In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Marketers
bloomberg.com
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Humans won't be marketing, they will be marketed. Humans will be a novelty, like a hand-carved chair or a horse-drawn carriage. Probably worse than the human-free product, but worth paying a bit extra for the idea of it.
This is the good outcome.
In a post-intelligence world, humans will be cute zoo animals. We might have freedom, but I can't imagine us having any measure of real control. Even if modern society continues, it will be a cordoned off bubble, a "human preserve".
If we're unruly and give the robots too much trouble, they could just dispense with us. Or dumb us down and make us tame--domesticate us, like animals.
I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon. Not like this is news, but the end of world has always been right around the corner - most everything is broken here and death is everywhere.
The strangest thing to me about comments like this is the assumption that a nefarious super-intelligence would stop at subjugating us. If a super-intelligence was evil and had power to act, it would just kill us all and sterilize the planet, given the chance.
I just don't believe we have the ability to make a standalone computer super-intelligence - we universally suck at coding at-scale. Don't get me wrong, the AI and machine learning algorithms we have are amazing, but we're not going to get a being out of those experiments.
What I'm worried about is humans: humans continuing to turn tech against other humans for surveillance and telemetry in support of totalitarianism. And, I'm worried about humans augmenting their brains with compute. If there ever will be an evil super-intelligence, I wager it will be a (meta-)man.
There's a very large and vocal group on HN that believes in the advent of AI and regularly comments as is it was a done deal. Almost every robot/AI/ML thread gets hijacked with this idea/meme.
In the meantime Google can't get my first language right, the windows 7/8/10 search is a joke and Facebook wants me to be friends with my SO's exes. And 2017's revolution ? Dial menus in messenger.
I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I was so convinced Y2K was going to crash society. I was all looted up, ready to bug out when the city started burning. Turns out, there was enough preparation (and money dumped on the problem), and like only one power station that didn't get the upgrades on the east coast went down for 15 minutes.
I'm just as guilty of telling ghost stories and contributing to the disinformation. I remember writing a frantic, doomsday prediction email to my house rep in the lead up to Y2K and I swear based on some of his public comments that I was responsible for him quitting the house and heading for early retirement. I have no proof that was the case, but I'm still not proud of what I wrote.
After all we are building machines in our own image. From how AI thinks to building sex robots.
I think the transition will be more nuanced and peaceful.
I predict that humans will always be vitally important for our dexterity at the 1m scale. We can (and do) use tools for smaller scales and larger scales, but we are truly excellent entities at this scale.
In a world with strong AI, old-school humans would be pathetic. Hybrids, however, could build synergistically on the strengths of all components.
So why not just integrate all those machines better?
Why would they make puns, or speech that sounds human? They could make speech that is more pleasant to robots if they didn't care about humans. I don't go around making speech that sounds dog-like.
A machine can only measure parameters and take action to get to some target. Its priorities are set by its program and the data it has. Its own continued existence and propagation are not the default. It cannot want and doesn't need to the way a living thing does.
And I don't see reason to try to give machines such qualities. People have wanted servants that have no concern for their own needs for as long as there have been people. Slaves that are selfless and highly capable. And that is how most automation will be designed.
Fiction presents human-like machines but that hardly means that is what will build or want when the time actually comes.
Why not the same for a machine? I mean, after all, we are fundamentally machines. Just made of organic nanobot stuff.
If we build AI as a fresh, state of the art object, withouth evolutionary history it doesn't need any motivation that evolved entities must have had to evolve.
But of course, that could be a dangerous path ;)
The problem with hard AI, is not them randomly becoming evil.
The problem is if humans program them with a goal, and don't think through the implications.
IE, think paper clip grey goo AI. The AI may not be evil, but it's value function was originally set to maximize the amount of paper clips in the world as a part of some manufacturing process.
But malevolence by humans is also.
I don't worry about machines suddenly getting motivations. But many people have seen a lot of movies.
>And I don't see reason to try to give machines such qualities.
