Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots
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Hawkings wrote this in the same thread:
You’re right: media often misrepresent what is actually said. The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants. Please encourage your students to think not only about how to create AI, but also about how to ensure its beneficial use.
This was what her wrote when asked about technological unemployment:
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
It took a joint collaboration between corporations and government to blow up the economy with the 2008 financial crisis. And then the government bailed out the financial elites. In a capitalist society, those who failed would go under. In fact, we probably wouldn't have reached that crisis point, because the Fed would not exist (and would not be manipulating interest rates), there would be no revolving door between corporations and government (Former Goldman Sachs CEO becomes Treasury Secretary, promptly gives trillions of dollars to Wall St; Former senior executive for Monsanto becomes head of FDA).
Granted, pure capitalism is not exactly possible given the flawed existence of humans and our fragile societies. But let's at least call our current system what it is: corporatism. Maybe even with a dash of nepotism, militarism and fascism.
What we should be really scared of is a population whose majority clamors for democracy yet prefers to trust government over holding representatives accountable.
The problem is the people have been rendered powerless through mis-education to the point they've forgotten their non-interventionist history. Keeping guns is necessary but not sufficient for the government to fear its people.
People have also been convinced the only way to get educated is to go into debt, since independent thought is ridiculed on mainstream entertainment venues. That gives governments an opportunity to control what people learn.
It goes on and on but it all starts with what you rightfully noted, that this is no Capitalism, but Corporatism. I wouldn't expect a university professor (even an economist) to understand this finer point as I know first-hand those people either have approved opinions or they don't have a job in academia.
For those who only dabble in economics (and here I include up to Ph.Ds in Economics) here's a hint: if your economy only has one money, and its price is centrally controlled, as interest rates are by the Fed in the U.S., what you have is not Capitalism, because no saving of capital is taking place.
On the topic of mainstream education, my brother is "unschooling" his children. They went to public school for one year, then he saw what was happening not only with the level of standardized education, but also the drills to "prepare" for school shootings. Schools prepare not by hiring security guards, but by having realistic simulations of a shooter, and having the children cower under their desks. Welcome to the new normal: Dept of Education's standards for dealing with ~~nuclear~~ handgun proliferation.
i visited my brother last year and it was interesting to see his kids interact socially. this is typically one of the big arguments that comes up for homeschooled children: How will your children grow socially? How will they learn to interact? After watching them at their golf practice, surrounded by tons of other kids, it was clear: my brother's kids were leaders, and the other kids were mostly followers.
his kids learn what they want, guided by their father's loose curriculum. They started learning algebra at 7, with the assistance of some very clever iPad apps. They read. They play games. And most of all, they enjoy life. They're not just waiting for recess. Or high school. Or college. Or their first job.
Those kids will be just fine.
You can't be more wrong. The term capitalism was pretty much coined by Marx to describe the system he lived in (where production capital is mostly privately owned and labor is a commodity). The definition still holds true today. Maybe you can call today corporatism on top of that, but then the late 19th century was ruled by corporations more than today...
I frankly don't understand this line of reasoning. Why don't you just accept the name capitalism for what it really is, why the need to "own" the term and twist its original meaning? We have plenty of perfectly good names for system you probably describe, such as libertarianism or anarchocapitalism or minarchism or propertarianism... It seems that you're just unwilling to accept that free markets simply tend to being not free as capital accumulates.
Although there is some truth to this, the past tends to be only a limited predictor for the future ("It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." -- Yogi Berra ), and of course logically this stance cannot be supported.
Also, there is some grounds to believe that this time actually is different: whereas production and consumption used to expand to soak up new found productivity, we're reaching both resource limits in terms of what can be produced, and at least in the west saturation in terms of consumption. We already consume way more than we really want/need, and more and more people are realizing that their stuff is not liberating them, but rather taking them hostage.
Furthermore, there also is evidence that this is already happening. Blue collar wages are stagnating or in decline, same though to a lesser extent for the middle class. Debt has soared as people try to maintain their standard of living.
