I use Firefox and I didn't realize this was a feature. The engineers seem to have thought it through, and it makes sense to remove this kind of largely unused legacy code, since it costs time and money to test and maintain. I mean, the last updates were 7 years ago. They're also giving a migration path for the users and there are reasonable alternatives, so it's not like they're just leaving people out in the cold.
Most importantly, it's really a feature that makes more sense as an extension than as a built-in part of the browser. As an add-on it can evolve separately from the browser, and multiple extensions can compete with each other (and fill in different niches) without having to go through the trouble of developing a full web-browser.
Risk is never a positive, if you could charge the same interest for two loans but one had no risk and the other had a high risk, the better deal is the no risk loan. Financial risk (borrower's risk of repayment) is closely correlated with reward (interest rate) because we have a fairly efficient financial services market. If I have great credit, there's no end to the banks willing to offer me loans at a good rate, so I'll just choose the one with the best (commodity) rate. If have less good credit, there's fewer banks willing to loan to me, but as long as the risk isn't too high and their confidence in their methods for determining my risk rate are accurate, then my loan is still a pretty sure bet when grouped with many other similar loans and a higher interest is charged to make up the losses. Once the risk is mitigated this way, my loan becomes a commodity again, but at this higher cost/interest rate, so the many banks out there compete for my loans and I end up with the commodity interest rate at that risk level being offered.
Real value has to come from somewhere. I don't want money so a number I own gets higher, Cookie Clicker-style, I want money to buy things of real value: real estate, food, cars, computers, services, trips and transport, etc. These things take real labor and real limited resources. If I take a bunch of money out of the bank and give it to someone else for something of real value, then that money had better stay valuable at least until they're able to spend it on something else of value, or else I (inadvertently?) defrauded them out of the real thing they gave me. It makes sense that people wanting to withdraw money, which could be used to directly acquire things of real value, would be a huge drain on the system that produces money out of thin air. In the end though, all these various economic failure modes you mentioned come back to this simple principle: real value has to come from somewhere.
Central banks making money out of thin air is really bad for an ordinary person, since the real value has to come from somewhere and ordinary people will bear the majority of the burden, as they are still the primary engine of value creation (though automation is becoming more and more of a source of real value over time). The value produced goes to those with the most money, a different group of people. So, it's basically a pump to move value from one group of people to another group. Economic collapse is part of the system, a natural re-balancing of the books, and it makes it hard to pin the blame properly. There's usually some scapegoats sacrificed each time, but that's just a token to appease people. The various controlled rates are based on how fast the owners of the system have figured out they can run the pump without precipitating the collapse too quickly, since repeated back-to-back collapses would reduce confidence too much for the system to work.
This isn't to say the financial system is all bad, just the part about making money out of thin air without doing anything that creates real value. Servicing financial needs at all levels of risk creates real value by allowing individuals to take on risk that often allows them to produce more value than they otherwise would have been able to. Note that it's not the bank taking on the risk though (at least as long as their risk measurement systems are indeed accurate), but the individual that receives the loan money. A failed venture still needs to be paid for somehow, and the venture owner is on the hook. Generally speaking though, it creates a lot of wealth by allowing new ventures to be launched and larger operations to expand more than they'd normally be able to. This helps slow down the inevitable collapse designed into the current system as well, and in theory it could halt the collapse indefinitely, but only if the amount of value generated was equal to or in excess of the amount of money generated, which is not realistic because it's always easier to make more money than real value.
I was mostly joking, nobody has enough market power to get doctors to work at minimum wage, though I think there's a kernel of truth here as well.
The basic problem is that the labor market is particularly "sticky" in that you can't freely change jobs, since you are most useful when you spend at least some time with one employer and people aren't just work modules that can be freely mixed and matched with no overhead. It's also expensive (in terms of time) to find better jobs and moving to a new job can be costly as well. Due to this effect people are less likely to look elsewhere than they would be if this were not a factor. This can be exploited (for profit) by keeping new hire wages low (except in the case of highly in-demand talent, of course) and only raising the wages of senior people enough that they don't jump ship at too high a rate. This means the company can raise wages much slower than they'd otherwise have to, effectively skimming the difference in costs between staying and jumping ship from their workers. This effect becomes much more powerful once it becomes the industry norm, since if most starting positions are relatively low wage and/or low benefit, then it becomes even more expensive to the individual worker to find and acquire the limited high value opportunities that are out there, increasing how much profit can be skimmed this way.
Of course, this isn't a problem for extremely in-demand individuals, who can command very high salaries as companies compete for their labor (or start their own business), but it is a problem for the average worker.
It won't get a relatively in-demand field's (doctors, engineers, etc.) wages down to minimum wage, but it will reduce their wages compared to what this would be without this effect.
Not only will these businesses not go out of business (especially if they're well entrenched for other reasons), but they often will make more profit (possibly even long term if they spend some of that profit to retain a few very high performers), and I observe this behavior all over the place.
The wage freeze thing is realistically a tactic for recession time, since most average workers will be happy to have a job at such a time, so they will accept a wage freeze, allowing inflation to eat into their wages quietly, which they won't necessarily notice after the recession is over.
After skimming the paper, it seems they're essentially recommending using hydro and other renewables to power these carbon reactors, since they can be sited anywhere on Earth, so why not site them near substantial sources of clean energy?
From the paper: "Global intensities [of electricity generation-based CO2 emissions] would only be relevant in a world with perfect universal electric transmission. In practice, there are many locations where low-carbon renewables are transmission constrained. These are the locations where DAC with electricity imports makes sense."
Just have a few "senior" doctors you pay the correct amount to keep the business running. If it becomes rampant practice, then you can push them extra hard because all the job listings out there will be for $7.50/hr. Bonus points if you freeze their wages and let inflation wipe out their current salaries.
At my bank, I declined to sign up for NSF and it's been amazing. In theory I might need it, but I haven't yet in 6 years even when I was getting pretty close to the edge ($20 in the account for several days) repeatedly.
The carbon bubble/fossil fuel capital abandonment issue is an issue that is looming 10+ years from now (though there are present situations that can be held up as analogies, such as the ongoing conversion of coal plants to natural gas plants https://energynews.us/2017/02/... which is causing coal capital abandonment). Renewables are near the bottom of the adoption S-curve, where they're just starting to take off, so they're still a small player today even if they're starting to have a visible impact and that impact is accelerating.
Personally, I'm very surprised that energy-related carbon emissions were flat for 4 years despite ever growing power demand.
There's actually a really good reason to think it COULD happen before 2035. Autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles (EV) have a great synergy together (A-EV), which would drive the adoption of both far faster than one would expect. The short version is that autonomous vehicles allow the reduction of automobile stocks by about a factor of 10, due to primarily to heavier re-use as part of an autonomous transportation network, as well as more efficient use patterns (for instance, it'd make "carpooling" to work on an electric shuttle bus much easier and dirt cheap). In addition, it'll drastically drive down transportation prices at the same time, especially when EVs are used since they're much more efficient and deprecate very slowly due to their simplicity (few moving parts means low maintenance costs). We're seriously talking about costs so low that it'll probably end up being packaged as a monthly transport network use fee (ex. $50/month for "unlimited" on-demand in-city transport). Even if someone hates driving with people it'd still be only like $0.10/mile to go anywhere in a private vehicle. The prices will be so low that using your currently existing paid-off vehicle will lose you a LOT of money compared to just using the transportation network, driving people to abandon their current vehicles even if it's at the loss of the entire vehicle and their investment in said vehicle with no recompense (since just the insurance and maintenance costs are more than using the transport network an unlimited number of times, let alone the fuel costs).
Requiring 10% of today's vehicles to service the population and offering vastly lower costs means that the transition time may very well be 10x faster as well, and given that a present day car lasts around 10 years, a year or two's worth of present-day car production volume may be all that's needed to replace our current stocks of gasoline vehicles with A-EVs (once critical mass is reached).
The following report lays out the full case for this. This report suggests a slower but still shockingly fast transition period of 10-ish years with the main transition happening over approximately 4 years. https://www.rethinkx.com/execu... Full report here: https://static1.squarespace.co...