You don't want a firewall (think more on the lines of defense system) that automatically adapts and protects itself from attacks?
Remember if we get this powerful AI, said AI will be used to attack other AI's. Either humans will have to 'fix' the AI every time another AI breaks it, or it will have to self-adapt.
Problem is they're not your slaves, and they don't care about you any more than themselves.
For life seen as a part of system/society reproduction is the key motivation (for lack of a better word). Non-reproducing activities are irrelevant temporary aberrations because societies that don't reproduce get extinct and are replaced by societies that focus on reproduction.
I don't worry about it but it frequently behaves that way.
If humans no longer fed and sheltered dogs, the dominant dog species would probably evolve to be uglier, wilder, more aggressive and generally more wolf like. We should expect the same of the machines.
Economic demand also stems from survival instinct.
Companies are gradually being automated out of economic necessity. For some reasons I don't trust the market to keep on feeding billions of idle meat bags once they are not needed anymore for production.
Currently paying unemployed people prevents them from turning to crime and ensure that society as a whole can be productive. It may not make sense once the vast majority isn't productive anymore.
Humanity is the scaffold of the mechanic beast that's being built.
----
Mais l'entreprise elle évolue
Pour mieux pouvoir grandir elle mue
Les pigeons qui vollent à la porte
Sont les écailles de sa peau morte
----
Mais l'entreprise elle évolue
Et pour ne pas mourir elle mue
Les édentés qui prennent la porte
Sont les écailles de sa peau morte
----
Rough translation: "The entreprise evolves, to grow better it molts, the suckers who are fired are the scales of its dead skin."
For dramatic effect, imagine the above sung looping by a choir that grows in strength until robotic voices join in. Then human voices dwindle.
With AI and robots, I think the selection pressure is going to be ability to do stuff that (some) humans value, or think they value. The risk isn't that the robots might rebel, it's that the people in charge of them don't understand the consequences of what they're selecting for and/or don't have everyone's best interests at heart.
We want work performed in better cheaper ways. We don't want competition.
I'm going to assume you've never been to a farm and seen huge fat chickens. Yes, selective breeding is an accelerated evolution to traits we want.
And it is not our best interests to make an evolving robot,
But that not the question, the question is, can it be done. And if that answer is yes, it will be done.
Some people do. Some AIs will.
It all depends on the progress and advancement of automation/robots/bots/etc but if we reach a point of "generalized" AI which can pass the Turing Test, we might be at a stage where it wouldn't make to market towards humans. Marketing might be directed to the elite who controls AI but what incentive would be there to divert resources to the masses and if resources aren't directed to the masses, what incentive is there to market to them?
Though I don't think we are anywhere near generalized AI, I am genuinely shocked at the progress being made. When I was taking AI class 10 years ago, I remember the professor saying we were quite a long ways ( 2 or more decades ) away from AI beating the best at Go, Jeopardy, etc. The same thing with AI language/translation, image recognition, etc.
The idea was that the "space" of Go was just too large for AI to be effective in the near term. And that an AI could grasp the "puns/history/questions" of jeopardy, let alone answer it was something that wasn't reachable in the near future.
But just few years after I graduated, all of these "difficult" AI problems were "solved".
I'm not trying to sound cynical, but the elite control the world and the human masses are an asset/property which the elite use for their ends - production in modern capitalist times. If AI and robots serve the elites better than humans, what incentive is there for the elite to divert resources to humans?
this is the gist of the reactions i got to a comment i made on an article on a similar topic here a few days ago.
this article better articulated what i was trying to say there:
But machines are not effective at persuading, at developing advertising campaigns, at branding products or corporations, or at greeting you at the door in a charming manner, as is done so often in restaurants, even if you order on an iPad. Those activities will remain the province of human beings for a long time to come.
people here seem to forget that all this automation is being done to serve us better, the people (i guess you could argue it's really being done to better serve shareholders, but that's another discussion).
we're still weird, unpredictable creatures who eat, sleep, poop, and work in a 4-dimensional world...so there will ALWAYS be a human component to delivering products and services.
even if a good bit of the designing, building, and distribution of these services may be automated.
