Stephen Hawking: AI will decimate middle class jobs
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
This is accurate. It is Moravec's Paradox.
I keep repeating it because there is a slew of newspaper articles since Trump's victory claiming that Silicon Valley destroyed the manufacturing jobs.
This isn't even wrong.
It is true that technology destroyed them, but we're talking about Industrial Revolution era technology.
Highly Repetitive manual tasks have been automated by machines. Finishing components and configuration of components is mostly performed in Chinese factories or in Western factories, some of which are so highly automated they are called black sites. Anything that could be put into a factory for making the parameters of the task simpler, is mostly already there.
The 'low hanging fruit' for disrupting the working class is gone, long gone.
It now requires very sophisticated AI and robotics to really impact the remaining working class niches. This is easily several decades away.
Guess who performs a lot of work with raw information? The middle classes. That's why they are in the crosshairs of Silicon Valley.
A cynic might suggest this 'panic' over the working class losing their jobs has a lot more to do with the middle classes losing theirs.
I mean, what are the alternatives?
You can prohibit automation per law, so that everyone can stay in their jobs. This will probably fail because not every country will pass such laws.
You can try to teach the people new stuff that can't be automated easily.
But does a clerk want to become a pastry chef or gardener (some of the harder to automate jobs it seems)?
Or teach them "higher" education in the hopes they can create their own automations and make money with it, but how much of these clerks are good enough to get through universtiy decades after they left school.
As far as alternatives to UBI go, a lot of people have the hope that automation (indirectly) will create new jobs, and society will ultimately adjust to fill those jobs. I don't know if this will always happen. Many people aren't going to buy any pastry or ask for gardeners if only a handful of them can afford these things to begin with.
I think so, too.
But I also think the new jobs would be better if they weren't created because of fear, but because people wanted to do them.
There is a litany of reasons why. Mostly on the "I agree in principal but..." basis. Here are three.
1. The Big Bang.
A change as drastic as UBI should be introduced gradually. Fucking up on this scale would have enormous repercussions. For instance: one could gradually lower the age of retirement until everyone is retired (or you could lower taxes, or discount healthcare... you get the idea).
If these are untenable propositions, then UBI definitely is.
2. Poison In The Well.
If the government is the arbiter of UBI funds, then it gains a type of power it currently does not possess. If there exists criteria for taking UBI away from an individual or group, then the government has the ability to 'tone police' (like China's social credit system) in a way which has more in common with authoritarian dictatorships than a Western style state. Having the autonomy of providing your own food, shelter and other resources enables you to have political independence even if everybody doesn't like you. Not so under UBI. Your economic state is hitched such that only the wealthy now have the right to political opinions. Moral panics should not be able to affect funding.
The left and right shall tear UBI apart like a rag doll and it could even become the fulcrum through which a civil war begins. If people feel a threat to their source of food exists you'd have an Arab Spring situation.
3. The Parasite Traveller.
There is a contradiction between UBI and having open borders. You must have very close to closed borders to citizens of poorer countries or UBI states which are less wealthy.
You have to choose between values. There is no state on this planet capable of UBI for all.
There's much to be said for this point of view. Certainly since the 90's in the US most of the manufacturing jobs have gone to Mexico or overseas. Those that remain tend to be higher skilled jobs. It didn't seem to be an issue worthy of much official news promulgation until the Midwest became important as a vote bank...
Of course journalists will never consider that their enterprise would require reform. They are used to being the question makers and opinion formers.
I suspect if we got rid of them all the world would be no worse off. People would communicate to each other as before and nothing of value would be lost. Perhaps less coordination of mind-share is what we need. Does anybody seriously believe our political systems improved with the availability of 24 hour news? Perhaps our political leaders should not be available on camera at all. I don't see what the argument is that more journalism and televisual display somehow made politics better. It made it more theatrical and less practical. How was that supposed to improve governance?
tldr; They don't like it up 'em.
http://www.businessinsider.com/clsa-wef-and-citi-on-the-futu...