I was skeptical of this at first, but after reading it I'm confident it'll play out this way if full autonomy can be worked out. The disadvantages of EVs are completely moot when they're used in this way (ex. the high up front expense doesn't matter when each car is worth 10 today and they have much lower long term costs and a much longer lifespan). Socially, most people will respond to the drastically lower cost and drastically higher convenience, since it'll basically take transportation costs down to a rounding error on their current costs ($10,000 today to $50-100) and be available 24/7 without needing to park or drive. I'm sure there'll be some holdouts that refuse to change, but they'll pay out the nose to keep the luxury of their own vehicle, and most will have to transition to EVs when the carbon bubble pops (which they detail in said report, basically you'll see a massive stock of abandoned fossil fuel vehicles due to the earlier mentioned incentives, and the gasoline infrastructure will collapse as soon as the transition gets serious because you can't easily stockpile gasoline as it's a volatile chemical, driving even more people to adopt EVs even if they aren't using them autonomously).
As for electrical needs, it won't be nearly as bad as you're thinking, since EVs use a LOT less energy than gasoline vehicles, and if we're only running a tenth of the vehicles (admittedly much more frequently), then the energy requirements will be substantially lower. EVs can also make better use of cheap baseload power in the middle of the night and intermittent renewables (th
I was worried that nobody would read it, since halfway into writing it I realized that I was taking too long and Slashdot would have moved on before I was done writing it.
The wording "big lie" is probably a bit much, since it has such a big emotional charge due to its connection to Hitler, though what I'm talking about is definitely related. The Big Promise perhaps? People will tend to believe a bigger promise over a smaller one, simply because there's more at stake. If I promise something will result in $100, then there's a relatively small limit to what anyone would put into making this promise come true, since $100 is only worth so much, and people are a lot less likely to care enough to engage the idea. However, a promise worth $infinity can be worth doing literally anything to achieve, the expected value is infinite even if it's extremely unlikely, and the fear of missing out is intense. Plus, if I make a promise of $100 and someone thinks its unlikely, they're more likely to think I'm a small time fraudster, but if I make a promise of $infinity then they're more likely to think I'm just crazy. It's both safer and more likely to work to make a big promise, so ideas attached to big promises are going to naturally be more successful.
If you look carefully, you'll note that I say the "big lie"/big promise is just a hook that is used by a lot of meme-complexes, including earthly ideologies. Most ideologues/religionists don't realize that they are hooked by it. Once you're hooked by the promise of heaven or threat of hell, it's perfectly sensible to want to save as many people as possible, to hold tightly to your ideas in the face of competing ideas, and see those opposing your work as evil or depraved. The same is true for ideologies like (for instance) Communism, most of the communist revolutionaries thought they were doing the right thing and it was natural for them to see capitalist forces as evil and depraved and leading the world towards decay and destruction. I don't think there was some cynical elite person who came up with these ideas just to get many people to do their bidding (though of course this is possible in some cases, and it's also common for an ideological framework to get hijacked after it's established by opportunistic actors).
The point is that the "big lie"/big promise is a common attribute of successful religions and ideologies, because it is an effective booster that when it attaches to a meme-complex (often naturally, as ideas move from mind to mind and people add to it and mutate it). It basically makes a meme-complex more virulent than the version without it, at least as long as it makes sense with the hook attached (ex. you can't sensibly attach a supernatural heaven or hell to communism because it's an inherently materialistic philosophy).
There's often a version without the hook around, but it's generally much less popular (for instance, there are Christians that don't believe in hell such as the Unitarians, but they number in the hundreds of thousands compared to the billions of more conventional believers that do believe in hell). I personally am an agnostic who strongly believes there is no hell, so the worst that I believe could happen is that I'd miss out on heaven rather than going to hell for an eternity. I saw a fascinating movie on Netflix recently, Come Sunday, about how seriously some people oppose this idea. Carlton Pearson was told he was doing Satan's work just because he preached that hell didn't exist, and he was excommunicated from his church. It's only such a touchy subject because it's part of the big promise (the promise that sinful behavior will lead to eternal damnation in hell, promises aren't always positive and in this case it's worth negative infinity instead of positive infinity like heaven is, but it's the same basic idea).
If you'll notice, I also attach the idea of a hook to ideologies I ascribe to. I fully believe in transhumanism and I believe the singularity is plausible. Transhumanism and singularitism have a similar hook: by staying alive long enough to see the full benefits of technology (and actually taking advantage of these technologies) it will lead to me regaining youth, having a long life,
This is assuming that we wouldn't be pulled into the singularity as well. Unmodified humanity is unlikely to exist post-singularity, except perhaps as a historical curiosity that's maintained for the same reason we maintain museums and nature preserves, but that doesn't imply we'd be killed by the singularity in the process, we might just be altered by it.
I wouldn't say singularitism is THE new religion. It's one of many modern post-traditional religion religions.
I consider ideology and religion to be basically the same thing: self-reinforcing meme-complexes. Most meme-complexes tend to not cover the entire space of ideas (or if they do, they usually only provide the broadest strokes outside of their core area), so you can have multiple of them in your mind at the same time. Most people assemble several of these meme-complexes into a mostly cohesive worldview. There's strong alliances between some meme-complexes and animosity between others (especially meme-complexes that have drastically different views on the same area, which makes meme-complexes tend towards segregating into categories where they overlap relatively little with other categories). This makes it much more likely that someone will end up with multiple allied meme-complexes and much less likely that someone will end up with two opposed meme-complexes. The distinction between religion and ideology comes from the fact that mainstream meme-complexes in these categories tend to slot into two different areas of thoughtspace and so can generally co-exist peacefully with each other.
It should also be noted that there's plenty of other categories, some of which are almost completely dominated by a single ultra-successful meme-complex, such as mathematics and science.
Ideologies and religions are the most alike in the sense that the most successful meme-complexes in their areas have a few common characteristics. The biggest is that almost all successful ideologies and religions use the "big lie" (that is, if you make a huge promise then people are more likely to believe it) or more charitably the "big gamble" (with Pascal's Wager being a great example) to get people hooked. Religions in particular are much more dependent on this, because it's easy to care less about abstract worlds and meaning that isn't seemingly involved in one's day to day life. If Christianity were just some historical stories and a mythology about God, angels, and demons largely living in a parallel universe from ours, nobody would really care that much. However, people DO care when they could spend an eternity in bliss or hellish torture depending on their actions in this world, and everything else in the world becomes unimportant compared to how that works out. Inject ultra-high/infinite value or punishment into any idea system and the stakes suddenly become a lot higher, since ignoring the right message could be catastrophic. However, you have to accept that the premise is correct before the rest of it follows, so the hook is critical in getting people over that roadbump (which of course works even better if they're children and thus don't have as many other meme-complexes to resist these ideas). I wouldn't define the religion category by the presence of this hook, especially since most successful ideologies have at least a mild hook present, but all successful religions have it and are dependent on it for their continued success on a large scale (even Buddhism has the promises of Nirvana and enlightenment).
Singularitism is belief in the technological singularity, and it somewhat straddles the line between the traditional categories of religion and ideology, but is much more on the religion side of things. It has a much weaker hook than traditional religion, since the only personal responsibility one has for receiving the benefits of the singularity is to live long enough to experience the singularity. Presumably one should also try to speed up the singularity, but unless one is a billionaire or a genius there's not really much one can do. Cryonics also comes up as a possible solution if one is getting old, but it's a separate question of whether modern cryonics actually works (though presumably even a low chance of success is better than zero). That said, they definitely have the ultra-high/infinite benefit part, since the singularity as envisioned would be incredible, well beyond our limited imagination for how
This technology has a lot of the solutions to its own problems embedded in it.
A youthful populace means higher productivity, both between not taking care of elders and not taking care of as many children. If the working age today is 18-67, that's 49 years (45 for the college educated and even less for those with even more education) out of 78, which means 29 dependent years (33 for college educated workers). Only 62.8% of the current lifespan is productive (57.7% for the college educated). By simply getting the old portion of the population back into the workforce, productivity would go up 14.1% immediately (increasing US GDP by $2.6 trillion if this happened today) and medical expenditures would go down by about a third (saving about $1.1 trillion in the US if this happened today), representing an overall increase in available production of nearly 20%. As children became scarcer as well, we'd see up to another 23% base increase in GDP, with reductions in education and medical spending amplifying the effect. We could easily see a 50% increase in productivity over today, and possibly much more. Also, this doesn't even take into account that the prime work years are a small percentage of the total working time, and that a worker with a 60 year old's experience and a 20 year old's energy and mental flexibility could be drastically more effective than any worker alive today. What will this extra production be turned towards?
