I'm greatly looking forward to a future full of function-follows-form from the good ol' days!
Unless you're being sarcastic... I don't know why you would think that's in the cards; Jony Ive is the villain that took away the beautiful icons iOS and OS X / MacOS used to have and replaced them with dull, flat, information-culled pastels reminiscent of an interior decorator's shart, not to mention being the conceptual guy who was in authority when the clueless process that brought us the abortion that is the "trashcan" Mac Pro went down.
Unless he's been off recovering from a head injury, this appears to bode very poorly for the future of everything Apple.
It's looking more and more like a big windows tower lurks in my future. Damn it.
it's[sic] GPS has been effectively disabled in hardware (took it apart, found the GPS antenna, shorted it to Ground; no GPS).
They know where the phone is anyway if it's on; tower-based location has been with us for some time. Any time your GPS could have reported the phone live, the phone was in range of a tower anyway. So... they still know where that phone is. The only way to win that war is to not carry the phone, or take its battery out. If possible.
BTW, "off" isn't always "off." If you really want "off", you need to take out the battery.
How can I stave off these notes attempting to be humorous? Will someone on staff help me out? Really, these are very bass remarks. Someone needs to study their clef notes before trying again. Perhaps that would make me a bit more well-tempered.
Why not? (Aside from the fact that they own the government lock, stock, and barrel.)
Well yes, that's part of the current system - they won't let you do it, and they are most definitely in control at this point. But there are other reasons. Right now, businesses operate as enablers for people to advance. Corporations are microcosms of that very effect; if you break them - and if you take all their profit, you will break them - they will no longer be serve that function, and they will devolve into less effective entities. They will have no stock value; no one will invest; there will be no margins for raises, growth will be difficult (and financially pointless to the individuals who would cause that growth) etc., etc.
With broad automation, the human motive is sidelined, or perhaps even eradicated. You'll still have production.
But we aren't there, not even close. Until we are, you can't break the system in place.
All taxes that a corporation pays come from the consumer or customer.
From direct sales, yes. From re-investment in other corporations and bonds and so on, no. And in any case, corporations use resources: when a corporation moves in, should all the people pay the taxes for the fire support, the roads, the water mains, the traffic control, the sidewalks, the regulators... ??? Or should that be rolled into the product/service cost, and so only those who use the product or service pay for those product/service-related costs? Think about it.
Or, l can put it this way: under the present economic model, why should you have to pay the governance and service costs for my widget and fluffing?
But so what? Doesn't even move the goalposts. You still can't take all corporate profit under the current system, and it would take that, and more, to create any more than the most pitiful form of UBI for a broadly unemployed populace.
Why would you expect 99% unemployment? This AI will never be able to: [optimism redacted]
No, not this one. Not even the next one. The one after that? Or after that?
Eventually, they will. The question is simply how long will that be. Right now, the ML pace continues to accelerate. Soon, they'll be stacking one skill upon another. The skill to walk. The skill to understand plumbing joints and leaks. The skill to know home construction. Etc.
It's coming. That whole "will never be able to" business... that's not going to pan out for anyone.
A poster below me already mentioned that your corporate profit figures are off - increase the amount to $2T, and make it quarterly, and you have the right idea.
Doesn't matter. Isn't even in the ballpark.
While your comment correctly asserts that the premise of the article is flawed (there isn't enough US corporate profit to realistically pay for UBI) you then make a flaw by assuming that UBI is unworkable by any means, and that's quite untrue.
No, I didn't say that. I said it was unworkable in the context of the current economic system - which is accurate. I also made it pretty clear that we're going to have to do something, once it becomes clear what that something is - which is not yet the case.
but the point is, all that's REALLY required to fund a UBI is a rework of the tax policy no more drastic than what the GOP is doing right now, along with replacing entitlements.
That is utter nonsense. The entire federal tax collection in 2016 was 3.46 trillion dollars. That'd be about $24k for 150 million people. Poverty, under the current system. Poverty accompanied by zero government services, no military, no federal law enforcement, etc.
