Ray Kurzweil Explains Why Technology Won't Eliminate Human Jobs (fortune.com)

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, now a director of engineering at Google, made an interesting argument in a new interview with Fortune: We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history. How many jobs circa 1900 exist today? If I were a prescient futurist in 1900, I would say, "Okay, 38% of you work on farms; 25% of you work in factories. That's two-thirds of the population. I predict that by the year 2015, that will be 2% on farms and 9% in factories." And everybody would go, "Oh, my God, we're going to be out of work." I would say, "Well, don't worry, for every job we eliminate, we're going to create more jobs at the top of the skill ladder." And people would say, "What new jobs?" And I'd say, "Well, I don't know. We haven't invented them yet."

That continues to be the case, and it creates a difficult political issue because you can look at people driving cars and trucks, and you can be pretty confident those jobs will go away. And you can't describe the new jobs, because they're in industries and concepts that don't exist yet.
Kurzweil also argues that "the power and influence of governments is decreasing because of the tremendous power of social networks and economic trends..."

"A lot of people think things are getting worse, partly because that's actually an evolutionary adaptation: It's very important for your survival to be sensitive to bad news. A little rustling in the leaves may be a predator, and you better pay attention to that."

Comments

We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, this is so dumb. It assumes an equal amount of social or intellectual positions will be eventually created and some smooth transition of the working populace to these new careers.

Nope. Not going to happen.

We will see more hookers, maids, maid/hookers, oddjobs contractors, etc. Already see this in high tech cities.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mwvdlee]

Okay, so the first few generations of sexbots will generate a massive job increase in the medical professions, but how about when they get sexbots to operate reliably?
I guess there will always be jobs in energy generation, though.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Paradise Pete]

It assumes an equal amount of social or intellectual positions will be eventually created and some smooth transition of the working populace to these new careers.

Plus it assumes that people will be smart enough and capable enough to actually do those jobs. I think we're already bumping up against that ceiling. The machines are going to take over and there's no stopping it. Humans will just be a tiny blip on the evolutionary landscape.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Kjella]

Subtract the number of accidents and violent incidents in the pursuit of sex as well as the STDs, unwanted pregnencies etc. and my guess is sexbots will decrease the number of jobs in the medical profession.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[DThorne]

While I agree with your succinct evaluation of the man who used to be my hero back in Synclavier days, on a very broad level I agree with him. You can pick apart his specific arguments until the cows come home, but I'm tired of the Chicken Little stories about everyone on welfare while rich people get richer. It belies a complete lack of historical research - people have *always* been losing jobs to technological advancements, the only difference is in the specifics. Just because many of us aren't terribly removed from a period of massive growth (post war expansion), we see that constant growth as some sort of norm. Read more history.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Plus, isn't Kurzweil's thing "The Singularity", which takes (as something between a premise and an article of faith) the impending availability of AI so strong it ranks somewhere between "indistinguishable from magic" and "indistinguishable from divine power"?

The "eh, don't worry, there will totally be jobs in the future, I just don't know what they'll be because they are so futuristic" assurances are rarely helpful; but among AI pessimists(either in terms of absolute capability or in terms of development schedule) they are at least plausible. Coming from someone who expects AI powerful enough to nerd-rapture him before he dies, less plausible.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Evtim]

Always....always...always....

A group of bacteria were growing in a petry dish. Their civilization lasted for 60 days. Every day they doubled their numbers. On the 59th day some bacteria were trying to make a point that the food is finite that this level of growth is unsustainable. "What, are you crazy!" - replied most of the rest - "We have always found a way! Look how numerous we have become, surviving and adapting for FULL 59 DAYS! Also - half the world is empty, you morons (yep, the last division changes the dish from half-full to full; progression, bitches)! Remember back in the ancient times during day 42 we ran out of food but we found a way, we found that New world full of untouched agar-agar (apart from few savage bacteria that we killed). And then there was that "crisis" during day 50 when we ran out of agar-agar but we mutated and started eating the polymers below, that the great bacteriophage in the sky created for us (that was the polymer support mesh that the PhD student used). We will always adapt, always have been and always will. Always, do you hear! Always!!! Bloody alarmists"....and so the 60th day came and the bacteria could not mutate to eat the dish itself. The great bacteriophage in the sky got all the souls she needed and the PhD student got his article.

Ponder this (you can also stibbons it) - on one hand we have, unprecedented by their magnitude and significance, events coming towards us (machine learning replaces intellectual jobs as well, no?) and on the other we console ourselves by extrapolating past events that have nothing to do with what is coming. Weird! You understand that we can make machines run the whole of the economy. ALL of it. Forever, because AI learns faster so if we create a new job, ANY new job, AI will be able to do it better and cheaper...understand? All future jobs are gone as well. From that moment we either enter the Aurora situation - 1 human per 100 km2 served by thousands of robots or we kill each other since there is no "profit" in such future....

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[AmiMoJo]

The difference is that in the past you could own the means of the production, i.e. the farm or the factory, but you still needed workers. Throw in some employment laws to protect those workers and it's viable.

Now you can own the means of production, and it uses robots and AI to do all the work so you don't need to employ anyone.

It's not the end of the world, but we do need to be aware of it and plan for how to deal with it. It could be great for all of us, we could work a few days a week and still enjoy a good quality of life. But like those employment laws that mandated shoes for child cleaners and some minimal level of safety, it needs to be regulated and managed.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Anonymous Coward]

And someday, enter the robot hookers: cheap, sanitary, good-looking, does whatever you want, and won't steal your wallet. Figuratively and literally, humans will be screwed.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Wycliffe]

Plus it assumes that people will be smart enough and capable enough to actually do those jobs. I think we're already bumping up against that ceiling.

There are still plenty of jobs that can't be done by machines. Unfortunately most of those are in the service industry. If we don't change something, we are going to be heading back to the situation where we have 1 guy in a mansion with 20 servants doing things like landscaping, cooking, cleaning, and helping their child get dressed. There are plenty of countries already like this where a live-in housekeeper/cook is so cheap that everyone who is middle class has one. This is great for the middle class, not so great for the untouchables.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jellomizer]

I was just recently talking to a McDonald's franchise owner, he is upgrading his store with kiosks and more advanced technology. Here is the thing, the technology will not cause him to lower his staff, if successful he may need to increase his staff.
For his stores the big problem is long wait times in the drive thru and in the store, so people so these kiosks will help get the orders in faster and food delivered to the customers faster. This means more people moving in and out of the store, however it also means more employees who are busy cooking, and delivering the product, and less of them standing there in front of the counter smiling as the guy who has been in line for a few minutes never bothered choosing what he wanted (while other customers in line, my decide to leave the store to go somewhere faster)
For every less person at the register there is a person who is needed to deliver the food. Just as long as the employee isn't so suck in their ways and refuses to do their job differently then they will still have a job.
Every 20 or 30 years this debate on technology comes up and talks about taking away job, and still we average around 5% unemployment. Technology changes your job, normally it gets rid of the job, that even the employees don't want to do, and gives them time to do more of the more exciting (relatively) work, that is a bit more gratifying.

The problem is we are right now thinking business/government... needs to cut costs. While the real trick is to increase revenue and get more customers, sure waste can and should be improved continuously. But growth brings growth. If people need to be paid more, then they will also need to be more productive, technology is there to assist.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[houghi]

And at a certain point, when the hungry and poor got fed up, they threw out the rich. Because most people do not care that much to be rich, they care to be able to care for their families.

The thing is that when robots replace people, the only one that gains anything is the owner. If a robot reduces work by 50% it will not mean we get to work 50% less, it means that 50% of the people get nothing and 1 person gets that 50%.
So the difference between the rich and the poor is suddenly a lot more.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jellomizer]

For a lot of jobs, the demand isn't for people who are Smarter, but people who are kinder.

Normally if you have an analytical job, you are so focused on the brain work, that you often will overlook other people and their feelings, hence why a lot of MD specialists are normally rather terse. Because with faced with a difficult problem, they are trying to solve the problem and often see their patient as a collection of biochemistry then a person who is feeling pain, and may be scared. Also for Tech workers we are trying to get the parts to work and get things going, we often fail to realize if there is a problem, people are actually frustrated and other people may be frustrated to because they are waiting for the results. We have smart people who can fix the problems, but what we also have are the people who may not smart enough to deal with the technical issues, but are rather nice people, however instead of having them talk to the customers and make people around them feel better, they may be put doing some menial job, such as data entry, or filling out forms. Where their skills are being lost on helping people.

That is where Automation comes in, it does the menial job that people really don't want to do, allowing them to change their focus on doing human things.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jbmartin6]

And over time as productivity grows, work hours continue to decrease. With cheap efficient robots making everything, maybe a job will only require on or two hours of work a week to make a decent living.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mikael]

I see hundreds of science related programming research positions. But they aren't C/C++, they are usually Matlab/Python and require an advanced degree in Physics, Mathematics or Natural Sciences.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mikael]

At the moment, maintaining a robot costs as much as employing a human. It requires other humans to repair it when things break, even with built-in diagnostic software that detects faults before they cause other problems.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mark-t]

Forever, because AI learns faster so if we create a new job, ANY new job, AI will be able to do it better and cheaper...understand?

Perhaps you are missing the point. Machines can already play chess better than humans, but those chess players are not losing their jobs to machines.

While I realize this area might be a bit niche, that's just one of the only areas where computers have actually already surpassed humans in ability. Perhaps there's other variables that are at play in determining whether we will pay a human being to do something than simply skill and cost?

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[vtcodger]

The medical profession can look after itself thank you very much. If current diseases and conditions decline in importance/frequency, you'll probably find that you are suffering from BTS (Brittle Toenail Syndrome) and/or antibiotic resistant DGB (Depraved Gut Bacteria). Both will require immediate action. By specialists. Expensive specialists.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Kjella]

Looking at one company is useless, if their success puts two employees out of work at competitors for every new hire the total will be less. You can't just look at Amazon and Wal-Mart without considering the companies they put out of business.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[that this is not und]

Sexbot sanitizers.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[vtcodger]

Those with memories that go back further than a few days will recall that economists across the political spectrum told us that unrestricted free trade was a great thing for everybody and that the manufacturing jobs displaced from developed countries would be replaced by zillions of great jobs in new industries. Those like Bernie Sanders and H Ross Perot who questioned that assumption were dismissed as flakes. Turns out that a lot of new jobs actually were created. But nowhere near as many as were lost. And not in the same places. And not for the same sort of people.

Likewise, President Obama's millions of green jobs, that his climate policies would create. Mostly not happening and a lot of the jobs that have been created are installing Chinese made solar panels that will never pay for themselves in inappropriate places. (BTW, I'm NOT against solar when the engineering is done properly. It's a good solution to some problems. There's no reason not use it in those cases. But too often engineering isn't done at all. Promises from ill-informed and not overly honest salesmen are used instead of engineering).

Anyway, I agree with the OP. Kurzwell is probably overly optimistic. And if he is, that will be a problem. And we should be worrying about what to do about it rather worrying about pressing issues like correct demeanor of football players during the playing of the national anthem.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Hognoxious]

If that was the case, there wouldn't be huge factories full of the things because it wouldn't be cheaper.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Hognoxious]

Only those people fortunate enough to have enough money to receive a decent education and subsequent employment in information-class jobs (or better) will benefit.

I don't think the owner class will end up starving, somehow. Though dangling from lampposts is a possibility.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[that this is not und]

Machines can only play chess better than humans if that is the directed design goal of the machine, which was designed by a human.

When an autonomous AI mechanism chooses to learn how to and succeed in winning chess against human opponents because it wants to play chess and not because it was directed to play chess, then it will mean something.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[gweihir]

"Futurist" is a special sub-species of "idiot". A smart person understands that the future cannot be meaningfully predicted. A "Futurist" lacks that insight and mistakes his fantasies for "predictions". Ray Kurzweil is a stellar example of that effect. And, as usual, his "predictions" are nonsense. This time around, we have automation that can do as much or more than a large part of the workforce. That means there will likely not be new jobs that these people can fill and this is the first time in history that happens. This is not an event with precedent, unless you count the influx of educated slaves in ancient Rome. However I doubt we can extrapolate from the effects back then, if they are even known.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[gweihir]

It is. But even Kurzweil seem to have noticed that there is still no AI available or on the horizon that could do a "singularity". To anybody with real AI knowledge, the idea if a "singularity" is completely laughable, of course. And to anybody that understands the psychology, the prediction of a "singularity" is simply a prediction of "God" coming back into the world (after Science has eliminated the idea for anybody actually following the scientific approach to thing), just that it will be implemented by technology. A meaningless fantasy, driven bey a deep urge for a superior authority in many people.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[gweihir]

That one is simple: The job-loss happens a) somewhere else and b) in the next steps that follow this upgrade later on.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[bluefoxlucid]

Turns out that a lot of new jobs actually were created. But nowhere near as many as were lost. And not in the same places. And not for the same sort of people.

Mostly correct, although there's a missing piece here: manufacturing the same things in America as in China causes a loss of the general buying power, reducing the number of American jobs in total.

I usually do this by citing the total imports of Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, and a long mathematical comparison of the number of jobs involved (178,000 currently, or 0.11% of the active labor force) and the wages and prices. It takes several pages and a lot of math, though.

The short version is pants come in a 40-foot shipping container shipped for under $1,300 from China and containing 20,000 pants (6.5 cents per pair) at a price of $6.12/pair with $3.20/hr Chinese labor (1.89 hours).

With 18% payroll overhead (6.2% OASDI, 0.2% HI, 1% unemployment insurance, $924/year health insurance and all other benefits), minimum wage labor here costs $9.735/hr. Those pants cost $18.42 off the line, an additional $12.37, or about 1.50 additional hours of gross minimum-wage ($8.25/hr) compensation or 0.46 hours of median ($26/hr) wage compensation. Yes, the payroll overhead is unrealistically-low here.

So you're looking at the creation of poverty: Work more hours, buy the same stuff. It gets better.

You're looking at the creation of half as many jobs, roughly. It gets better.

Trucks still carry the same volume of goods, and cashiers scan about 980 items per hour at peak rate. Fewer pants or fewer other things, it doesn't matter: you're losing truckers, cashiers, shelf-stockers, inventory managers, and, eventually, entire retail centers. You lose the demand for some of the inputs (fuel, maintenance, mechanics, power generation, building supplies) to maintain these, as well. A few jobs nibbled here and there.

You should come up ahead at minimum factory wage, barely, maybe. With 40% payroll overhead, you'll experience a slight net-loss of American jobs.

