The rise of the useless class
ideas.ted.com
ideas.ted.com
In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the "pattern recognition" aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity (apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to play Go.)
I don't doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously threaten human usefulness/dignity, but I question the timeline of "decades away".
If this makes you laugh, you have probably never worked in the public sector or big corps.
To put it into a more concrete analogy, Google is putting out autonomous cars when tons of companies are celebrating releasing the Model T or are still currently developing it with massive delays and cost overruns. Meanwhile, much of the appetite for government spending is dwindling for various reasons and this will cause a lot of strife that hurts already-slow moving organizations. Furthermore, brand recognition by the current generation of entrepreneurs for old hat technology companies is looking absolutely horrific. The next Fortune 500 CEOs 30 years from now are likely in their 30s or 40s now and they're well aware of the lack of compelling vision by so-called "technology" companies that are really just technology re-sellers and are thus unsuitable partners for increasingly tech-reliant businesses (the few that don't have such plans may be so clueless they won't matter).
I think it will make their job easier, which means more people will compete, which means less profitable work.
Most new construction would still follow fads, since humans tend to like them - look at the popularity of the McMansion, after all. A few designs from creative folks, who are not architects, would be simply beautiful or simply weird.
The folks in the supply chain - or whoever owns it - would wind up being more profitable because of more demand, though.
edited for an afterthought.
Furthermore, AI doesn't have to be 100% error free and spectacularly outperform every human, it just has to be cheaper and as-good or better than the average worker. I can think of a good number of coworkers in past jobs that are ripe for automating away - its just a matter of time when it becomes cheap enough to implement. These jobs are not high thought jobs but the ones where the rules are already set and they just follow them.
On the other hand, our society is getting more and more complex, and tasks are getting more and more specific. At the same time, organizations are structuring themselves so that employees are hyper-specialized and are only allowed to perform the exact set of tasks that they need to.
This is where AI can thrive.
In as much as doubling the workforce is similar to halving the number of jobs in pre-existing categories, I don't see the sky falling. Like with women joining the workforce, the shift to more automation will stimulate new kinds of labor demand. And it's similarly likely to make education even more important and relevant.
That said, women joining the workforce is perhaps the single largest contributor to long-term stagnant wage growth. Such shifts are unlikely to prove the end of labor, but they do create significant displacement that requires serious attention. Nothing about the "free market" guarantees that the economy and labor system will adjust quickly enough within timespans relevant to maintaining the well-being of the individuals displaced.
I don't really think there'll be anything particularly challenging about the next shift. In simple terms I don't see how it could be much more problematic than the addition of women to the domestic workforce immediately followed by hundreds of millions of Chinese laborers joining the global industrial economy. We just don't appreciate how disruptive those historical events were because, despite the weak U.S. response (as compared to Germany), even unassisted the labor economy did a decent job of treading water. It's quite amazing in retrospect.
Theoretically we could learn from our past mistakes and not only adjust but come out ahead in terms of income growth and equality. OTOH, we could not learn from our past mistakes, and our current issues would only be compounded. On this I'm much more pessimistic. When the electorate and political culture still pine for a labor economy that is 2 or 3 epochs in the past (i.e. ancient history!), that doesn't bode well for their ability to commit to the demands of the future.
Even worse is the fact that the intellectual class seems oblivious that history is merely repeating itself. The books about robots and labor literally have almost identical titles to books I read in the 1990s in college seminars discussing the implications of women, China, the information economy, and of course the rise of robots. Some of them were written in the 1980s. One famous book, "The End of Work" (Jermey Rifkin, 1994) could probably be re-published today with nary an edit. People would find it just as timely and insightful as they did then, and it'll prove just as irrelevant 25 years from now as it is today. We saw neither the dystopia nor the paradise he envisioned, but rather (as always) a slow, systematic, and largely hidden reorganization of the labor economy that became evident, if at all, only in hindsight.
My reaction was more like, we have this already due to plain old economic stagnation and (in the US) offshoring. No AI needed!
This said, I am strongly of the opinion that globalization is not a force that benefits everyone (to put it nicely) and it is not constructive that this opinion is not discussed more widely without having to pussyfoot around dirty words like protectionism and nationalism as if they are automatically bad words.
Over the 19th and early 20th century, the benefits of American westward expansion and the development of the industrial Midwest largely accrued to the big banks in New York. The same is occurring, just on a larger scale and accelerated due to leaps in technology.