A person with an indefinite lifespan would also have a lot more at stake when it comes to taking care of the planet. It's easy to look at the global warming data today and say "well all the really bad stuff doesn't happen until 2100" and stop caring about the problem. I'm 32 years old, so I'm very unlikely to make it past 2065, and I'd have to make it to 115 to live to see 2100 (which would get me on the oldest living people lists). Even if I have children at 35, they're unlikely to live to 2100, though it's much more in the realm of possibility. Only my grandchildren and later generations are likely to live in the post-2100 world, and I won't meet my grandchildren for another 20-30 years (and at this point I'll be dependent on my savings and children, and so not able to make much change to the situation). This isn't to say I don't personally care about those year 2100 people, but rather to show how far away 2100 really is, it's further away from me than the moon is. Caring about the Earth in 2100 requires a lot of abstract thought, and it's easy to lose sight of it in the day to day. However, if I am going to live to be 130 or even indefinitely, and I'm going to be well the whole time, then I will make it to 2115 easily and I might reasonably be kicking around in the 2500s if this technology keeps improving. Suddenly I have a lot of self-interest in the matter of the state of the world in 2100, since if the Earth is in serious trouble by then and I might be killed early by it, I lose many years of life over something I could have prevented. I also care less about the amount of short-term growth/production because I have more time to benefit from it. While not everyone will care under these circumstances, a lot will, especially among those with the resources to do something about it. Combined with the additional productivity mentioned above, it seems to me that more and more of our GDP will go towards investing in and protecting our environment in the post-aging world.
There may need to be some kind of family planning laws (ex. one child per couple) or (dis-)incentives (ex. legally having to pay 100% of the costs to raise your children in a modern society, including medical care, education, and at least basic new housing for them in their adult lives, with any shortfalls turning into impossible to escape loans on the parents much like the US student loan system works but on the responsible parents instead of the children) to curb excessively large families in settled areas (ex. almost all of Earth). That said, population growth is already slowing down massively worldwide without any
That could be interesting, but I think my problem with these proposals is scale. Can entertainment really soak up 40 hours a week for ~3 billion people? Even rich people don't have time for that much entertainment, and there's not enough of them go go around.
Yes, entertainment can soak up that much effort. The experience industry is already huge and will only keep growing. You've also got to realize that this kind of entertainment (living environments) would be extremely inefficient (the average actor would only add a tiny amount of value to the guests, with the real value being delivered by the whole, and in some cases hosts might hardly directly interact with the guests). You've also got to consider that it may be a quite different mode of work. Essentially, most of the guests would be living an ordinary life within some magic circle of additional rules depending on the park's theme. For instance, an actor playing a peasant in a medieval themed park might live similarly to a real medieval peasant (but without real bandits and with access to modern medical technology, and with more modern living quarters and entertainments available when they're not on the clock plus vacations away from the park). A given guest is unlikely to interact with a given host peasant, with the host being far more likely to interact with the lord and ladies or fake bandits, but each peasant would add to the world's illusion. Many hundreds of parks at sufficient scale (a city-themed park could easily employ millions alone, being a literal city) could get into the hundreds of millions or even billions of employees. You've just got to think big.
That said, I think there could be issues if all the money accrues to far too few people to support this entertainment industry (for instance, only 100 people having all the money couldn't support more than a few parks), or if the transition happens too quickly and devolves into violence. Speaking of which, there doesn't seem to be a trend toward this in the real world at the moment, building these parks and getting people used to them in society will definitely take time, which I'm not sure we have.
There's also a question of whether we want a society where a few people live like demi-gods and everyone else has to dance to their tune...or else.
My earlier point was just that due to scenarios like this, we can't rule out that it'll just "work out" without any deliberate correction.
It's not that bad. Bigger risk for a bigger reward. Even if you fail, you can still go to trade school for $1000 and the loan repayments can be deferred until you're employed. And really, after the first year of college, you'll know whether you can succeed academically. By the end of the 2nd year, you'll know if there's companies willing to hire you, because they'll be offering you internships. If neither of those happen, you need to change majors or quit before you collect 6 years of student debt.
Part of the problem here is that a lot of people are making really irrational choices about all this. If anyone is uncertain, they should go to community college and drop out quickly if they have issues (so they maybe only have $1000 in student debt, and having "some college" will work to their benefit as an added bonus), but I've seen a lot of people jump straight to expensive universities and/or persist long after what is reasonable. Also, a lot of potentially qualified people who leave college don't then go into the trades.
You also have the tendency for people to fail out of a high paid major and into to another less well paid one, rather than failing out of college entirely. This doesn't make much sense when you consider that the universities don't typically price different majors differently. It does make sense if you found your passion in a different field and know you'd prefer that work, even with the lower pay. However, I'm pretty sure that most such major changes are of the "I can't cut it at X but I can still get a degree in Y."
Overall, there's a pattern of desperation, needing to get that degree at any cost, when what really matters isn't the piece of paper but the ability to think in a disciplined way that the degree (hopefully) represents. If it wasn't for this desperation, then for-profit diploma mills would never be able to trick enough people to be profitable. Articles like this are meant to help counter the pro-college memes that drive this irrational desperation (well, that and drive down trades prices, but when the situation is so massively imbalanced it's not a bad thing overall).
I highly doubt they will be enough to take the place of low-skilled work. The new jobs we are seeing are ever more niche and unstable. A quick glance at a job board brings up a bunch of "specialist", "analyst" and "technician" jobs. Those are decent jobs ($65k or more), but they're all different and there's not a huge demand for any specific one. It's also hard to find training for them, so the best you can do is go to university and hope that a well-rounded education means you can learn the rest on the job.
What I was saying is that they *could* be right, not that they are right, and so that's an uncertainty that needs to be accounted for. For instance, what if it turns out that video games or real life parks where there's a large number of human NPC actors become popular with the wealthy in the near future and it soaks up a lot of the out of work unskilled workers? I'm thinking of something like Westworld, but tamer since you can't endanger the hosts. While it might seem like a wacky idea today, it's not something that can be ruled out easily. It's hard to automate because a human NPC can provide a better quality experience than a robot until we have very advanced robotics and AI (and some patrons may prefer the real deal anyway). It also scales well because you could have a whole artificial town or even city just for the atmosphere, and you can make many of these parks and games offering different experiences. Having a whole town just to provide atmosphere is a huge luxury, but it's a luxury that a new ultra-wealthy class that owns the automation could afford. It should also be noted that things like this do already exist, like Colonial Williamsburg, which employs around 2500 people today.
Combined with jobs that need to keep existing, like the trades and nursing, and other new and hard to foresee jobs,
While incumbent workers would suffer from a flood of new workers in their area of specialty, they'll suffer less than the poor people who are moving to that field out of desperation. Would you rather hire a plumber that's been doing it for 10 years or one of the dozen fresh out of training? Workers with experience in their field can still demand a premium. If there's a living wage in the job for the newbies, then the incumbent should be able to do better than a living wage, and if there's not a living wage for the newbies then it won't be long before the incumbent is all that's left.
While it's true that a lower barrier to entry is a liability once you are in a given job, taking on any job with a higher barrier to entry is always a bigger risk by definition. If you picked the wrong high barrier to entry job to train in, it's a catastrophe (especially when student loans can't be left behind by bankruptcy).
You have to account for the risk of a high school grad not getting a potentially better college-educated job (and being left with substantial student debt). If the trades job training has a 95% chance of success and costs $1,000 while college has a 70% chance of success and costs $40,000, then that's a lot less immediate risk (and while the college grad will make a lot more over the long term, salaries for in-demand college educated workers are only something like twice that of trades and a larger percentage of that income goes into taxes). For a student with poor grades it might even be that college has such a low chance of success that it's a terrible idea, while the trades job remains within realistic reach.