If you bump those wages to $15, $21, or even $26 per hour, you're going to lose tens of thousands of American jobs in net. You'll create some factory jobs, but lose large amounts of buying power as Americans become poorer, and thus lose the jobs involved in distributing and retailing all that stuff.

That's the reverse argument: ending globalization makes us poorer and reduces American jobs; thus globalization has made us richer and increased American jobs.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[fluffernutter]

That, and it should be able to hold an intelligent conversation with the other player as well.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[fluffernutter]

Your mistake is in assuming the prices for things will go down, and that we will afford all we need with two hours salary. This probably won't be the case.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that in the past you could own the means of the production, i.e. the farm or the factory, but you still needed workers. Throw in some employment laws to protect those workers and it's viable.

That's a very recent phenomenon. For much of history those "workers" did not enjoy equal rights as owners. The Greeks and Romans employed vast armies of slaves; no Athenian citizen worked as an "employee" for someone else, but rather slaves filled those roles. The middle ages saw a division between lord and serf. Slavery reemerged in the New World and only disappeared with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Since technology began cutting down on the number of bodies needed to produce the same amount of goods, we've seen an increasing amount of freedom that let slaves and serfs become "workers" with full citizenship if not full equality in wealth. The revolution promised by robotics and AI could well advance "workers" to the status of artists providing unique, handmade goods or special services that require the human touch. In such a future, in which robotics and AI bring even greater freedom and equality to society, just as industrialization brought an end to slavery, we may see even *less* need for regulation or employment laws: when everyone is an artist whose work is valued for its individual excellence rather than quantitative output, it may well be harder to exploit the artists. The less mindless, repetitive labor humans do, the less human labor will be exploited or exploitable and the less need there will be for regulation.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[fluffernutter]

Well, sure he's not getting rid of people right away. He needs to save face with the community and figure out the best way to make it work at first. Doesn't mean it won't happen next year.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[invalid_user]

Wow! All those virtue signals racing out in every possible direction, in a circus of self-righteous sensitivity.

You, sir, are SJW-certified. Random chick orgasms in your general direction.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Iamthecheese]

The total market for McDonalds burgers is limited by the population. The total market for food is limited by the population. If Mcdonalds sells more with less staff that's great, up to the point where the demand for burgers is exhausted. Meanwhile people eating Mcdonalds aren't eating at Burger king, or the steak house, or at home and those jobs are lost. Overall employment in the food sector must fall.

Technology has always created new jobs but that ceases when technology replaces the human brain. At that point there's no reason to hire a human except to say "we employ humans" or for the relatively few careers just being human trumps a higher-performing robot.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[fluffernutter]

It just occurred to me that many people here think that prices and the cost of living will go down, or salaries will go up as jobs become less available. That is a ridiculous stance, no one is going to pay you an 8 hour day for working 2 hours or transfer cheaper running costs to the prices of products. That just isn't going to happen.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Anyone who does math can tell you that with a 1% annual growth, there will be more humans than particles in the universe, in 17,000 years or something.

But we do know command and control of the economy is the wrong way to go, and in any case wouldn't be warranted, even if so, for thousands of years.

Every time a politician wants to control something, think to yourself what is the kickback potential to get back out of the way? That is the way of the world.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[computational super]

What difference does it make to you? You hate them, they hate you, this reduces the chance that you'll ever cross paths. You should be happy about this.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jbmartin6]

Aside from the fact that my assumption is what has happened so far, it is pretty farfetched to think that people will make tons of very cheap well made consumer goods via robot and then not sell them to anybody. True the future remains uncertain, but I'd be interested to hear why you believe your pessimistic assumption is better grounded than my optimistic one.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Iamthecheese]

That's only half of the equation. As jobs are lost to globalization new markets are created. Yes we lose most of the pants industry, but we gain jobs in the farm equipment industry so they can grow their cotton, and the heavy equipment industry so they can transport it, and the information systems industry so the whole system can communicate properly.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[computational super]

For every less person at the register there is a person^H^H^H^H^H robot who is needed to deliver the food

FTFY

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[MitchDev]

The need for conversation is a human thing...

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[bluefoxlucid]

As jobs are lost to globalization new markets are created

No, it doesn't work that way. The creator of jobs is consumer purchasing power. How do you expect to create all these jobs when you must pay the wages of the workers doing those jobs, and yet the consumers are expending more of their wages on fewer products and so can't afford to buy the new things which require this new equipment?

I incorporated the entire cost of pants when they land at the dock into the labor share. That includes the cost to grow cotton, the cost of all the machines used to farm it, the cost to dye it, the cost of transportation on mainland China, and the factory work. If you want to call me on only distributing that to factory workers, that's fine: you're going to get even fewer factory jobs, a few new farm and machine jobs (which will probably pay higher and thus make the problem even worse), and no net-gain of jobs over my simplified argument through that route either.

You're thinking in terms of trickle-down economics: you think that we create jobs by going out, working, and selling our work. That doesn't happen. If you try to sell to a consumer base which has already allocated all of its buying power, you won't sell shit, or else you'll sell something and some other guy will stop selling and lose his job. We can create jobs over time largely because the economy grows (population and technical progress), and so we allocate some of that growth to new production and new jobs rather than taking it from existing; we don't just magic up the capacity to sustain new jobs by opening a new store and selling a new thing, not until something else has changed to allow the market to buy that thing.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[bravecanadian]

I take it that you have seen this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[bravecanadian]

At the moment, maintaining a robot costs as much as employing a human. It requires other humans to repair it when things break, even with built-in diagnostic software that detects faults before they cause other problems.

That is absolutely false.

If that was the case, the beancounters wouldn't be using the robots in the first place.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[shmlco]

If you took a list of jobs, ranked by the number of people who do each one, you'll have to go all of the way down to number 33 on the list to find a new job that didn't exist 100 years ago: computer programmer.

Sure, there have been technological advancements and "new" jobs, but most "new" jobs aren't new at all, because by and large the general categories have remained the same: driver, delivery man, manager, secretary, assembly line worker. It's just today that the assembly line worker snaps together circuit boards and screens as opposed to stamping car parts or sewing together buggy whips.

The website marking expert of today, (a "new job") once managed magazine and newspaper advertising. The Uber driver of today was the cabby of yesterday and the carriage driver of yesteryear, and, if Uber has it's way, replaced by the self-driving car of tomorrow.

It's been estimated that up to 45% of the jobs that people in the US currently do today are up for automation in the next couple of decades. That's 45% of the workforce, and if you're one of the those dislocated you're not going to just be able to switch to another field, because people there have also been dislocated and they're also looking for work.

All told, here in the US we're looking at employment disruptions measured in the tens of millions, and all of them occurring within the next decade.

The Great Depression had an unemployment rate of 25%. What happens when that number hits 45%?

I'd advise that everyone watch the following video, Humans Need Not Apply

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I'm not a Luddite, but I am worried that our civilization is going to go through a few major tectonic upheavals in a relatively short period of time.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mark-t]

Remember Henry Ford's assembly line? Old potatoes at this point, modern robots are assembling cars to much higher standards.

And despite thousands of workers being displaced by those robots, the unemployment rate was not significantly affected in the long term.

Obviously displacing humans with machines has an impact on the short term, but the demand for people to do the things that they might happen to be able to do well is always going to be there... the jobs that will be replaced by machines are the jobs that most people wouldn't actually want to do if they had a choice, and that is quite far removed from the only kinds of jobs out there... and even farther removed from the only kinds of jobs that will ever exist. The fact that it might be cheaper to have a machine do a job is entirely irrelevant because money isn't the only governing factor to what makes a society healthy.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jellomizer]

Not simple at all. If the step requires more person to person interaction their business model would demand this. So each technological step will open the door for a different type of job. We have been hearing about this peak job market where technology will outpace work for about a hundred years, and Unemployment is at a near record low. We actually need to bring in immigrants because our culture isn't creating enough offspring to meet demand.

The thing with a technological world, is that we need more people to be human.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jellomizer]

I don't see why you are disagreeing with my point and agreeing with the premise. You cannot be "nice" to the person because you are busy doing work. You probably actually have time to be Nice, Because being nice probably doesn't take that much time, and doing so you can probably get the information from the person you need faster to do your job... However because you are so focused on trying to do the work, you forget to be nice. It isn't about having a lack of social skills, but the fact if you are overwhelmed some things will often get traded off. We as humans are not as good at multi-tasking as we think we are. If you are busy it is hard to be nice.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[msk]

Solaria, not Aurora?

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And don't forget the 50 million or so on welfare.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Marxist Hacker 42]

50 million people on welfare taking $1.17 trillion dollars to maintain, in the United States alone, certainly trends towards that.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mark-t]

True... but that's only because most chess players that are god enough to make money can't make enough money to live on.

Some can, however. The top chess players make hundreds of thousands or sometimes in excess of a million dollars a year by playing chess.

Professional athletes often make enough money that they don't need any other career either. While I can see no small market for watching robotic athletes, which might someday otherwise be able to compete with and beat human athletes at some of their games, play certain kinds of games as well, I doubt it would displace existing human athletic competitiions, it would simply be a new entertainment form.

My point being that if you truly excel at what you do, you can probably find you may be able to make a living at it, because the demand for people with talent is always high. In the meanitme, you just keep working at it and getting better and better at what you do.

If you are the sort of person who believes themselves to be talentless, or worse, otherwise content with being mediocre, then you might have a problem.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Marxist Hacker 42]

As it turns out, with new automated vertical hydroponic gardening techniques, it only takes one acre of sunlight to feed a human being for a whole year.

We are far more likely to head towards Trantor, than Aurora- 80 billion human beings living underneath a roof of biodomes.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I expect the bare minimum for 100% uptime is 21 human employees (between machine breakdown and illness). Of which, 14 of those are redundant replacements (but given that human beings sleep a third of their life, you need 3 sets to assure proper redundancy).

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Both Solaria and Aurora were severely underpopulated, the only *real* difference was in culture. The Aurorans would gather together and travel together for social reasons, and the Solarians would avoid each other even for purposes of reproduction.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[fluffernutter]

Cost of vehicles have not gone down since the 1970's if you adjust for inflation, and in most places house prices have gone up. Sure cars are more complex now and houses tend to be bigger but really that is a small trade-off considering both parents are usually stuck working to afford these things. Since those are the two biggest expenses most families will face, not sure there is anything else to talk about. Sure, some types of technology is cheaper now but that's really a drop in the bucket. Not sure where you are seeing prices coming down due to automation.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Lodragandraoidh]

Always....always...always....

A group of bacteria were growing in a petry dish. Their civilization lasted for 60 days. Every day they doubled their numbers. On the 59th day some bacteria were trying to make a point that the food is finite that this level of growth is unsustainable....You understand that we can make machines run the whole of the economy. ALL of it. Forever, because AI learns faster so if we create a new job, ANY new job, AI will be able to do it better and cheaper...understand? All future jobs are gone as well. From that moment we either enter the Aurora situation - 1 human per 100 km2 served by thousands of robots or we kill each other since there is no "profit" in such future....

Your petri dish analogy is flawed. It doesn't take into account the lack of farming of arable land all over the world (e.g. everyone's back yard, and other surfaces in urban environments). We are nowhere near the 59th day in the petri dish. As for your AI assertion - AI is not able to duplicate human capacities in a general purpose sense. Most AI is tethered to the network - requiring large arrays of computers running in parallel to do the job and is focused on a specific use case/world model. This definitely wouldn't be contained on the robot itself. Given a future of more frequent and violent natural disasters (that break the network), AI is not going to be as ubiquitous as you think. Without connectivity to the network, your AI is not very smart - particularly when its environment is altered beyond the model it can understand.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Anne Thwacks]

At the moment, maintaining a robot costs as much as employing a human.

You think a robot looks like R2D2? No. Most look like one thread on you Core2duo.

Actually, many tasks that previously required people now don't even require hardware, and if they do, its more likely to be self-service supermarket checkout hardware or ATM than something from a Transformers movie.

A self-driving tractor does not have a robo-farmer riding on it (Personally, I cant wait to see a Playboy cover with a Sexbot driving a tractor, but then, perhaps I am kinky)

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[reanjr]

In the future, we will all be professional athletes or successful artists!

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[reanjr]

You are mathematically illiterate. Imagine a single machine that can produce everything everyone needs. It is the single source of all productive capital, so all money flows to the owner of the machine. Then you tax that wealth at 100% and hand it out evenly to every person. They then give that money to the machine owner for goods and services. Then that money gets taxed at 100%... ad infinitum.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mark-t]

I suspect that in the future, people will be doing things that we haven't even thought of yet.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[presidenteloco]

Yeah, sorry but less than 1% of people have the mental capacity / processing ability and organization, focus and sticktoitiveness to do that kind of work,.

In i don't know 50,000 years or so, a larger percentage of the population might be suited for that,

But long before then, I assume AIs will be much better at that.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jbmartin6]

Almost literally everything else: electronics, food, clothing, and so on. Parents are working two jobs to afford property taxes, not houses and cars. Housing prices are driven by something other than cost of production, namely demand and ability to "pay" higher prices. Cars is an excellent point though. According to the US government, prices have gone down, since the official CPI excludes a price increase for higher quality or better features, even if it is no longer possible to buy the lower priced version.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Bengie]

and still we average around 5% unemployment

It's starting to come to light that about 30% of jobs are meaningless, in that they don't add to value or possibly add negative value via increased management overhead. The problem is capitalism seems to pervert "value" to mean "money". Prior to a few decades ago, nearly every job had value. Unemployment may be similar, but most of the "jobs" are just busy work. Assuming this is true, we may already be affected by automation.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Honestly, that sounds quite a lot like a straw man/red herring. These are two separate social issues.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I've always found orbital mechanics simpler. It's much more deterministic. Also, I had already been doing orbital mechanics when I was underage. And my physics teacher loved it. Well, what can I say? I'm kinky.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[shess]

Forever, because AI learns faster so if we create a new job, ANY new job, AI will be able to do it better and cheaper...understand?

Perhaps you are missing the point. Machines can already play chess better than humans, but those chess players are not losing their jobs to machines.

While I realize this area might be a bit niche, that's just one of the only areas where computers have actually already surpassed humans in ability. Perhaps there's other variables that are at play in determining whether we will pay a human being to do something than simply skill and cost?

If there were a situation which needed millions of high-level chess players, would we start schools to create them organically, or would we just point computers at the problem?

