Have you had the “AI talk” with your kids?
anxiousrobot.net
anxiousrobot.net
We quit our jobs and moved to Puerto Rico and moved to a mountain top in the center of the island. Our goal was to show them what life is like in most other parts of the world where people struggle.
They run around and play in the forest, help tend the garden, and learn from us, books, and exploration. It's been our year of "disconnecting" from the rat race and learning how to thrive as a family of 5 on under $1200 a month.
We're packing up and moving to Ithaca, NY at the end of the summer but I hope none of us go straight back to a consumer-based lifestyle even though we'll have the income to do it.
When regular employment dries up and all they have is self-sufficiency, maybe they'll now have the tools to be content.
It annoys me anything below today's incredibly high standard of living is considered struggling.
Puerto-rico's per capita GDP is 5x (!!!) higher than the United States in 1900 (US GDP per Cap was $4,096.00 in 1900 inflation adjusted).
Is it really correct to say that almost the entire US population was struggling up until the mid 1900s? And now we're in some utopia?
'Struggling' implies an emotional state. Yet the standard of living implies almost nothing about emotional state. I'd imagine Puerto Rico has a very similar emotional state to the US! So why do we constantly use the word struggle as a financial comparison and not an emotional one? It almost seems like a unconscious conspiracy to garner emotional support for what amounts to a more financial difference.
For an argument about relativity, a reliance on GDP is an amusing false equivalence.
Yet, I don't feel like I'm struggling. Is it really fair to say I'm struggling just because I don't meet the standard of living of 300+ years from now?
That seems like the same idea as saying that much or the majority of the US was struggling in 1900.
Given that most of the world is past number 1, all the rest they'd need to do is have financial equality (hard, IMO), or ensure that only few have wealth and are segregated (easier, IMO).
The last thing you'd want is poor, middle, and rich in 1/3, 1/3 , 1/3 quantities all interacting with each other.
Just yesterday there was a study that made rounds how having the Economy Class airplane passengers walk past the First Class causes turmoil. That's a perfect example of what not to do.
Moving goalposts doesn't change lives. As standards of living improve, people's perceptions of what they ought to have changes as well.
Your saying what people should or should not constitute as suffering will have very little effect given that people tend not to listen when they suspect they are being talked down to.
Struggling is not really all that subjective, IMO. It's something we've all felt (emphasis on emotion) and can quickly relate to and reasonably collectively define.
My point is we should not try and constitute something other than struggling as struggling. Struggling is already a reasonably well defined emotional state, there's no need to try and equivocate other things with struggling.
More directly, We should not conclude that poor and few means implies struggling. All too often we conclude that richer means less struggling, and that by increasing wealth we can make the world a better place.
yes, that was the point I was trying to make. GDP per capital say little about how much people are actually struggling - an emotional state, not necesssarily a financial one.
yet people always equivocate 'poor' with 'struggling'.
-Join a farm share. We have a zillion around here and it helps plan out meals ahead of time instead of being pulled into the event horizon of Wegmans.
-Speaking of, consider getting a meat freezer and hunting for deer. We have way too many and venison will last you for months. Just be mindful of your weapons - IIRC rifles are banned in Tompkins County.
-Don't take off the snow tires until at least May. Trust me on this.
-If you need contracting done, look to the Mennonites first. They work hard, they're affordable, and it's real quality.
-Take vitamin D supplements. The sun doesn't exist here.
We're looking at renting a house at the Ithaca Eco Community to help the kids with socialization and to continue the intent to let the kids open the door and just go out and play with friends in nature. One of the other benefits is that there are lots of other residents that grow food and they let you set aside land to grow your own stuff.
We're not really hunters, but it's never too late to learn. We'll get a freezer and probably try to find a local hunter willing to let me pay for processing in exchange for half of the meat.
Excellent suggestion about the Mennonites. Our goal is to buy some land within 10 minutes of town and build a small cabin during our first year. Then we'll use that as a stepping stone to build a real home over a few more years, depending on disposable income. We don't like financing things.
Best place to buy land is to the east in the Dryden/Freeville area. Mostly because it's cheap and it has good bus connections. Anything in the town or city of Ithaca is (seriously) at San Francisco levels of cost relative to average income. The real house might be best placed to the south in the Danby area, since it's also cheap and there's a lot of south hill development (past IC) being planned, so the value is gonna go up in the next few decades. It's also the best way to get to New York (south via Owego).