Lastly, it's important to keep in mind that the automation of most present day jobs is not inevitable. Don't get me wrong, I think it's an extremely likely scenario that a large proportion of jobs will vanish with automation, but it's possible the "people will find new jobs we're not expecting" crowd is right. Even more likely is that the loss of jobs will become irrelevant. For instance, once things start getting really bad, I could easily see governments starting up UBI or welfare programs to prevent the loss of jobs from becoming a disaster that kills millions. If this is true, then it may not matter too much if one's job will vanish in 2030 to be replaced by a UBI, and it may even be that such programs have the effect that plumbers and other trades become even more in demand by decreasing the labor supply, which combined with the UBI money may make plumber a great job for those who want to do it.
Also, I don't see how the demand for automation is unlimited in some way that most other jobs aren't. At some point you can wrap up automating everything that matters. If anything, automation work is more limited due to it being in project form (you automate a thing once, but you can wash dishes every day). It is a kind of work that's hard to automate, but it's not the only class of work that's hard to automate.
I'm largely agreeing with you, AI is not even close to ready for trade jobs today. It's not something we should take seriously today.
That said, the growth of this field is unpredictable and exponential. We weren't expecting Go to suddenly yield to new methods, and yet here we are. New ideas and AI technologies could have a vast impact at any time, supercharged by the enormous and growing pool of computing resources available.
Also, since the growth is exponential it'll be much larger in a few years than we expect from reasoning about it linearly. Going by Moore's law, we'll have hardware that's 1024 times better than today's in 20 years. If today's AIs are as intelligent as bees or frogs, 1024 times more powerful hardware may be enough to create neural networks that are as smart as humans or even smarter without coming up with too many new ideas...and there will be much better AI techniques in 20 years. Whether Moore's law continues to keep up isn't particularly relevant, since there's many other technological growth trends that together would likely have similar impacts (similar to how we run our most intelligent AIs on powerful GPUs today, rather than more traditional CPUs because CPU performance has relatively stalled out). A few decades of engineering new hardware designed to run neural networks (dense networks of TPUs perhaps?) will likely lead to new hardware that runs circles around anything we have today. We have plenty of room to expand in size from today's microscopic chips, even if we can't squeeze any more performance out of the individual chips.
Anyway, my point is that while AI is very dumb today, it could catch up with us at any time in the next few decades. There's no real way to know when that will be, and it might not even happen for a very long time. I could easily see strong AI being around in 20 years...or not. We really can't predict this accurately.
Regardless though, the development of strong AI would make our current socioeconomic worries look like a walk in the park in comparison. Half of the current labor force being out of a job might lead to catastrophic civil unrest and perhaps even massive casualties, but it would surely be resolved in a few years one way or another and there'd be a good number of human survivors (if automation displaced 90% of jobs, that would mean there's still something like 400 million+ jobs worldwide and 700 million+ survivors even in the unlikely worst case scenario, and most likely most countries would step in long before people started dying by the millions). Scenarios with strong AI tend to end even more extremely for humanity, for good or ill. The development of strong AI could easily lead to our complete extermination, or it could lead to a true utopia.
The point is that the world would be so transformed by the emergence of strong AI that it wouldn't matter whether a trades job was a good bet today or not. With 100% unemployment, you'd either be living a life of luxury with the machines providing for your wants and needs, or you'd be exterminated one way or another. Picking trades or IT or anything else for that matter would all have the same effect, so you don't really need to take this scenario into account. After all, nobody takes a possible nuclear war into account when planning their careers, or if they do the analysis becomes very different (making enough money to prep now is all that matters).
A trades job is a good bet today and in the case where strong AI doesn't emerge, so pursuing that career path is good advice for young people right now.
The problem with that is that while it'd be easy for a rouge AI to kill most of humanity through some sort of biological or chemical vector, rooting out the last survivors would take a lot more effort. Nerve agents in the water supply wouldn't impact humans that are drinking bottled water or have their own wells. Engineered super-plagues would work even better and it'd be easier to cover up the source (so the AI can keep the humans confused until it's too late), but they'd peter out once the population density dropped sufficiently. Even if you could cover the world in a cloud of deadly poisonous/infectious spores, a few survivors in underground bunkers with gas masks and large caches of supplies would hold out for many years, and it would take a lot of material and energy to produce all that poison and get it pumped into the environment.
My money is on engineered plagues followed by hunter-killer robots. Either that or engineered plagues followed by the AIs not bothering to finish the job, with the remaining humans becoming minor pests (which would be controlled with chemical weapons or hunter-killer robots where needed). Alternately, if nanoswarms are easy for the AI to create, then that would be even more fast and effective, but that's assuming that the AI gets far ahead of humanity very quickly (technological singularity). Yet another alternative would be the AI seemingly working with us for many years, convincing us to do the work of our own destruction (though it doesn't matter too much in the end whether you're being hunted down by AI-influenced humans or robots, and there's sure to be some robots with the humans, especially as the humans become scarce).
The point is that hunter-killer robots are actually pretty likely if AIs decide to take out humanity. After all, isn't one of the best extermination strategies for larger animals to hunt them?
What's not likely is a nuclear exchange, since that would be devastating to the infrastructure the AI would need. A relatively orderly transition is also more likely than a very messy one. Even if they hit us with super-plagues, it'd be after they already had enough of a power base to fill the territory we left behind.
Hopefully it'll either go towards this being a good event (benevolent AI that takes care of us), or we'll become the next (transhuman) species instead of creating our replacement that outcompetes us. It could also be that AI never emerges, most likely because we beat the AI to the punch and wiped ourselves out. It's hard to predict the future.
I'm normally bullish on AI, but this is one of the hardest types of work to automate.
Consider that a plumber has to go to a site, which could very well have a completely non-standard layout and plumbing design, then troubleshoot the problem and fix whatever is wrong with it at the lowest cost, which generally means figuring out some sort of hack. Replacing parts (or worse yet, whole systems) is a last resort due to their expense, and even when this happens getting the new parts put in may be complicated. It's completely non-routine work.
If you want to see where AI is on this, look at the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... While it's amazing that these high end robots can do some of these simple tasks in the field, they're not even close to humans right now, and the complexity of these courses is nothing compared to real work.
Where AI will completely displace human labor in the near future is in areas where the labor is either already quite routine and in a reasonably well-controlled or standardized environment or where we can use clever tricks to simplify the work to make it more amenable to automation (ex. replacing bridge tollkeepers with license plate reading cameras). This is why, for instance, you see intense interest in delivery drones compared to delivery ground robots, because they can simply fly over the complexity of someone's yard to deliver a package and it's easier to ask a homeowner to provide a dropoff pad than a dropoff path. Similarly, self-driving cars seem smarter than they really are because they rely on a standardized environment and they simply need to drive more safely than the humans that have relatively terrible reaction times, limited sensors, constantly break the rules of safe driving, and can easily get distracted or inebriated. People don't care about the otherwise lowered quality of driving service if they're able to goof off while in the vehicle.
The reason AI is important is because a lot of our current jobs fit this description (many of the top job categories in the US are highly automatable), and not because AI is ready to take on all work anytime soon. When it is, we'll have a much bigger socioeconomic revolution on our hands than that caused by a mere lack of jobs. If that happens within 20 years time, you'll not have to worry about a job, whether that's because your livelihood has been separated from your labor or because you're more worried about the robot soldiers hunting you down.
PL/SQL is the worst real language (which is to say, a language I would consider actually implementing something in if everything lined up right). It's deeply married to Oracle. It only runs on Oracle databases, which in addition to the obvious lock-in potential also means you have to keep your PL/SQL up to date on a per-database level and you have to share resources with your other applications and scripts. The language itself is based on Ada, which lacks many modern features that even languages such as Java have. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it's easy to break into writing SQL at any time, though unfortunately the performance of this is miserable because it effectively calls the SQL engine like any other app would (it does admittedly have the advantage of not having to make a network call if your database is hosted separately, but it doesn't really buy you as much as you might think in most situations). Even crazier, if you can potentially get multiple rows back, it will by default fetch 1 row at a time (though it kinda makes sense due to the shared resources thing, since memory would be pretty limited on one box running many PL/SQL scripts and queries), which leads to a massive context switching overhead if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Uber and Lyft are creating a beloved service that is continuing to grow in popularity for some reason! We must kill it!
I use Firefox and I didn't realize this was a feature. The engineers seem to have thought it through, and it makes sense to remove this kind of largely unused legacy code, since it costs time and money to test and maintain. I mean, the last updates were 7 years ago. They're also giving a migration path for the users and there are reasonable alternatives, so it's not like they're just leaving people out in the cold.