Well, it's being done to increase profit. That's a bit different.
As for why profit on it's own is bad: Because - as established - it's only about improving the lifes of the people receiving the profits - but readily externalizes the cost to everyone else.
If the market is not saturated pretty much everybody is working on building stuff faster and cheaper. It sells itself.
When market gets saturated suddenly your survival is dependant on conning people into buying your staff instead of those of your competition.
The more the production part is mastered, the more resources you need to pour into marketing to just stay afloat.
Since the production got more efficient humans got shifted to marketing. But the same way people in stock trading are getting replaced with algorithms, people will get replaced in marketing as well.
If we reach the time where AI fully understands human behavior and emotions, I think by that time the concept of marketing will be long gone...
The problem is the wrong conception of what work actually is. Work is what you do with your day that you find enjoyable and that others consider useful. When that gets paid we call it a job.
And that's it.
Work is leisure you get paid to do. It's a social activity that furthers the cause of the group of humans engaged in it.
If it isn't, then perhaps the system we've chosen to allocate work is broken rather than the concept of work.
Perhaps we need a system that ensures there are always more jobs than people that want them, and that creates work and jobs based upon agreed social value. Which then forces the market sector to compete, which in turn forces market value to align properly with the social value we're after.
If you want to work together with other people to do some goal, then do that.
If you want to spend all your time watching movies or traveling or playing video games, then you could do that and zero of the "work" stuff.
The mega rich already live in that world. They can choose to work, or not, and are generally able to do anything. I don't hear them complaining about how they are bored or need something to do with their life.
Now imagine that everyone had the same resources as the mega rich do now.
Because if I'm a robot operator and you can do whatever you want, then I know I'm not going to get anything of value from you. So why should I work beyond Tuesday to make stuff that you need to live? I may as well go home and be 'free'. Your money is literally worthless to me.
We know what everybody doing what they want leads to. It leads to land redistribution and hyperinflation - as demonstrated in spades in Zimbabwe.
Unless you are completely self-sufficient then you have to look at the systemic impact of your idea on everybody. Then you'll find it has a severe fallacy of composition in it.
The mega rich get away with it simply because they have a slave class (the rest of us) to do their bidding. If you can do whatever you want, who is the slave class working more than they need to to service your needs?
To maintain an advanced society we need the robots working 24x7 and the land worked 24x7. To get people to give up their time to do that you have to give them something in return. Money isn't enough. That is the service to others you have to do if you want the carrots others grow.
As Ali said: Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. What we lack is a mechanism to allow people to make that rent.
The future may not need many human robot operators either.
If the world only needs a couple hundred thousand people to run the robots, maybe there will be enough of them who are willing to do it just because it is fun to run the robots and provide for the world.
People do charity all the time today and the world of the future would need much less charity.
Obviously most people would not be interested in doing this work for free. But fortunately we might only need. 0.001% of the population to be willing to do it for free.
I expect that at least 0.001% of the population in the future will be charitable enough that they will be willing to do work for free in order to provide for the entire world, by running the robots.
Obviously that would be the machines. You need people to maintain those, but less human time is required to produce the same goods. Basic things might get so cheap that they're almost free.
> What we lack is a mechanism to allow people to make that rent.
Sounds like you want something like a job guarantee. Sure, there is never a lack of useful work that you could force people into. But there is simply not enough work that is essential enough that you could argue, from an economic point of view, that everyone has to work 5 days a week just to earn their right to exist.
They can raise a family, get given a house, free health care, free education including university, TV, internet, computer games and even holidays.
They dont have to worry about dying from polio, TB, malaria etc. Very little hunger etc
On paper they live a lifestyle better than kings of the past did.
Yet depression and unhappiness is common. Drug use rampant. Suicides high.
On top of that, you have to deal with being demonized as a worthless scrounger by the press, and having the government do everything in its power to find ways to take your benefits away.