Robots have the capacity to help us bring about the 15 hour work week Keynes predicted, or maybe even the 4 hour work week, but we probably will have to restructure our wealth distribution mechanisms somewhat to achieve it.
Which is, of course, false in its premise -- it happened with the technological developments which were happening alongside the development of the economic system which would become dominant in the developed world of the time, which would later be named "capitalism" by its critics, and was mitigated to a certain degree (but not, by any stretch of the imagination, solved) when capitalism was largely replaced in the developed world with modern "mixed economies" which limit the capitalist property system through the adoption of redistributive and socialized regulatory mechanisms while retaining the capitalist arrangement in outline (in the developed world, this approach has prevailed, for now, over both retaining -- or reverting to -- capitalism without compromising its structure and abandoning its property structure outright.)
A great example of this is Malthus. His predictions were absolutely correct based on the history of the world until that point. The reason he was so wrong was because the world changed so dramatically.
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-robot-lords-a...
It's amazing how many things look like a tragedy of the commons (rather than a wonderful efficient market) when you hit boundary conditions.
When I first saw this article, I said this to myself, "But robots...but matrix...but terminator" a few hours later, I realized the grounded logic he is conveying.
Currently, robots/ai are like the gun issues of today. Guns don't kill people. People do and legislating gun control is sticky (so is regulating ai).
As far as I am aware, every single economical system in history has produced wealth inequality, so replacing it with something else wouldn't really change much. It's been tried numerous times, and none of those experiments managed to solve the issue of wealth inequality in a sustainable way.
Capitalism is far from being an ideal system, but it works, and replacing it can cause only more pain for everyone. I can see the appeal of blaming it for everything; it's a handy scapegoat, "the devil we know" -- but I haven't seen many realistic proposals what should replace it.
Check out the Islamic perspective on economics and finance. It sets certain restrictions, while keeping many things open to the requirements of the society: no interest, shared risk, the population is responsible for the poor, etc. while still allowing the opportunities to acquire wealth.
It was during the days of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz[0] that it was reported that there were no more poor people left to take Zakat[1], because everyone did their duties.
Certain exemptions are made to people that have this as their only alternative, other than being thrown out on the street if they can't pay their rent for instance. However, this is only reserved for dire situations, and some people take this too far, and think that they can be exempted, whereas they cannot. It is the responsibility of the community to provide for the poor first and foremost.
I would need to look up to see where this shift started to happen, but I would not be surprised if it started to take place at, or around WWI (that's when a lot of other problems started to happen in the region).
If that turns out to be the case, then yes, it is quite sustainable that it lasted for over 1250 years.
As I pointed out, Islamically, the rich people of the community would be responsible to aid the society. A tremendous amount of wealth is in the hands of a tiny, tiny minority of the population. They can put their money in interest bearing accounts and bonds, and live purely off of interest. This is exploitative, and not fair, and makes the problem worse.
In an Islamic system, the rich would have an obligation toward the rest of society to lift it up, particularly in the case where there is a massive wealth gap, as we see today.
The poor are consistently getting penalized, whereas the rich just get richer. This article was posted here on HN not too long ago: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21663262-why-low...
In a society where people are scarce and visible, the social contract is enforced by association. Just like everyone looked after each other in most places around the world in small villages etc. - iterated prisoner's dilemma
In a city of 20 million people this breaks down. - more defectors
And yes, with more people there is a higher likelyhood that not everyone will do their duties. However, all that is needed is a critical mass (whether in the number of people, or the total wealth produced) that does. As I pointed out, if the ultra wealthy were forced to "pay up" in order to help out the poor and oppressed, we would be in a very different place. Not to mention all the tax money wasted on the military and invading other countries.
The other point I brought up is that of dealing with interest, and other exploitative transactions, which are forbidden Islamically. These aid the wealthy, and hurt the poor. All these factors go hand in hand to raise the quality of life for society.
Islamically, the poor have a right to get money from Zakat; which is paid by the rich. In other words, the rich owe money to the poor. This is a fundamentally different system from what we see today in most countries.
A few posts ago you said it all worked nicely and there were no poor because people did their duty.
But now in the Zakat system, you say that the rich are forced to give money to the poor.