Most importantly, it's really a feature that makes more sense as an extension than as a built-in part of the browser. As an add-on it can evolve separately from the browser, and multiple extensions can compete with each other (and fill in different niches) without having to go through the trouble of developing a full web-browser.
Risk is never a positive, if you could charge the same interest for two loans but one had no risk and the other had a high risk, the better deal is the no risk loan. Financial risk (borrower's risk of repayment) is closely correlated with reward (interest rate) because we have a fairly efficient financial services market. If I have great credit, there's no end to the banks willing to offer me loans at a good rate, so I'll just choose the one with the best (commodity) rate. If have less good credit, there's fewer banks willing to loan to me, but as long as the risk isn't too high and their confidence in their methods for determining my risk rate are accurate, then my loan is still a pretty sure bet when grouped with many other similar loans and a higher interest is charged to make up the losses. Once the risk is mitigated this way, my loan becomes a commodity again, but at this higher cost/interest rate, so the many banks out there compete for my loans and I end up with the commodity interest rate at that risk level being offered.
Real value has to come from somewhere. I don't want money so a number I own gets higher, Cookie Clicker-style, I want money to buy things of real value: real estate, food, cars, computers, services, trips and transport, etc. These things take real labor and real limited resources. If I take a bunch of money out of the bank and give it to someone else for something of real value, then that money had better stay valuable at least until they're able to spend it on something else of value, or else I (inadvertently?) defrauded them out of the real thing they gave me. It makes sense that people wanting to withdraw money, which could be used to directly acquire things of real value, would be a huge drain on the system that produces money out of thin air. In the end though, all these various economic failure modes you mentioned come back to this simple principle: real value has to come from somewhere.
Central banks making money out of thin air is really bad for an ordinary person, since the real value has to come from somewhere and ordinary people will bear the majority of the burden, as they are still the primary engine of value creation (though automation is becoming more and more of a source of real value over time). The value produced goes to those with the most money, a different group of people. So, it's basically a pump to move value from one group of people to another group. Economic collapse is part of the system, a natural re-balancing of the books, and it makes it hard to pin the blame properly. There's usually some scapegoats sacrificed each time, but that's just a token to appease people. The various controlled rates are based on how fast the owners of the system have figured out they can run the pump without precipitating the collapse too quickly, since repeated back-to-back collapses would reduce confidence too much for the system to work.
This isn't to say the financial system is all bad, just the part about making money out of thin air without doing anything that creates real value. Servicing financial needs at all levels of risk creates real value by allowing individuals to take on risk that often allows them to produce more value than they otherwise would have been able to. Note that it's not the bank taking on the risk though (at least as long as their risk measurement systems are indeed accurate), but the individual that receives the loan money. A failed venture still needs to be paid for somehow, and the venture owner is on the hook. Generally speaking though, it creates a lot of wealth by allowing new ventures to be launched and larger operations to expand more than they'd normally be able to. This helps slow down the inevitable collapse designed into the current system as well, and in theory it could halt the collapse indefinitely, but only if the amount of value generated was equal to or in excess of the amount of money generated, which is not realistic because it's always easier to make more money than real value.
So that's why Firefox has been becoming more and more Chrome-like, so it can be an alternative to Chrome after this change!
I was mostly joking, nobody has enough market power to get doctors to work at minimum wage, though I think there's a kernel of truth here as well.
The basic problem is that the labor market is particularly "sticky" in that you can't freely change jobs, since you are most useful when you spend at least some time with one employer and people aren't just work modules that can be freely mixed and matched with no overhead. It's also expensive (in terms of time) to find better jobs and moving to a new job can be costly as well. Due to this effect people are less likely to look elsewhere than they would be if this were not a factor. This can be exploited (for profit) by keeping new hire wages low (except in the case of highly in-demand talent, of course) and only raising the wages of senior people enough that they don't jump ship at too high a rate. This means the company can raise wages much slower than they'd otherwise have to, effectively skimming the difference in costs between staying and jumping ship from their workers. This effect becomes much more powerful once it becomes the industry norm, since if most starting positions are relatively low wage and/or low benefit, then it becomes even more expensive to the individual worker to find and acquire the limited high value opportunities that are out there, increasing how much profit can be skimmed this way.
Of course, this isn't a problem for extremely in-demand individuals, who can command very high salaries as companies compete for their labor (or start their own business), but it is a problem for the average worker.
It won't get a relatively in-demand field's (doctors, engineers, etc.) wages down to minimum wage, but it will reduce their wages compared to what this would be without this effect.
Not only will these businesses not go out of business (especially if they're well entrenched for other reasons), but they often will make more profit (possibly even long term if they spend some of that profit to retain a few very high performers), and I observe this behavior all over the place.
The wage freeze thing is realistically a tactic for recession time, since most average workers will be happy to have a job at such a time, so they will accept a wage freeze, allowing inflation to eat into their wages quietly, which they won't necessarily notice after the recession is over.
After skimming the paper, it seems they're essentially recommending using hydro and other renewables to power these carbon reactors, since they can be sited anywhere on Earth, so why not site them near substantial sources of clean energy?
From the paper: "Global intensities [of electricity generation-based CO2 emissions] would only be relevant in a world with perfect universal electric transmission. In practice, there are many locations where low-carbon renewables are transmission constrained. These are the locations where DAC with electricity imports makes sense."
Just have a few "senior" doctors you pay the correct amount to keep the business running. If it becomes rampant practice, then you can push them extra hard because all the job listings out there will be for $7.50/hr. Bonus points if you freeze their wages and let inflation wipe out their current salaries.
At my bank, I declined to sign up for NSF and it's been amazing. In theory I might need it, but I haven't yet in 6 years even when I was getting pretty close to the edge ($20 in the account for several days) repeatedly.
The carbon bubble/fossil fuel capital abandonment issue is an issue that is looming 10+ years from now (though there are present situations that can be held up as analogies, such as the ongoing conversion of coal plants to natural gas plants https://energynews.us/2017/02/... which is causing coal capital abandonment). Renewables are near the bottom of the adoption S-curve, where they're just starting to take off, so they're still a small player today even if they're starting to have a visible impact and that impact is accelerating.
Personally, I'm very surprised that energy-related carbon emissions were flat for 4 years despite ever growing power demand.
There's actually a really good reason to think it COULD happen before 2035. Autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles (EV) have a great synergy together (A-EV), which would drive the adoption of both far faster than one would expect. The short version is that autonomous vehicles allow the reduction of automobile stocks by about a factor of 10, due to primarily to heavier re-use as part of an autonomous transportation network, as well as more efficient use patterns (for instance, it'd make "carpooling" to work on an electric shuttle bus much easier and dirt cheap). In addition, it'll drastically drive down transportation prices at the same time, especially when EVs are used since they're much more efficient and deprecate very slowly due to their simplicity (few moving parts means low maintenance costs). We're seriously talking about costs so low that it'll probably end up being packaged as a monthly transport network use fee (ex. $50/month for "unlimited" on-demand in-city transport). Even if someone hates driving with people it'd still be only like $0.10/mile to go anywhere in a private vehicle. The prices will be so low that using your currently existing paid-off vehicle will lose you a LOT of money compared to just using the transportation network, driving people to abandon their current vehicles even if it's at the loss of the entire vehicle and their investment in said vehicle with no recompense (since just the insurance and maintenance costs are more than using the transport network an unlimited number of times, let alone the fuel costs).
Requiring 10% of today's vehicles to service the population and offering vastly lower costs means that the transition time may very well be 10x faster as well, and given that a present day car lasts around 10 years, a year or two's worth of present-day car production volume may be all that's needed to replace our current stocks of gasoline vehicles with A-EVs (once critical mass is reached).
The following report lays out the full case for this. This report suggests a slower but still shockingly fast transition period of 10-ish years with the main transition happening over approximately 4 years.
https://www.rethinkx.com/execu...
Full report here:
https://static1.squarespace.co...