The US is more than double Germany.
As for centralization, I agree with you, but what do you do with all the people who didn't back the right industry? They're slowly being displaced. If you subscribe to the concept of social welfare, a government should be ensuring their quality of life. This includes access to employment, education, healthcare and even pleasure.
This is the inconvenient truth of the current world we live in, but frustratingly it took a Trump and a Brexit to happen for the idea to get much coverage, and even still it is mired in unnecessary political complications that are not strictly relevant.
So:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/265cd8fb02fb44a69cf0eaa2063e1...
"Blame robots [for your imminent unemployment].
[Proved by] "A study at Ball State University's Center for Business and Economic Research" ("The myth and reality of manufacturing in America").
Which states:
http://conexus.cberdata.org/files/MfgReality.pdf
"We begin by examining productivity. The most common measure of productivity is the average product of labor, which is simply the value of all goods manufactured in the U.S. divided by the number of workers. "
^^
Which literally means that according to the author's calculations, if you offshore 50 workers and maintain sales, you have decreased US employment / GDP ratio and thus increased.
The of the paper then measures productivity, states that it's gone up and segues into a lot of reasons why it thinks the increase in productivity is actually because of machines.
Then they invent a calculation involving the trade deficit to determine the number of jobs lost by outsourcing (where one Chinese person buying a $5 million house/year in Cali "makes up for" losing 20 $50k/year jobs) and finish up with what can only be described as an unrelated whinge about US corporate tax rates (just in case you were left with any lingering doubts about whose side they're on).
Authors: Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA.
tl;dr some people use phony math to explain why it's wrong to point pitchforks at the 1%.
It has the potential to be a very vexing problem, actually. That may condemn literally hundreds of millions of people to poverty, feelings of uselessness (if not outright despair and depression). And very likely be contributing to higher suicide rates, among the newly obsolesced.
In that vein, it seems rather callous to describe earnest attempts to get a handle on the problem as "chatter".
1. Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased.
2. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will we reach a point where it is cheaper to automate a job than hire a person? Think of non-forklift lifting/moving of heavy stuff, we don't really need people doing this manually, robots should be able to do it. But we see with the Boston Dynamics robots that we are many years or decades away from commoditizing lifting robots.
3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc).
Actually, those jobs are still there. The current useless class are the people who are not capable of holding a modern job. And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When you take away someone's ability to support themselves because there are new, more efficient ways of using the shared resources, they're entitled to compensation [1]; but as a society we don't have a good way of enforcing that.
Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers).
[1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does
Handling cash can be handled by automatic machines (as evidenced by the many self-checkout systems) with one person dedicated to 4-8 checkout stations to assist with issues, check customer IDs, etc.
It's not that they're useless, but cashiers' utility is greatly diminished these days with automation reducing the skill, trust, and number of personnel required.
Interestingly, productivity has plateaued these past few years at the same time we're supposedly entering a golden period for applied machine learning. There are a million ways to explain that away, of course, but it's a reality people should really consider carefully before reflexively dismissing as transient.
In any event, if productivity improvements were to kick into high gear tomorrow we could expect more of the same--increasing displacement but not an overall, calamitous reduction in jobs per se. The increase in the unemployed labor force will open up new opportunities for businesses built around human services, while the reduction in prices for consumer goods will allow people to spend more money on those new services.
Things can totally get worse, especially in terms of wage inequality. But the laws of supply & demand make it almost impossible for a complex labor economy to simply fall off a cliff in the ways that overly imaginative "futurists" and "thinkers" would have us believe. In terms of basic economics, nothing about machine learning is substantially different from historical disruptions.
If you were to teleport somebody from 100 years ago to today, and then to 20 years from now, the relative differences in automation and computer intelligence between today and 20 years in the future would likely be indistinguishable from his perspective when comparing either of those time periods to 100 years ago. And yet without a doubt the contemporary and future economies would be far stronger, wealthier, and even more "equal" compared to the time period he came from. All precisely _because_ of that automation, not despite it.
What do you suppose is fair compensation for being replaced in that fashion? I think this is more complicated than just touting that we deserve basic income. Does an able-bodied person who chooses to not work deserve the same income as someone who is handicap and cannot work? And then the question arises of what amount of income is deemed sufficient?