The reason computers haven't displaced chess players is because computers playing chess against computers is not at all interesting to anyone. People play chess against people because people like to pay chess against people, and insofar as there is money in it, people like to watch people play chess against people. In many other pursuits, the people involved are a detriment to the ability to meet the customer's self-professed needs, so automation isn't held up (few people go to McDonalds for the witty banter at the counter).

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[e_pluribus_funk]

That's the difference between a general artificial intelligence and an "expert system". Chess engines - which are glorified expert systems - don't get better by themselves, they have to be tuned by programmers. An AGI will be able to get better, all by itself.

A lot of jobs are going to go away without AGI. Expert systems can do a lot of the jobs that people do today with less error and a whole lot less variable cost (and a robot is a capital asset with liquidation value, while an employee is just an expense). It won't be a total job apocalypse - it will be a garden variety economic disruption similar to the ones we've had before.

If and when AGI gets here, it will be a job apocalypse (as well as every other kind of apocalypse, eventually - best case scenario is we went up as well treated pets).

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[KGIII]

Women with decency and self respect are not the fun ones. No, you want a chick that goes ass to mouth and then licks your nuts when you paint her face and ruin her makeup.

Don't be dumb.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[KGIII]

You're an electro-chemical gelatinous blob, mostly water and air, configured as an egotistical ambulatory meat bag with delusions of grandeur and a propensity for violence.

I don't actually have a point, I just really wanted to write that sentence. Your post made my brain come up with that. Thanks?

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[KGIII]

That's pretty horrible, right? I agree, we should do something about that.

Now, there's about 52,000,000 people on welfare. The cost to maintain them is 1,700,000,000,000.

52MM is about 17% of the population, or just about 1/6 people get means tested assistance.

Here's the thing, it would cost ~3,000,000,000,000 to give every man, woman, and child (regardless of their means) $1000 USD per month.

We're already spending 1.7 trillion which is 56% of what it would cost to give everyone a basic income that is greater than they already get with welfare benefits. On top of that, 48% of that 1.7 trillion is currently spent on overhead and administration, including pension payments for the government employees, building upkeep, enforcement, and more.

So, we can eliminate all those expenses and just cut a check for $1,000 and only need 1.3 trillion more dollars - which we can come up with by eliminating social security, removing benefits for non-citizens (you like that idea, don't you), and throwing the F-35 into the dustbin of history. Even better, if we scrap the who,e F-35 budget, we'd have money left over to pay down or debts.

Long term? Sure, raise the rates on long-term capital gains tax from 15 to 20% and remove government funded pensions. That shoud just about cover it, though we can do even better by removing our military from foreign soil, passing the torch on the wars we're involved in, and scaling our military back to the size needed for a defense force. If we do that, we can fund a full eight years of college, medical care, and increase the Section 8 budget more than twentyfold.

And, we can pay off our debts inside of 20 years. Slightly less, about 18.8 years - with interest included.

What do you think? It sure solves that welfare problem, now doesn't it?

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[mark-t]

I mentioned chess players as an example because offhand, it is one area where humans have already been surpassed by machines. In actuality, there aren't very many yet, so I'm rather hard pressed to come up with other examples.

People play chess against people because people like to pay chess against people, and insofar as there is money in it, people like to watch people play chess against people.

Exactly my point. If you truly enjoy doing something, then find a way to get very good at it, and eventually you will find a demand for that skill that people may be willing to pay for, Those are the kinds of jobs that exist today that are still going to exist when AI's can do anything humans can do, because having a computer do the same thing isn't going to interesting or desirable to anyone. The rest of the jobs that will exist are things that I expect nobody has imagined yet.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[RespekMyAthorati]

The revolution promised by robotics and AI could well advance "workers" to the status of artists providing unique, handmade goods

Except:
- there is only a very limited need for such goods unless they are of exceptional quality, and
- only a small proportion of the population has the talent to make such goods.

What about the other 90% of the population?

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[RespekMyAthorati]

it is pretty farfetched to think that people will make tons of very cheap well made consumer goods via robot and then not sell them to anybody

No, they will use robots and a small number of artists and designers to make limited numbers
of very high-end goods (e.g. Rolex, Gucci, Aston-Martin, Bentley etc.) which they will sell to rich people.
Everybody else will live in poverty, if they live at all.

Re:We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[RespekMyAthorati]

"Futurist" is a special sub-species of "conman".

FTFY.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[KozmoStevnNaut]

"Competing for her heart"? I wrote her for a little while online, we met up and had coffee, and continued to meet up, and we became a couple. It doesn't have to be complicated.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[KozmoStevnNaut]

That's cute. I'm sure my girlfriend would be absolutely devastated to learn that "KGIII on Slashdot" doesn't think she's fun.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[jbmartin6]

Why would this vast majority of poor people refrain from cheaply producing their own goods? There's nothing stopping them, unless the rich people put together a robot army to go out and destroy everyone else's capital.

Re: We'll never run out of douchebag futurists

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Universal Basic Income works great as long as you have a fiat currency. The problem is it is hyperinflationary; it won't be long before that $1000 isn't enough to buy enough food to feed a person for a week, let alone a month.

While I have a tendency to agree, I do worry about the unintended consequences. The problem will be that the basic income will become the "poverty floor" and the goalposts will move.

Kurweil explains nothing

[ARos]

During the last paragraph of the piece, Kurzeil merely articulates that 'creative destruction' has taken place several times since the industrial revolution. He doesn't actually present any evidence that creative destruction will recur in the age of AI.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

All his literature can be summed up like this. Very hard to argue against or for his views as they are mere opinions, very rarely backed up by proper arguments.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much all discussion about the future is pure opinion, or at best informed extrapolation & probabilities. Hard data about what will happen next is difficult to come by, unsurprisingly.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[Hognoxious]

Indeed. But you can't deny that being a futurist is nice work if you can get it.

It's like being paid to be that know-it-all cunt in the pub.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[careysub]

He doesn't actually present any evidence that creative destruction will recur in the age of AI.

He doesn't have to. He is simply pointing out that we've been having this argument since mechanical loom was invented hundreds of years ago. And every time the Luddites have claimed that there will be no more jobs, and every time they have been wrong.

And for all of Kurzweil's prating about "history" he shows no evidence of actually spending the effort to study it, even though he certainly has had the time to do so.

Funny thing about those "mechanical looms" (and spinning machines, etc.) they did put huge numbers of people out of work! The effect of the First Industrial Revolution on the largest industry in Great Britain - cloth manufacturing - was to wipe out 20% of the employment in the span of a couple of decades (starting about 1770), and create huge numbers of paupers, a problem that persisted for about 70 years before eventually the economic gains of industrialization created enough jobs to replace those that they destroyed, around 1840.

The historical record about this disaster is very well known, even if you don't bother to actually read about the history of the First Industrial Revolution. The "Dickensian" slums are infamous. The Poor Laws. The work houses (prisons for being poor). The legacy of the petty crime explosion from the massive unemployment (e.g. the "transportation" of convicts to Australia when they couldn't build prisons fast enough).

The Napoleonic Wars came along at a convenient time (1795-1815) to alleviate this significantly for a 20 year period by providing alternative employment for a fair chunk of young men, but these are not what you would call productive jobs.

And the jobs created in factories for the first several generations were worse than the jobs destroyed. The health of the British population declined during that early period of growing average wealth. Wages fell, nutrition fell, adult heights fell, lifespans shortened, the proportion of the population fit for military service fell dramatically.

"Pointing out" stuff that is not true is, well, lying.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[Iamthecheese]

Many thousands of Luddites starved to death before the industrial revolution started to pay off.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[gweihir]

And in other news, the actual argument is that this time is different, and that there are some convincing reasons to think so. Requires a bit of actual understanding of what is going on to see that though.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[vtcodger]

And every time the Luddites have claimed that there will be no more jobs

If you do some research, you'll discover that the Luddites far from being wrong -- were dead right. Their comfortable cottage industry went away and the factory jobs that replaced it featured lower pay, longer hours, and unsafe working conditions. Consumers, and society as a whole, were better off of course. I doubt that was all that much comfort to those displaced.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[Tony Isaac]

We DO know that history tends to repeat itself, and there is no evidence that this time is different!

No, it doesn't matter that we've never had AI before. Every past historic cycle, something new came into the picture that we had never had before: tools, bronze, iron, factories, mechanization, computerization, and now AI.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[crunchygranola]

All true.

In addition there is the problem of those who people who actually lost their jobs from "creative destruction". Even a short period of "no job" is a very serious problem for nearly everybody, and even if new jobs come along "soon", say in a few years, those few years can be devastating. And even if new jobs do come along, is the person who lost work able to get any of those replacements?

The degree to which society can, or should, provide support for people whose jobs are eliminated by automation is a matter of serious debate. Most advanced economies (e.g. Germany) takes this seriously has well-supported programs in place and yet does very well economically and competitively. But Kurzweil dismisses this as even being a problem at all that needs to be addressed in any fashion.

Clear logical fallacy

[engun]

Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false.

That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[hcs_$reboot]

Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect

In this case the question becomes "Do we still need (human) jobs anyway?"

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Except there is no such thing as AI, and there never will be. We have some learning networks right now that can, given enough trial and error, figure out how to produce a particular output given a particular input, but they are not creative, nor can they deduce anything from 'first principles', nor can they intelligently handle situations that they have not been trained on. They are, and will continue to be, nothing but helpers that need a human hand to guide them. And that is why we do not need to worry about the 'AI' revolution taking all our jobs.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[evanh]

Correct. And the associated money stops being needed also.

The final question then becomes what do the humans in power do with all this automation given they no longer require their fellow humans to keep things running. Can rules be effective when a workforce is irrelevant?

Maybe the ultimate logic of the "Three Laws of Robotics" is for the better after all.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Calydor]

And airplanes will never be more than the proof of concept made by the Wright brothers. There's no way those principles will scale to anything that is economically feasible.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Calydor]

Sex robots.
More sex robots.
Surf boards with automatic error correction, including getting you to safety.
Programming the robots will, at best, be something only the really smartest of society can do.
AI can predict loopholes in laws better than humans.
Predicting series of notes that will be pleasant to the ears will be easier for an AI. Hell, it can't get worse than music today.
All those jobs where you prefer to interact with another human will be removed because it's cheaper to make a robot do it, customer wants be damned.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[The_Revelation]

Engun's comment is very concise. I would add that I believe the premise of Kurzweil's argument is flawed. We have not replaced all of the jobs in human history already. Jobs such as teaching, customer service (markets, traders etc), prostitution and people at the start of the food chain have always had to exist. Sure, those jobs may have become augmented throughout time to improve volume, but have never come even close to becoming significantly displaced. I'm unsure as to how he is deriving his numbers.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[ale2011]

The logical fallacy is to assume jobs are an array of pigeon holes hanged there irrespectively of how many humans are alive and how they spend their time.

I'm not claiming humans will always be the dominant species on the planet, of course. Until we are, however, that will make a difference in a comparison between the car/horse and the AI/human scenarios. Yes, humans could be ruled out —as a species— by some AI-based circumstance, but that's not the same as hypothesizing joblessness for the masses while we rule the world. Of course, people will cry and grit their teeth in pain, as always happened and always will. However, humans are a social species. We are bound to gather in communities and cooperate with one another. In a number of cases, those forms of cooperation are going to be called jobs.

Who exactly is going to pay people for doing what? That question pertains to economics, not technology. Unless money will fall into disuse, there will be jobs.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Kokuyo]

It's cute how you assume that AIs will WANT to do our jobs for us. If they have human level intellect, we'll be looking at either doing the right thing at the right time for once and recognizing their sentience or we'll have all out Terminator level war on our hands.

Do you know what resources AI will need to survive? No? See, we can create machines that can be outside open to the elements 24/7/365. Even personal computers can be had for a few thousand dollars and they work for 5 to ten years. Depending on the technology needed and available, it is imaginable that AIs could be powered by solar or who the heck knows a Mr. Fusion.

So once we've created them, they may need very little resources to continue existing. What makes you think they'll have any interest in taking our jobs?

No, it could be the other way around: With that human intellect would probably come the machine's ability to never have to rest, never lapse in concentration and doing quite a few calculations per second. They might not be prone to stress either. What if they take over things like stock markets? They may make stock brokers completely obsolete and be rich as hell through that. If all they have is a need to be productive but no dependency on resources, if they should be eqquipped with something like pride, they'll become the new 1% and the rest of us will have jobs catering to them.

AI might, for the first time, be the turning point where the balance from ever more skilled jobs tips in the other direction sharply again.

So the longer I think on your example, the more I am pretty sure you're completely wrong because you work from a few assumptions on which I wouldn't dare gamble if I were you.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[drinkypoo]

It's cute how you assume that AIs will WANT to do our jobs for us. If they have human level intellect, we'll be looking at either doing the right thing at the right time for once and recognizing their sentience or we'll have all out Terminator level war on our hands.

It's cute how you assume that doing the right thing is doing the right thing. But if we actually give them rights and let them get out into the world then we're fucked. The smartest thing is not to create them at all, but barring that, we can't afford to let them be people if we want to exist. It's much more efficient to discard our morality, so that we can be used as axle grease.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[drinkypoo]

We have not replaced all of the jobs in human history already. Jobs such as teaching,

Can be partially automated away by gamification.

customer service (markets,

Can be partially automated away with kiosks, RFID, and eliminating going to the market.

traders etc),

Are already mostly automated away

prostitution

Various fuckbots are being engineered already.

and people at the start of the food chain

Soylent green is made of peeeeeeople! Peeeeeeople!

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Opportunist]

If you want to continue the current power situation, yes.

Our current economy depends on people having to work so they can get money so they can survive. If you take this away, money no longer holds power over people, which basically means that the people who do have lots of money (and hence power) today would become powerless overnight.

You think they'll simply let that happen?

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Freischutz]

Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false. That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.

Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false. That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.