I was skeptical of this at first, but after reading it I'm confident it'll play out this way if full autonomy can be worked out. The disadvantages of EVs are completely moot when they're used in this way (ex. the high up front expense doesn't matter when each car is worth 10 today and they have much lower long term costs and a much longer lifespan). Socially, most people will respond to the drastically lower cost and drastically higher convenience, since it'll basically take transportation costs down to a rounding error on their current costs ($10,000 today to $50-100) and be available 24/7 without needing to park or drive. I'm sure there'll be some holdouts that refuse to change, but they'll pay out the nose to keep the luxury of their own vehicle, and most will have to transition to EVs when the carbon bubble pops (which they detail in said report, basically you'll see a massive stock of abandoned fossil fuel vehicles due to the earlier mentioned incentives, and the gasoline infrastructure will collapse as soon as the transition gets serious because you can't easily stockpile gasoline as it's a volatile chemical, driving even more people to adopt EVs even if they aren't using them autonomously).
As for electrical needs, it won't be nearly as bad as you're thinking, since EVs use a LOT less energy than gasoline vehicles, and if we're only running a tenth of the vehicles (admittedly much more frequently), then the energy requirements will be substantially lower. EVs can also make better use of cheap baseload power in the middle of the night and intermittent renewables (th
Elon Musk seems like he's really good at messing with people in humorous ways. I mean, an eccentric billionaire's gotta have hobbies, right?
I'm glad to hear you liked my post. :)
I was worried that nobody would read it, since halfway into writing it I realized that I was taking too long and Slashdot would have moved on before I was done writing it.
The wording "big lie" is probably a bit much, since it has such a big emotional charge due to its connection to Hitler, though what I'm talking about is definitely related. The Big Promise perhaps? People will tend to believe a bigger promise over a smaller one, simply because there's more at stake. If I promise something will result in $100, then there's a relatively small limit to what anyone would put into making this promise come true, since $100 is only worth so much, and people are a lot less likely to care enough to engage the idea. However, a promise worth $infinity can be worth doing literally anything to achieve, the expected value is infinite even if it's extremely unlikely, and the fear of missing out is intense. Plus, if I make a promise of $100 and someone thinks its unlikely, they're more likely to think I'm a small time fraudster, but if I make a promise of $infinity then they're more likely to think I'm just crazy. It's both safer and more likely to work to make a big promise, so ideas attached to big promises are going to naturally be more successful.
If you look carefully, you'll note that I say the "big lie"/big promise is just a hook that is used by a lot of meme-complexes, including earthly ideologies. Most ideologues/religionists don't realize that they are hooked by it. Once you're hooked by the promise of heaven or threat of hell, it's perfectly sensible to want to save as many people as possible, to hold tightly to your ideas in the face of competing ideas, and see those opposing your work as evil or depraved. The same is true for ideologies like (for instance) Communism, most of the communist revolutionaries thought they were doing the right thing and it was natural for them to see capitalist forces as evil and depraved and leading the world towards decay and destruction. I don't think there was some cynical elite person who came up with these ideas just to get many people to do their bidding (though of course this is possible in some cases, and it's also common for an ideological framework to get hijacked after it's established by opportunistic actors).
The point is that the "big lie"/big promise is a common attribute of successful religions and ideologies, because it is an effective booster that when it attaches to a meme-complex (often naturally, as ideas move from mind to mind and people add to it and mutate it). It basically makes a meme-complex more virulent than the version without it, at least as long as it makes sense with the hook attached (ex. you can't sensibly attach a supernatural heaven or hell to communism because it's an inherently materialistic philosophy).
There's often a version without the hook around, but it's generally much less popular (for instance, there are Christians that don't believe in hell such as the Unitarians, but they number in the hundreds of thousands compared to the billions of more conventional believers that do believe in hell). I personally am an agnostic who strongly believes there is no hell, so the worst that I believe could happen is that I'd miss out on heaven rather than going to hell for an eternity. I saw a fascinating movie on Netflix recently, Come Sunday, about how seriously some people oppose this idea. Carlton Pearson was told he was doing Satan's work just because he preached that hell didn't exist, and he was excommunicated from his church. It's only such a touchy subject because it's part of the big promise (the promise that sinful behavior will lead to eternal damnation in hell, promises aren't always positive and in this case it's worth negative infinity instead of positive infinity like heaven is, but it's the same basic idea).
If you'll notice, I also attach the idea of a hook to ideologies I ascribe to. I fully believe in transhumanism and I believe the singularity is plausible. Transhumanism and singularitism have a similar hook: by staying alive long enough to see the full benefits of technology (and actually taking advantage of these technologies) it will lead to me regaining youth, having a long life,
This is assuming that we wouldn't be pulled into the singularity as well. Unmodified humanity is unlikely to exist post-singularity, except perhaps as a historical curiosity that's maintained for the same reason we maintain museums and nature preserves, but that doesn't imply we'd be killed by the singularity in the process, we might just be altered by it.
I wouldn't say singularitism is THE new religion. It's one of many modern post-traditional religion religions.
I consider ideology and religion to be basically the same thing: self-reinforcing meme-complexes. Most meme-complexes tend to not cover the entire space of ideas (or if they do, they usually only provide the broadest strokes outside of their core area), so you can have multiple of them in your mind at the same time. Most people assemble several of these meme-complexes into a mostly cohesive worldview. There's strong alliances between some meme-complexes and animosity between others (especially meme-complexes that have drastically different views on the same area, which makes meme-complexes tend towards segregating into categories where they overlap relatively little with other categories). This makes it much more likely that someone will end up with multiple allied meme-complexes and much less likely that someone will end up with two opposed meme-complexes. The distinction between religion and ideology comes from the fact that mainstream meme-complexes in these categories tend to slot into two different areas of thoughtspace and so can generally co-exist peacefully with each other.
It should also be noted that there's plenty of other categories, some of which are almost completely dominated by a single ultra-successful meme-complex, such as mathematics and science.
Ideologies and religions are the most alike in the sense that the most successful meme-complexes in their areas have a few common characteristics. The biggest is that almost all successful ideologies and religions use the "big lie" (that is, if you make a huge promise then people are more likely to believe it) or more charitably the "big gamble" (with Pascal's Wager being a great example) to get people hooked. Religions in particular are much more dependent on this, because it's easy to care less about abstract worlds and meaning that isn't seemingly involved in one's day to day life. If Christianity were just some historical stories and a mythology about God, angels, and demons largely living in a parallel universe from ours, nobody would really care that much. However, people DO care when they could spend an eternity in bliss or hellish torture depending on their actions in this world, and everything else in the world becomes unimportant compared to how that works out. Inject ultra-high/infinite value or punishment into any idea system and the stakes suddenly become a lot higher, since ignoring the right message could be catastrophic. However, you have to accept that the premise is correct before the rest of it follows, so the hook is critical in getting people over that roadbump (which of course works even better if they're children and thus don't have as many other meme-complexes to resist these ideas). I wouldn't define the religion category by the presence of this hook, especially since most successful ideologies have at least a mild hook present, but all successful religions have it and are dependent on it for their continued success on a large scale (even Buddhism has the promises of Nirvana and enlightenment).
Singularitism is belief in the technological singularity, and it somewhat straddles the line between the traditional categories of religion and ideology, but is much more on the religion side of things. It has a much weaker hook than traditional religion, since the only personal responsibility one has for receiving the benefits of the singularity is to live long enough to experience the singularity. Presumably one should also try to speed up the singularity, but unless one is a billionaire or a genius there's not really much one can do. Cryonics also comes up as a possible solution if one is getting old, but it's a separate question of whether modern cryonics actually works (though presumably even a low chance of success is better than zero). That said, they definitely have the ultra-high/infinite benefit part, since the singularity as envisioned would be incredible, well beyond our limited imagination for how
This technology has a lot of the solutions to its own problems embedded in it.
A youthful populace means higher productivity, both between not taking care of elders and not taking care of as many children. If the working age today is 18-67, that's 49 years (45 for the college educated and even less for those with even more education) out of 78, which means 29 dependent years (33 for college educated workers). Only 62.8% of the current lifespan is productive (57.7% for the college educated). By simply getting the old portion of the population back into the workforce, productivity would go up 14.1% immediately (increasing US GDP by $2.6 trillion if this happened today) and medical expenditures would go down by about a third (saving about $1.1 trillion in the US if this happened today), representing an overall increase in available production of nearly 20%. As children became scarcer as well, we'd see up to another 23% base increase in GDP, with reductions in education and medical spending amplifying the effect. We could easily see a 50% increase in productivity over today, and possibly much more. Also, this doesn't even take into account that the prime work years are a small percentage of the total working time, and that a worker with a 60 year old's experience and a 20 year old's energy and mental flexibility could be drastically more effective than any worker alive today. What will this extra production be turned towards?
