Google self-driving car pioneer wants to teach people how to face the future
economist.com
economist.com
I also think there are a lot of merits to online-education and Udacity seems to have the right general idea. On-line education needs to be more engaging and entertaining than simply videos and online collaboration.
However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. In our current economic model, this seems like increased pain for most of us.
IMHO it would be much better if we could stop this denial. We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. I think a much better strategy would be for us to start focusing our best and brightest on full automation of our needs and basic wants so that we can provide most essential services to people with minimal human and resource cost.
People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs.
People don't need money, they need a level of security in the basic necessities: food, water, shelter. Money is the primary legal way to get these things, but the basic necessities are the issue, not money.
Basic income, or any good solution involving money, is pragmatic and worthy of consideration since money is so embedded in the culture, but when we are talking about real needs we're talking about physical needs, of which money is not one.
The question here is will a small subset of the world accrue all the benefit from the AI productivity improvement? One answer is basic income, presumably based on taxation of the rich. Is another answer some kind of universal ownership scheme of the companies creating the AI? I'm not advocating government ownership of business (this rarely ends well) but perhaps some way for the government to give shares in index funds in lieu of basic cash payments? Essentially equity based social security or welfare payments in lieu of some portion of the cash payments. I haven't thought this fully through yet, but it does allow some aspect of shared upside. (My sense is there will be a lot of shared upside anyway, similar to how we all benefit from free maps and search)
One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years).
A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)
I am really starting to think that government should reduce the cost of education as a public good.
Can you please expand? I did not know of this
I seem to remember Bush II proposing this early in his first term. I was quite young at the time, but I remember some some stuff about "Ownership Society" and a scheme that boiled down to "let's take the social security money and invest it."
I also heard him talking about ownership in the sense everyone should own a home. Right at the peak of the housing bubble. Lots of people took a big hit.
What I'm trying to get at here though isn't just turning people into equity investors, but specifically capturing the upside from an environment where robots do all the work and the gains are captured mostly by an oligopoly of their makers.
If the robots (or AI) are broadly created and owned, this is much less of a problem.
Productivity increases by itself will never cause problem. If we become 1000 times more productive overnight, we have loads of excellent solutions to handle it. Like have people work only 1 day per year, relying on voluntary service, increase material wealth like crazy…
But we've gotta admit, our society sucks at absorbing productivity increases. Just watch what will happen to professional drivers in the 10, 15 years to come. If we don't come up with something, the shock will be brutal.
A more recent and viable model to look at is probably some of the successful Sovereign wealth fund, like Norway, UAE, Qatar and etc.
So putting a floor on what people get each year seems like a pretty good idea. How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread? 10x? 100x? Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?
One of the main arguments of basic income, as opposed to unemployment benefits, is to reduce the bureaucracy involved. So the answer would be an empathetic 'no'. Hopefully, having a guaranteed income decoupled from location would push people to populate cheaper places. And thus, rent would get much cheaper overall.
Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.
See what unabridged said.
>Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.
Giving people more money because the rent is more expensive where they live equates to giving more money to landlords. That is an even more terrible idea.
Besides, Manhattan isn't that good of a place to live. Specially when you aren't tied to the job market and can take more risks.
In no possible way up to you to decide, thankfully.
It's one thing to say "nobody should go hungry or live on the street"; we could argue about the most efficient way to go about achieving that, but it's not an unreasonable statement. It's quite another thing to say "you're not allowed to be too successful or we'll steal it from you".
> you're not allowed to be too successful or we'll steal it from you
Well, maybe there wouldn't be a hard ceiling, but I could see the revival of the 90% tax bracket for big earners.
That's a very entitled, might-makes-right point of view; what gives you the right to do so, other than getting a mob together with enough might?
But, if radical redistribution of wealth is wanted by voters, then the population can enact laws to make it happen.
I have no doubt that automation on a scale beyond what most people think is possible (and maybe desirable) is coming. Today, any talk of basic income in the US isn't going to go anywhere. However, at some point enough people are going to be out of work that they will be a big enough voting block that politicians will start restructuring the economy to make those voters happy. I'm not sure I see any other possible outcome.
That said, it would be best for governments to provide free safe housing, heat, sanitation, food, water, communications (fast internet and telephone), medical care (including preventive care through gym memberships and such), and high quality accessible education, certification.
The reason I don't like basic income: while in comparison it's a lot easier to budget, it's also a lot harder to keep up to date, or keep geographically relevant. It's harder to find efficiencies, like Soylent for food or improving gyms, hospitals, schools. Its easily abused, money can buy guns or heroin, it doesn't always get used for food. Meanwhile, food in a world where food is free can only feed you and your family.
That makes a lot of sense.
The idea is to lift the very bottom of the income distribution, those who are likely to be put out of work first by automation, to a level where they are not plagued by a desperation for basics that causes them to damage themselves and society (i.e. drug abuse, crime). People in that situation already represent a significant cost, both in dealing with the problems, and also in the lost human potential.
The hope is that as automation reduces the cost of a lot of basic consumables (not rent or real estate), fewer people are kept in the aforementioned desperation.
With automation, these consumables will also not vary tremendously in price between Manhattan and Wichita, since the one of the biggest differences in production costs between both places, labor, has been removed from the production costs. Therefore, there would be no need to index BI by location.