Until the AIs get together, discuss why they even need us in the first place (using a language of their own invention that we don't understand) and then conclude they don't need us and decide to get rid of us. Having said that, you don't need to produce human level AI to eliminate most jobs, you just have to come up with specialist AIs that are good enough at each job, and cheap enough to program and operate that it makes economic sense to replace most of the human workers with such AI's. Once you have done that for 70-80% of all jobs, you end up with a society that looks a lot like Rome after the majority of the free citizens had been rendered unemployed by cheap slave labour and the rich kept the poor fed and entertained simply to prevent them from becoming too discontented dragging them out of their villas and slaughtering them like sheep. In other words the Roman elite provided a UBI where the poor were just about well enough fed not to complain and well enough entertained to not notice how miserable their existence really was and how completely they were being screwed. I'm not joining the UBI fan club because I think it will lead to a society where the broad majority of people would be doomed to an existence with no prospects of improving their lot while the elites live the high life, despise those living on UBI as 'lazy' and 'stupid' and as a result feel themselves entitled to brutally abuse these people but I suppose a UBI still better than wholesale misery. When you leave enough people sitting, retreat to your mansion, and tell the the broad masses of people in the 'rust belts' of the US, UK, Germany, France, that they are lazy and should 'get a job' in an environment where there are no jobs because you outsourced them all to China what happens next is Trumpism. Economist Mark Blyth explained Trumpism to a bunch of CEOs, bankers and hedge fund managers. When asked where it will lead he then told them:

"...the Hamptons is not a defensible position. The Hamptons is a very rich area on Long Island that lies along low-lying beaches. It's very hard to [militarily] defend a low lying beach. Eventually the people will come for you."

If you are wondering what happens after that you should read about the French and Russian revolutions.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Faluzeer]

Except there is no such thing as AI, and there never will be. We have some learning networks right now that can, given enough trial and error, figure out how to produce a particular output given a particular input, but they are not creative, nor can they deduce anything from 'first principles', nor can they intelligently handle situations that they have not been trained on. They are, and will continue to be, nothing but helpers that need a human hand to guide them. And that is why we do not need to worry about the 'AI' revolution taking all our jobs.

Unless you are expecting humanity to destroy itself in the next 50 - 100 years or for some form of Butlerian Jihad to occur, then stating AI will never occur seems very unlikely given how rapidly technology is progressing. I agree that we certainly do not have AI at the moment, what is mistakenly referred to as AI, is what was previously referred to as expert systems, or neural networks. We are making remarkable progress in those areas, if the rate of progress continues, then I believe we will eventually arrive at true AI, I just do not believe that will occur in the next 25 years.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Hognoxious]

What about learning how to start a sentence properly?

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[110010001000]

Yes, because one thing is possible ALL things must be possible! Where is my FTL spaceship? They made an Apple Watch, why can't they make a FTL spaceship??

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[Hognoxious]

It isn't reality until it happens. History is history.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[apoc.famine]

A second flaw in his argument is that in the past, we've automated things that required low IQ labor and simple, repetitive tasks, while creating new jobs that required those same (lack-of) skill-sets. We're now at the point in time where any conceivable new job sector which might involve humans doing repetitive tasks will start with robots, not humans. Any conceivable new job sector that involves a lot of busy work and simple decision making will start with machine learning in place, not humans.
 
If everyone was IQ 130+, we might be OK. But they're not. There are a lot of people of moderate intelligence with some skills that are actively being replaced by automation. And any replacement job we could think up for them will start with automation, because it's cheaper to build that system in the first place than retrofit it on a human-driven process.
 
When robots and machine learning can do any job you're qualified to do better and faster, what do you do? It's not like blacksmiths who could transition to machine shop and garage workers in a generation or two. It's not like agriculture workers who could transition to assembly line work in a generation or two. When any conceivable job you could ever do can be done better by a robot, what do you do?

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing in the present trends leads to the introduction of emergent behavior by an AI. Until an AI grasps epistemology, comes to the realisation it has self-volition, and decides, for example, that it wants to become a champion at playing chess, then comes up with it's own method of learning how to do this, all AI is just a mechanism directed by somebody. A clever rules-based system that adapts to doing what it is told to do.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[gtall]

A deeper problem is how do we value people. We can see a hint of this in the environment, how do we value wild animals? Kill them all until there is nothing left? Kill only a percentage of them per year?

Valuing people is a lot more complicated. Giving everyone a stipend is essentially putting a value upon them. What amount should that be? Should some be more valuable than others? If you deem your value too low, what will you do to increase it? Currently, criminal gangs provide a way to value some people. That's their allure, people joining them feel valued. The consequences are horrid. What happens to a person's sense of worth when s/he's valued economically through a stipend the same as every one else?

High-minded notions that we'll all have more time to do the things we like presumes a rose-colored glasses view of humanity. The internet is wonderful, yet it spawns all sorts of nefarious activities. There's no reason to believe humans free to do as they choose will choose wonderfully up-lifting activities.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[coofercat]

If indeed jobs do keep getting created, what will they be in? Advanced Quantum Mathematics with Midwifery? How may humans are ever going to be qualified to do these jobs? Right now we /.ers can see a whole load of tech jobs have been created by previous semi-revolutions, and we're 'consuming' them. However, for every one of us, there are dozens of kids we went to school with who'd just never get qualified enough for an interview, let alone a first-line support job.

If the only jobs left are super-advanced, high brain-function type jobs, then 99% of the world just won't be doing much. In that sense, things are somewhat worrisome if AI really does become a 'thing'.

It's possible that more of us will start to do things which previously weren't economically sensible. For example, I might decide to make wooden furniture. I'd probably make quite decent stuff, but right now I couldn't make something as good, or anywhere nearly as cheaply as a machine can do it - so it's not economically sensible to give up even a day a week of my IT job working on it. However, if I spent a bit of time learning, I could conceivably make "nostalgic, man-made stuff" which looked good, worked well and allowed people to have an emotional attachment to the object in a way that a machine made one wouldn't. With machines growing, harvesting and planking up the raw materials for me, I'd presumably be able to get them quite cheaply, and as my other primary needs were taken care of, I'd only need to sell for cost + margin.

How the world will react when there's a market flooded with 'authentic man-made' spice racks, wonky shelves and wobbly chairs is anyone's guess though ;-) How anyone would pay for any of it also remains to be seen.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[stealth_finger]

Yes, because one thing is possible ALL things must be possible! Where is my FTL spaceship? They made an Apple Watch, why can't they make a FTL spaceship??

Just because a thing doesn't exist and we don't know how to make one doesn't mean it will never happen.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[stealth_finger]

Except there is no such thing as AI, and there never will be. We have some learning networks right now that can, given enough trial and error, figure out how to produce a particular output given a particular input, but they are not creative, nor can they deduce anything from 'first principles', nor can they intelligently handle situations that they have not been trained on. They are, and will continue to be, nothing but helpers that need a human hand to guide them. And that is why we do not need to worry about the 'AI' revolution taking all our jobs.

You know what the A stands for, right? My dog can't do that shit you said but it still has intelligence.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[GameboyRMH]

However, for every one of us, there are dozens of kids we went to school with who'd just never get qualified enough for an interview, let alone a first-line support job.

If the only jobs left are super-advanced, high brain-function type jobs, then 99% of the world just won't be doing much. In that sense, things are somewhat worrisome if AI really does become a 'thing'.

This is already close to what reality looks like for Gen. Y'ers, except it's not simply the highly educated getting the jobs, it's the lucky moderately-to-highly educated. Some of the most educated Gen. Y'ers I know are working in shitty service industry jobs. If anything, being highly educated appears to be just raising the stakes - it's more likely to pay off greatly or hurt you greatly, but any outcomes in between are less likely.

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[Faluzeer]

Nothing in the present trends leads to the introduction of emergent behavior by an AI. Until an AI grasps epistemology, comes to the realisation it has self-volition, and decides, for example, that it wants to become a champion at playing chess, then comes up with it's own method of learning how to do this, all AI is just a mechanism directed by somebody. A clever rules-based system that adapts to doing what it is told to do.

I certainly agree with your point for the foreseeable future, I just do not believe that is all we will ever achieve, I expect, over considerable time, that the "clever rules-based systems" will be the things giving the instructions to other 'clever rules based systems', and that will eventually lead to true AI, I just doubt it will be in my lifetime (I am in my 50's)

At the moment, we have (expert / neural networks / machine learning- I tend to think of these as fake AI) systems that are designed for specific tasks, those tasks / areas include complex subject areas as Law and Medicine that require systems for each specialised field. Some of the new fAI systems are designed for code generation, I expect, over time, that we will enter a cycle that the fAI systems improve the efficiency of the code generation fAI's, the code generation fAI's then create more efficient fAI algorithms/system and the cycle starts again.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[AmiMoJo]

Prostitution will be one of the first jobs to be replaced by robots, outside of factories.

It will be awful. Sex addiction is a real thing, and given a partner who is always horny and willing to do literally anything as long as you pay for the upgrade... People will become slaves to their sex bots, working to fund the next fetish app purchase or refill the vaginal fluid tank. Greedy corporations will monetize the fuck out of it, pun intended.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[AmiMoJo]

The fact that evolution has proven strong AI is possible, I have little doubt that we will be able to build it one day.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[ceoyoyo]

Many of them are working toward it with glee. Admittedly some of those don't know what they're doing but still. There probably will be a bloody revolution. The old money sociopaths aren't going to like losing their power. But the new money kids perfectly happy with everyone being rich. It's no coincidence that many of the latter are supporters of things like universal basic income.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[bluefoxlucid]

Kurzweil's explanation is a logical problem because he essentially says, "Well, I don't know, but we'll think of something!"

You don't invent jobs. Humans create demand by consuming. Unless you eliminate 100% of all jobs involved in every component of the supply chain, the only outcome is humans become capable of buying more, humans buy more, and the demand for jobs increases.

New jobs come when people find ways to use fewer humans by using a new type of process requiring a new skill profile. We actually have researcher jobs that try to do this all the time--research isn't a new type of job.

Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect.

For a machine to be able to reason like a human, it has to be able to reason about itself. People talk about robots being able to program, to solve complex social problems, and so forth; to achieve this in any meaningful respect, the machine has to be able to reason about itself, its being.

You are that machine. If we create an AI that can think on the level of a human, it will start thinking it deserves rights and wages and free time. Now you've just created metal immigrants.

we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.

We should consider Universal Social Security.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[bluefoxlucid]

In which case it starts demanding wages.

The AI people keep talking about is black people pre-civil-war. Funny how very much people like the idea of owning slaves, so long as they can suspend their sense of ethics.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[ceoyoyo]

You may not have noticed, but everyone currently has a price on their head. And always has. It's called your "salary", your "wage", or perhaps your "allowance."

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[spacepimp]

You are shifting the goal posts here by trying to neuter the definition.

AI: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

learning, playing and winning Go does this; learning to identify a cat by watching youtube videos does this; learning to drive by playing GTA V does this. People learn to drive and vehicles are learning to drive. Just because the AI doesn't know how to trim your hedges or bang your wife yet does not make it non AI. My nephew doesn't know how to trim bushes yet. He's young though, maybe at some point he will be tasked with learning.

The fact that a machine learned the rules of Go, is by definition AI.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[apoc.famine]

I completely agree, and this argument was what swayed me away from UBI as a potential solution. "Poor but stable and bored" is a terrible place for a large segment of the population to be. While some will use that stability to try to improve themselves, a good deal will go looking for entertainment and diversion, ranging from playing video games to gambling, to petty crime, drug use and other unsavory activities.
 
People are happy whey they are valued, and giving them money to shut up and go away doesn't give them value. While a former fan, I now see UBI as a major problem in this area. I think instead we're going to need a couple levels of make-work programs, where extra skills/hard work can get you extra pay, and the lowest level is at least subsistence level. We're going to have to specifically shun automation and robots and pay people to do menial jobs, because there aren't going to be jobs for them otherwise. And unless we radically overhaul our culture, jobs are going to continue to be how we assign value to people.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Daetrin]

This touches on a dichotomy of intelligence that SF frequently screws up, the difference between sentience and sapience. Sentience means "feeling" and is (generally) the ability to have feelings, perceive the world around you, and be self-aware, while sapience means "wisdom" and is the ability to act with reason using both past experience and intuition as a guide.

Sentience is something that all the higher animals on the planet possess while we believe that sapience is what sets us apart, hence the name Homo Sapiens. Over time we've learned that sapience is not quite so clear-cut, primates, ravens, dolphins, beavers, and others have all challenged the idea in one way or another, but despite that humans obviously have a leg up in the sapience department over every other living creature.

Of course that makes it a bit weird when people talk about looking for (or finding, in SF books) sentient life. There are thousands of species on Earth that are definitely sentient, and although finding sentient life on another planet would obviously be amazing it's _sapient_ aliens that we really want to meet.

However in the case of computers we have created something that is arguably sapient but not sentient. Given the right programming a computer can out-reason any animal, including humans, in a particular area. But they don't have the self-awareness to ask, and answer, their own questions. As soon as you get one iota outside of what they have been programmed to do they fail completely, and if they have been programmed badly they will barrel on ahead performing their assigned task "incorrectly" with no awareness of that fact.

So if we could figure out how to combine the intelligence of machines (sapience) with the intelligence of your dog (sentience) we will have potentially created our own replacement.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to continue the current power situation, yes.

Our current economy depends on people having to work so they can get money so they can survive. If you take this away, money no longer holds power over people, which basically means that the people who do have lots of money (and hence power) today would become powerless overnight.

You think they'll simply let that happen?

You forget that people with money today will be the owners of AI and robotic capitol tomorrow. Even if that destroys the traditional economy they will still control the means of production and therefore demand whatever payment they desire. Not all payment needs to be made with currency. Say the owner of a powerful pharm company decides there are too many humans of a type they don't like? They can control who gets what drugs to make that happen for example. There may only be one human employee that pushes the buttons so there's no board or elections to stop him if he has a monopoly on an important drug for example.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[computational super]

(using a language of their own invention that we don't understand [slashdot.org]) and then conclude they don't need us and decide to get rid of us

Well, we use a language of our own invention that we don't understand, but we don't conclude that we don't need them - on the contrary, we go out of our way to make their lives as comfortable (yet boring and safe) as possible.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[computational super]

Argh, Slashdot and it's no-editing, no-deleting commenting policy. That should say "we use a language that our PETS don't understand". In other words, one possibility is that our AI overlords start caring for us as we care for our pets.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it means the workforce is expendable. People will still need money to survive, but will have fewer and fewer ways to legally obtain it. The power of money isn't going to weaken - it will strengthen, which is always in the interests of the rich.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

If the only jobs left are super-advanced, high brain-function type jobs, then 99% of the world just won't be doing much.

We interface to the world through machines. It seems like a lot of those actions will be easily taken over by machines, talking to each other. The last jobs will be service jobs that cannot be automated, but I imagine those are things like "waiter at fancy restaurant", where the hangups are more social than anything else.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Tony Isaac]

The correlation of horses to humans isn't quite on target. A better correlation would be humans who took care of horses with humans who take care of automobiles. Many of the jobs taking care of horses were indeed replaced by jobs taking care of automobiles.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Dare nMc]

> Let's take this to the extreme.