I hope you enjoy the most good enough place in the world :)
When 60% of the workforce is unemployable, either there will be massive unemployment, and the crime, poverty, and starvation associated, or there will be a massive paradigm shift in how we think about employment, money, and scarcity.
I'm hoping we get to the latter before the former.
That doesn't necessarily mean humans will go extinct, but there might only be a handful of us left in zoos, bred for whatever characteristics pleases the machines most.
The industrial revolution eliminated 60% of the jobs and gave birth to communism/socialism/a reaction to the wear of workers by a powerful people.
Subsequent revolutions also gave much more leverage to the "guy in his garage in the Silicon Valley". My wishful thinking hopes that AI will enable us to take up much bigger projects, each of us. Writing a symphony when you're alone? Creating a band, 2 albums, with all the matching marketingware and tv ads, in just 2 weeks? Developing a custom processor as a startup of 3ppl? Creating a new model of car every week? My gut says we'll invent enough fashions and arts to keep us busy.
But there sure will be a lot of poverty and reactive movements. A bloodshed, at least as much as today.
Bloodshed has been steadily going down for the past hundred years. Besides, Facebook's precognitive security system will anticipate and humanely neutralize dissent before blood is shed. ;)
Bloodshed is going down! This is just a blip! Heil Hitler!
They are not analogous. People are expensive, inefficient and unreliable when compared to machines (where they can even be compared). Each new "revolution" will try to get rid of as many workers as it can. There won't be new jobs for the people that have little or no education. Hell, there may not even be new jobs for people with education. Silicon Valley is the perfect example how this process will go down: new riches for a few people concentrated in very rich metropolises. Where is Namibia's Spotify? In Sweden. There's nothing wrong with this btw, old age technologists used to envision a time where technology freed human beings from the shackles of work but capitalism is in conflict with this idea. The stewards of capitalism need the "losers" and the result will be a lot of misery until we figure out how to accommodate all the unemployed.
1) obsessing about employment numbers is exactly the problem.
2) it will be catastrophic unless we change our economic system.
[0] I'm talking about the weird "dual mandate" of the central banks - "maintain employment numbers" and "keep inflation in check": Mostly they have chosen to attack the first with policies encouraging positive inflation, occasionally ignoring the second altogether. A great way to keep employment up is to require people to get jobs in order to stay on a compounding treadmill of currency devaluation. So we see a lot more people entering the workforce too, with collateral damage that families now have to have two working parents, single parents can barely support their children, people go into massive debt to get past the first jobs gatekeeper (college) etc.
Are you referring to the fewer women in the workforce 50 years ago? If so, with the increase of women in the workforce during and after WWII, I think "50% of society not working" sounds like a rough overestimation.
(low interest rates have been a policy after recessions but haven't really lead to long periods of inflation like occurred in the 1970s)
That's fine if you think it shouldn't be allowed to exist, but quoting quips is a dreary way to argue it.
Economic power translates into real power quickly. What's to stop that from happening this time around ?
Nothing.
That economic power translates in real power differences didn't just manifest itself between men and women, but between far more groups in society as well.
Once you can do things in and with your head, the world becomes your playground. Once the kids understand that hurting people in any way is literally senseless, that the civil servant state and nine-to-five work is destroying intellect, once they realise the awesomeness that lies within that big melon everyone of us is carrying around, I think humanity as a whole can get out of this mess properly.
And I think enlightment is the only way humans are going anywhere other than destruction, by whom- or whatever it may be. The consumer (a.k.a. mind-numbing) industry everybody seems to be so happy about is definitely not the way to go. Forgive the metaphor, but plugging everybody into the matrix and feeding them bullshit 24/7 just to keep them happy is not how we can stay on top of things and our intelligent machines. If the complex machinery that is a Human is reduced to a consumer, it is of no value to electronic machines out to solve the galaxy's problems (other than maybe as an energy source ).
It seems as though we won't be going anywhere far away from the solar system for a while, so instead let's go deep. Let's go into ourselves and discover the worlds inside that nature has provided us with.
Philosophy and psychology. Not by forcing students to learn Kant by heart and regurgigate him for a good grade, but by showing children what they have in their minds and what they can do with that.
Mathematics. Strongly related to philosophy, show the beauty in making connections between simple building blocks to create massively complex systems. You and I, this world, everything we know of is dictated by mathematics (or can at least be understood through them, depending on your point of view).
That alone can give any non-debilitated mind enough material to think about for the rest of its days.
If your mind is not structured in a way favourable to the understanding of complex relationships, you can go into the arts or crafts. Some minds work better with something physical to work on, some are better at internatlizing concepts and tearing them to pieces by thought.
