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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!
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.
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
That's cute, you think that the on-line sales/help agent you are chatting with isn't already a chatbot... Be sure to send her programmer a +1...
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.
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.
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.
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
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
The problem is that the current trend is replacing good jobs with crap jobs. Even worse, many of the crap jobs exist not because they can't be automated but because it is cheaper to pay $8 per hour to a person than it is to automate the job. This means that automation has put a ceiling on all those jobs so they will never be middle class jobs. Take a job at mcdonalds and figure out how much it would cost to automate it and depreciate that over 20 years and you can easily calculate the point where raising minimum wage would cause that job to disappear. Likewise, you can calculate what the price of the robot needs to drop to before that job vanishes.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think a better solution that Guaranteed Income would be reduced work hours and mandatory vacation. If people were forced to work less hours then those hours could be given to other people. This works as long as middle class jobs that can't be automated continue to exists. It reduces the supply of labor which should increase the demand for labor and therefore the pay. It doesn't work for jobs that can just be automated away though because if labor cost goes above the automation cost then those jobs just vanish. The only thing that is currently keeping unemployment from spiralling out of control is that it's currently cheaper to pay someone $8 per hour than it is to automate that job away. Increase minimum wage to $15 per hour like many are suggesting and you will likely see any job that can be automated or eliminated like cashier, waitress, stocker, drive thru worker, etc... automated away.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Sure, but past innovations displaced specific sets of workers, from specific fields. (pun intended) I think what he is worrying over is the potential to displace many different workers very quickly, from many different industries.
Automation is all awesome, and displacing specific sets of workers in steps is progress.
Displacing MANY different workers from MANY different fields, as automation looks to be about to do, is very painful progress, and will force many tough decisions. At least, that's what I took from the read. S.H. is a pretty smart dude, and the writing is on the wall. This time is IS different, the potential applications of good AI in automating the things will grow very quickly as business owners innovate. This will have consequences that I don't think we can really accurately predict.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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"No externalities". Typical of the unbridled-capitalism/free-trade mindset. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, 'tis said...
Thanks for the link.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You can start by outgrowing the Protestant Work Ethic thing that is obviously colouring your judgement.
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
Some other nice ones:
Markets are efficient iff P=NP
Finding out if there are booby traps in certain derivatives (like CDOs) is NP-complete
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.
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
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