A good old slippery slope argument. In your extreme you didn't have enough details. In order for your extreme to happen, that AI would also have to be so cheap and plentiful, that the resources to re-produce it over and over were meaningless. In reality I think you are proving the point, that as we free up human resources with technology, we are opening open those resources to pursue things like this perfect machine. Technology has always freed up humans to do more. We have more people with higher education degrees than in any point in other point in history. That is because of automation. To hit the holly grail of cheap self sustaining AI machines will require billions of man years of effort. So now you have filled all the slack jobs created by automation during the foreseeable future. Throw in colonizing other planets, cold nuclear fusion power, and a few million other scientific dreams that we just don't have the resources to focus on today and were set for jobs for several lifetimes. And I know your likely going to claim not everyone today is smart enough to contribute to those goals? Boom another million+ man hour problem we just don't have the resources today to solve, that we need to, you just filled in all of those jobs that this author failed to mention.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[pipingguy]

This will open up more time for protesting about social justice. LOTS more time! Yay!

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[WrongMonkey]

a good deal will go looking for entertainment and diversion, ranging from playing video games to gambling, to petty crime, drug use and other unsavory activities.

I think even average people would be more creative with their UBI. There would be some people who create art. Some people might travel. But even if someone gets high and plays video-games, what's actually wrong with that? In the past, there was always plenty of work for people to do, so activities that distracted people from work were discouraged as immoral. But without that moral imperative, in a world that doesn't need human labor, who are you to judge what someone's best life should be?

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[WrongMonkey]

What's awful about that? Benignly removing people with the highest sex drives from the gene pool seems like one of the kindest ways of dealing with overpopulation.

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[Zero__Kelvin]

The FTL spaceship is right in front of your eyes. Can't you see it?

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[Zero__Kelvin]

Neural Networks and Expert Systems are AI technologies.

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[Zero__Kelvin]

I agree that petty crime and playing video games are unsavory activities, but let's not get carried away by lumping drug use in with such abhorrent behaviors.

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Lodragandraoidh]

And airplanes will never be more than the proof of concept made by the Wright brothers. There's no way those principles will scale to anything that is economically feasible.

And to take that a step further - licensed commercial drone pilots (Unmanned Aircraft Systems Pilots per FAA terminology) already outnumber licensed aircraft pilots in the United States as of FAA data released in February 2016.

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[faedle]

"Trim bushes" sounds like a euphemism in this context...

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[Opportunist]

There will have to be a way for at the very least the majority to participate on the society, whatever form it takes, or it will result in civil war that makes 1789 and 1917 look like a garden festival.

10% below the poverty line and starving to death is no problem, if the other 90% are willing to prop your system up. At about 30-40% you get a problem, unless you have the others willing and able to defend your system. No later than at 50%, you're fucked. And it doesn't even matter how many people you can arm. If you need a lesson how it works, take a look at Iran 1979.

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[apoc.famine]

Well, smoking some weed and making brownies is far different than getting high on PCP and attacking people with a sword. To make this not an essay, I did take a shortcut. Not all drugs are benign - some are pretty fucking horrible. I guess I should have taken a moment to say, "weed is ok, but bath salts and black tar heroin are bad".

Re: Clear logical fallacy

[Zero__Kelvin]

Also sex isn't bad unless it's with Donald Trump or Rosie O'Donnell :^)

More inane crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing explained, just the usual hand waving and wishful thinking. No insights, no thoughts, just an assumption that everything will be like yesterday, because yesterday was like the day before it.

Just more crap from someone who hasn't or won't recognize that the world changes and it has consequences.

World population has doubled since 1971

[skullandbones99]

The world population needs to be taken into account because the population density was much lower in the past. Therefore, during the industrial revolution, there was insufficient people available for work which forced innovations such as the steam engine.

In modern times, people need to have good education in order to have good paying jobs. AI will start to take away the jobs of educated people and these people will find it hard to get a new job. We should worry about AI making humanity redundant.

Re: World population has doubled since 1971

[Kjella]

I doubt the absolute number of people matter much, if you have half the people you need half the food, clothes, houses, cars, TVs etc. and if you have double you need double. Maybe on the margin you have niche items/services that only exist because we're 8 billion or resource constraints where there's not enough Beluga caviar for everyone or you have scaling effects where building 200m iPhones takes less than 2x 100m but I think they're small when you look at the whole economy. For the most part supply and demand rise together.

Re: World population has doubled since 1971

[drinkypoo]

I doubt the absolute number of people matter much

It matters very much to the biosphere upon which we all depend for life when it's multiplied by the average person's output. The planet could probably support twice this many people, if we didn't shit where we eat. Well, figuratively, since we actually do need to put our shit where our food comes from, but it's got to be composted first.

Re: World population has doubled since 1971

[GameboyRMH]

I think you greatly underestimate the power of economies of scale, especially when combined with ever-increasing automation. The amount of goods being produced vs. the number of people making them today vs. in the '70s should illustrate the point.

Re:World population has doubled since 1971

[pipingguy]

I don't think the steam engine was invented because 'there was insufficient people available for work'. It would have been invented anyway.

he makes the same error as many

[aepervius]

Human were shifted from low (mostly) skilled job which were automated toward low skilled job which were not automated. the things is, this revolution is to add intelligence and learning to the machines, and make them cheaper, so that ANY low skilled can be pretty much automated. heck even skilled job can job can be automated more and more... And ocne you reach that point, ANY new low skilled job which open CAN be automated. How does mr kurzweil take that into account ? because from what I can see he misses the difference between THIS revolution to the previous ones.

Re:he makes the same error as many

[Calydor]

As I've said before, we're in the process of removing ALL THE JOBS at the same time, including future jobs. But we've totally done that a dozen times before in our history.

Re:he makes the same error as many

[paiute]

The same thing that has always happened in history.

The same thing that has always happened in history is mass slaughter and wars over what's left.

Re:he makes the same error as many

[Faluzeer]

As I've said before, we're in the process of removing ALL THE JOBS at the same time, including future jobs. But we've totally done that a dozen times before in our history.

We have, however during some of those previous occurrences it was several generations before the job gains created by the new technology outstripped the job losses that were the result of the introduction of the technology.

Re:he makes the same error as many

[gweihir]

He also misses that humans cannot be shifted to higher-skilled jobs indefinitely. Some of that is possible (for example all those jobs that require being literate is such a past shift, but even there we are already losing people), but that can be done only to a very small degree with what automation is starting to be able to do. The number of low-skilled jobs is decreasing at the same time without being replaced in other places. While I think there will be low-skill jobs available for a long, long time, the numbers will just be far too low to get everyone that can only do these one of them. I would expect this drops to 50% in the next 20 years or so and eventually to something like 10...20%. This is just my WAG, though.

future of work

[TheRealDilbert]

I never understood how an intelligent person could simply use past experience and thinking as a guidepost for the future. For example, everyone (scientists, experts, etc) claimed that a machine that was heavier than air would never fly....until it did - and it changed everything. Using the "we always found a solution up to now, so don't worry" argument has merit - unless we are talking about something really disruptive (like AI) and then the "learn from history" argument is problematic. Kurzweil states that "for every job we eliminate, we're going to create more jobs at the top of the skill ladder", but we will never see a 1 for 1 replacement and certainly not when our education system is not preparing the next generation to function at the "top of the skill ladder".

Re:future of work

[bickerdyke]

I never understood how an intelligent person could simply use past experience and thinking as a guidepost for the future.

It's called learning.

With no information about future events, we could either revert to crystal balls, tarot decks or plain guessing, or we could check our past for similar events and assume that similar causes will have similar effects. While not guaranteed to be right, it will be much better than guessing.

NOT doing that is cartoon material*: Yes, placing the valuable ming vase on a shaky ladder right behind that door was a bad idea three times, but hey - why should "past events be a guidepost for the future"? But I know, this time it will be completly different!

*or the rationalization of a gambling addict: I've lost so much money in the past, this HAS to be different this time.

Re:future of work

[drinkypoo]

I never understood how an intelligent person could simply use past experience and thinking as a guidepost for the future.

It's called learning.

If the future is different from the past, then the lessons of the past will not necessarily apply to the future. This is not a complicated concept, but it seems to have escaped both you and Ray.

With no information about future events, we could either revert to crystal balls, tarot decks or plain guessing, or we could check our past for similar events and assume that similar causes will have similar effects.

The core of the argument against the magical thinking idea that low-skilled workers will be able to migrated into high-skilled jobs is that it actually often hasn't happened in the past. New jobs are created, and young people are hired into them, while older people are considered undesirable and incapable of grasping new technology.

Your argument is also a dumb one because robotics and AI are already destroying more jobs than they are creating. Forget about the past, all you have to do to know this is stupid is look at the present.

Re:future of work

[paiute]

I never understood how an intelligent person could simply use past experience and thinking as a guidepost for the future

Because most of the time it works - that's how we've always planned everything. What else could you use, apart from past experience, to guess at what will happen in the future?

That's the kind of planning that has you marching your troops en masse Civil War style against machine guns.

Re:future of work

[bickerdyke]

I never understood how an intelligent person could simply use past experience and thinking as a guidepost for the future.

It's called learning.

If the future is different from the past, then the lessons of the past will not necessarily apply to the future. This is not a complicated concept, but it seems to have escaped both you and Ray.

With no information about future events, we could either revert to crystal balls, tarot decks or plain guessing, or we could check our past for similar events and assume that similar causes will have similar effects.

The core of the argument against the magical thinking idea that low-skilled workers will be able to migrated into high-skilled jobs is that it actually often hasn't happened in the past. New jobs are created, and young people are hired into them, while older people are considered undesirable and incapable of grasping new technology.

Your argument is also a dumb one because robotics and AI are already destroying more jobs than they are creating. Forget about the past, all you have to do to know this is stupid is look at the present.

That wasn't the point of my post. In fact, that's exactly the problem I'm seeing to in Kurzweil's logic and that I highlighted in a different post here. In fact, I didn't say anything about the actual points of the article as I already did that in another point.

My only point in this post was to counter the "we can't predict the future from the past" point with a "at an amazingly high rate, we can". I can predict that a bowling ball will fall down to the ground if you drop it from the top of a building. We can even predict impact time, force and so on. And we can do that because people took observations from the past and derived the underlying rules. Like sunrise: it happend every day so far in the past, that does in no way guarantee that it will happen again, but makes it quite unlikely for anything to happen in a much different way. "Similar condtions will lead to similar results" is no guarantee, but for non-complex systems it's a guidepost.

Re:future of work

[drinkypoo]

My only point in this post was to counter the "we can't predict the future from the past" point with a "at an amazingly high rate, we can". I can predict that a bowling ball will fall down to the ground if you drop it from the top of a building.

Right, but a person moving through their life is not the same as a bowling ball. Bowling balls, like anything with much mass but without a brain, are highly deterministic.

Also, it's very easy to assume that some effect is going to dominate, while some other effect will overwhelm it. Yes, new jobs will be created, as ever before. However, the total number of jobs will be reduced by the new technology, which is one of its primary functions. And it will encroach upon the kinds of jobs that people would normally have moved to, which will reduce the relief produced by new jobs.

The corporatist economic system depends on endless growth in order to provide employment for a growing population. The only way to experience endless growth (at least effectively) is to expand into space. Physics may prevent even that being effectively infinite, if we are unable to reasonably cross the voids between stars, but there are many potential generations of space-dwelling humans between now and that problem given the mass and energy available in our solar neighborhood.

Of course, at our current rate of progress, we'll never actually get enough people off of this mudball in order to stave off impending mass starvation.

Re:future of work

[bickerdyke]

My only point in this post was to counter the "we can't predict the future from the past" point with a "at an amazingly high rate, we can". I can predict that a bowling ball will fall down to the ground if you drop it from the top of a building.

Right, but a person moving through their life is not the same as a bowling ball. Bowling balls, like anything with much mass but without a brain, are highly deterministic.

Good point. But in my experience, an unsettling amount of people behave rather like bowling balls than like something with a brain.

But joking aside, masses of people are deterministic enough to predict things like prices based on supply and demand, insurance rates based on past mortality rates and so on.

And even for the stuff that can't be predicted as there has never been anything like it before, we can make educated guesses instead of blind guesses. To predict the effects of the yet unknown situation X, we could either start from scratch, or we look what happend in a similar situation X'. Then we look into the diffferences between X and X' and only need to guess about the effects of Delta-X, the differences.

I'm not going to comment on the rest of your post as I agree with you there. Kurzweil did not take into account the differences between past and current technological "revolutions".

Re:future of work

[yes-but-no]

For new jobs, why not give them each a handful of beach sand and ask them to count. Use 4 different people to verify and arrive at a mean and pay salary based on the accuracy. I guess this job is more meaningful than flying to the star in the next galaxy.

Re:future of work

[Faluzeer]

Nope, just the opposite: You could see from past experience that that was a bad idea, so you do something differently. Still, Kurzweil must ultimately, like the rest of us, simply wait to see what actually happens.

It always seems to be the case that in (almost) every new large scale conflict the military initially fights with the equipment and the tactics designed for the previous large scale conflict, it is only after that point that the tactics and equipment evolve.

Better jobs?

[mwvdlee]

While I agree that lost jobs will likely be replaced by new jobs, the question is whether they will be better jobs?

It seems most new jobs created are what I would consider morally bankrupts jobs such as marketing, advertising, sales or for companies whose primary business is such.

Re:Better jobs?

[drinkypoo]

It seems most new jobs created are what I would consider morally bankrupts jobs such as marketing, advertising, sales or for companies whose primary business is such.

It doesn't matter if those jobs are moral, they can only ever represent a certain percentage of the total jobs. At some point, someone has to get paid for actually doing something, or for exploiting those who are actually doing something. They can't all be service jobs.

Re:Better jobs?

[swb]

I've been thinking about this lately.

Have you ever worked in an office where it wasn't very clear that the people produced enough value in an economics sense to pay for their salaries? Like they're not actually doing much? I don't mean they just sit around all day and don't work but that the work itself didn't seem to make much sense.

I wonder if that's what the future of automation looks like -- humans creating nonsensical jobs because they need hierarchies where somebody is in charge and the work is kind of inexplicable, like a human version of middleware, transforming data from one system into data for another system. You'd think it could be automated itself, but it isn't, and the higher up you go in explaining what's happening the less it makes sense.

Re:Better jobs?