That's not a basic income within the context of the current economic system. That's pocket change. You won't be raising children, owning a home and a vehicle, enjoying the network, consuming utilities, buying new clothing, receiving medical care, etc. on $24k. The economic system will have to be re-jiggered in a major way to make the available resources and services map to the number of people - and that's almost certainly what's going to happen when automation of most jobs comes along. Until then, the environment precludes a working model in other than over-funded, under-utilized small test groups. You can't just swap out the current social safety net and distribute it to everyone - it'll just fall on its face. In only works now (and it barely works, frankly) because the recipients are limited in number and in benefits.
Sure, we know that augmenting income will work when you have income. But when there's no income, and that is what we're going to be facing, augmentation is not a viable solution.
This paints a fundamentally different picture than that on which you have premised your post.
You've completely missed the point, and besides, no, it doesn't. It's still completely impractical. That's the point - you can't tax the corporations at a level that will work under the present economic system. It wouldn't work if it were double your numbers. Because you can't tax the corporations at that level, or anything even remotely close to that level.
Here's another window into how impossible this is under the current economic system: The entire US federal tax collection was about 3.268 trillion for 2016. Divide that by the number of citizens, and keep in mind that in order to do that, you'd have to eliminate all government services.
TFA appears to be unaware that there are countries other than the US
The US government can tax US corporations. That's the tool that's presently available. And the US government is responsible for US citizens; not others.
I'm dividing all US corporate profits by all US citizens, and the reason I did that was to show that it's not enough to fund UBI in the current economic model. It doesn't matter how they earn it; it's money that could, in an apocalyptic (and tooth-clenchingly naive) tax environment, be apportioned among the citizens. It's not a viable mechanism under the current economic model, no matter how they make that money, even if you could collect that money without destroying the entities that earn it, which I highly doubt.
If you restrict which profits somehow, that just makes the number per citizen smaller.
The whole idea of taxing FB (much as I dislike them, and I really dislike them) to "fund" UBI is absurd.
All of US corporate profit is running around 1500 billion / year right now.
1500 billion ($) / 330 million (Citizens) is $4,545 per citizen per year.
Leaving aside the issue of what corporations would do if they could not keep their profits, which does not seem likely to be a good thing, it's pretty clear that all corporate profits in the current economy would not suffice to do anything useful.
However, the idea of UBI, or at least, the sane version, is that it would be implemented in an "economy of plenty" where automation was producing goods and services at much lower costs and much higher availability. Those conditions are hand-wavey; we can't quantify them yet, so it's problematic to try and predict the costs of living, etc. But that's why UBI or similar will be required; workers will be out and automation will be in. It's not today's landscape that defines the need.
The current economic model will almost certainly be unsustainable with pervasive automation and the number of citizens we have. That's pretty clear. We also know that although distribution of wealth right now is very uneven, there's enough of it to keep everyone eating and sheltered (which is not to say that always happens... but money in, goods and services out, the numbers work.) So given an economic sea change - a very, very painful one, I'm guessing - UBI or something along those lines should be feasible.
The problem comes when we try to see how it would work today, in the current economy. It wouldn't; it can't. Tests can work - certainly the extra income is welcome and used by recipients - but that's only because such tests are far less costly compared to the amount of money available to fund them. When you count everyone in, suddenly the available funds aren't there. But that's today. The future holds the potential for massive change. "Funds" may not even be the operative mechanism; because if survival is no longer pendant upon an exchange of value, it may not be reasonable to try to quantify and structure it that way any longer.
You already own one of these you carry everywhere — your cellphone. A microphone (and camera!) you take everywhere, and is connected everywhere, including in your home.
The Echo and its brethren are not a sudden influx of a listening device that can be hacked. You swallowed that bait a long, long time ago.
Let's give them a coal-fired plant as an alternative.
The problem is, you're giving the people the coal fired plant, when it was the politicians that screwed the people in the first place.
It's heartbreaking to watch the deep corruption in politics hold society back while doing direct harm to the citizens with their "wars" on informed personal and consensual choice and their blatant corporate fluffing.
But as long as the voters remain largely poorly educated and gullible, it's going to continue to be corrupt politicians all the way down. Sadly, the people are unable to make the connection between their voting habits and their problems. Not unwilling; unable.
Things like these are the reason why I'm not donating money to Mozilla.