In an age where income inequality is more of an issue than before[1], does someone on a basic income government program deserve as much as someone who obtained a degree and has a low paying job[2] (the averages here seem to be ~$35k for a low paying job. Keep in mind that the poverty level is about $16k[3] for a family of 2). How do you pay people on a basic income government program enough for a livable situation without making it unfair for people who are working for maybe just double the poverty limit?
[1] http://inequality.org/income-inequality/ [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=low+paying+college+degrees [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=federal+poverty+level
What about progressive taxation? Someone at double the poverty line might pay 10% and someone making $10 million might pay 60%.
Did the number of cashier's per customer (or perhaps more significantly, as a share of the population -- not labor force) increase? If you look at even AEIs graph [0] that they use to try to sell idea that ATMs didn't kill cashiers' jobs, it shows cashiers increasing rapidly during the very slow rollout of ATMs in the 1970s and 1980s, and the growth tapering off to very slow growth as ATMs take off in the 1990s and beyond (and remaining relatively flat even after the number of ATMs itself flattens in the mid-00s, probably as ATMs basically reached saturation but are still increasing functions, reducing the need for more tellers.)
[0] http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...
So the different types of numbers can help drive home different points:
* in absolute numbers, ATMs didn't cause any job losses.
* in relative numbers, there are less job opportunities in this space. (e.g. there used to be a need for 1 cashier per N people, not there is only a slot for 1 cashier per 2N people).
The second type of thinking is what people are worried about - if we keep reducing percentage of people who are needed to do stuff, what the other folks do?
When those improvements are AI-driven automation, we can.
(Made some edits to this comment after I realized I mistook the tellers graph for the ATMs.)
Bank teller employment is in decline.[2] -8% from 2014 to 2024, says DOL's projection. Although, as DOL says, "Job prospects for tellers should be favorable because many workers leave this occupation."
AEI's last data point is from 2008, which was before most ATMs could cash checks and pay out immediately. Now that ATMs can read and validate checks (including handwritten ones, there's considerable AI behind that), the big Friday check cashing line is at the ATM, not the teller windows.
A friend of mine runs a branch of a major bank. The bank is moving to a branch layout which looks like a car dealership without the cars. There's a receptionist to direct traffic, and offices on both sides with sliding glass doors, just like the ones in car dealerships. That's where they sell loans and other financial products. In the back, barely visible, are two teller windows. There are conveniently placed ATMs both inside and outside the branch. That's what's happening to bank tellers.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/cashiers.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/te...
My bank in France took it a step further in 1999: no more tellers at all. Nobody touches cash except for the machines. The staff is therefore considerably reduced and only for less common operations, or high-touch sales.
Perhaps if we keep insisting that robots need to look like a human in some form factor.
Otherwise, we are already there. We already have fully autonomous forklift robot systems in warehouses and other similar jobs. I know such robots will also be used in construction and elsewhere, if they aren't already (all of the heavy equipment manufacturers are working on such systems today). Smaller lifting tasks (think in a grocery store or other retail outlet) could be done by smaller but similar machines.
Change the shelving system and/or the packaging to accommodate the objects being lifted and put into place, and the entire thing can likely be automated. I can easily see stores like Walmart or Costco doing this. Right now, the only thing stopping them is the cost (the robots themselves are one thing, changing the shelves, packaging, stores, etc - that's going to be a great expense). Perhaps as time goes on, they'll do it first in new stores being built.
I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education.
Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existence here and should continue to be passed on to as many people as we can.
I find the excitement for UBI concerning. People seem to have already tossed up their hands and said, "well, I'll be useless in the future, I guess I can't work now!".
Meanwhile, Mike Rowe has been saying for years that there are unfulfilled blue collar jobs. Our culture's problem is not that machines will take over or that schools are failing to educate students. It's that we don't find enough value in the contributions that we do make. It's okay to not be a successful tech founder. Everyone is useful in some way or another.
The tech generation's wealthy view UBI as a way to simplify the tax code, thus saving money.
UBI would cause inflation and lower the lower class. Their buying power would eventually be worth nothing in a capitalist society. One couldn't expect the government to appropriately increase UBI over time.
Stay in school, kids. There's no future where you don't need to do work in order to have the lifestyle you want.
How many people use say more than 1% of the knowledge they learn in High School? Hell how many people even remember more than 1% of it? There have been studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal education and are allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do only sightly worse than schooled kids.