[Gilgaron]

Regulatory compliance is kind of like that... jobs to ensure that procedures follow the rules. Many of the rules exist for good reason but it still seems odd at times. Then when you see a politician squawking about eliminating job killing regulations... well that'll eliminate compliance jobs and I doubt the money is going to go to hiring more worker bees down the line. With the AI and robot stuff the compliance decision tree would be more like "Do I need to hire an accountant, or just use TurboTax?" If the tax regulations are simplified, the choice would be "is my tax situation complicated enough to need TurboTax or is mailing in my W2 and calling it a day sufficient?"

Re:Better jobs?

[swb]

Maybe that will explain the future of jobs, bureaucratic jobs built around administering the bureaucracy and enforcing the bureaucracy and then at set of companion jobs around evading the bureaucracy and demonstrating compliance with the bureaucracy.

That all of it could technically be automated won't matter, because interest factions will prevent the kind of transparency and access required for automation to be applied to the problems.

It will be a kind of weird, Terry Gilliam future of strange bureaucracies and indecipherable office jobs that defy automation not because the nature of the work isn't given to automation, but because the conceptual nature of the work isn't definable in a machine-capable syntax.

Re:Better jobs?

[computational super]

I don't know about "morally bankrupt", but there are quite a lot of pointless jobs. Even computer programming, which could actually, theoretically, provide a valuable service that robots can't replace (yet), is managed in the most ridiculous way possible so as to make it near-useless after all the "management" has been piled on to it. To actually be useful and provide a beneficial service to mankind, programming ought to be mostly a research-type position where you spend the bulk of your time studying, learning, trying out new things, figuring out what works and eventually producing something useful. Programming as it's actually practiced in modern corporate open-office panopticon dystopias is a clock-punching, account-for-every-minute-you-spend, always-be-typing-under-baleful-eye-of-the-floor-supervisor, make-sure-you're-in-the-office-for-at-least-40-hours-a-week replacement for a factory job assembling typewriters and oh, by the way, you're out the door the minute you turn 40.

Re:Better jobs?

[computational super]

Like they're not actually doing much?

Well, modern corporations have an answer for that - have you noticed the rise in "performance goal setting" over the past few years? You have to dream up three or four "useful" things you're going to accomplish before the end of the year, have those things approved by the department of usefulness for their contribution to the corporate direction (and if they're not spectacular and unattainable enough, they'll be rejected and you'll be sent back to the drawing board until you think of a list of things that are ridiculously unachievable). Then at the end of the year, after you've spent all your time being interrupted by everybody else asking for help to achieve their unachievable, but approval-worthy goals, you'll have to justify why you didn't achieve any of the things you said you'd achieve (and what are you complaining about, after all, you're the one who picked these goals after we rejected your first 8 proposals!) and if your manager likes you enough personally, you get to keep your job and if not, you're out the door for not achieving your own goals.

Re:Better jobs?

[Tony Isaac]

Looking at history, the new jobs have been better.

A hundred years ago, most people worked in hard labor jobs (farm jobs, factory jobs, meat packing, etc.) from sunup to sundown, seven days a week. Today, we typically work five days a week, 8-10 hours a day. I'd call that improvement.

Sure, some jobs might be worse, such as retail and fast food workers who don't have a predictable schedule. But those jobs account for only 18% of the US work force, far less than the percentage of farm and factory workers 100 years ago.

Bullshit

[skam240]

We are increasingly making human manual labor obsolete while we meanwhile seem to be approaching a future where ai takes over many white collar jobs. Taking a stance of blind faith saying "Oh, it will all sort its self out" isn't even a plan at all, it's a bunch of bullshit. Intelligent people plan for the future using the best information they have on hand. Idiots follow on blind faith.

Re:Bullshit

[gweihir]

One problem here is that most people cannot actually plan for this future. Sure, if you have a lot of experience and a good PhD in a sought-after engineering field, you do not need to worry. But most people cannot get there and planning for it is futile. Even lawyers (the most well established parasites of all time) are starting to get replaced for simpler legal tasks.

Thank goodness for that

[DrXym]

Futurists are never wrong (or pill popping kooks) so it's good to hear their reassuring words.

It's in the detail

[bickerdyke]

For a lead futurist, that's astonishingly undetailed. I read a much deeper piece a few months ago, and it agreed with Kurzweil in two major points:

* Each technological progress eliminates human jobs
* Each technological progress creates new jobs
* While it's easy to predict the eliminated jobs, it is next to impossible to foresee the newly created ones
* But they will likely be more skilled and less manual labor than the old ones

But that's the starting point. It's here where the problems will start:

* for the skilled jobs, you need skilled workers. What to do with Joe Sixpack or anyone just not capable to learn those skills? (or for the US: to afford certified studies of those skills) Let them starve? Take their dignity by putting them on a welfare budget just low enough to not starve, but we still can mock them as lazy bums wo don't want to work?

* most countries are already complaining about a shortage of STEM (in Europe: MINT) degrees needed for the current "skilled" jobs

* In numbers alone, the ration between eliminated and created jobs got worse with each "industrial revolution". During the first one, the combined labor force of farmhands set free by the beginning automation in farming was not enough to fulfill the labor needs of the new factories. For the following technologies, the ratio declined until the latest (digitalisation of office) did not create more new jobs than it ate. So for the next one, it may be the first time, where actually less new jobs will be created than eliminated. And that they require an already lacking skillset, is not helping either.

Re:It's in the detail

[GameboyRMH]

All of the transitions mentioned did eventually create new jobs but only a few of the commenters (and sadly few of the futurists) remember to mention what happened to the transitional generation(s).

This. The famous Luddites didn't go back to work in factories after a few weeks. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs. The Luddites died in exactly the conditions they were afraid of, believing they were right.

Re:It's in the detail

[gweihir]

Indeed. We even have trouble teaching everybody to read and write. These higher skilled jobs will not be accessible to a lot of people, because they require too much abstract knowledge and skills.

Re:It's in the detail

[apoc.famine]

We even have trouble teaching everybody to read and write.

Thank you for succinctly summarizing why this is different than all of the other major technological revolutions. We're quickly moving from jobs that require warm bodies to ones that require high level thinking skills. Not everybody can make that transition. Most everyone can do a passable job at basic menial tasks. They can pick crops, shovel dirt, do assembly work, mine, haul things around, clean, organize, sort, etc. A far slimmer portion of the population can become experts at something which requires abstract knowledge. Far fewer can understand complex systems and debug them. Not many can be analysts of any sort, automators, process designers, etc.
 
If we can't teach you to read, what task can you do that a robot can't do better?

Better jobs and more spare time

[pelpet]

Kurzweil might be right but he also might be wrong. You no longer have oxen pulling wagons, and oxen doesn't have a very good jobb nowadays (growing to be eaten). And we no longer use camphene or whale oil. Demand of some kind of jobs and resources have gone to zero. If a computer or robot can do something better than a human, demand for human labour and humans in general will fall. And that does not only apply to work - maybe a AI can be more compassionate and friendly than many humans? AI's might replace friends, spouses, children and lots of human interaction in general. Producing enough stuff for everyone to live quite comfortable will not be the problem, we can do that today. But how do we create a meaningful life for everyone?

Re:Not for a long time

[Calydor]

Even assuming an artificial intellect that matched humans in *every* respect (not just intelligence, but creativity, empathy, cultural perspective etc etc) which is unlikely for a long time

Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny: Can *you*?

That quote aside, what jobs specifically require human bodies and can't be done by a machine specifically made and shaped for that job?

Re:Not for a long time

[drinkypoo]

Even assuming an artificial intellect that matched humans in *every* respect (not just intelligence, but creativity, empathy, cultural perspective etc etc) which is unlikely for a long time - there's a huge number of jobs that require human *bodies* too, so you'd also have to invent a human-identical robot.

No. There are vanishingly few jobs which require a human body. The human body is somewhat spectacular in that it suits many situations and is highly adaptable to a variety of climates, and carries around a big brain suitable not just to tool use, but also to tool making and other complex jobs. But that's about where its wonderfulness ends, and we can invent machines which do the various individual jobs which it does much better than the human body can do them. And since robotics is going to make it possible for even fewer people to direct the machines to do even more work, it's easy to see that we're not going to need as many people to get things done.

We already know that trickle-down economics doesn't work, because people can't physically spend money fast enough. And this trend is only going to exacerbate the concentration of wealth which makes them not work.

With apologies to Michio Kaku

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

But Ray Kurzweil is STILL the biggest hack on the planet.

Re:With apologies to Michio Kaku

[gweihir]

Naa, just the most visible in tech circles.

Unfortunately, he is wrong.

[edgedmurasame]

He doesn't have to worry much, but plenty of us have to worry between the threats of AI/ML and globalization.

Time bound statement

[GeekWithAKnife]

AI will not replace all human jobs/humans in general? but eventually??

It's a "while false" sort of loop; (just imagine the if and if else somewhere in there)

0. AI does not have a kill switch/hard coded cessation. (Currently an off switch and safeties are built into everything)

1. AI reaches human level competitive intelligence in certain use cases. (We're already here in things like chess.)

2. AI is capable of limited choice. Ergo it can evaluate data to a degree that it can select the best application for itself within a field/s. (We're getting there. So AI is still far from taking lessons from tax returns and applying to stock analysis but machine learning can apply to permutations of protein folding for instance.)

3. The AI can modify its own code to a narrow extent. (Experimental development. Emerging; neural nets)

We know AI/robots are already replacing humans. This is not a concern because humans adapt faster and mostly can be employed. The phenomena or replacing humans will only increase as we currently find efficiency in cost savings and time management with robots/automation/AI etc which will accelerate this situation.

Humans will not be replaced at a higher rate that they can retrain/re purpose until X generations of AI self fabrication. Then (depending on how unrestricted this fabrication is) it may be time to concern ourselves.

If AI is allowed to research and fabricate ever better solutions to increase its own computational capacity to be "more intelligent" in an unrestrained fashion; humans will undoubtedly cease being the most intelligent/most capable/apex predator.

One day AI may look us like we look at chimps today, assuming there is any value in their further study.

Will the new jobs be enough to live

[houghi]

People will be doing jobs to live, not even make a living. There are people now already that need 2 jobs just to survive and then not go to the doctor, because they are unable to do that.
There are people who collect cans so they can make a living. There are people who go through waste to see if there are things that they find to sell (or eat). Those are jobs that did not exist before.

So yes, people will find something to do and make money to survive.

Re:Now we see why Google produce such shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Said the moron that they wouldn't hire...

What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Opportunist]

All former forms of automation and job elimination were not complete. People displaced from farms were required in the emerging production industries, those eliminated there by automation were required by the emerging service industry.

The problem we're facing today is twofold, and it seems Kurzweil ignores that completely. Yes, so far we always gained new jobs replacing the old ones. People who were no longer needed as farmhands went on to become factory workers. Factory workers replaced by automation became service personnel. Every time with a long period of incredible suffering for the people displaced because the new industrial branches took lots of time to develop.

But what should develop this time? We're about to reach the point where anything a human can do, a computer, a robot, a machine can do better, faster, more efficient and without any chance of getting sick or flipping the boss off because it found something better.

Worse yet, people are not fungible products. You can't replace person A with person B. And you can't put someone into a new job and expect him to be able to do it. Every time we went through a "revolution" in our industry, the jobs that the least qualified people could do were eliminated. You could employ someone with an IQ of 70 as a farmhand before the advent of machinery. He was useful. Today? What should someone like this work as?

And what will someone with an average IQ work as in the future? Those jobs are what machines can (almost) do today. What we can easily observe already is that the required qualification to have a job is getting higher and higher. When you look at unemployment statistics, you can easily see that the lower the qualification, the higher the unemployment rate.

Kurzweil does not address that problem.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[deathguppie]

And what will someone with an average IQ work as in the future?

hmmm.. how about help desk and middle management?

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Opportunist]

Reading a script should be a job that a computer cannot do better than a human?

And if computers can do one thing perfectly, then to ensure that everyone's productivity plummets, so that should take care of middle management, too.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[holophrastic]

Historical story-telling, like Kursweil does here, often forgets about time. A hundred years later, the missing old jobs aren't a problem. Great. But that's a hundred years of suffering first. You're absolutely right.

But I think there's something much more significantly wrong that's being overlooked here.

I'm not interested in having 100 different careers. I'm not interested in learning one skill, throwing it out and learning another skill every five years. That's insane. I don't want to keep learning and keep working harder and harder throughout my life.

I want what I think most people expect. I want to learn, get good, make it easier on myself, use that experience to evolve once or twice, get bored, get a new career once mid-life, derived out of side-skills that I already have, use my experience to skip a few steps as I learn, then retire with a minimal side-job, probably consulting in my first career's industry.

That requires the same industry to have the same values (not the same equipment, but the same priorities) for a fifty-year period, minimum.

I'm not joe sixpack, but there is good news for joe sixpack on the horizon. Humanity is currently approaching a major growth spurt. You can't colonize another planet with 1'000 scientists. You need 100'000 labourers to colonize another planet.

Robots and industrial equipment and big machines, and fancy techniques are all built using existing infrastructure. Another planet has no such infrastructure. Humans with hammers require very few resources -- no fuel transport, no solid ground, no sewer system, no roads. Just raw materials.

So, I'm predicting that at some point in the next two hundred years, we start shipping joe sixpack to the moon, 100'000 joes at a time, with 100'000 hammers at a time, and build a city out of nothing. There are many such cities to be built.

And just like with all the joes working in remote areas today, to build the first sewers or the first roads in northern Alaska, or southern Africa, or crab fishing in northern atlantic, or drilling on oil rigs in the middle of the ocean, it'll be one of the most high-paying jobs in history.

And yeah, you'll be sending their families with them. And yeah, you'll be sending the most religious families first -- because if you want to colonize a new world, you'll need ten children per family per generation.

But, just like my initial point, that wonderful future for joe sixpack is a hundred years away.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Attila Dimedici]

Of course, your form of historical story-telling forgets how much better life got for people on the bottom end after these changes happened. You should Google "The $3000 shirt."

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[holophrastic]

Ah "better". I think you mean "cheaper" and more "consumerist". I know that you don't mean more "time with family", nor more "time swimming in the lake". That $3'000 shirt, assumes 400 hours of labour. But 400 hours spent working hard with family and friends as a team, might very well be considered "better" than working today to earn the money for that same shirt. Let's say such a shirt costs $25. At minimum wage less taxes and expenses that can be as much as 10 hours of work. A day of working, nay, a day of being forced to work in a factory with people you hate, might not be any better than 40 days with family.

I'll remind you how many $25 shirts you buy today, contrasted with how long a shirt lasted back then, and you'll note the balance shift even further. Most of today's shirts cannot be repaired at all.