It's not a good situation. To be fair, in the end, it is free money and it's definitely better than being in a Victorian poorhouse, but it's still miles away from the UBI world view where it would be possible to not work and live a meagre but comfortable life, and one which society didn't vilify.
"Work is leisure you get paid to do."
Source ? This is really the first time I have heard the definition of "work" where enjoyment or leisure are factors; it's not a coincidence that it is often used as an opposite of "play".
If you find a job you enjoy, you should thank the stars because most people work for a living rather than leisure.
[1]http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...
Our credit unions are not competitive and will have to merge away into a direct bank at some point. They currently survive on path dependencies.
Germany is a cash heavy market & free universal ATMs are omnipresent. Ironically mostly through credit unions.
Making computers want interesting things is perhaps THE problem in artificial intelligence. If you can solve it, you've got AGI. You can hand a machine learning algorithm a very constrained environment and it can work out some basic goals, like making a high score go up.
But increase the complexity of the environment and all of a sudden, the algorithm needs to learn how to simulate it, significantly ramping up the difficulty of what it has to do.
Humans are going to start getting inexorably shifted out of things that humans really shouldn't be doing in the first place, to be replaced by the just-as-difficult task of commanding our new robot slaves. Maybe for a little while it'll be difficult for humans to find purchase in the brave new world, but the limitations of machines to literally read our brains and tell us what we want is going to quickly make themselves known and humans all over the world will take on the role of specifying the behavior of machines that are getting increasingly smarter.
You're going to see the same sort of stratification of haves and have-nots you have now, I see little about the new production modes that's going to change the fundamentals of economics. But everybody is going to have more of it, because making things is going to get much, much easier, even easier than it is now, and it's already really easy.
Marketing automation is already here and its only going to get bigger and better. The sales and marketing teams will shrink to 1-2 persons even for large corporations. They will make us more efficient.
Those will make money; but will they just cause stagnation/niche specialized behaviours that have less benefit to society as a whole?
I always found this turn of phrasd to be somewhat odd.
Why has cultivating relstionships never been more important? What is it about today that makes this true? And if it's not true, then the whole "but" is just handwaving nonsense inserted in place of the crux of the whole argument.
Whenever he wants to write about something becoming more marketing or advertising oriented, he quickly adds some points along the lines of "...of course advertising is usually totally awesome but..."
Those bits seldomly even have any sources or arguments to them to make them convincing.
Some examples:
> To be sure, a lot of commercial persuasion is useful. Marketing informs consumers about new products and their properties, or convinces them that one product is better for them than another.
> Each business tries to pull customers away from the other brands, and while the final matching of customers to products is usually closely attuned to what people want, [...]
> Although consumers enjoy these panderings to some degree, [...]
Also, the author clearly misses Coke's marketing strategy. It is pretty well understood that Coke doesn't advertise to get people to buy their product. AI has been good at getting us to buy products. And I'm pretty sure AI will also get good at keeping us using products.
Really it just comes off as naive and overly optimistic.
This seems like a crazy assertion to me. I think you're thinking very small and short-term, as in: 3mm people don't drive anymore for their job, so we have 3mm fewer jobs.
In a world where no one drives, no one owns cars, they zip around in a global mesh that's tied together with all other forms of transport and logistics, which are also automated...how can we possibly predict what such a world will look like, and what new opportunities, lifestyles, and paradigm shifts will occur?
In that world, I'd rather become a human-assisted robot. Potentially immortal, even.
Go pick up a copy of "Debt: The First 5000 Years" for a complete defenestration of that tired trope.
In a robot economy all humans will just be consumers.
An entrepreneur's primary function is to create jobs. Every job ever created that wasn't made by the government was a direct or indirect consequence of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is thriving.
A business's primary function is to hire people. Any large business that isn't firing is hiring. And public businesses need to grow to stay in business. 75% of Google's income is from ads. There couldn't be an easier service to automate and robotize than an ad system. Yet, not only are they hiring, but they're looking to spend this money in completely unrelated areas. They're literally starting from "A" and going down the alphabet.
