an end point where it was no longer capable, per se, of assuring that reasonable distribution of wealth.
Dennis Allard
Santa Monica
December 5, 2016
> If a person in their mid-life wants to go to university, they will most likely be dead before they've been able to pay off their school debt.
I started school at age 38. My total cost of attendance at a state university is $14,000; $6,000 / year tuition minus $2,500 / year tax credit. If the IT degree increases my income by even $4,500 / year, I'll pay for itself in about three years.
In fact, three years into school, the classes I've already completed are one reason my income increased $45,000/year while I'm still in school. The schooling pays for itself before I even graduate. You may have seen the story on Slashdot today that the average annualized income of an intern in a tech company is $70,000. That's the average for people who are still students who choose their major wisely. So the cost of school is 2 1/2 month's salary, going into the fields that are now in demand. Of course, if you major in women's studies and marijuana at Columbia, your salary may be lower and your costs higher. Decisions do have consequences.
> The vast majority did not. Now these same people are basically working at less than minimum wage as walmart greeters.
The vast majority are working at less than minimum wage? Citation very much needed. You might find one where you pulled that data from, your ass. Or did you get that from a Bernie speech and forget to spend two seconds thinking about whether it makes any sense whatsoever?
I did see the article about interns supposedly making $70k. I call bullshit on that one. Maybe that's what happens if you're particularly lucky and manage to get a job at google or some VC backed startup with more money than sense, but there's no way in hell a lowly intern is going to make that kind of money with no experience at a normal company. I've been working in IT my whole life and I have *never* seen such a ridiculously generous salary for someone in an intern role.
Regarding university, are you saying you did a full course load AND high paying job? I'm absolutely calling bullshit on that, unless you sacrificed all your free time, abandoned any hope of ever having a full night sleep at that time, nor having a social life.
I'm sorry but your story sounds so idyllically successful that I simply cannot believe you. This is not the kind of thing that happens to an average person unless they happen to have some excellent connections and/or are a professional bullshit artist who exudes enough charisma to con their way into positions much loftier than their skill set deserves.
So it seems whenever someone chooses to do something with their life, rather than playing victim, you "call bullshit" and pretend it never happened. If that's the way you choose to live, that's your choice.
> Regarding university, are you saying you did a full course load AND high paying job? I'm absolutely calling bullshit on that,
Most of my study is listening to video courses during my commute (and any other time I'm in the car). It turns out I'm in the car 10 hours per week or so. Udemy puts out a lot of videos, CBT Nuggets, and O'Reilly had a 60% off sale last week. I have text books on my phone which I read whenever I'm waiting for 5-10 minutes. You may be someone who checks Slashdot or Facebook 3,4, or 10 times per day; I spend those short times reading a few pages in a text book.
Once I *understand* a topic by having it explained audibly and reading it, then on my lunch hour I practice, or write, or whatever I need to do to reinforce it that I can't do in 10-minute chunks.
Quoting myself:
> You may be someone who checks Slashdot or Facebook 3,4, or 10 times per day
I just clicked your user name and I see that yesterday (a work day for most people), you posted on Slashdot seven times. Assuming that you read *before* you reply, that's maybe an hour and a half to read the story and the other comments, then make your reply.
Depending on how fast you read, an hour and a half is 30-150 pages. Let's guess on the lower end, 45 pages for you in an hour and a half. 45 pages X 7 days in a week - you could read 315 textbook pages per week in the time you spend reading Slashdot comments and posting here, if you wanted to. If you spend the same amount of time on some other site, such as Facebook, that's 730 pages per week.
Just your Slashdot time is, for a slower reader, enough time to read 16,000 pages per year. That's almost twice as much as you need to read in a year of college.