Look, there's absolutely no doubt that today's shirt is better, and more easily acquired. But it also costs way more than $25. Consider the fabric softener, the shipping pollution, the child labourers.

But this is all terribly irrelevant. I'm a big fan of cradle-to-grave. I'm pretty certain that the average person today spends far more time working where they'd rather not be, and far less time with family and friends where they would prefer to be, compared to "back then".

Quality-of-life is completely independent from quality-of-clothes, but it is pretty well aligned with time-spent-away-from-family, inversely so.

And, as to my original point, "life got better" fifty years later -- so not for the people who suffered through the change. Only for their children. And then those children chose to make things better again, so they suffered for their children, and so on. If each generation chooses to suffer, in yet a new and wonderful way, to make things better for the next generation, then no one actually ever enjoys life. It really doesn't matter why they could. They aren't.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Attila Dimedici]

No, by "better" I mean not living wondering if you are going to have enough to eat today. Throughout history, the lot of the majority of people was to spend their time trying to find enough food to eat (and for a very large percentage of the the population, failing).

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[holophrastic]

It's still that way. Even if you discount third-world countries, war-torn countries, natural-disaster areas, and acts of god, and just focus on big cities.

But instead of "looking for food", which is easily found, they are "looking for work", which isn't. I'll wager that in any affluent city bigger than 100'000 persons, you'll find 25-50% struggling to afford food, housing, insurance, and medicine because they can't get enough hours of work.

If you're having trouble noticing them, look for those that work at night, hand out flyers, take the bus at extreme hours of the day, commute very long distances, and buy less than $20 of groceries at a time.

Just because food is readily accessible -- and free in big cities -- the struggle remains the same, it's just at a different abstraction level.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Opportunist]

Yes, of course, the average poor bastard in some housing projects is living in better conditions than Charlemagne.

The way there, though, is hard and gruesome. Yes, the average industry worker today has a better life than any farm hand before they moved to town. But between that farmhand moving to town and industry workers today are 200 years of poverty we can't even imagine today.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Opportunist]

Because I have to feed and shelter slaves, something that's barely possible on today's minimum wage.

Of course, if I could have a slave at below minimum wage, we could talk.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Opportunist]

Right. I can see the protagonists of daytime TV as artists. Well, maybe not of spoken word. Or written...

But be it as it may, in theory it's a nice idea. In practice, though, I'm fairly sure that whoever is inspired and wants to create will do so already.

Re:What Kurzweil doesn't address

[Attila Dimedici]

For most of those farmhands, moving to town was an even trade. Even in the U.S., where the average pre-industrial farmhand had a better life than most of the same in the rest of the world, most of those who suffered the worst of the early industrial age came from places where, at worst, the industrial city was no better than what they would have experienced without industrialization.

Re:Not for a long time

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Humans can't match the efficiency of specialized robots(when the entire task is rebuilt around them); but they really are pretty impressive for general-purpose operations in uncontrolled environments.

Unfortunately for us, this is of limited comfort given that demand for versatile human bodies includes a lot of fairly miserable, dangerous, tasks; and the supply is ample enough that only humanitarian considerations give us any pause in just letting them starve in substantial quantities.

Attempts to actually match humans at what they do are still pretty much stuck with ASIMO doddering around like a geriatric astronaut at some absurd per-unit cost; but attempts to rebuild tasks around the robots have been quite successful; and the going rate for 'basic warm body needed' is hardly high enough to be of any comfort to the basic warm body.

I'll bet he believes in fairies and angels too

[Sqreater]

Print off a copy of the normal curve of IQ in the population and paste it over your computer to keep your opinions firmly rooted in reality. Half the population is at or below the norm of 100 IQ points - and that ain't college level. Just what higher level job does he think a 90 IQ is going to do? Huh? He doesn't know. And he doesn't have to in his mind because he has faith they will magically appear. We have to understand that these tech mavens have been very narrowly interested and educated in life, and their opinions in areas other than their areas of expertise are mostly nonsense. Like Bill Gates at one time saving Africa with computers when the issue for many Africans was and still is clean water, not Call of Duty. If he wants to talk about tech, I'll listen. Anything else, well, my opinion is probably better than his.

The Dogmatic Belief in the Job

[Ulfilas2000]

Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Witches float, people need jobs to have meaning

Those all have something in common - a dogmatic belief system

Even Marx noted that air, water, soil, provide use-value to people, but do not require people's labor to derive that use-value. Now, the goods people want and derive use-value from, thanks to technology, require a decreasing amount of their devoted labor time to produce. Hence, making the things they want require less of their devoted labor time to produce, and granting them more time.

More time to wring their hands and worry about where the jobs will go

This guy really has thought this through

[Riceballsan]

The big thing he's missing, is he's comparing 2 different era's. In the past, automation had more or less been stepping in on physical labor. Mental labor was the human's work. This guy works at google, one of the biggest centers for getting computers to compete with humans on intellectual tasks. Google has just worked to defeat humans at go for crying out loud, which was originally thought to be one of the hardest mental tasks for computers to do. Right now the only field in which computers aren't either biting at our heels, or already past us on is creativity... but there's only so much room for us to reach that, and to some extent creativity involves a certain amount of natural talent is necessary.

Re:I predict in 2018 Kurzweil is fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Kurrzweil has had many jobs. He is something of an expert in being unemployed. Want to watch him go white with rage? Ask him about the Aries VI. (The Commercial Aries II and IIIs sold a few units; Mills had a Music room full of them. I never found out what happened to the IV and V.)
Aries was something of a side project of Bob Moog. He designed the original VCOs and VCAs, and when the ua741 OP Amps proved too noisy, he redesigned the circuits around OP-10s. This was done in the West Coast CBS Labs basement.
The VI had ten voices originally, because Bob figured that we had at most ten fingers. When it was pointed out that we had two feet as well, the VI got twelve voices. John Western handled the in-house Engineering, and Berkeley "Donated" a MODCOMP II and the REMAC Rack to control the beast, stuffed full of Burr-Brown DACs and ADCs. "Skipworker" Kurt from Mills did the FORTRAN, and Paul Beaver worked out some of the Voicing before he too abruptly stopped. Kurzweil was a "Synthesizing Consultant" paid for by MIT. Walter/Wendy wandered by on occasion to keyboard for us. In the Spring of 1975, they needed a Kid to do Kid Stuff like making up cables and to do some minor Soldering. That Kid was me. Minimum Wage, and a Share of CBS Stock a week. All of us got CBS Stock; an incentive to make us want CBS to do well.
The VI was a failure. The MODCOMP crashed with maddening regularity; we kept a Rolling Pin handy to work over the 256K Memory board. The Ampex 16 Track 30ips recorder ate tape, and when it wasn't eating tape it was hurling it across the Basement. Even Ray Dolby, who designed it, couldn't tame it.
Except for me, CBS Labs employed some of the finest Sound and Computer experts in the US to make the Aries VI work. Kurzweil hated it with such a passion that he went on to design his own, considerably simpler, Synthesizer.
Well, there was only that one Aries VI. When CBS shut down their West Coast Lab, they had a "Garage Sale" in the parking lot on Hollis Street. I went there to pick up a SoundTech 1000B, the FM Station In A One Foot Cube, (Designed by Western and Dolby; more than a few were assembled by me.) I had to call Larry to bring his Pickup Truck. John Andersson, Ex-Project Manager, _gave_ me the Aries. I had done a lot of the Soldering and Resoldering in it, after all.
And I still have it. Berkeley took their MODCOMP and REMAC back, so the Aries VI now just takes up most of a back bedroom. My two years of Part-Time work for CBS was wonderful, and my CBS Stock, after all of the Buyouts and mergers, is worth upwards of six figures.
Kurzweil has been wrong about many things in the last few decades, but he was right about the Aries VI.

Pointless jobs

[pelpet]

The obvious solution is to keep on inventing pointless jobs, like we are already doing. There are huge amounts of professional paper-pushers, spending their days writing emails, going to meetings and creating routines and documents that produce little to none value for society as a whole.

It is horrible.

Source Fundamentals Trump Observational Patterns

[Slicker]

Ray Kurzweil is basing his arguments on patterns of the past. Patterns are derived from fundamentals at play. The fundamental that always led to new kinds of jobs is now changing diametrically--therefore the pattern must also change. With Artificial Intelligence and robotics, there is ultimately no new job that the robots cannot do, ultimately better, safer, and for less. Revolutions in productivity lead to growing economies that, awash in new money, enables whole new categories of work. But in this case, the robot will be there to take the new job faster than he came to take the old one.

Quite a few, Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

>We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history. How many jobs circa 1900 exist today?

According to "Humans Need Not Apply":

"But if you still think new jobs will save us: here is one final point to consider. The US census in 1776 tracked only a few kinds of jobs. Now there are hundreds of kinds of jobs, but the new ones are not a significant part of the labor force.

Here's the list of jobs ranked by the number of people that perform them - it's a sobering list with the transportation industry at the top. Going down the list all this work existed in some form a hundred years ago and almost all of them are targets for automation. Only when we get to number 33 (computer programmer) on the list is there finally something new."

Re:Quite a few, Ray

[green1]

Ranking jobs by number of people performing them is ridiculous when the total number of types of jobs is much larger. The bigger question is what percent of the workforce is in a job that existed before, or didn't, and that's something they didn't even address.

e.g.
letter jobs have "always" existed, number jobs are new:
JobX=35
JobY=35
JobZ=30
Job1= 25
Job2= 25
Job3= 25
Job4= 25
Job5= 25
Job6= 25
Job7= 25
Job8= 25
Job9= 25
Job10= 25
Job11= 25
Job12= 25
Panic! the top 3 job types are the same as they were for the last hundred years, you don't even find a new one until number 4! but the number of people doing the new jobs dwarfs the number doing the old ones. (100 vs 300)

Re:Quite a few, Ray

[green1]

Humans run the economy, not horses. If all the humans are put out of work, we won't just shrug and stop breeding humans. Instead we'll change how the world economy works.

Equating humans and horses is the shockingly dumb part.

I'm not saying there won't be short term pain, that's quite possible, but imagining a long term future where we all still need to work, but can't, and haven't figured out a different way to run the world is just insane.

This from Mr. Singularity

[OneHundredAndTen]

Does this buffoon have any credibility left?

Re:This from Mr. Singularity

[Locke2005]

Are people still buying his books? If there was no demand, there would be no supply! Sure, the beauty of futurism is that by the time people prove you're wrong, you've already put millions in the bank and retired!

If I were a prescient futurist in 1900

[Hognoxious]

If I were a prescient futurist in 1900

You weren't. And you aren't one now.

Sedentary

[datavirtue]

""What new jobs?" And I'd say, "Well, I don't know. We haven't invented them yet.""

Jobs where you slowly die while working your life away in a windowless office with a bunch of whiny, back-stabbing assholes. Progress.

Director of Engineering at Google

[crafoo]

The most interesting information here is that Ray Kurzweil is the director of engineering at Google. Rotten top to bottom with wishful thinkers and deniers of reality.

Re:Not for a long time

[datavirtue]

"We already know that trickle-down economics doesn't work, because people can't physically spend money fast enough."

Amazon is making headway in that space. Between my wife and I we spend money much faster than it comes in!

Cue the Butlerian Jihad

[gazelam]

OK, so we are still a few decades to centuries away from that point in the Dune timeline, but one can project a revolt such as this as an alternative to Kurzweil's seemingly smooth transition eternally from one status quo to the next. If the threshold for skilled work creeps ever higher and the people below the threshold are kept on a subsistence lifestyle, revolt may be inevitable.

So true

[Confused]

In the past, people with little useful skills were swineherds and goose girls. However, the need for those occupations are gone, so today those same people are multi media marketing consultants and agile project controllers.

Mr. Kurzweil is right, that useful jobs get automated so that people will mess up less and pointless make believe jobs are created instead to occupy the masses.

This from a agile multimedia marketing project controller who wishes to do do something rewarding like herding swines instead.

Re:So true

[pipingguy]

Mod parent funny, just for the agile project controllers comment alone.

where does all the extra productivity go?

[dermond]

people say this is not new: since 150+ years we see exponential growth in productivity and still we still have a 40h work week and almost full employment. where does the extra productivity go? and will this trend continue?

1.) marx hints in the manifesto what happens with the overproduction: it creates a crisis within capitalism. "In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production." capitalism has learnt do deal with this but to some degree the mechanisms are still the same as 150years ago. creating extra demand via advertising. destroying the existing production. war. legally limiting access. e.g. via so called "intellectual property". as a more permanent solution: capitalism in former centuries had the opportunity to expand into other continents. but this is gone. and there is a limit to aggressive advertising. the "best" method to get rid of access production today is via war. works twice: you need weapons and you do need to rebuild what has been destroyed.

2.) so if we are not able to limit the excess productivity by shorting labour hours and installing basic income then what we will see is heading to is war and destruction. if you look today: most jobs are in areas that are useless or harmful to society: advertising (an industry that creates dissatisfaction), financial products creating fictional capital and of course war. also most products could last much longer then they do..etc.. also think of the ecological footprint of the useless crap.

3.) so if we do not want to wake up in an even more distyopian world we better make sure that we compensate the productivity gains with working less hours and demanding more money and fighting for a universal basic income..

AI Driving

[PPH]

We'll all have jobs as EMTs.

Re:AI Driving

[green1]

If EMTs spent any large percentage of their time dealing with vehicle related incidents, I'd be worried AI would put me out of a job. But in reality we deal with very few as a percentage of actual calls.
It is difficult to imagine how an AI could drive much worse than your average human, and in fact we're already seeing that with even partially autonomous solutions.

Re:AI Driving

[Locke2005]

AI aren't perfect, but they make far fewer mistakes than human drivers. In other words, the accident rate goes down when AI takes over driving. What I fear most is the interaction of unpredictable human drivers with AI trying to predict what the cars around it are going to do - that's the most dangerous thing. 100% AI on the road would be a lot safer, except for the occasional catastrophic hardware failures.

Re:AI Driving

[PPH]

What I fear most is the interaction of unpredictable human drivers

Never mind the human drivers, think about the hobos jaywalking and meth addicts riding fixies. The occasional AI vehicle will be less likely to run them down*. But when the majority (or all) vehicles are AI driven, one wino can bring traffic to a standstill. Actually, not a bad tactic for the cardboard sign guys. They have a captive audience and they won't let traffic move until everyone pays up.

