Yeah, Yeah, we all know about decomposition of tasks and delegation of authority, Now I'll repeat the question I asked earlier in the thread of that last self-made braggart. How did you raise the capital to start your business? You said your father was an executive, so was it family seed money? that's OK I"m not criticizing, but it seems to me that many of the "success" stories I've heard about talk about the easy stuff that when you are smart you can figure out anyway, But the hard thing about starting any venture is to persuade someone you just met to part with his/her money to help you. This is the same as finding a job in a hostile job market. You have to persuade some idiot interviewer who doesn't know you from Adam that he can trust you. Because he may not know what the job description means he looks for trouble first. It my be as simple as you have grey hair or some obvious deformity or you aren't his race, it is the same problem, and the hard part you'd rather forget about, eh?
Um, tell us the REAL story, how did you get investment for your business? It is fine for you to brag about getting up and running and to advise people to get out there and create something, not take a job but create one and all, but the fact is that jobs don't materialize out of dreams or thin air unless you persuade some stingy bastard who can't see beyond the end of his nose to part with some cash for you. How'd you do that? Tell us who may be smart but are less skilled at sales and conning people how you did that.
will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
Let me remind people here that this is, in the long run, a good thing (TM). Machines putting people out of work enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week and a society where people are majoritarily middle class.
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England and lead to asinine ideologies such as fascism, luddism and socialism elsewhere. These ideologies were misguided attempts to compensate for this momentous labour force disruption by addressing the wrong aspects of the industrial revolution (democracy, machines and capital respectively).
This boils down to how we define the worth of individuals in society and what roles we give them as a result. There is no doubt that the IRs have saved people from the risk and drudgery of manual labor, but when this encroaches into domains that are higher-order human skills, it ups the ante for a majority of people if they are competing with AI defined by the most high-achieving humans. People need to understand their tools against the possibility that they might do wrong, be incorrect, or not controllable. There is always a second guessing of the result, even if it was made by an expert system with a complex statistical inference net.
Technology creates roles that were once impossible or too expensive and will continue to do so, but they cannot result in the elimination of a useful function for most people. Political and economic change can result in exploitative and repressive systems in which people lose power over their lives and are forced into low value roles, and the inclusive systems we have up to now can degenerate into these repressive systems. Technology could be used to create a repressive system in which a few technocrats garner too much power.
In my experience engineers are not very good at predicting the future, and human beings in general are poor at anticipating consequences. History is not a set of conspiracies driven by power; at best it is the reactive response of society to largely unintended consequences. So these will rear their ugly head. If you believe any of the results about global warming, they already are emerging, the unforeseen effects of grand technological schemes.
Remember the message of the Fermi Hypothesis and the Permian Mass Extinction, that intelligence may arise over and over in the Universe but we may not meet other intelligent beings from other worlds before they have destroyed themselves and for our type of life our demise, and we have not yet survived the average life span of fossil species in the geologic record of about 4 million years, could come in the guise of the very gasses that get pumped into our biosphere by our technologies, just as it did 251 Million years ago.
Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
That is the linear extrapolation, but things go non-linear.
And then eventually Skynet decides to kill us all, but that’s another story.
Actually it is part of the same story, because people won't sit by and let a bunch of engineers and greedy business people take away their role in society. They hay have to reinvent themselves, yes, but they won't allow or all choices they have to be eliminated by technical change. They will rise up and destroy the technocrats, Matrix-like.
I wonder where you think the income distribution in the U.S. comes from with its concentration of wealth in a small minority? You would admit that statistics can be made to support any conclusion if you change the the sample bounds? So ON AVERAGE per capita GDP can go up driven by the productivity of the tiny minority aided by high tech. My guess is that the top percentage earners and producers are a product of the application of computer technology to dealing with investing and business decisions, and that the rest of people are put at a disadvantage by that. In the end this is a problem of Human Use of Human Beings, a reference to one of the early discussions of automation now forty ears on. Regardless of who actually is productive, society has to make a useful place for a large majority of its human members of subsidize there existence in some way or suffer discord. If the world is becoming a ruthless meritocracy driven by AI robotics, new relevance is given to the Luddite reaction which seemed naive in the steam age, but it is less obvious when the energy is intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Yeah, we all know about decomposition of tasks and delegation of authority, Now I'll repeat the question I asked earlier in the thread of that last self-made braggart. How did you raise the capital to start your business? You said your father was an executive, so was it family seed money? that's OK I"m not criticizing, but it seems to me that many of the "success" stories I've heard about talk about the easy stuff that when you are smart you can figure out anyway, But the hard thing about starting any venture is to persuade someone you just met to part with his/her money to help you. This is the same as finding a job in a hostile job market. You have to persuade some idiot interviewer who doesn't know you from Adam that he can trust you. Because he may not know what the job description means he looks for trouble first. It my be as simple as you have grey hair or some obvious deformity or you aren't his race, it is the same problem, and the hard part you'd rather forget about, eh?