If - and I don't yet know if this is the case, they don't actually seem to say - this represents a stand-alone, does-not-go-to-the-LAN-or-WAN speech-to-text system... with an error rate of 6.5% on English speech as claimed... then it's way more important than Yet Another Web Browser.
This is precisely the kind of thing projects like Mycroft need to become not just another way to send your activity out on the net, which inherently decreases both reliability and security.
If indeed this is what this is, then the door opens for all manner of sophisticated home advances we can actually trust and depend on.
They claim around 1:1 [decode rate : normal speech rate] with a reasonably modern CPU/GPU. That needs considerable improvement. Reference quote from here:
On a MacBook Pro, using the GPU, the model can do inference at a real-time factor of around 0.3x, and around 1.4x on the CPU alone. (A real-time factor of 1x means you can transcribe 1 second of audio in 1 second.)
That's a lot of computing power to hand off, particularly in a laptop. Using just the CPU, you'll be pegging it the whole time you're talking, and then some. For a decent desktop, it's at least doable, but it's still a very heavy compute load.
Though... saying "MacBook Pro" doesn't really tell us enough... I have a MacBook Pro that is a dual-core Intel machine... it's not what you'd call quick. There are a lot of different hardware configs that could be described by "MacBook Pro."
Seems like a pretty big deal to have to dedicate a server to the STT task (but then again, if I could get my STT tasks out from under the cloud... I'd probably do it. I have a spare 3 GHz 8-core hanging around, so...) but I think for general use, they have to do better. This isn't going to fly well on a Raspberry pi, for instance, it'll just get way behind.
When you drive down the cost of goods and services, you drive up the value of currency. As currency is more valuable, people will have a higher demand for things.
And those things will be produced by automation.
As demand rises, so will supply.
And said supply will be provided by automation.
As supply rises, so will need for more jobs.
And more automation will fill those jobs, because it will be less expensive and more reliable and considerably less troublesome on many other fronts.
No arguing, no sick days, no limits on shift time, no shovel-leaning, no "had to take my kid to the whatever" outages, no "whoops, I forgot that step" events, no "I want a raise", no "we're unionizing", no "dude, did you shower today?" events, no rudeness to customers, no sexual harassment lawsuits, no unemployment claims, no injury-on-the-job claims, no "I got stuck in traffic" events, no haters post-inter/intra-office-romance events, no surfing the net on company time, no "you promoted them when I wanted you to promote me" events, no "trained employee took off and went to work for competitor" events... you get the idea. Why would anyone want to hire a person if they didn't absolutely have to?
Yes those jobs will require different skills but they will exist.
And those skills will be supplied by automation.
In addition, niche economies will erupt for things that are handmade and not automated.
Yes, perhaps. Also for things where demand is very, very low. But that won't affect the overall picture significantly. One must, just for starters, wonder what the economic mechanism is for an unemployed person to be obtaining handmade niche items without a complete restructuring of the economy. Human service is another area that can't be automated. If you want a human service, you'll have to find a way to convince someone to supply that. You're unemployed, though. How will you do that?
I'm skeptical. I think that is a looooooong way off.
I think if you actually look at what's going on, you'll see it's non-linear and goes in fits and starts, which makes it very hard to predict in terms of "in N years, X consequences arrive."
However, once you can see the tanks on the horizon, one should really start thinking about what is to be done when you get there, regardless of if you know there are easily passible open fields, or difficult to navigate swamps, between here or there... or not.
Look how fast incandescent light bulbs went away after being in constant use for some time. Look how few years those awful curly fluorescents held on until LEDs came along. Look how fast mechanical calculators went under with the advent of the microprocessor (or even just the ALU.)
Fits and starts. Non-linearity. Surprise technologies. Sometimes the stuff you can see, that you're inclined to make predictions from, isn't good enough, because more stuff will be arriving before your predicted time / event idea jells. Stuff just up and suddenly evaporates. Payphones, for instance. Steam engines and commercial sailing ships. CRTs. etc. But generally, these types of things give way to something even more efficacious. Which causes progress that depends on the technology in question to accelerate.
We can be sure that if what we see now isn't going to be "the thing" to leverage our predictions, something else, probably even more effective, will replace it. So when what we see rings an alarm bell... we should pay attention.
