What to do with billions of useless humans?
koreaherald.com
koreaherald.com
So, what happens when retooling isn't even an option? Utopia for some, utopia for all? I just can't seem to make any sense of it, but given the lack of empathy in the current climate for people labeled as other, I would suspect the former.
Arnold Kling is fond of "The Diamond Age", with Thetes and Vickies. Thetes are proles who live on a stipend type thing; Vickies are the ruling elite with extremely tight social strictures. Hopefully somebody more familiar with the book than I can help - I'm repeating Arnold's view of it.
BTW, Arnold Kling also does work in "PSST" - Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade, which is largely athwart this issue.
I do think that "opting out" will become more and more important as society becomes increasingly ephemeral.
There are worse options!
I once asked a question on Reddit indirectly asking about working class men and what the Tiny House community (majority women) thought of them since many working class men would have the skills to help construct houses.
After that I felt pretty sure large swathes of Americans utterly despise each other. It wasn't a good feeling.
*not really.... right next to it, though. Of course I grew up "middle class" like everyone else, right?
I think rich people are well aware of the problem (appeals to superiority) in a way that most people aren't. They are constantly in contact with people trying to butter them up. Gradually they develop a sense of detachment, not really believing they're that awesome as they're being told but searching out independent metrics since the human feedback has become unreliable. Or they go batshit into fantasy land.
I may be biased myself but I honestly believe the middle class is responsible for many of the problems we see. They have been constantly buttered up by sycophant politicians and media sources.
I have even seen statements in the media to the effect that the middle class can do no wrong. Recent complaints about the reduction in size of this class often have this thrown in. It is never considered they might NOT actually be God's gift to planet earth but part of the problem.
Is it so surprising that the government has elected officials in western countries that are almost universally doctors and lawyers? Two groups of people who famously have no time for understanding anything other than their field of study because they spent the better part of their lives absorbed in that intense study. Maybe we can't be saved by lawyers and doctors, no matter that they have high IQ, because they are attracted to work on the wrong problems for society.
Consider how different a Congress of computer geeks and scientists would be. I also believe there would be substantial problems since our group also has failure modes like any other. But to say the least it would be different to what we have right now. To be frank I suspect the denizens of HN are more aware of their failure modes than present day Congress. It is not about IQ, it is about the problems you process.
There exist whole swathes of problem areas I see exactly nobody addressing! But by all means let's cross our t's and dot our i's in trade agreements and constitutional amendments.
I vote for the Brain In A Vat things I saw in Psycho-Pass. They had at least some handle on the distributed nature of knowledge and understanding.
I think the attraction of medicine and law is status. And you can't do anything about that. That's how hu-mans are wired.
Oh no! They got to you too! :-)
If you have an opportunity take a gander at "Ben's Mill" It's a short twenty minute documentary on youtube. I think it is very revealing about the kind of self confidence and respect the working class used to have in western countries but which is now lost.
If nothing else it is a beautiful illustration of how things were, it's well worth the watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s
To render all those people unto 'trailer trash' 'white trash', is despicable. You can tell a lot about people by how they treat others they consider their inferiors.
Doctors are responsible for killing their patients by virtue of not being efficient and by preventing technological adaptions. Even properly done digital medical records are impossible in the present world. I'm sure you read recently on HN that medical staff error is responsible for an incredible number of deaths. When I think: heart disease and cancer, it seems incredible that you should add 'Doctor' into the mix of things most likely to kill us, yet it is so.
Lawyers are harming the economic progress of in the main. Don't even think that is very controversial here. Niall Ferguson has outright accused them of this, that's the establishment!
On balance saying doctors and lawyers are a positive force for good is a crapshoot. Maybe so. Maybe there's objective evidence against the intuitive position. Just maybe, they're parasites in a parasitical system that is getting worse with their intransigeance.
I look forward to a flourishing of terrible poetry, bad music, and sure, lots of TV watching etc.
My facebook feed is really interesting, the AI that curates it is doing a good job, it seems to know what I like to see and recommends more interesting things to get sucked into.
I think humans and machines will blend, so there won't be an AI vs human 'war'... we will integrate AI tools into ourselves thus becoming more than human. A hyper connected being.
I also agree with the blending, reality thus far seems to be one big mixing matrix of mass energy, and our classification of what is AI vs what is human seems pretty moot in comparison.
[0]: http://infinite-dusk-4495.herokuapp.com/stories/1-1427256350...