Um, tell us the REAL story, how did you get investment for your business? It is fine for you to brag about getting up and running and to advise people to get out there and create something, not take a job but create one and all, but the fact is that jobs don't materialize out of dreams or thin air unless you persuade some stingy bastard who can't see beyond the end of his nose to part with some cash for you. How'd you do that? Tell us who may be smart but are less skilled at sales and conning people how you did that.
will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
Let me remind people here that this is, in the long run, a good thing (TM). Machines putting people out of work enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week and a society where people are majoritarily middle class.
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England and lead to asinine ideologies such as fascism, luddism and socialism elsewhere. These ideologies were misguided attempts to compensate for this momentous labour force disruption by addressing the wrong aspects of the industrial revolution (democracy, machines and capital respectively).
This boils down to how we define the worth of individuals in society and what roles we give them as a result. There is no doubt that the IRs have saved people from the risk and drudgery of manual labor, but when this encroaches into domains that are higher-order human skills, it ups the ante for a majority of people if they are competing with AI defined by the most high-achieving humans. People need to understand their tools against the possibility that they might do wrong, be incorrect, or not controllable. There is always a second guessing of the result, even if it was made by an expert system with a complex statistical inference net.
Technology creates roles that were once impossible or too expensive and will continue to do so, but they cannot result in the elimination of a useful function for most people. Political and economic change can result in exploitative and repressive systems in which people lose power over their lives and are forced into low value roles, and the inclusive systems we have up to now can degenerate into these repressive systems. Technology could be used to create a repressive system in which a few technocrats garner too much power.
In my experience engineers are not very good at predicting the future, and human beings in general are poor at anticipating consequences. History is not a set of conspiracies driven by power; at best it is the reactive response of society to largely unintended consequences. So these will rear their ugly head. If you believe any of the results about global warming, they already are emerging, the unforeseen effects of grand technological schemes.
Remember the message of the Fermi Hypothesis and the Permian Mass Extinction, that intelligence may arise over and over in the Universe but we may not meet other intelligent beings from other worlds before they have destroyed themselves and for our type of life our demise, and we have not yet survived the average life span of fossil species in the geologic record of about 4 million years, could come in the guise of the very gasses that get pumped into our biosphere by our technologies, just as it did 251 Million years ago.
Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
That is the linear extrapolation, but things go non-linear.
And then eventually Skynet decides to kill us all, but that’s another story.
Actually it is part of the same story, because people won't sit by and let a bunch of engineers and greedy business people take away their role in society. They hay have to reinvent themselves, yes, but they won't allow or all choices they have to be eliminated by technical change. They will rise up and destroy the technocrats, Matrix-like.
I wonder where you think the income distribution in the U.S. comes from with its concentration of wealth in a small minority? You would admit that statistics can be made to support any conclusion if you change the the sample bounds? So ON AVERAGE per capita GDP can go up driven by the productivity of the tiny minority aided by high tech. My guess is that the top percentage earners and producers are a product of the application of computer technology to dealing with investing and business decisions, and that the rest of people are put at a disadvantage by that. In the end this is a problem of Human Use of Human Beings, a reference to one of the early discussions of automation now forty ears on. Regardless of who actually is productive, society has to make a useful place for a large majority of its human members of subsidize there existence in some way or suffer discord. If the world is becoming a ruthless meritocracy driven by AI robotics, new relevance is given to the Luddite reaction which seemed naive in the steam age, but it is less obvious when the energy is intelligence.