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"This is a perfect example of how AI is taking over the world by storm."

Because they taught a robot hand to rotate a cube well... ?

Take it from an AI researcher, it's one thing to make a demo of a technique solving a narrow very simple problem and quite another to use that technique to solve a real world need.

"Any new job will require some sort of skills out the set of skills that can be trained" - even if we do reach the level of AI there this would actually hold, we are NOWHERE near that today, and this result certainly does not demonstrate we are.

Dextrous manipulation is a big deal though. Typical stuff we've seen like generating synthetic faces using GANs is not commercially useful, but eye-hand coordination is 90% of commercial activity worldwide.

That is true (and I am well aware of this, as I do research on robotic grasping https://sites.google.com/view/task-oriented-grasp ). But, this would very hard to generalize to more complex manipulation where the object is not already in-hand etc. ; it's yet another piece of the puzzle, but it by itself does not get us that much closer to general purpose training of robust complex manipulation.

Well, i can see that you are a expert in this field, but i still have to say the method they demonstrate, domain randomization is a big deal because that can then be applied to anything else like picking up stuff. Domain randomization is a year old thing now, but it's a big deal - if you can build a "crappy" simulator for it, you will be able to do anything. I feel like domain randomization isnt being promoted enough in the media

sure, but they demonstrate it for a very simple use case of a single object with no background etc. ; domain randomization has yet to be demonstrated to work on more complex environments/tasks

One of the last things not automated at Amazon fulfillment centers is identifying and picking up the item from the shelf brought by the robots which contain it.

sure, and there has already been a ton of work on grasping (see eg DexNet 2.0, Closing the loop for robotic grasping). This stuff is already in the process of being commercialized, and this research does not advance it much.

This is a response to you and all the various siblings, nieces and nephews.

AI does not remove scarcity.

Comparative advantage is a real thing. It is well studied and well understood.

The common argument seems to conflate AI, automation, robotics, and similar things with the removal of scarcity.

In the presence of scarcity, comparative advantage tells us that we're unlikely to see the vast majority of the world's population with nothing to do.

Comparative advantage is exactly why so many people will loose their jobs.

If a small number of people, with the aid of machines, can do the equivalent work of thousands of workers, how will the free market support the higher cost of human labour in comparison to the robots?

Its not that people will have nothing to do. But for a huge number of people, there will be no way to get paid as much as it costs them to live.

Comparative advantage is an economic theory that says there is still gain from trade between asymmetric producers.

It is possible to have an absolute advantage in production of all goods, but still gain from trading with your inferior partner.

This is based on another of the foundational concepts in economics, that of opportunity cost.

Economics is debate-ably a science, but it is certainly a mature field of study. Much like other mature fields of study and technical fields, it contains jargon. Economics suffers exceptionally from the challenge of its jargon sounding like vernacular language.

You are not using comparative advantage correctly. The wikipedia article is relatively short and clear.[0]

That being said, your argument seems to be "efficiencies in production will drive the prices of goods down" and "humans will earn less money." There is a pretty big jump to "humans will not earn enough to pay the prices of the (now cheaper) goods they require to live."

Let's engage on that argument. Is it a fair (though obviously simplified) statement of your position? What leads you to believe that wages will fall to a greater extent than prices?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Late response here. Yeah I clearly missed the reference to the economics term, but that makes sense.

To respond on the main debate, my argument is not that "efficiencies in production will drive the prices of goods down" but instead that "efficiencies in production will drive the production costs of goods down".

Just because it becomes cheaper to make a product, doesn't mean that the consumer price will drop the same amount. Especially if that cheaper production can only be utilized by a few companies with automation skills.

The economic benefits of automation may trickle down to consumers, but will largely be taken by the few large companies capable of such automation.

> I don't quite get the "New Jobs will be created" fallacy.

Nobody 20 years ago would have imagined the job of mobile app developer. The mobile phone replaced many devices and probably many jobs in manufacturing, but also created new domains that we couldn't have imagined and empowered people in the developing world (and elsewhere).

> We need to address this now, otherwise i don't see a bright future for the generations to come.

You look at things the wrong way. Humans have always had a job which can't be taken away by corporations - the job of caring for oneself and one's needs. If we don't have corporate jobs, then we can become self reliant at individual, community and country level and find ways to support ourselves. We can build houses, teach children, provide medical care and many other things with jobless people for jobless people. We can even use automation for our own benefit, like we do with open source software.

https://medium.com/@alphorisms/no-jobs-for-horses-e0748f565e...

What you fail to address is that the success of software is that it does so much more with so much fewer people. A mobile app developer might be a new job but it actually replaces (indirectly) the jobs of dozens to hundreds of people. That's why it's a success in the first place.

My job as a developer is, in a real sense, to eliminate as much work from people as possible. If I wasn't doing that, there'd be no point to my job. We don't just make software for the hell of it.