Don't put everyone through the same grind because everybody is different. No wonder our schools fail, because they do precisely that. Also, students are expected to learn a bunch of rules by heart, they often don't need to understand the underlying concepts to pass with flying colours. If you don't know where something comes from, you can hardly expand on it because there's nothing to build on. It's like a structure just hanging mid-air, going nowhere, but steadily being tacked stuff onto. It's not stable, and the stuff being tacked on has no relations to anything else, since there is no foundation of broad, general knowledge about the world.
(edit) Classes are way overcrowded. What we need is lots of teachers for little groups so that every student's enquiries can be answered in proper time. Instant feedback on any question should also help make the whole thing more like a dialog where the student tries to find out more about a subject and the teacher can provide the information or show the student where and how it can be looked up.
That's the traditional answer. It's obsolete. We've already reached "peak school", where sending more people to college doesn't pay off. (Especially if you have to pay for the schooling with loans.) About half of new US college graduates are not doing a job that requires their education.
Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Teach a computer to do something, now millions of computers can do it.
There are other avenues we can take with teaching that revolve around self-learning, online tutoring and short-term intensive programs for specific skill sets.
Higher education is not necessarily the same as vocational education and has value beyond the teaching one to "do something"
I see why you say this answer is obsolete, but I would disagree. Increasing the education level of a population I think will increase its likelihood to come up with creative solutions to the "no jobs" problem: either by the development of new jobs for educated humans, or more likely, a new way to live in our jobless society.
Once you have a certain base knowledge (which wouldn't necessarily be the same for everyone, not sure about that), the brain, if given the freedom to do so, starts exploring possibilities, all by itself. Children need to have interesting, fascinating things to play with. Learning the tools then becomes part of the games and starts happening automatically.
> sending more people to college doesn't pay off. (Especially if you have to pay for the schooling with loans.)
That's an economic problem, i.e. one humans have created themselves, thus it can, with the appropriate effort, be solved. In the perverse case of american student loans, it's just one issue in a whole system that cannot be profitable for more than a tiny fraction of its constituents.
> About half of new US college graduates are not doing a job that requires their education.
So now that AI is taking over, let these people finally do something with their knowledge that they enjoy. (edit) That means stop with this productivity madness. Creativity, be it graphical, musical, philosphical, mathematical, whatever, is not productive. Let the machine be productive, let the human mind roam free.
> Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Teach a computer to do something, now millions of computers can do it.
We are still a long way off artificial human intelligence, for a very simple reason: we do not understand ourselves. How do you plan on replicating our intellect as long as the same is misunderstood?
Because that's not a Nash equilibrium. Translation: if you do this you're dead, because anybody can come in, give a slight nudge to this system and it'll topple over entirely.
> We are still a long way off artificial human intelligence, for a very simple reason: we do not understand ourselves. How do you plan on replicating our intellect as long as the same is misunderstood?
Sure but most of the misunderstanding that we know existed came from OVERestimating human intellect. Not from underestimating it.
Example: chess.
But what if it isn't where we wander off to, inside or outside, that matters but the wanderlust itself? Maybe the main hindrance to human happiness, once some living standards are satisfied, is just our inherent restlessness. And maybe Pascal was right: maybe all of our miseries indeed derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Your second point is interesting and I have never considered the issue like that. Time to think ;)
Something like this: http://www.wired.com/2016/05/mysteries-chickpea-water-magica... springs to mind as an example.
Are there going to be unemployed truck drivers, and ditch diggers... yes. Will there be a larger place for craftsmenship, and art, I would sure hope so. The question is how we get through the transition.
Because art is expression, and expression is fundamental to humanity, machines won't be able to push art in the same way that humans can.
The bean water thing is a bit different. Turning something that was basically garbage (or pig feed) into something that might have a lot of new and interesting uses, is a bit beyond Watson today.
To me the future is one where we all have access to the basics, and you choose to have a few things that are of quality.
The catch is, making things by hand isn't very profitable. I think a minimum income paid for by machine "owners", distributed to everyone frees normal people find the work they LOVE instead of just "work".
If I didn't have to worry about money, i'd split my time between the woodshop, and designing a new programming language.
Some people will still pay the artisan to create the table, but most will continue to take the cheaper route.
Could this be automated? I guess, once someone has thought of it. But could the thought of this be automated?
Looks like he's using an electric stick welder clipped to some nails driven into dampened wood.
That’s not the case this time. This time it’s different."