I think what the bulk of the "sky's not falling" folks seem to be missing is what really happened in the past. We automated jobs that the average human could do, and they then moved on to other jobs that were, at that time, not possible or economical to automate.
I agree. There's also a dose of "this never happened before, so it can't happen now" going on.
When I can replace the average human on any given task with a system that can do it better, faster, and/or cheaper, what does that human do now?
Yes, that's going to cause a major cultural shift all by itself. The obvious: have sex, eat, drink and be merry is going to be very disruptive to those whose worldview tells them that they only have significance as providers and contributors, working. Particularly if they're not well educated, formally or otherwise.
It's an interesting time to be living in.:/
the huge problem doesn't start when it's every job that can be done better - just enough jobs that the number left are insufficient to allow everyone to have a job.
Precisely. That's when it starts. But it'll get worse. A lot worse. If the social safety net isn't there, or our society hasn't accommodated these events some other way, it'll get bloody.
Baloney. Soviet Union had many free loaders. So it does matter.
The Soviet Union didn't fall because of freeloaders. The Soviet Union fell because it was focused upon spending an unsustainable amount of money on a non-income generating endeavor, specifically its military.
In any case, the Soviets didn't have pervasive automation, which is the case we're talking about here — so even if you were right that freeloaders brought the country down (which you are not) you're just handwaving about irrelevancies.
there are hundreds [of studies] demonstrating dogs solving problems that cats may not care to solve.
FTFY. Also:
I do not think there are any studies demonstrating cats solving a problem that dogs cannot
Cats evolved in such a way as to have solved the problem of keeping small rodents down. Dogs have not. In addition, as a single data point, cats have evolved to address the problem of being annoying to me, and likely others –whereas dogs annoy me because they are demanding, loud, drooly, and smelly. Most cats don't need to be "trained" to use a litter box. They just use them the first time you drop them in one, or just show them where it is. Not saying this makes them smarter (although it tends to look that way), but it sure as heck makes them less annoying than an animal that has to be taken for a walk or let out and in again.
Bottom line, we don't know how smart these animals are – either species – because we can't communicate with them in a way that gives us those answers. Counting neurons is disingenuous; there are people with smaller neuron counts that are obviously "smarter" than people with larger neuron counts. At some point it becomes an issue of plasticity and topology. There are neural networks that can outperform humans at various tasks; go, for instance. Are those networks smarter than people are? Think about that very carefully before you answer.
While you're at it, think about the number of, and relative complexity of, neural networks it requires to run a simpler, smaller body, with smaller, simpler organs, fewer nerve endings, etc. You want to be very careful if you're counting neurons and making sweeping generalizations about "cats" and "dogs" and "people."
Okay, mercy: here's the answer: We don't know. Because we can't measure how smart people are very well, we don't even know what it is. "IQ" is a very weak metric, for instance. All we can do is make assumptions based on performance. But that means we have to be able to evaluate performance as it relates to intelligence... and that's a very iffy road to assume you have mapped with an animal that can't (or won't, in the case of some humans) talk to you, and as far as anyone has been able to tell with felines, really doesn't care what you want anyway. If you want to train a cat, you need to figure out what it wants, and that doesn't appear to be a thing we've figured out very much at all.
what else can they do? Hope some rich techbro forces congress to pass UBI?
It won't be some rich techbro. It'll be a mass of very desperate people.
UBI, or some economic equivalent, is inevitable. They're going to have to aim for an economy of plenty. How that actually looks is impossible to say right now, but UBI is definitely one of the possible paths. The alternative is the government looking for a tarring and feathering.
OMG technology will take our jobs. Oh wait it took jobs that we didn’t want to do and it created a new market for more jobs.
One of these things is not like the others.
When you automate a few, or even all, sock factories, the workers can go make sweaters and underwear, etc. The economy as a whole doesn't make a radical shift. There's some hardship for a small number, but the flex is there.
When you automate everything, the workers won't have that option. The entire economy will shift. There won't be new jobs for workers – because just like the old jobs, general purpose systems will be able to do those as well. There will be no case for hiring a human for such jobs. None.