I realize there are people who feel that way. I'm not one of them. There are a lot of things I synthesized from school. For me, practicing learning a bunch of different things was useful in itself.
Some people learn better in school, and some find ways to do it on their own.
> There have been studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal education and are allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do only sightly worse than schooled kids
There is a big difference between having a few unschooled kids and changing the whole system to be unschooled.
If unschooled is going to be the way of the future, do it at local levels and let it grow with its success. We need not defund public education to achieve an idealized educational system that isn't going to work for everyone.
I wouldn't quite characterize the excitement as giving up. I see it as a form of liberation. Although I doubt society is ready to take such a mental/psychological leap, work/labor does not have to be the primary way in which one derives a sense of self-worth and purpose. I once worked in a mind-numbing, soul-crushing job (it was in the sub-prime credit market, basically screwing people over who didn't understand the concept of compounded interest rates) just to make ends meet.
If I had UBI and didn't have to worry about whether I'd have somewhere to sleep, I would've volunteered working at the local hospital (I ended up quitting and doing this anyway, but only after another 6 months of working)
To clarify, the excitement comes from knowledge workers who think they have something in mind that will satisfy displaced laborers. I don't think most laborers would be excited about not working for a lifetime and relying on government payments. I think they'd be concerned about getting scammed at some point down the road.
> work/labor does not have to be the primary way in which one derives a sense of self-worth and purpose
It doesn't for everyone, but it is for some people. UBI is a one-size-fits-all that would replace individually tailored programs.
I don't think "work" is so terrible. Money is just a paper form of trust. You did some work for me, and I know you did that, so I convert your contribution to society into special paper that you can exchange elsewhere for stuff.
A small community wouldn't need money. They'd all know each other. In a larger society, where we each have a specific role, it's one way to ensure people are pulling their weight.
Work connects us, and money smooths the path. We're all working together on something. Some people need more than just money to keep going, so, I don't feel UBI is the right solution. My 2c.
Although it's impossible to know with 100% accuracy, a lot of historians believe that the origins of money tied up in the creation of empire and slavery.
As you say, smaller societies didn't need money and worked on favors. As armies began being created, soldiers wanted something concrete up front, because they could die before you repaid the favor. So they settled on precious metals and eventually coins. Someone has to mine for these metals and mining is backbreaking work. The solution was to take conquered people and turn them into slaves. This is the vicious cycle of empire...armies need to get paid, so you need to plunder and conquer people, you have more territory which requires more soldiers which requires more coins which requires more slaves and on and on.
Arguing that the creation of money was tied to the creation of armies sounds like a political view that someone might push alongside the promise of peace on earth.
Yet, animals fight over food. If humans didn't have money, we'd fight over that or something else that maintains our health and well being.
I wasn't penning some Marxist screed or making a value judgment about the nature of money. It's awesome because it means I don't have to farm the food that i eat. I specifically stated where that statement came from. You may try to call it political, but coin money was tied to the raising of armies. Before that, people just relied on an elaborate credit system. Coins originally were not used as a medium of exchange, they were just a way to represent quantity.
> Yet, animals fight over food. If humans didn't have money, we'd fight over that or something else that maintains our health and well being.
Eh, history and anthropology are murky on this subject. Personally, I think we focus too much on the role of competition in history and discount the role of cooperation.
Okay, well, you're the one who believes money was created to pay armies.
I'd argue that the notion of exchange of some goods for different goods precedes that and has a lot more to do with cooperation. A promissory note is just a natural evolution of exchanging goods. It's my signature saying, yes I owe you x bananas because you gave me y tomatoes. Doesn't matter if it comes from a state or individual. Same concept.
Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen.
Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekinetic so then we get the neural internet from that. We would actually be less divided, more connected and more productive as a human race. Our current sense of self is too selfish and our intellect too limited. I'm sure it would be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case so everyone could make better decisions, not just about themselves but about humanity, etc. because they could perceive things at a grander scale.
Taking this further, most technology we use daily (word processors, email, the Internet, etc.) are enhancements of the man+machine organism and enhance our performance as well as the 'machine''s.
This worked between about 2008 and 2013; but those days are long one. Engines such as Stockfish 8 surpass both humans and human+engine "centaurs". That is, incorporating a human into the loop only makes things worse.
However Go was beaten by a neural network trained on millions of games. It already has pattern recognition. At least on par with humans, and probably superior to them. In the famous AlphaGo match, it considered and made moves that looked stupid to humans... at first.