I.e. useless. Sure, not morally, but economically. This is what we're talking about when discussing automation of jobs. It's important to be precise, otherwise we risk miscommunication.
Politicians need GDP growth because of how government is financed. This isn't foolish nor power-hungry. It's just more or less a fact.
And turn this on it's head - somewhere, a guy/gal is making something you don't even know you'll need yet, who you have never met. That's the thing least about power I ever did hear.
Specifically, jobs-as-political-fodder is ensconced into law in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1979, which lays on the Fed the dual mandate of currency stability and employment. If it is oppressive, it certainly wasn't anticipated to be that; quite the opposite.
Whenever you go to work to earn money for your bread; whenever you adjust your price to equalize supply and demand; whenever you change a product to make it more profitable - you're serving the economy. Single humans and single companies (hell, even most countries) are too weak to dictate how the market works.
I think it's important to keep in mind money isn't the end goal when we go to work. We work to live. And if we can live without working, it is a choice we can take.
The truth is that what really makes people 'useful' is there interactions with other humans. No matter how sophisticated the technology or what level of super-human super-intelligent or even as he speculates super-empathetic type of AI, human relationships will still be the true measure of value for people.
This concept of 'useless human beings' only makes sense if you have a primitive elitist Malthusian view in the first place. Which unfortunately many people do have that.
We should expect unenhanced human 1.0 to become the next chimpanzee analog in the hierarchy. We should hope he is right that the AIs are more empathetic towards their inferiors than we have been.
It depends on what you mean by "earned".
So you've got a completely independent "fully automated" economy of robots creating "goods" (as defined by humans) and exchanging them with one another while humans starve to death watching that?
The market can and does get stuck in weird stupid-ass loops. Consider, for instance, the advertising industry. Most of its output is aimed at cancelling itself out (e.g. when you and I compete for the same group of customers, my advertising expenditure goes mostly to cancel out yours, and vice versa). Also in on-line advertising, a lot of money is being moved over nothing - consider, for instance, analytics. Many people in Internet marketing are clueless about statistics, but so are their clients - so as long as they can bullshit the customers that their service is helping (graph is going up!), they get paid, and customers are happy, because they're clueless too and can't verify the effectiveness of the service they paid for.
And now for a funny twist - people making those analytics tools know this too, and guess what - they're starting to offer statistically invalid measures that are likely to look like the changes marketing people introduced are working. So those marketing people are being bulshitted by their tools now.
It's not a circle per se, but it shows another example of money moving around over no value created.
Humans dictate what the "loop" is. They define what gets manufactured, and who it gets delivered to. How do they get out of the loop?
I believe the whole idea of humans becoming "useless" or "obsolete" is the biggest piece of nonsense I've come across in the last few years.
Also, it may be one with a solution that's easy to state - but not necessarily easy to reach. We can't suddenly change how the economy works - we don't have direct control over it. We can try to transition the current one to the desired future one my means of setting up incentive structures appropriately.
I don't know what would or could prevent that assuming the ratio and rough magnitude between those two figures. At that point, you'd hope that the pursuit of status would presumably move elsewhere.
Engineering incentives is beyond difficult. Many, many of the things people complain about most in the modern economy is due to some crufty legacy incentive-engineering left over from years past.
Before the industrial revolution we had lots of horses for horse power. Then we made engines which replaced horses. Horses didn't change jobs, they couldn't.
Low hanging fruit here is education, tradespeople (AI will not be repairing your car for a while), managerial and oversight tasks, QA engineers, blah, blah, blah. There are plenty of things that humans will be doing better than AI, and from those we'll probably continue specializing and be more ready to handle when automation of more complex tasks does eventually happen.
That may not be the right question. There are all kinds of things that theoretically we could replace with bots over humans but we do not because of convention. For example Home Depot or any Home/Shed tool supply store. Let me explain?
In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age there is a class of humans who generate handcrafted items. They have machines that produce anything to molecular perfection and yet humans (due to our nature) seek to distinguish themselves from other groups of humans using objects. In this case flawed objects, but objects they willingly paid for nonetheless. It's all about status!
This is not outlandish to me. I want to construct a Tiny House. I know that when I develop the skills and accomplish this task I will place considerable value on my creation.
It is extremely likely that this is not optimal because of the division of labour. However I will enjoy my Tiny House regardless.
AI can endlessly optimize production but it cannot manufacture personal pride or social class.
Human nature creates scarcity naturally even within a state of abundance.