A person with an indefinite lifespan would also have a lot more at stake when it comes to taking care of the planet. It's easy to look at the global warming data today and say "well all the really bad stuff doesn't happen until 2100" and stop caring about the problem. I'm 32 years old, so I'm very unlikely to make it past 2065, and I'd have to make it to 115 to live to see 2100 (which would get me on the oldest living people lists). Even if I have children at 35, they're unlikely to live to 2100, though it's much more in the realm of possibility. Only my grandchildren and later generations are likely to live in the post-2100 world, and I won't meet my grandchildren for another 20-30 years (and at this point I'll be dependent on my savings and children, and so not able to make much change to the situation). This isn't to say I don't personally care about those year 2100 people, but rather to show how far away 2100 really is, it's further away from me than the moon is. Caring about the Earth in 2100 requires a lot of abstract thought, and it's easy to lose sight of it in the day to day. However, if I am going to live to be 130 or even indefinitely, and I'm going to be well the whole time, then I will make it to 2115 easily and I might reasonably be kicking around in the 2500s if this technology keeps improving. Suddenly I have a lot of self-interest in the matter of the state of the world in 2100, since if the Earth is in serious trouble by then and I might be killed early by it, I lose many years of life over something I could have prevented. I also care less about the amount of short-term growth/production because I have more time to benefit from it. While not everyone will care under these circumstances, a lot will, especially among those with the resources to do something about it. Combined with the additional productivity mentioned above, it seems to me that more and more of our GDP will go towards investing in and protecting our environment in the post-aging world.
There may need to be some kind of family planning laws (ex. one child per couple) or (dis-)incentives (ex. legally having to pay 100% of the costs to raise your children in a modern society, including medical care, education, and at least basic new housing for them in their adult lives, with any shortfalls turning into impossible to escape loans on the parents much like the US student loan system works but on the responsible parents instead of the children) to curb excessively large families in settled areas (ex. almost all of Earth). That said, population growth is already slowing down massively worldwide without any
I don't see how this is any different from today...
Either way, you've got a world full of stupid people.
That could be interesting, but I think my problem with these proposals is scale. Can entertainment really soak up 40 hours a week for ~3 billion people? Even rich people don't have time for that much entertainment, and there's not enough of them go go around.
Yes, entertainment can soak up that much effort. The experience industry is already huge and will only keep growing. You've also got to realize that this kind of entertainment (living environments) would be extremely inefficient (the average actor would only add a tiny amount of value to the guests, with the real value being delivered by the whole, and in some cases hosts might hardly directly interact with the guests). You've also got to consider that it may be a quite different mode of work. Essentially, most of the guests would be living an ordinary life within some magic circle of additional rules depending on the park's theme. For instance, an actor playing a peasant in a medieval themed park might live similarly to a real medieval peasant (but without real bandits and with access to modern medical technology, and with more modern living quarters and entertainments available when they're not on the clock plus vacations away from the park). A given guest is unlikely to interact with a given host peasant, with the host being far more likely to interact with the lord and ladies or fake bandits, but each peasant would add to the world's illusion. Many hundreds of parks at sufficient scale (a city-themed park could easily employ millions alone, being a literal city) could get into the hundreds of millions or even billions of employees. You've just got to think big.
That said, I think there could be issues if all the money accrues to far too few people to support this entertainment industry (for instance, only 100 people having all the money couldn't support more than a few parks), or if the transition happens too quickly and devolves into violence. Speaking of which, there doesn't seem to be a trend toward this in the real world at the moment, building these parks and getting people used to them in society will definitely take time, which I'm not sure we have.
There's also a question of whether we want a society where a few people live like demi-gods and everyone else has to dance to their tune...or else.
My earlier point was just that due to scenarios like this, we can't rule out that it'll just "work out" without any deliberate correction.
Generally good points.
It's not that bad. Bigger risk for a bigger reward. Even if you fail, you can still go to trade school for $1000 and the loan repayments can be deferred until you're employed. And really, after the first year of college, you'll know whether you can succeed academically. By the end of the 2nd year, you'll know if there's companies willing to hire you, because they'll be offering you internships. If neither of those happen, you need to change majors or quit before you collect 6 years of student debt.
Part of the problem here is that a lot of people are making really irrational choices about all this. If anyone is uncertain, they should go to community college and drop out quickly if they have issues (so they maybe only have $1000 in student debt, and having "some college" will work to their benefit as an added bonus), but I've seen a lot of people jump straight to expensive universities and/or persist long after what is reasonable. Also, a lot of potentially qualified people who leave college don't then go into the trades.
You also have the tendency for people to fail out of a high paid major and into to another less well paid one, rather than failing out of college entirely. This doesn't make much sense when you consider that the universities don't typically price different majors differently. It does make sense if you found your passion in a different field and know you'd prefer that work, even with the lower pay. However, I'm pretty sure that most such major changes are of the "I can't cut it at X but I can still get a degree in Y."
Overall, there's a pattern of desperation, needing to get that degree at any cost, when what really matters isn't the piece of paper but the ability to think in a disciplined way that the degree (hopefully) represents. If it wasn't for this desperation, then for-profit diploma mills would never be able to trick enough people to be profitable. Articles like this are meant to help counter the pro-college memes that drive this irrational desperation (well, that and drive down trades prices, but when the situation is so massively imbalanced it's not a bad thing overall).
I highly doubt they will be enough to take the place of low-skilled work. The new jobs we are seeing are ever more niche and unstable. A quick glance at a job board brings up a bunch of "specialist", "analyst" and "technician" jobs. Those are decent jobs ($65k or more), but they're all different and there's not a huge demand for any specific one. It's also hard to find training for them, so the best you can do is go to university and hope that a well-rounded education means you can learn the rest on the job.
What I was saying is that they *could* be right, not that they are right, and so that's an uncertainty that needs to be accounted for. For instance, what if it turns out that video games or real life parks where there's a large number of human NPC actors become popular with the wealthy in the near future and it soaks up a lot of the out of work unskilled workers? I'm thinking of something like Westworld, but tamer since you can't endanger the hosts. While it might seem like a wacky idea today, it's not something that can be ruled out easily. It's hard to automate because a human NPC can provide a better quality experience than a robot until we have very advanced robotics and AI (and some patrons may prefer the real deal anyway). It also scales well because you could have a whole artificial town or even city just for the atmosphere, and you can make many of these parks and games offering different experiences. Having a whole town just to provide atmosphere is a huge luxury, but it's a luxury that a new ultra-wealthy class that owns the automation could afford. It should also be noted that things like this do already exist, like Colonial Williamsburg, which employs around 2500 people today.
Combined with jobs that need to keep existing, like the trades and nursing, and other new and hard to foresee jobs,
While incumbent workers would suffer from a flood of new workers in their area of specialty, they'll suffer less than the poor people who are moving to that field out of desperation. Would you rather hire a plumber that's been doing it for 10 years or one of the dozen fresh out of training? Workers with experience in their field can still demand a premium. If there's a living wage in the job for the newbies, then the incumbent should be able to do better than a living wage, and if there's not a living wage for the newbies then it won't be long before the incumbent is all that's left.
While it's true that a lower barrier to entry is a liability once you are in a given job, taking on any job with a higher barrier to entry is always a bigger risk by definition. If you picked the wrong high barrier to entry job to train in, it's a catastrophe (especially when student loans can't be left behind by bankruptcy).
You have to account for the risk of a high school grad not getting a potentially better college-educated job (and being left with substantial student debt). If the trades job training has a 95% chance of success and costs $1,000 while college has a 70% chance of success and costs $40,000, then that's a lot less immediate risk (and while the college grad will make a lot more over the long term, salaries for in-demand college educated workers are only something like twice that of trades and a larger percentage of that income goes into taxes). For a student with poor grades it might even be that college has such a low chance of success that it's a terrible idea, while the trades job remains within realistic reach.