Entrepreneurs and businesses will always look to automate. But they will also always look to hire. Elon Musk is partially responsible for this AI job paranoia, but not only is Tesla not fully robotized they have a shortage of workers and they're hiring like mad [1].
Jobs are about skills, and yes, if you're doing a job that is a candidate for new methods of automation - like driving - your job is in danger. But unless you're only capable of doing one job, all you'll do is find another. You're not a "robot".
And even if humanoids begin to take over more human work, entrepreneurs and businesses will simply hire more and hire them all. We will work alongside our robotic co-workers, and the economy (should) just expand to meet our collective output.
But herein lies the real issue.
Robots will not be owned by robots. They will be owned by people. And if robots are productive, they'll become the new real estate. A robot with a job will be like a house that pays rent.
Bill Gates recently came out with a robot tax video [2]. But taxes are not enough to equalize the wealth gap. It hasn't worked for humans, and it won't work for bots.
Not only money, but ownership needs to be redistributed. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a solution for this old problem either.
So what if you lost your job if you own two apartments that bring in a middle class wage? Replace apartments with robots.
The Robot Economy is not about jobs. It's about wealth.
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Where does that weird idea come from?
That's one job made from none. They can decide not to hire or be happy alone, but eventually, you'd be hard pressed not to hire if your business is thriving and you're generating more work than you can handle yourself. Business have always grown with people. People consuming work = a job.
The job market is not zero sum.
When I clean my house, I sweep the floor. That doesn't mean the purpose of cleaning my house is to sweep the floor.
The purpose would be for your house to get cleaned, but we can clean the house without ending in a clean house. We wouldn't however, not have swept the floor, for that would mean we didn't even attempt to clean the house.
Either way, this is semantics. My main point has nothing to do with "primary function" is debatable or not. Entrepreneurs create jobs. This is a fact that doesn't change however you word it.
I apologize if my word choice was poor, but feel free to substitute with your own wording.
The common denominator is that they create jobs, starting with the entrepreneur. And jobs are an objective measure of economic value.
The first job they create is for themselves. And that is one less job the government and everyone else has to worry about.
And you are assuming there will be no entrepreneurs who create work for themselves, or that there wouldn't be people who would rather do the work than let robots do it, or that people wouldn't hire people just to work with people. You're ignoring the fact that many genuinely enjoy working, and that businesses grow with headcount because they can totally afford it.
And lets say your final assertion is true. Robots will replace all workers.
But the business is still owned by a person. This person will be incredibly wealthy if all these robots are working for the price of electricity and parts.
So this is a wealth problem, more so if you truly believe your own assertions. It may be a jobs problem for certain people sooner, but no one is talking about the wealth problem. Neither are you.
The questions are:
* Will they get bad enough?
* Will robots gun down the poor, or will the revolution achieve success?
Ever heard of public companies and the stock market?
We need a better solution - one that aligns incentives of all involved parties (society at large being one of them), not separates them further.
No, it's to create wealth. That jobs can also be created is a happy side effect.
Entrepreneurs often fail at creating wealth, but they never fail to create jobs, even if they are temporary.
Case in point, most entrepreneurs have little to no wealth until a successful valuation or exit, but are still paying payroll. And they provide no wealth until ownership of that company becomes valuable.
Purpose can exist without function, but function exists even without purpose. That is why I specifically chose the word, though I wouldn't use it again considering all these comments being hung up on the second sentence, and not the first.
(adding: The purpose of entrepreneurship might be to get rich or gain independence or change the world. But whether you succeed or not, you're going to create jobs. That is why, especially in light of the context which is "jobs", the primary function of entrepreneurship is job creation.)
Also, make sure your robot maker isn't making kill-bots.
And then you answer your own premise by pointing out the obvious reason it would be detrimental: kill-bots. We all know that is where it is headed. It is unchangeable human nature.