I really doubt human + machine will do any better than just machine at Go. Or anything NNs take over. Human brains can't possibly compete with a machine that can iterate over billions of training examples in a few hours.
No offense but I literally laughed out loud when I got to that part. Reminds me of what people said about the internet. Doesn't that comparison lend credence to the notion that greater access to information might often lead to a retreat into comforting echo chambers? That greater ease of communication might often increase the vectors for infection for unreason?
Yes, folks have their echo chambers. But alternatively, perhaps we simply teach the new generation better critical thinking skills, introduce uncomfortable viewpoints, and how to better not fall for tricks such as "fake news".
Just because we have problems with echo chambers now doesn't mean that we will in the future. Heck, in a way, the internet is teaching us about our echo chambers - it isn't a new phenomenom (families and community provided it for us), but having a choice in one's echo chamber really is.
Shouldn't this be the ultimate goal anyway? I know Elon Musk sees the future where there is a merging of man and machine to enhance what he sees as man's limited upload bandwidth (talking, writing, gesticulating, etc.)
Every day I look at the lazy beast and wonder at the simplicity of its existence. Give me that life and an allowance for supplies to create, eat, socialize, and travel and let me loose.
The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death cycle...
But, if actually given the opportunity, I doubt most people would take it!
This is the kind of life I'd like to prepare for my kids :)
Humans define what is useful or not. They're certainly not going to will themselves into uselessness, curl up into a ball and die. The idea that humans can be useless is complete nonsense to me. It's something akin to a type error. And I have a hard time understanding why that meme keeps being repeated and debated without anyone pointing this out.
Now I agree with you that this (valuing people by the utility they provide) is a shallow and incorrect way of measuring a human being's value but it is true.
Here's what I'm getting at (and failing horribly, because I'm too lazy to think it through): many articles have been written that seem to outline scenarios where runaway automation leads to a situation where you have some sort of closed loop automated economy where humans have no role to play, thus making humanity "useless." I think that's hogwash. It presupposes that the goal of humanity is to perform a certain number of tasks that happen to be the tasks we currently perform. If we can find something to substitute that performs the same tasks, our goal is accomplished, and thus humanity is "useless."
That's when I generally go: that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
The reason for the automation revolution (I just coined that phrase) is allow humanity to become a better citizen of the planet and not to discarded.
However, it seems obvious that humanity will handle this like many cultures have - by choice. Just like some people chose not to eat GM food, and others (Amish) generally elect not to use electricity, humans too will reach a point where they will simply choose to either accept that their lives are 100% sustained by autonomy or, live a life free of AI-generated products (i.e. food, services, art, etc).
Maybe once Uber decides to flip the switch on all of the drivers who are now dependent on them for some if not all of their income, we'll see people in the streets vandalizing and otherwise circumventing empty self driving vehicles.
That's already the case, imo.
As always, people who do make learning new things a part of their life's rituals will generally be more successful than those who do not.
Nice username, by the way.
As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. Human law already recognizes intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as “legal persons.” Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to algorithms. An algorithm could then own a transportation empire or a venture-capital fund without having to obey the wishes of any human master. Before dismissing the idea, remember that most of our planet is already legally owned by non-human intersubjective entities, namely nations and corporations. Indeed, 5,000 years ago much of Sumer was owned by imaginary gods such as Enki and Inanna. If gods can possess land and employ people, why not algorithms?
I think the question here is whether there are advantages to making algorithms legal entities similar to our other communal legal entities. It's a radical idea, but so is UBI and some other suggestions for mitigating the obsolescence of many human being as a result of automation.
The wage cost pressure is just pricing low productivity work out of the market there more quickly than elsewhere. A taxi in the valley is cheap. A taxi in any of these? Rather more expensive...
Jobs being replaced with technology? Government policy trying to do something about it? Keep an eye on what happens in these countries...
Do you think Trump would have still been elected if we had a proper safety net and social support for folks?
are people really "useless" if they do not provide labor to make rich people richer?
if the economic system can't make a profit off your presence, are you "superfluous"?
is this the mentality that would cause our "leaders" to abandon health-care for the large majority of our population who will soon be unable to afford insurance?
and please don't tell me that a _job_ is necessary to make people feel useful. many wealthy people seem to be able to do nothing productive at all, without having doubt about their right to exist.