Lastly, it's important to keep in mind that the automation of most present day jobs is not inevitable. Don't get me wrong, I think it's an extremely likely scenario that a large proportion of jobs will vanish with automation, but it's possible the "people will find new jobs we're not expecting" crowd is right. Even more likely is that the loss of jobs will become irrelevant. For instance, once things start getting really bad, I could easily see governments starting up UBI or welfare programs to prevent the loss of jobs from becoming a disaster that kills millions. If this is true, then it may not matter too much if one's job will vanish in 2030 to be replaced by a UBI, and it may even be that such programs have the effect that plumbers and other trades become even more in demand by decreasing the labor supply, which combined with the UBI money may make plumber a great job for those who want to do it.
Also, I don't see how the demand for automation is unlimited in some way that most other jobs aren't. At some point you can wrap up automating everything that matters. If anything, automation work is more limited due to it being in project form (you automate a thing once, but you can wash dishes every day). It is a kind of work that's hard to automate, but it's not the only class of work that's hard to automate.
I'm largely agreeing with you, AI is not even close to ready for trade jobs today. It's not something we should take seriously today.
That said, the growth of this field is unpredictable and exponential. We weren't expecting Go to suddenly yield to new methods, and yet here we are. New ideas and AI technologies could have a vast impact at any time, supercharged by the enormous and growing pool of computing resources available.
Also, since the growth is exponential it'll be much larger in a few years than we expect from reasoning about it linearly. Going by Moore's law, we'll have hardware that's 1024 times better than today's in 20 years. If today's AIs are as intelligent as bees or frogs, 1024 times more powerful hardware may be enough to create neural networks that are as smart as humans or even smarter without coming up with too many new ideas...and there will be much better AI techniques in 20 years. Whether Moore's law continues to keep up isn't particularly relevant, since there's many other technological growth trends that together would likely have similar impacts (similar to how we run our most intelligent AIs on powerful GPUs today, rather than more traditional CPUs because CPU performance has relatively stalled out). A few decades of engineering new hardware designed to run neural networks (dense networks of TPUs perhaps?) will likely lead to new hardware that runs circles around anything we have today. We have plenty of room to expand in size from today's microscopic chips, even if we can't squeeze any more performance out of the individual chips.
Anyway, my point is that while AI is very dumb today, it could catch up with us at any time in the next few decades. There's no real way to know when that will be, and it might not even happen for a very long time. I could easily see strong AI being around in 20 years...or not. We really can't predict this accurately.
Regardless though, the development of strong AI would make our current socioeconomic worries look like a walk in the park in comparison. Half of the current labor force being out of a job might lead to catastrophic civil unrest and perhaps even massive casualties, but it would surely be resolved in a few years one way or another and there'd be a good number of human survivors (if automation displaced 90% of jobs, that would mean there's still something like 400 million+ jobs worldwide and 700 million+ survivors even in the unlikely worst case scenario, and most likely most countries would step in long before people started dying by the millions). Scenarios with strong AI tend to end even more extremely for humanity, for good or ill. The development of strong AI could easily lead to our complete extermination, or it could lead to a true utopia.
The point is that the world would be so transformed by the emergence of strong AI that it wouldn't matter whether a trades job was a good bet today or not. With 100% unemployment, you'd either be living a life of luxury with the machines providing for your wants and needs, or you'd be exterminated one way or another. Picking trades or IT or anything else for that matter would all have the same effect, so you don't really need to take this scenario into account. After all, nobody takes a possible nuclear war into account when planning their careers, or if they do the analysis becomes very different (making enough money to prep now is all that matters).
A trades job is a good bet today and in the case where strong AI doesn't emerge, so pursuing that career path is good advice for young people right now.
The problem with that is that while it'd be easy for a rouge AI to kill most of humanity through some sort of biological or chemical vector, rooting out the last survivors would take a lot more effort. Nerve agents in the water supply wouldn't impact humans that are drinking bottled water or have their own wells. Engineered super-plagues would work even better and it'd be easier to cover up the source (so the AI can keep the humans confused until it's too late), but they'd peter out once the population density dropped sufficiently. Even if you could cover the world in a cloud of deadly poisonous/infectious spores, a few survivors in underground bunkers with gas masks and large caches of supplies would hold out for many years, and it would take a lot of material and energy to produce all that poison and get it pumped into the environment.
My money is on engineered plagues followed by hunter-killer robots. Either that or engineered plagues followed by the AIs not bothering to finish the job, with the remaining humans becoming minor pests (which would be controlled with chemical weapons or hunter-killer robots where needed). Alternately, if nanoswarms are easy for the AI to create, then that would be even more fast and effective, but that's assuming that the AI gets far ahead of humanity very quickly (technological singularity). Yet another alternative would be the AI seemingly working with us for many years, convincing us to do the work of our own destruction (though it doesn't matter too much in the end whether you're being hunted down by AI-influenced humans or robots, and there's sure to be some robots with the humans, especially as the humans become scarce).
The point is that hunter-killer robots are actually pretty likely if AIs decide to take out humanity. After all, isn't one of the best extermination strategies for larger animals to hunt them?
What's not likely is a nuclear exchange, since that would be devastating to the infrastructure the AI would need. A relatively orderly transition is also more likely than a very messy one. Even if they hit us with super-plagues, it'd be after they already had enough of a power base to fill the territory we left behind.
Hopefully it'll either go towards this being a good event (benevolent AI that takes care of us), or we'll become the next (transhuman) species instead of creating our replacement that outcompetes us. It could also be that AI never emerges, most likely because we beat the AI to the punch and wiped ourselves out. It's hard to predict the future.
I'm normally bullish on AI, but this is one of the hardest types of work to automate.
Consider that a plumber has to go to a site, which could very well have a completely non-standard layout and plumbing design, then troubleshoot the problem and fix whatever is wrong with it at the lowest cost, which generally means figuring out some sort of hack. Replacing parts (or worse yet, whole systems) is a last resort due to their expense, and even when this happens getting the new parts put in may be complicated. It's completely non-routine work.
If you want to see where AI is on this, look at the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... While it's amazing that these high end robots can do some of these simple tasks in the field, they're not even close to humans right now, and the complexity of these courses is nothing compared to real work.
Where AI will completely displace human labor in the near future is in areas where the labor is either already quite routine and in a reasonably well-controlled or standardized environment or where we can use clever tricks to simplify the work to make it more amenable to automation (ex. replacing bridge tollkeepers with license plate reading cameras). This is why, for instance, you see intense interest in delivery drones compared to delivery ground robots, because they can simply fly over the complexity of someone's yard to deliver a package and it's easier to ask a homeowner to provide a dropoff pad than a dropoff path. Similarly, self-driving cars seem smarter than they really are because they rely on a standardized environment and they simply need to drive more safely than the humans that have relatively terrible reaction times, limited sensors, constantly break the rules of safe driving, and can easily get distracted or inebriated. People don't care about the otherwise lowered quality of driving service if they're able to goof off while in the vehicle.
The reason AI is important is because a lot of our current jobs fit this description (many of the top job categories in the US are highly automatable), and not because AI is ready to take on all work anytime soon. When it is, we'll have a much bigger socioeconomic revolution on our hands than that caused by a mere lack of jobs. If that happens within 20 years time, you'll not have to worry about a job, whether that's because your livelihood has been separated from your labor or because you're more worried about the robot soldiers hunting you down.
The N word? Do you mean "Net Neutrality"?
PL/SQL is the worst real language (which is to say, a language I would consider actually implementing something in if everything lined up right). It's deeply married to Oracle. It only runs on Oracle databases, which in addition to the obvious lock-in potential also means you have to keep your PL/SQL up to date on a per-database level and you have to share resources with your other applications and scripts. The language itself is based on Ada, which lacks many modern features that even languages such as Java have. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it's easy to break into writing SQL at any time, though unfortunately the performance of this is miserable because it effectively calls the SQL engine like any other app would (it does admittedly have the advantage of not having to make a network call if your database is hosted separately, but it doesn't really buy you as much as you might think in most situations). Even crazier, if you can potentially get multiple rows back, it will by default fetch 1 row at a time (though it kinda makes sense due to the shared resources thing, since memory would be pretty limited on one box running many PL/SQL scripts and queries), which leads to a massive context switching overhead if you don't know exactly what you're doing.