It is not fundamentally different from a basic social welfare economy like much of Europe.
> A few posts ago you said it all worked nicely and there were no poor because people did their duty.
Well, there is no contradiction between the two. The people did they duty and paid their Zakat. People were generally more pious back then. It wouldn't have been too hard for them to hide their money -- not everything was tracked the way it is today :-)
I pay taxes for those two already. Must I still blame capitalism?
Not trying to be obtuse, but some of the thing mentioned are already supposedly part of our society. Represented by proxy through our government, yet we don't hold it accountable. Capitalism is not our problem.
HFT and whatever Wall street is up to? Same thing. It's all exploitative and benefits only a few, while harming most.
Edit: sharing risk on certain transactions, and paying taxes are two different things.
Edit: another example: what about mind numbing advertisements? What about ads for prescription only medication? Purely a product of capitalism. Sexist car advertisements with naked women in them? Yep.
Edit: isn't tax evasion by inversion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_inversion) also a product of capitalism?
Are you saying that economic systems have morality? And that all capitalist lack ethics and morals? There are many different forms of the two -- who is to decide which form is acceptable?
Again, the reason for everything happening in the society is not any single political and economical system -- like soylent green, it's the people.
You are right, it is the people. But, left to their own whim, people will do terrible things. We have seen this time and time again, all throughout history.
It's illusion to believe that there is anything except "people's own whim". It's always the question of someone's whim, the question is only if you will allow me to decide based on my own whim or you will force or persuade me to follow your whim. I'm not saying that we always have full conscious control over our actions -- quite the contrary, indeed -- but in nearly all cases people act according to their own interests (perceived or real) or values.
And of all the systems that have historically developed in an organic way, I would be ready to suggest that capitalism is the most fair we have seen so far; certainly much more fair than, say, feudalism and slavery.
Why not, given that the Islamic system was more or less "decreed" in a sense, but at the same time, lasted for over 1000 years? We are still struggling with all the other organic systems, since, well practically forever now.
Economic systems are about how scarce resources are allocated. The choice of the mechanism for doing this is always, inherently, based on a value system (possibly an extremely simple one consisting of a single value proposition).
In that sense, any economic systems involves a moral choice -- to say that a particular economic systems has "no regard for ethics or morals" really usually means that that system is perceived to have no regard for the the value propositions that the speaker believes to define correct morality.
That being said, I absolutely agree with your final statement.
The idea that organizing a system of legal structures (particularly, property rights) the way that capitalism does is not one made with "no regard for ethics or morals" is incorrect; instead, it reflects a decision that doing so is a moral good, either intrinsically (e.g., that the structure of capitalism directly reflects moral axioms, a common argument from those who hold to a view of "natural rights" to property that align with the structure of capitalist property rights) or because it serves some other good (the usually "other good" referenced is the common good from an aggregate utilitarian perspective, with reference to the optimality of markets in maximizing realized utility in the absence of externalities under the assumptions of rational choice theory.)
I would expect we'll get a lot further trying to make it better, than starting from scratch. It's also a lot more likely to happen.
Waelth inequality is probably going to be very hard to eliminate, wealth distribution follows zipfs law, which suggests that inequality is the stable configuration and equality will tend to fall apart.
I think there's a big difference between gun regulation and drone/ai regulation. If in 20 years we have drones that could patrol a location and can use some sort of force on targets it deems a threat, this technology that you own and are responsible for could kill people while you sleep. With guns, you hold it and you pull the trigger. With automated drones, you could be out of the way of danger entirely and making decisions based on the drone's camera output, or even have the drone make these sorts of decisions while you are away.
Of course, this is all hypothetical and we've never accurately predicted the future of most technologies, but the issues of drones and ai being used for lethal purposes already have the potential to be larger issues than guns. You wouldn't need to mobilize an army if you could buy as many "troops" as you could afford.
"A society where scarcity is essentially nil" is the part that doesn't make sense.
Particularly given the degree to which human experience of utility/disutility is demonstrated to be strongly influenced by relative rather than absolute conditions.
Relative abundance doesn't really substantially change the degree to which capitalism does or does not work.