Unless you have some concrete proposal for the re-employment of the vast majority of the workforce, your vision remains on the highly unlikely side – McDonald's will not put a worker in place of a machine that costs much less and is more reliable; there's absolutely no business case for it. Neither will anyone else. In the present economic system, doing so is a straightforward invitation for competition to undercut your costs and overwhelm your competence.
These systems will be able to do all such jobs. The only question is just how sophisticated they will get... and betting that they won't get very sophisticated is a dubious bet. We're seeing higher levels of competence every day now, and there's no sign of it slowing down – quite the contrary, it's still accelerating.
A major social and economic shift will result. It could be very painful if we're not very quick on our feet. All of the "work ethic" inculcation people are driven by is going to turn from an advantage to a serious detriment in the space of just a few years.
You watch. Unless the whole machine learning sector drags to a halt (not looking that way at all, btw), this stuff is all inevitable. It's almost certain to cause an immense cultural and economic shock.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're being sarcastic... I don't know why you would think that's in the cards; Jony Ive is the villain that took away the beautiful icons iOS and OS X / MacOS used to have and replaced them with dull, flat, information-culled pastels reminiscent of an interior decorator's shart, not to mention being the conceptual guy who was in authority when the clueless process that brought us the abortion that is the "trashcan" Mac Pro went down.
Unless he's been off recovering from a head injury, this appears to bode very poorly for the future of everything Apple.
It's looking more and more like a big windows tower lurks in my future. Damn it.
They know where the phone is anyway if it's on; tower-based location has been with us for some time. Any time your GPS could have reported the phone live, the phone was in range of a tower anyway. So... they still know where that phone is. The only way to win that war is to not carry the phone, or take its battery out. If possible.
BTW, "off" isn't always "off." If you really want "off", you need to take out the battery.
How can I stave off these notes attempting to be humorous? Will someone on staff help me out? Really, these are very bass remarks. Someone needs to study their clef notes before trying again. Perhaps that would make me a bit more well-tempered.
Well yes, that's part of the current system - they won't let you do it, and they are most definitely in control at this point. But there are other reasons. Right now, businesses operate as enablers for people to advance. Corporations are microcosms of that very effect; if you break them - and if you take all their profit, you will break them - they will no longer be serve that function, and they will devolve into less effective entities. They will have no stock value; no one will invest; there will be no margins for raises, growth will be difficult (and financially pointless to the individuals who would cause that growth) etc., etc.
With broad automation, the human motive is sidelined, or perhaps even eradicated. You'll still have production.
But we aren't there, not even close. Until we are, you can't break the system in place.
From direct sales, yes. From re-investment in other corporations and bonds and so on, no. And in any case, corporations use resources: when a corporation moves in, should all the people pay the taxes for the fire support, the roads, the water mains, the traffic control, the sidewalks, the regulators... ??? Or should that be rolled into the product/service cost, and so only those who use the product or service pay for those product/service-related costs? Think about it.
Or, l can put it this way: under the present economic model, why should you have to pay the governance and service costs for my widget and fluffing?
But so what? Doesn't even move the goalposts. You still can't take all corporate profit under the current system, and it would take that, and more, to create any more than the most pitiful form of UBI for a broadly unemployed populace.
Either the system changes, or it crashes.
No, not this one. Not even the next one. The one after that? Or after that?
Eventually, they will. The question is simply how long will that be. Right now, the ML pace continues to accelerate. Soon, they'll be stacking one skill upon another. The skill to walk. The skill to understand plumbing joints and leaks. The skill to know home construction. Etc.
It's coming. That whole "will never be able to" business... that's not going to pan out for anyone.
Doesn't matter. Isn't even in the ballpark.
No, I didn't say that. I said it was unworkable in the context of the current economic system - which is accurate. I also made it pretty clear that we're going to have to do something, once it becomes clear what that something is - which is not yet the case.
That is utter nonsense. The entire federal tax collection in 2016 was 3.46 trillion dollars. That'd be about $24k for 150 million people. Poverty, under the current system. Poverty accompanied by zero government services, no military, no federal law enforcement, etc.