We really do like to belong to tribes and be 'self made'.
Also, I find it weird to put agricultural and industrial revolution together in this context.
Agricultural revolution was when people shifted from doing less physical work (hunting) to doing more physical work (building a civilization). It probably wasn't even by choice, but simply because agricultural societies were more efficient and would conquer those which didn't settle down. About the only thing I see here in common with industrial revolution is the forced change of lifestyle.
Perhaps you mean the initial spark of an invention, the idea which strikes like a lightning, and so on? But many inventions happen by accident (like the post-it note invention, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-note...). And then you could argument that only human are crazy enough to find novel usage for useless things.
I don't know.
Or is it a gradient, where the high end of the mental work will remain performed by humans, and will grow to encompass more work?
And if it works like that, can our education systems change to keep people productive for longer?
A hundred farm workers get replaced by one tractor, but that's okay, because those hundred workers become tractor repairmen, tractor factory workers, tractor designers, and we can farm far more land and produce wealth more efficiently. But not everyone who could plow a field can design a tractor. A thousand years ago, damn near every job was manual labour and could be done with a two-digit IQ, but we're reaching the point in first-world countries where less than half the work which needs to be done can actually be done by someone in the lower half of the population's intelligence distribution.
If we're not there yet, we will be soon. And I think it's fundamentally different to every previous automation revolution.
If we pushed towards educating people in practical skills, like tractor design, do you really think that it would be a large number of people who are incapable of grasping the concepts? Especially if we used the modern research we have into how people learn effectively?
Education as an industry and cultural norm needs to grow -- and not in the abominable way that it is now, with us glorifying education for the sake of education -- but a push towards valuing people who have learned specialized skills, regardless of what they are.
There's a reason that we have a dearth of mechanics in the U.S., and it's not because being a mechanic is an unattainable goal, but rather because the social norms around specialized blue collar work are ridiculous in the U.S.
Besides we still haven't really figured out post-industrial revolution employment all that well. Lots of people in bullshit jobs collecting paychecks just because.
Once most of customer service and human drivers are eaten by software, which will probably happen without solving 'hard AI' tech will employ even fewer people.
Jobs will only be created out of that if cheaper transportation and customer service enables a new place in the market that wasn't already existent.
So far I don't know of any jobs that the AI revolution has created other than people that create and train AI systems. It simply wouldn't be profitable to employ these people if they weren't destroying more jobs than they take up.
It's a good book but he chickens out of saying difficult to hear things about us humans. It was extremely obvious to me that he skates figure eights around controversial topics because he made contradictory statements several times. In the first half of the book he'll say one thing, and then in the second half he'll kowtow to prevailing orthodoxies about humans.
During my reading I began to think he might be writing it in a Straussian style i.e. one version of reality for intellectuals, another for the plebs. My copy of his books is sprinkled with exclamation marks.
Given how popular witch hunts are these days perhaps that what it takes to get a message out there.
We are biological animals! We are flawed beings! Let's accept this and move on!
The problem is that we value human life and would never subject people to the dangers of space even if they willingly accept the risk. Life is too valuable!
But what happens when a human life is worth nothing? What happens when a human's contribution to humanity is net negative and every person is, by default, a waste of resources? What happens when a person is cheaper than a machine for some tasks?
It wasn't too long ago that people threw themselves to the ocean in the hope of establishing a better life somewhere unknown. People died, but no one found the cost too high to bear. Life wasn't too valuable then.
We have an opportunity here, but we have to devalue life to take advantage of it. And btw, I don't delude myself. I am sure that my children or grandchildren, no matter how successful I may come to be, will be part of that generation, Generation Zero, the one without value. But I hope they have a purpose, at least.
of course the AI will be designed not to help the caller get to their ends, it will be designed to maximize shareholder value. ie, say just the right things to get you quit, and to upgrade, ie manipulate you.
And probably dead. Except for some tiny proportion of slaves who are entertaining and/or useful.
The one shareholder will be the most aggressive, narcissistic and psychopathic son of a bitch, because those are the qualities competition selects for.
I thought this election cycle was bad. It's almost reassuring that much worse horrors are possible.
Maybe for some things we will prefer caring humans, because they're not just faking it, and this has value. And maybe we could create an economy built around deep human relationships.
If AI takeoff is slow? Basic income -> intelligence amplification -> mind merging. With the option to stop at any point and have a comfortable life.
Instead it postulated the already known givens.