I guess the point here is that the author cant fathom new job types in the future, so therefore there will be no new job types in the future. Glad we got that one settled!
This argument has been going on literally for hundreds of years. Just because the author cant fathom new job types proves nothing.
People lose jobs because of decisions made by other people. Science will not ever come to an end, and there will always be new job types because of that.
Just imagine when commercial space travel becomes a serious thing. They will look back and say "did you know once a month they used to argue on HN about how in the future there will be no jobs? They were so silly because they didnt know about space travel."
And then someone else will say "yea they were wrong then, but this time its different..."
What are lathe operators doing these days? Some of them oversee automated factories - the rest flip burgers.
Which illustrates my point that people lose jobs because of decisions made by other people.
OK, so in Wall-E, no one did squat because the ship was self-contained and fully automated. But let's ponder the world that exists somewhere between today and Wall-E.
Entertainment is a profession. It's "kind of a rare one" right now, but it's becoming more and more of one. Whether you're "YouTube famous" or "that kid on Vine" or you've got a Twitch channel that makes you money, people pay just to watch other people be entertained or do something "useless" but somehow interesting.
Obviously, the bigger question in that article was "how money will be distributed and exchanged." Can a huge plurality of people be "Wall-E entertained" sustainably, while some do "critical" jobs (if there are any critical jobs that are still done by humans - hardware/network maintenance, software programming, will the vision of the future be determined by humans or AI?)
It seems to me that you're saying a small minority of people will work as entertainers (and presumably get paid for doing so) while another small minority fulfills critical functions that can't be automated, and the majority sits back to be entertained.
What I'm not clear on is where the money comes from to pay the entertainers and the critical maintainers, if the majority aren't working. The money can't come from the masses, because the masses aren't employed. Are you suggesting that in this scenario, it's a post-scarcity society, money is never transferred at all, and that's why it works?
But we've also seen niche markets be more effectively catered to. I'm running up a decent bill on Patreon each month, less than I would for a cable subscription, and I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the interactions I am having, even if they're somewhat passive.
I see the future of work looking a lot like migrant laborers sending remittances does now, but with a very different scale and breadth. A lot of mid-sized communities (small towns), where there's a single major breadwinner and a bunch of entertainment and services to support them, but without the vassalage that this lead to in the past because of the interconnectedness of the social graph and the amount of flexibility that allows.
The new social structures are going to look somewhat between an extended family and an orgy. The social ties are moving from fixed points like blood and religion into common interests and value sets... which are well predicted by the old indicators, but not exclusively tied to.
I just hope that we survive it, because the re-org will not be pretty. Tribalism and fear of the unknown are still powerful factors, even if the widening of personality-space has weakened them.
[1]https://np.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/35pjuq/tolarian_co... [2]https://www.patreon.com/tolariancommunitycollege
Personally speaking, the future is far too nebulous for me to have a lot of conviction on what's going to happen, so I'm going to accept or discount anything yet.
Everyone seems to look at technology-caused unemployment as a doomsday scenario, but really, why should humans bother working when their basic needs can be taken care of? Isn't it a worse world when people either do meaningless work or else participate in meaningless status games for employment?
No.
The point here is that in the past it was always easier to teach a person how to do a new kind of job, than it was to build a machine to do it. That meant that as our world got more complex, there were an ever-expanding constellation of jobs which made sense for humans to do.
The problem comes when there is a generalist robot available which has a similar form factor and more capabilities than a human. At that point EVERY job is easier for a robot than a human. And the cost of building and operating that robot becomes a ceiling on what it makes sense to pay a human.
At first those robots will be insanely expensive. But thanks to Moore's Law, that won't last.
The _maximum capabilities_ of machines are ever improving, while the maximum capabilities of humans remain roughly stagnant [1]. Originally, we had humans distributed across the entire labor market, while machines had a maximum capacity of essentially 0 and performed no labor.
When the capacity of machines grew, it displaced the original luddites. While the transition was painful for those displaced at the time, ultimately humans were generally able to move "up" in the labor market. Today the maximum capacity of machines is increasing again. But, again, while painful for people being displaced there's still room for humans to move "up" in the labor market. Hopefully, again, discovering a new wealth of labor tasks that can be performed at these levels.
But a day will come when that's no longer sufficient. At some point the capacity for machines will equal that of humans. I don't think it's "now", but I do think it's going to happen in the next couple hundred or so years.
[1] There is definitely growth of the maximum ability of humans over time, but it is a much slower growth than that of machines.