That's not a basic income within the context of the current economic system. That's pocket change. You won't be raising children, owning a home and a vehicle, enjoying the network, consuming utilities, buying new clothing, receiving medical care, etc. on $24k. The economic system will have to be re-jiggered in a major way to make the available resources and services map to the number of people - and that's almost certainly what's going to happen when automation of most jobs comes along. Until then, the environment precludes a working model in other than over-funded, under-utilized small test groups. You can't just swap out the current social safety net and distribute it to everyone - it'll just fall on its face. In only works now (and it barely works, frankly) because the recipients are limited in number and in benefits.
Sure, we know that augmenting income will work when you have income. But when there's no income, and that is what we're going to be facing, augmentation is not a viable solution.
You've completely missed the point, and besides, no, it doesn't. It's still completely impractical. That's the point - you can't tax the corporations at a level that will work under the present economic system. It wouldn't work if it were double your numbers. Because you can't tax the corporations at that level, or anything even remotely close to that level.
Here's another window into how impossible this is under the current economic system: The entire US federal tax collection was about 3.268 trillion for 2016. Divide that by the number of citizens, and keep in mind that in order to do that, you'd have to eliminate all government services.
It. Won't. Work.
The US government can tax US corporations. That's the tool that's presently available. And the US government is responsible for US citizens; not others.
I'm dividing all US corporate profits by all US citizens, and the reason I did that was to show that it's not enough to fund UBI in the current economic model. It doesn't matter how they earn it; it's money that could, in an apocalyptic (and tooth-clenchingly naive) tax environment, be apportioned among the citizens. It's not a viable mechanism under the current economic model, no matter how they make that money, even if you could collect that money without destroying the entities that earn it, which I highly doubt.
If you restrict which profits somehow, that just makes the number per citizen smaller.
The whole idea of taxing FB (much as I dislike them, and I really dislike them) to "fund" UBI is absurd.
All of US corporate profit is running around 1500 billion / year right now.
1500 billion ($) / 330 million (Citizens) is $4,545 per citizen per year.
Leaving aside the issue of what corporations would do if they could not keep their profits, which does not seem likely to be a good thing, it's pretty clear that all corporate profits in the current economy would not suffice to do anything useful.
However, the idea of UBI, or at least, the sane version, is that it would be implemented in an "economy of plenty" where automation was producing goods and services at much lower costs and much higher availability. Those conditions are hand-wavey; we can't quantify them yet, so it's problematic to try and predict the costs of living, etc. But that's why UBI or similar will be required; workers will be out and automation will be in. It's not today's landscape that defines the need.
The current economic model will almost certainly be unsustainable with pervasive automation and the number of citizens we have. That's pretty clear. We also know that although distribution of wealth right now is very uneven, there's enough of it to keep everyone eating and sheltered (which is not to say that always happens... but money in, goods and services out, the numbers work.) So given an economic sea change - a very, very painful one, I'm guessing - UBI or something along those lines should be feasible.
The problem comes when we try to see how it would work today, in the current economy. It wouldn't; it can't. Tests can work - certainly the extra income is welcome and used by recipients - but that's only because such tests are far less costly compared to the amount of money available to fund them. When you count everyone in, suddenly the available funds aren't there. But that's today. The future holds the potential for massive change. "Funds" may not even be the operative mechanism; because if survival is no longer pendant upon an exchange of value, it may not be reasonable to try to quantify and structure it that way any longer.
It's still worth talking about.
You already own one of these you carry everywhere — your cellphone. A microphone (and camera!) you take everywhere, and is connected everywhere, including in your home.
The Echo and its brethren are not a sudden influx of a listening device that can be hacked. You swallowed that bait a long, long time ago.
The problem is, you're giving the people the coal fired plant, when it was the politicians that screwed the people in the first place.
It's heartbreaking to watch the deep corruption in politics hold society back while doing direct harm to the citizens with their "wars" on informed personal and consensual choice and their blatant corporate fluffing.
But as long as the voters remain largely poorly educated and gullible, it's going to continue to be corrupt politicians all the way down. Sadly, the people are unable to make the connection between their voting habits and their problems. Not unwilling; unable.
And guess who controls the people's education?
Right.