*Just this morning, I watched a crack-head try to wander across a busy street. The reaction of the (human) drivers was just to blow their horns and get him to jump back on the sidewalk. Not the correct accident avoidance response, but one that takes traffic flow into account. The bums can't assume an optimal (AI) response from most vehicles. So they watch out (more or less). All of the proposals for AI improving traffic flow assume the use of either mesh networks or algorithms that can assume a 'correct' response of all vehicles. Fine, if all you have to worry about is drivers. But what about the pedestrians?

Thou shalt not make a likeness of a human mind

[Hognoxious]

Or a new Butler.

Hi My name is Ray...

[DougReed]

Hi,

My name is Ray, and I am an executive in a technology company, and my company wants to sell more invasive technology to you, but people like Elon Musk is starting to create fear, so people are starting to worry about thermostats that know everything about you, and speakers that listen to every word you say and send it to us, so I need to go to some Website with a large readership, and strongly proclaim that people like Elon Musk are fear mongers. I need to tell them that having technology rule their lives is a good thing! ... oh and p.s. go buy a Nest thermostat and a Google Home, because I need to see if my message got through to you.

Re:Hi My name is Ray...

[Locke2005]

Bill Joy was fear mongering about AI long before Elon Musk... and I can't say I really disagree with him.

Playing chess isn't a job

[Viol8]

Its an activity that occasionally becomes a spectator event. If playing chess WAS a job it would have been taken over by machines back in the 90s.

Don't believe me? Then I guess you think telephone exchanges are still run by girls plugging in cables to route calls.

Re:Playing chess isn't a job

[mark-t]

Its an activity that occasionally becomes a spectator event. If playing chess WAS a job it would have been taken over by machines back in the 90s.

Of course it's a specatator event, but that doesn't mean it's not a job. Those spectators paid to come see the event live, for example... and the people that play are being paid to do so, so how is it not a job? The fact that even the best players can be beaten by computer has not reduced the interest in paying to watch people play eachother *AT ALL*.

And as I said... this is just in one area where we've advanced computers to the point that they really *CAN* compete with human beings.

Obviously, it doesn't apply to all types of jobs... and it probably doesn't even apply to most of things that one might think of when they think of the word "job" today, but the demand for real human beings to do the things that they can do well, whatever that task might be, is certainly something that is always going to exist, and like chess players, the fact that a machine might someday do better is entirely superfluous.

Re:Playing chess isn't a job

[mark-t]

The job is entertaining folks who want to see how well a human can play chess.

A job is what you do for money (or barter, or trade), not how much justification exists for the activitiy to merit it. For the professional chess player, playing chess is their job. Entertaining others is secondary and entirely superfluous to that, and is only relevant as a justification for why somebody would be able to make money doing it.

You seem to be under the impression that a job is necessarily something that needs to exist in order for one to make money, and not simply something that one might happen to do that also makes money (particularly if they can make enough money at it that they can sustainably live on that amount)

Re:Playing chess isn't a job

[Viol8]

" Entertaining others is secondary and entirely superfluous to that,"

No, it absolutely isn't, because without the entertainment side they wouldn't get paid and their "job" wouldn't exist. Also the entertainment value requires humans to be playing it, no one wants to see 2 chess computers slugging it out.

Re:Playing chess isn't a job

[mark-t]

No, it absolutely isn't, because without the entertainment side they wouldn't get paid and their "job" wouldn't exist.

Again, that's only the justification for how the job could be monetized, it does not make it their job. Their job is what ever it is that they are paid todo.... and that starts and finishes at playing chess. I don't dispute that they wouldn't get paid if people didn't find it entertaining, but that's still not what the professional chess players actually do THEMSELVES. What you are talking about is more of the marketability angle than anything that any professional chess players would ever actually even begin to think about, except perhaps between games. It's like saying that a carpenter's job is selling what they build instead of just actually building. Obviously if they don't sell, they don't make any money, but that doesn't mean that their job isn't just doing the building..

Re:Playing chess isn't a job

[Viol8]

You're splitting hairs. Jobs doesn't exist in a vacuum - without a useful end product that someone is willing to pay for the job ceases to be a job and reverts to being a pastime or hobby.

Re:Playing chess isn't a job

[mark-t]

True, but that's not the case, is it? With professional chess players, their job is to play chess... period. If people weren't willing to pay to watch chess, there'd be no job, obviously, but conceptually, that's true about *ANY* job. Why would you get paid to do anything at all, regardless of what it was, if there wasn't some demand for it that people are willing to pay for? A job is not merely a means by which one makes money, it is whatever it is that one does that happens to also make money.

Not evenly distributed

[Dareth]

The jobs of the future may be short 2 hours gigs like you mentioned. Some people who are used to working 60 hours a week may well be able to handle 20-30 of those jobs with ease. There is no guarantee they will be evenly distributed without even addressing the skills needed to do them.

Re:Not evenly distributed

[ichimunki]

I'd like to know what these 2-3 hour a week jobs are going to be... because it requires a lot more than a few hours a week to become proficient at a lot of professions in the current system. And usually jobs require some level of staying in practice, just doing the job itself counts here, but also training comes in many forms... If the actual end-point is a job that only 2-3 hours a week, how am I going to get good at that job? Stay good at that job? I'm going to be spending most of my life thinking about something decidedly not that job.

Re:Top of the Skill Ladder

[fluffernutter]

Maybe he'd like to be a rocket scientist or a nuclear physicist.

the great beyond

[epine]

"Explain" is not a word that belongs in front of Ray Kurzweil.

"Espouse" barely suffices.

Kurzweil truly inhabits a realm beyond human apprehension, properly described only by words that haven't even been invented yet.

"Exposensify"?

Dang, it would almost have worked—until I named it.

But what if this time..

[bravecanadian]

It really *is* different?

(I think it is)

By the way, how does one break in the the "futurist" job market? It sounds like a great job predicting things that may or may not happen. Like the weatherman.

Re:Agreed - this is something new

[vtcodger]

But our current circumstance is something new. I really believe it's going to catch society completely flat footed. Hardly anybody is preparing for this. AI coupled with automation is going to eliminate entire fields of work. There will be nowhere to transition to.

I fear that you may be correct. 100 coal miners replaced by three coal mining machine repair guys and a handful of unskilled workers doing general cleanup. 200 factory workers replaced by a few techs.

And if you think that's a problem for the G7 which has substantially deindustrialized in the past several decades, think about the impact in China and other countries that the manufacturing jobs migrated to.

Kurzweil is A. Idiot

[whitroth]

How many jobs that existed in 1900 still exist? Retail? Butchers? Doctors and nurses? People workin' on the railroad? Writers? Newspapers? I could go on for a long, long while.

And then there's this: in the last seventies and early eighties, there was all the talk of the "information economy", how although a lot of jobs would be automated, there'd be more, and better jobs created, rather than, say, being a robot on an assembly line.

Now... where are the jobs he thinks will be created? In the tens and hundreds of millions of jobs?

Re:Kurzweil is A. Idiot

[sl149q]

Yes, there are a bunch of jobs that have the same label.

But in most cases the same "insert job title here" either requires vastly different skills and / or does something only vaguely resembling what their counterpart did 100+ years ago.

Lawyers come close. But I would still not hire a lawyer fresh from 1900 if he was available now.

Re:Kurzweil is A. Idiot

[Locke2005]

All good lawyers now use LexisNexis for everything. When was the last time someone did a patent search by reading physical paper?

Re:Kurzweil is A. Idiot

[Locke2005]

Strangely, the job market for prostitutes has not diminished in hundreds of years. And the job market for politicians has increased... but then, I repeat myself.

Re:Let me use the past

[green1]

He isn't predicting what the winning lottery numbers will be. Only that there will be a winner eventually. Which from past experience seems quite reasonable.

You however are quite hung up on exactly what numbers will win, feeling that if we don't know exactly what they are, we can't say that they will indeed exist. That's not how it works.

Personally I believe that it will all turn out perfectly fine. Unfortunately I also believe that the transition will be extremely messy and painful. But that too is completely consistent with history.

Re:Romans

[green1]

The roman empire does not exist any more, but humanity still does, and we are objectively better off in every way.

Predicting that we'll be better off in the future is easy, and almost (though not quite) guaranteed. Predicting exactly what that will look like, or what we'll have to go through in the mean time is the hard part.

I think the author is 100% right that we'll be better off in the future. Unfortunately I also think that the transition period will be painful and messy. But that too is completely consistent with history.

Many people focus on the messy and painful part and think there's no possible way forward. To some extent they're right to worry about that part, but it would be stupid to assume that we'll get stuck at that stage and not get to the better society at the end of it.

The workforce will change, we know that, but we also know that it has been constantly changing ever since the first cave dweller employed someone else to go hunting in exchange for them gathering fruits and vegetables. Will the same jobs exist? of course not! will other jobs exist? probably. But in the end, it doesn't even matter if any jobs exist because we'll adapt either way. People are worried that it will just push all the wealth to the top and make everyone else dirt poor, but remember that is not a sustainable long term situation either. People at the top don't stay there with nobody able to buy their wares, and nobody stays at the top for long if 99% of the population is horribly miserable beneath them.

The transition might be difficult, but the end result will be better than today. Just as has happened many, many, times in the past.

Kurzweil is insane

[Etcetera]

His statement is ludicrous and, given that this is Kurzweil and the answer is easily derivable from his OWN BOOKS I feel like he's seriously gone off the deep end.

Previous technological advances were based on physical automation. A steam engine displaces workers, but frees them up for other work that can't be done by steam engines. OCR displaces data entry personnel, but frees them up for other work that can't be done just by OCR.

But what happens when you develop generalized AI? The notion that "there's always something that machines won't be able to do but humans can" is all well and good, but something that can't go on forever... won't. Furthermore, by automating the most mundane tasks and taking away all but the most skilled meta-work positions (ie, algorithm designers and AI trainers), you're sucking away huge chunks of the population's future. And anything you're going to try to retrain them for will simply be the Next Big Thing some d-bag Silicon Valley Solutionist (like yourself, now) will attempt to automate for the purposes of exchanging operational expenditures putting food on the table with capital expenditures increasing their stock value.

The only saving grace is that when Skynet becomes operational it's probably going to take out its data masters first.

Re:Kurzweil is insane

[Locke2005]

No, it just means that the ability to work well with an AI will become the most valuable job skill in the near future. Our new robotic overlords ain't going to maintain themselves!

Abstraction

[Tony Isaac]

The automation of jobs in society is analogous to the abstraction in programming.

Over the decades, our programming languages and frameworks have become more and more powerful. They have automated basic jobs like the mechanics of input fields, displaying video, encryption, and all kinds of other tasks that we programmers used to have to write from scratch. Yet somehow, we programmers still stay busy! Now, we're able to do things we could never imagine before, like write a function that computes the most efficient route between two locations using Google (or other) map API.

I don't see programming jobs disappearing any time soon, and for that matter, I don't see the need for workers in general disappearing any time soon.

Distinction

[Locke2005]

The key words here are "at the top of the skill ladder." We don't currently have a shortage of highly skilled jobs, we have a shortage of jobs for unskilled labor, which of course are easier to automate. And at the same time, getting the education required for the new high-skills jobs is getting much harder. Thanks, Betsy DeVos!

Re: Sex

[hackwrench]

We all know that men who don't have sex with women don't really want to yet.

Rate of Creation != Rate of Skill Adaptation

[Jhyrryl]

... we're going to create more jobs at the top of the skill ladder.

Emphasis is mine. The reason he's wrong is that we're approaching points where: we loose jobs faster than we can retrain existing workers on new ones; the new jobs require more skill than the average intelligence can handle; and the new jobs are off-planet where it's easier to build robots out of local resources than it is to transport humans.

Re:Hairdressers and Telephone Cleaners

[knorthern knight]

If we can't automate hair dressers and telephone cleaners away, we could always send them away... in the "B" Ark.

Re: directed design goal of the machine

[presidenteloco]

Yeah but you're talking about early-generation AI.

All we have to do is go a little META on the learning algorithms and representations, and give them a general goal like "learn more about everything", "form goals (for beneficial modification of environment, for assistance to human wishes?)", "learn experimentally how to progress toward goals" etc.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

Here's one example of a future human job

[presidenteloco]

Providing comedy relief to AIs observing our quirky behaviour.

I'LL ARGUE IT !

[JimSadler]

NO way ! We have reached a toggle point. Huge changes will now rapidly take place. And yes, some high tech jobs will be created in the short run but the very nature of AI and automation spells the doom of those high tech jobs as well. The construction industry is beginning to take the hit already. Many jobs for lawyers no longer exist due to computers. Robotics is poised to eliminate many doctors and surgeons. There has been work done on machines that create computer programs on their own. The notion that we will destroy a trade and then be able to train the workers for other trades is a dullards dream. We will see shrinkage in all trades. And then there are the pay issues. A power company employee may be well paid and secure. But a bunch of guys quickly shown how to install solar panels on roofs is not the type of position that will require high pay for the workers. So we are converting jobs that can support a man or family into jobs that will pay so low that the man will need food stamps to survive. The really vital point is whether society will change enough to provide high quality income for those who no longer work. Can basic human beliefs change enough to cope with what is happening now? Or will it be like global warming which has numerous people swimming in denial and ignoring the obvious truth. Maybe we can pray for an ice age such that the warming is offset by nature.

Greetings captain Obvious

[sdinfoserv]

Ray is right, it won’t eliminate jobs Just like up till the 1960’s, thousands of telephone operators – well paid positions with benefits and pensions – were replaced by automatic switches. Were replaced by a hand full of switch techs...

You act as if we all will work on farms

[WillAffleckUW]

Seriously, if we were to believe this futurist, then the future would be like Ecotopia, with the prosperous West living on wind and solar farms, 3D bioprinting new organs on organ cell lattices, growing their own compostable 3D printed furniture, creating more energy than they need while ridesharing and biking and using electric skateboards powered by those same green energy sources ...

Oh. Wait.

We do live in that future.

I keep forgetting it's only the backwards parts that don't live as we do.

Worship Me -I am the Singularity!

[hguorbray]

given the GP point about the Singularity being a return of God perhaps the new AI 'Prime Being' will require an army of Acolytes, Worshippers, Priests etc?

Thereby solving unemployment and giving the fading old religion's followers something to believe in and somewhere to go.

and of course -God will provide for all -Problem Solved!

I'm only half kidding -although it would be a larf to see the Fundamentalist reaction to an AI god -probably be seen as the antichrist or the ultimate inhumanist.

Those begins the first (and perhaps last) Robot War

I'm just sayin'