Easy to think that, say, some day there will be a job as a 'AR skinner' where you create fake furniture overlays for people to get home and change the decor without changing the physical objects necessarily (rich people will be able to actually change the furniture, middle class will only be able to afford new skins)
Or maybe there will be 'AR artist' jobs where there will be walls around the city that are available for art, and when walking around you can decide which artist you want to see there, and it's automatically monetized that every time you look at artist X's art you will pay them 0.001$ or something out of your 'AR art skins' micropayment accounts.
I am sure there will also be jobs for 'AR replacer software creators' where the more you pay the better replacements will be available, where you can walk around and instead of being in a drab town with rain coming down it will look like you are walking around Yellowstone with pink unicorns flying around and a Tatooine double sun in the sky
There will also for sure be many jobs to create the software to handle all of those, and some of those will be very well paid indeed, but can you honestly conceive that 90% of the population will be able to make all this? Just look at self publishing fiction today, the barrier of entry towards writing a bestseller is as low as it's ever been, but outside of a few outliers (the martian, for example) how many writers are out now making a living out of this?
What about bands? No barrier of entry there either, you can have a recording studio equivalent to one that costed millions years ago running on your laptop, but how many bedroom producers are making a living off their music now?
There will always be creatives much much much better than any AI/robot, but with the hyper-competitive and winner-takes-all attitudes that permeate society these days, I don't see how you can go from "there will be many amazing new jobs available" to "there will be jobs enough at a skill level low enough for everybody to make a living at"
Why shouldn't we improve as well? Every day it seems there is a new story about further advances in amazing / fast / cheap / etc. gene splicing technology, or some new breakthrough in understanding how cancers work, or how longevity may be achieved, or how to correct color-blindness, etc.
Is it any less presumptive to assert that humans will make ourselves more and more amazing, as it is to assert that machines inevitably will?
I agree that there is a timeless quality to learning sports or arts that are obsolete, but at some point... it might be kind of depressing.
Besides, the reality of superior ability wouldn't be anything new. For everyone of my abilities, it seems incredibly likely that there exists another human somewhere that might be considered "better" than me.
But what about collecting knowledge? Sure, you could help analyzing the genome & biology of a rare butterfly with all your free time. Say, maybe it would takes computer-assisted humans several years. But the AI could finish it in a month! Wouldn't you feel silly about that?
Investing all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, A.I. Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
Edit:
I also liked the reply when Banks was asked about the great Minds of the Culture "... Is this what gods would actually be like?" to which we replied "If we're lucky".
Humans already operate on a very high level of abstraction. I'm not aware of how my food is being digested, I'm not aware of how my muscles are being maintained. (Although, come to think of that, I do wish I could direct my muscles to get swole without going to the gym.) I'm not really aware of every photon my eyes capture, I'm given a blurry "executive summary" that has the contrast in the center turned up to 11, and the color spectrum I see has had a clustering algorithm run on it.
Similarly, executives in a company don't always know what's going on in the day-to-day of their reports. They have an idea, but they don't actually solve the problems, and in same cases they don't even know how to solve the problems.
We use computers to help inform our decisions. As long as we can continue the path where humans work with AI, we will have some place with them.
These people will end up with the lion's share of money.
Then who will the machines produce value for? The hyperrich in this situation of course.
So a few people will be both the owners and the superrich consumers. From a purely mathematical standpoint, this will result in a vibrant economy.
From the perspective of the 99% or 99.995% this will be a disaster. But the history of life is the history of the winners.
The only way to change that will involve a serious redesign of civilization from the bottom up. I am for that, but human beings don't seem to be well suited for that task. The mindless muddying of every important political issue of our times by news, corporations and politicians suggests most of the human race is going to take a huge hit and then waste its miserable time fighting about why instead of coming together.
Machines don't buy stuff. Selling only to billionaires isn't much of a market.
There is the idea of universal income, but then that theoretically just keeps this sort of insanity going longer.
Yeah, that's the real issue, at some point, AI will likely render capitalism as "unmaintainable" - but humans aren't very good at changing, and switching from capitalism to some kind of post-scarcity Star Trek economy is going to "hurt" too many of the rich and powerful for them to agree to it - so it will be fought. It will be fought with the armies that the rich and powerful control - and it will be very, very bloody. I don't think I'll live to see it (I'm almost 50), but I think it will happen.
I like to think
(and the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
(Edit, format)
The major if is the basic income part - if this is established, psychologically people will adapt to the eternal weekend just fine.
What if AR helped people with the knowledge part, the "sharing" economy helped people with the tools part, and "wanting to save money" helped people with the "will" part.