The important thing to remember is I might place zero value on something, but as long as you can find a buyer then stuff has value.
I suppose one other way to do this (That would hopefully be outlawed) is the creation of a virus that wipe out all the natural sources of a product (I'm thinking mainly of foodstuffs here), leaving a single company the owner of the plant/genome/whatever. The idea is explored in one of Zach's comics: [2]
>A human is only happy if she has two, and everybody else has one. And even then, she starts imagining three.
Once we eliminate all the "simple" causes of scarcity, we'll soon be on to the next group. Some things probably won't present themselves as limited until they become scarce.
One example I like to think of: Land, it is currently abundant, to the point of ridiculousness based on our population. However, land near X (city, hospital, family, etc), is pretty limited. This is caused by unique local/contextual reasons. Not every city can have a beautiful ocean sunset, not every city can have a giant canyon in the middle that provides a unique nightlife of weird depths.
Imagine an economy where everybody has a Universal Basic Income of about $10M. It's post-scarcity, so there are replicators that can make anything, and energy is really cheap. Robots mine and farm the asteroids using that cheap energy so all raw materials and raw food are really cheap. By really cheap, I mean about the same price as now. So you've got $10M a year in income, and can buy a car for about $500.
- Land is crazy expensive. There are billions of rich people bidding it up
- but you can rent an apartment for cheap since mile-high skyscrapers are easy to build
- human labour is crazy expensive -- who's going to work for you unless you pay substantially more than $10M/year?
- but people still need meaning in their life; most "work" is basically volunteer labour
Basically Star Trek.
Imagine a world where energy is practically free, you might be tempted to think that spells the end of scarcity. But you still have to deal with thermodynamics. Your factory could be churning out countless diamonds with the free energy you are getting but you are going to need a large heat sink for all the entropy you will be pumping out. The scarcity then is your local ability to dump entropy.
Or imagine a reality where we create a Dyson Sphere and have super nano-tech and world peace is a reality. No more scarcity right? Those descendents are now competing with other space faring actors. They may be content to stay in our home solar system and wait for the sun to kill the species or wait for another actor to take our star. The new scarcity there is solar system redundancy.
Of the 2 visions, I always found the Elysium model to be much more likely...actually I would argue inevitable. Given human nature, I just can't foresee a world where everyone lounges around in equally-served harmony. No...there will always be an elite, and the elite will find a way to procure and consume a vastly disproportionate amount of resources. Even in the movie Elysium, after the proletariat storm the space castle at the end, any "victory" will be short-lived and will just produce a new elite.
So I guess I'm suggesting that the proclaimed political/economic system is irrelevant. The reality ends up looking pretty much the same in either case. And that reality will probably not be pretty once human labor is fully commoditized through technology.
For that matter, what is wealth in such a context anyways? What are they wealthy of? Magical mythical currency that they exchange with other rich people? No, they have to give it to someone to do something. Even if it means giving it to the soldiers that have to police the ever-growing population below.
Really, the whole story just relies on an unproven notion that "wealthy people are evil", as that is the only motive that can hold up. Why couldn't the poor simply pool their resources together (government?) and buy one of these things from the rich people.
I'm really bothered that the narrative in the media and movies is constantly presented as "the poor rise up against the evil rich".
Right now today this minute there are poor children in India living near garbage dumps picking through other people's litter.
http://wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-groups/waste-...
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/drivers_urb_change/urb_env...
Have a look at the image tab here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=child+waste+pickers
Your second paragraph is just saying "trickle down works" when we know it doesn't.
I was simply pointing out the fact that this story portrays the rich in some sort of bubble, where they don't interact economically with the rest.
Any who, "trickle down economics", most popular straw-man ever (I theorize). I don't subscribe to it, nor was I recommending it. Let's coin a new phrase: "free-trickle" and let everyone trickle to everyone else. In the economic sense.
>"Right now today this minute there are poor children in India living near garbage dumps picking through other people's litter."
Are you saying this is due to the rich hoarding their technological advances for exclusive use? Poverty in the third world is a hugely complicated problem. Not to mention the amount of money people, rich people, and government have been throwing at it because it's universally recognized as a "Bad Thing".