There are. Unfortunately, this also contributes to making them near-intolerable companions: yappy, high-strung, and smelly.
Cats manage to be both pleasant to be around, and death on toast to rodents.
I'll stick with 'em. :)
IQ is ridiculously culturally and educationally relative. Just for two of its more severe problems.
If - and I don't yet know if this is the case, they don't actually seem to say - this represents a stand-alone, does-not-go-to-the-LAN-or-WAN speech-to-text system... with an error rate of 6.5% on English speech as claimed... then it's way more important than Yet Another Web Browser.
This is precisely the kind of thing projects like Mycroft need to become not just another way to send your activity out on the net, which inherently decreases both reliability and security.
If indeed this is what this is, then the door opens for all manner of sophisticated home advances we can actually trust and depend on.
They claim around 1:1 [decode rate : normal speech rate] with a reasonably modern CPU/GPU. That needs considerable improvement. Reference quote from here:
That's a lot of computing power to hand off, particularly in a laptop. Using just the CPU, you'll be pegging it the whole time you're talking, and then some. For a decent desktop, it's at least doable, but it's still a very heavy compute load.
Though... saying "MacBook Pro" doesn't really tell us enough... I have a MacBook Pro that is a dual-core Intel machine... it's not what you'd call quick. There are a lot of different hardware configs that could be described by "MacBook Pro."
Seems like a pretty big deal to have to dedicate a server to the STT task (but then again, if I could get my STT tasks out from under the cloud... I'd probably do it. I have a spare 3 GHz 8-core hanging around, so...) but I think for general use, they have to do better. This isn't going to fly well on a Raspberry pi, for instance, it'll just get way behind.
Still. IMHO, this may be important. Very.
And those things will be produced by automation.
And said supply will be provided by automation.
And more automation will fill those jobs, because it will be less expensive and more reliable and considerably less troublesome on many other fronts.
No arguing, no sick days, no limits on shift time, no shovel-leaning, no "had to take my kid to the whatever" outages, no "whoops, I forgot that step" events, no "I want a raise", no "we're unionizing", no "dude, did you shower today?" events, no rudeness to customers, no sexual harassment lawsuits, no unemployment claims, no injury-on-the-job claims, no "I got stuck in traffic" events, no haters post-inter/intra-office-romance events, no surfing the net on company time, no "you promoted them when I wanted you to promote me" events, no "trained employee took off and went to work for competitor" events... you get the idea. Why would anyone want to hire a person if they didn't absolutely have to?
And those skills will be supplied by automation.
Yes, perhaps. Also for things where demand is very, very low. But that won't affect the overall picture significantly. One must, just for starters, wonder what the economic mechanism is for an unemployed person to be obtaining handmade niche items without a complete restructuring of the economy. Human service is another area that can't be automated. If you want a human service, you'll have to find a way to convince someone to supply that. You're unemployed, though. How will you do that?
I think if you actually look at what's going on, you'll see it's non-linear and goes in fits and starts, which makes it very hard to predict in terms of "in N years, X consequences arrive."
However, once you can see the tanks on the horizon, one should really start thinking about what is to be done when you get there, regardless of if you know there are easily passible open fields, or difficult to navigate swamps, between here or there... or not.
Look how fast incandescent light bulbs went away after being in constant use for some time. Look how few years those awful curly fluorescents held on until LEDs came along. Look how fast mechanical calculators went under with the advent of the microprocessor (or even just the ALU.)
Fits and starts. Non-linearity. Surprise technologies. Sometimes the stuff you can see, that you're inclined to make predictions from, isn't good enough, because more stuff will be arriving before your predicted time / event idea jells. Stuff just up and suddenly evaporates. Payphones, for instance. Steam engines and commercial sailing ships. CRTs. etc. But generally, these types of things give way to something even more efficacious. Which causes progress that depends on the technology in question to accelerate.
We can be sure that if what we see now isn't going to be "the thing" to leverage our predictions, something else, probably even more effective, will replace it. So when what we see rings an alarm bell... we should pay attention.
I agree. There's also a dose of "this never happened before, so it can't happen now" going on.