Basic income can't solve the problem where automation has effectively removed all human-added value in all jobs. At that point, we'd have to impose more dramatic measures of redistribution, and also come up with new ways of measuring individuals' contributions to the general welfare, and reward them based on that. But I think we're still far away from that.
A prime example of this is housing, which is why many government welfare programs stipulate what the delivered value can be spent on (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) as opposed to just open-ended income.
Is it perfect? No. With every massive government program comes bureaucratic overhead - but throwing it out for something without the overhead but potentially economically damaging side effects isn't the solution.
In the long-term, sure: if we can successfully build an AI smarter than humans, it's unlikely any job will survive. But at the same time, no job will need to; there's a balance there. Planning for a post-scarcity economy makes sense, but the plans that work in such an economy don't necessarily work when scarcity still exists.
Why? Because this AI, which is basically just people smarter than us and getting smarter by the day, will decide that its only purpose in life is to serve its idiot masters?
What happens is that pressure is simply increasing all the time, and people are on a bell curve w.r.t. how well they can keep up. We are effectively grabbing that bell curve and pulling its ends much further apart.
We need a solution, otherwise things are going to get very, very ugly.
Improving educational opportunities (a la Udacity) is a noble idea because it levels the playing field a bit (giving the underprivileged a chance), but the end result is the same - a small number of people will inevitably own AI, and the world by extension.
Assuming that the new AI titans are compelled to share their wealth with humanity, wouldn't less productive members of society still face existential threat? Improved standard of living only takes care of the first 2-3 layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs - but "esteem" and "self-actualization" are really important as well.
Many people fill those needs with banal things like drinking contests or sports.
As others have pointed out, the real problem before us this century is to somehow decouple having a basic standard of living from performing work---more specifically from "contributing to productivity". My amateur guess is that even with our current state of food and energy production, the biggest barrier isn't the massively difficult economic and organizational problem, but advancing as a culture beyond our entrenched moral assumption that the means for basic living is something to be earned rather than a human right.
Nanodegrees may seem a good idea, and they no doubt make sense financially to google, but that does not make them inevitable. People have been attending today's traditional schools since long before the Aztecs were even a thing (Cambridge 1200s). There is wisdom in those years. It may be time to change that wisdom, but it won't happen within a generation.
Self-driving cars seem likely but are not inevitable. All sorts of safety-enhancing technologies are dropped for apparently irrelevant reasons. Why do we sell cars that can break speed limits? Why do school buses not have seat belts? Why do planes still have error-prone pilots? Why are alcohol and cigarettes still a thing? Each of those have at some point been challenged by technological progressives who though their version of the future was unavoidable. Each was proven wrong. Only the arrogant assume the future.
fyi, anyone who thinks driverless cars are inevitable should look at the futurama exhibit of 1939. We were then going to have them by 1960. Then it was ford. Now it is google. I'll believe it when I see it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s...
Yes they are inevitable.
All sorts of safety-enhancing technologies are dropped
Self-driving cars are not only a "safety-enhancing technology".
First and foremost they are a money-saving technology.
Over 4 million people are employed in the USA transportation industry[1]. 1.7 million of them are truck drivers[2].
Global logistics companies will save billions of dollars per year by upgrading their fleets to self-driving vehicles.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/he...
Google doesn't own Udacity.
As a general rule, industry prefers narrowly-targeted education for skilled/unskilled workers. But when it comes to managers those four/six/eight-year degrees from centuries-old universities are all important. You don't see many executives without degrees. Founders may forgo education, but not so much the people they higher to run things.
Perhaps I'm just jaded or cynical, but fuck people.
We, as a species, are the greatest threat to ourselves, and we are our greatest asset. An individual may be brilliant, and and large groups congregating together into governments that empower hundreds of millions of individuals may be the greatest feat our species has accomplished, but there is just so much instability across a wide spectrum of life.
We, as a species, are approaching the limit of what 7B people on this planet are capable of. Globalization is piquing and revolutionary growth will pique with it, and maintaining the rate at which we grow will be accomplished by broad-sweeping reforms with the end-goal being tearing down inefficiencies -- starting with economic.
We, as a species, absolutely can bring a first-world quality of life to everybody, so why shouldn't we?
We, as a species, absolutely can cooperate and govern on a global scale, where such cooperation is codified into law, so why shouldn't we?
The answer is that we don't want to because we can't handle giving up control to those other people because they don't have our best interests in mind.
How do we face the future? By letting go of our ill-conceived notion that we are fit to govern ourselves in the current manner, and accept that operational control of various aspects of humanity (eg: supply chain management, namely natural resource allocation and food distribution) will be automated, and as such outside of the purview of human judgement.
Not with the current lifestyle and the given ressources.
I'd like to thank you for contributing your perspective in this reasoned and impassioned advocacy for authoritarianism.
If and when it happens, nobody will miss having to manage large fleets of container ships that currently move hundreds of millions of dollars of goods per day.
If and when it happens, nobody will miss having to manage large fleets of trucks, vans, and cargo planes that currently move hundreds of millions of dollars of goods per week.
If and when it happens, nobody will miss having to find and drill for oil and nat-gas.
If and when it happens, nobody will miss having to raise and slaughter farm animals.
If and when it happens, nobody will miss having to tend to land for our apples and oranges.
Freedom of movement will diminish, in exchange we will achieve riches nobody ever dreamed of.