I'm not going to stand by idly while a small group of people get blamed for something we have all collectively tasked, and funded the government to do. Let's assign blame where it's really due.
When have entrenched elites ever given up power or let the poor rise voluntarily?
Either the poor would stage a revolution or some outside invaders would come in.
And what does a transition look like?
When I see this kind of thing, I think "of course!", but then I don't know what to advocate for, and what that might look like and how people will manage through the change.
That's the crux of the matter, isn't it?
Everybody "knows" that things should be changed, but nobody knows how and to what.
Fear, worry, shame based advocacy does more harm than good. Generally, of course. Sometimes we need those things, but not as norms in the political dialog.
When we are FOR things, it seems easier to work together on them to expected outcomes. Being AGAINST things is much easier, but so often leaves a hole we hope will be filled by market forces and that outcome will be better, or worthy.
Sometimes it is. I believe in markets, but they do come with inherent conflicts of interest that can be difficult to manage.
On this issue, it seems necessary to have a plan and a just and reasonable outcome goal.
They're both machines, which makes them distinct from humans and human decisions and human reasoning. We should neither be on guard against "robots" or capitalism[1] - rather, we should be on guard against machines in all their forms as they tend to affect humans without the safeguard of human reasoning.
I paraphrase Herbert:
Thou shalt not suffer a machine to rule over you.
[1] ... or democracy or catholicism ...
How does HN feel about technological unemployment?
Or not; it's still an open debate on whether and how sovereignty/government might counterbalance via entitlements (such as basic income schemes, etc.) the social changes that technological unemployment could bring.
In the meantime, the facts are that most people must strike bargains in order to obtain most (or possibly all) of the material needs of their lifestyles (and possibly also provide for dependents), and that the most usual bargaining to be struck involves their offer of labor; hence their reasons for all the dreading about technological unemployment. If most could clearly find their way to situations where employment wasn't a requirement towards getting their material needs met, then such fears would abate.
How does HN, a hotbed of libertarian free-market worship that also reveres smarts and science, respond to this?
They're all (as is the United States, for that matter) modern mixed economies; capitalism as a dominant economic system proper has been largely abandoned in the developed world in favor of systems which, compared to the then-dominant system named "capitalism" by its critics, systems with comparatively strong redistributive and central regulatory systems, and often a wide array of directly-provided State services, all reforms directed at mitigating the problems for which the critics that named "capitalism" were criticizing it.
Capitalism remains a significant ideology (particularly, surprisingly enough, among the capital-holding class and those who aspirationally associate with that class), and adherents to that ideology often misattribute the success of modern mixed economies compared to other alternatives to capitalism as a success of "capitalism".
Really, the difference between the US and European Social Democracies is between fairly small variations in the details of the structure of a mixed economy -- variations which can have a big practical effect, and are worth discussing, to be sure.
What annoys me is he often has the basic facts right. For example, fully general AI is dangerous (but not really because of Terminator-like scenarios); if there are intelligent aliens we should not expect them to be nice any more than mean, and there are good arguments to expect mean, and so we should be careful (but not because of the very unlikely scenario outlined in Signs); and in this case he's right that further automation of the economy will produce greater economic inequality, but economic inequality is a good thing, it's absolute wealth and poverty that's the real problem, and I'd bet on the trend of the poor not in fact getting poorer, on an absolute scale, continuing. See http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
I just want to point out the shallow stereotypicality of that remark. That's all.
"The rest", as a complement to "super rich" in the above, clearly means "not super rich". This necessarily includes various categories such as "merely rich, but short of super", as well as "well-off", "struggling", and "flat broke".
The poverty line is an abstraction that demarcates zones in a political field. What it means to be "poor" is a moving target. Someone from the 1600's would laugh at what constitutes a "poor" person today. How can someone be poor and have all that stuff (automobile, iPad, high speed Internet, 50" TV, ...), and weigh 300 pounds, too? And still alive at 45 years old, and smiling---with no missing teeth when doing so. What's more, working only 5 days a week for some 7 hours a day.