Yes, that's going to cause a major cultural shift all by itself. The obvious: have sex, eat, drink and be merry is going to be very disruptive to those whose worldview tells them that they only have significance as providers and contributors, working. Particularly if they're not well educated, formally or otherwise.
It's an interesting time to be living in. :/
Precisely. That's when it starts. But it'll get worse. A lot worse. If the social safety net isn't there, or our society hasn't accommodated these events some other way, it'll get bloody.
You know you can post anonymously when you're signed in, right?
The Soviet Union didn't fall because of freeloaders. The Soviet Union fell because it was focused upon spending an unsustainable amount of money on a non-income generating endeavor, specifically its military.
In any case, the Soviets didn't have pervasive automation, which is the case we're talking about here — so even if you were right that freeloaders brought the country down (which you are not) you're just handwaving about irrelevancies.
FTFY. Also:
Cats evolved in such a way as to have solved the problem of keeping small rodents down. Dogs have not. In addition, as a single data point, cats have evolved to address the problem of being annoying to me, and likely others –whereas dogs annoy me because they are demanding, loud, drooly, and smelly. Most cats don't need to be "trained" to use a litter box. They just use them the first time you drop them in one, or just show them where it is. Not saying this makes them smarter (although it tends to look that way), but it sure as heck makes them less annoying than an animal that has to be taken for a walk or let out and in again.
Bottom line, we don't know how smart these animals are – either species – because we can't communicate with them in a way that gives us those answers. Counting neurons is disingenuous; there are people with smaller neuron counts that are obviously "smarter" than people with larger neuron counts. At some point it becomes an issue of plasticity and topology. There are neural networks that can outperform humans at various tasks; go, for instance. Are those networks smarter than people are? Think about that very carefully before you answer.
While you're at it, think about the number of, and relative complexity of, neural networks it requires to run a simpler, smaller body, with smaller, simpler organs, fewer nerve endings, etc. You want to be very careful if you're counting neurons and making sweeping generalizations about "cats" and "dogs" and "people."
Okay, mercy: here's the answer: We don't know. Because we can't measure how smart people are very well, we don't even know what it is. "IQ" is a very weak metric, for instance. All we can do is make assumptions based on performance. But that means we have to be able to evaluate performance as it relates to intelligence... and that's a very iffy road to assume you have mapped with an animal that can't (or won't, in the case of some humans) talk to you, and as far as anyone has been able to tell with felines, really doesn't care what you want anyway. If you want to train a cat, you need to figure out what it wants, and that doesn't appear to be a thing we've figured out very much at all.
And you may be confusing "instinct driven behavioral patterns" with smart and dumb in this case.
Already answered.
It won't be some rich techbro. It'll be a mass of very desperate people.
UBI, or some economic equivalent, is inevitable. They're going to have to aim for an economy of plenty. How that actually looks is impossible to say right now, but UBI is definitely one of the possible paths. The alternative is the government looking for a tarring and feathering.
One of these things is not like the others.
When you automate a few, or even all, sock factories, the workers can go make sweaters and underwear, etc. The economy as a whole doesn't make a radical shift. There's some hardship for a small number, but the flex is there.
When you automate everything, the workers won't have that option. The entire economy will shift. There won't be new jobs for workers – because just like the old jobs, general purpose systems will be able to do those as well. There will be no case for hiring a human for such jobs. None.
Unless you have some concrete proposal for the re-employment of the vast majority of the workforce, your vision remains on the highly unlikely side – McDonald's will not put a worker in place of a machine that costs much less and is more reliable; there's absolutely no business case for it. Neither will anyone else. In the present economic system, doing so is a straightforward invitation for competition to undercut your costs and overwhelm your competence.
These systems will be able to do all such jobs. The only question is just how sophisticated they will get... and betting that they won't get very sophisticated is a dubious bet. We're seeing higher levels of competence every day now, and there's no sign of it slowing down – quite the contrary, it's still accelerating.
A major social and economic shift will result. It could be very painful if we're not very quick on our feet. All of the "work ethic" inculcation people are driven by is going to turn from an advantage to a serious detriment in the space of just a few years.
You watch. Unless the whole machine learning sector drags to a halt (not looking that way at all, btw), this stuff is all inevitable. It's almost certain to cause an immense cultural and economic shock.