No, what you're failing to understand is that the cell phone has created new opportunities even for the poorest people of the world. It opens up commerce, payments, short time borrowing, education, hiring, finding a spouse and many other things that lead to a successful life. On the whole it was a boon for humanity - in other words, it was worse for all of us, rich or poor, before it existed.

The world may very well be a better place and frankly saving people from work is actually a good thing. But I disagree with the idea that the computer/mobile/AI revolution is adding more jobs than it takes away. There are not more app developers than their were factory laborers.

Most people would be surprised that US manufacturing is at the highest level in history. And they are surprised because manufacturing employment is at the lowest levels.

Is it good that Americans are not doing highly physically demanding manufacturing jobs? Sure. But what are the long term consequences of productivity without people? Every industry is more productive with drastically fewer people and they're improving on that equation every day. Not just factories but also white collar office work too. When self-driving vehicles become the norm, a massive amount of people will no longer have jobs.

Jobless people can't build the factory to manufacture the components to build the homes, though. Building a factory requires capital which (currently) cannot be acquired in process you're outlining.

We can also build homes with simpler construction materials and lots of hard work. We can make our own bricks and panels of wood.

Think of it this way: what would people who have lots of free time (no job) and lots of unfulfilled needs do? They would work to be self reliant if that would mean having a better life. There would be plenty of manpower. All we need is land and raw materials.

This "new technology will create new jobs" is the biggest lie that economics ever told. The crises in the midwest in this country and the subsequent election of Donald Trump is a direct result of the displacement of American workers by technology and offshoring.

I am firmly in the camp that we have a glut of capability in terms of what an average individual can accomplish using the low cost, power efficiency, and enormous functionality of modern devices like microcontrollers, motors, and sensors.

But we also have an extreme paucity of people coming up with those ideas for what to do with our staggering collective potential; the skill to produce creative solutions to problems which may not have been identified yet is one that I believe we will have some difficulty teaching to machines in the short or medium term.

What you see as an intractable problem, I see as a deficit in training, education, and investment in workers. These days, people are fully capable of learning about any topic which sparks their interests; there are tutorials and how-to's from basic to advanced levels in both text and multimedia formats on everything from genetic engineering to programming to circuit design to working with materials like wood/leather/metal/plastic...the list goes on.

People either don't seem to realize that they can retrain themselves, or they don't have the resources and especially time to do so. We can help with both, but there doesn't seem to be much appetite to cough up any money for educating adults.

The solution is pretty easy though: Widespread enough ownership of robots. Making sure there are good open source versions of the robots should allow everyone to benefit from robot labor. There will still be scarcity when it comes to land, energy and raw materials. We will have to tackle inequality of ownership of to these things, at least as long as we are earth bound.

> The solution is pretty easy though: Widespread enough ownership of robots.

"Get everybody rich" is a solution to a lot of problems, but it’s not easy.

> Making sure there are good open source versions of the robots should allow everyone to benefit from robot labor.

Open-sourcing is a great thing, but does it really reduce the cost of building a robot?

Once robots are doing all the labor, and you have open source plans and code, the cost is only that of raw materials and energy.

> Once robots are doing all the labor, and you have open source plans and code, the cost is only that of raw materials and energy.

You still have to pay the people who write those open-source plans and code, plus the ones who build these robots (or the one who build the robots that build the robots), and the ones who sell it. Also, maintainance and updates costs.

Not once robots are doing all the labor. You just ask your robot to do it, or maybe your friends' robot if you don't have your first robot yet.

With the current state of AI, the situation you’re describing won’t exist before a century, if it ever exists. You can’t call such thing an "easy" solution.

Progress in robotics for the last several decades has been steady, but plodding and incremental. This is just one small step. I think it's amazing, don't get me wrong, but there is still a Mount Everest of progress to be made before we get to anything like a general purpose robot that can, say, do the housework.

> Let me explain: What is job? An Abstract way of looking at it: A job is something that requires a set skills to accomplish a task.

Given that definition AI is no threat. Of course your post implies the financial impact of AI upon people, in this context I think it's important to correctly frame a Job as "A way for individuals to use their skills to extract worth from an economy, for the purpose of trading that worth for other goods in the _same_ economy".

The emphasis is key, Jobs are not independent of the value of products sold... e.g taking the "AI will destroy all jobs" narrative to be true and then following it to it's extreme: A world where no one (or very few) have a job, in this world no one has any worth to trade for the value being produced by AI, it's a complete catch 22. The realistic way this could be possible is by living in a star trek universe devoid of "money". But this is not binary, in between there is not some post apocalyptic world where humans go live in the desert and AI meanwhile gradually destroys everyone's source of income, there is an in between:

AI is not as special as everyone thinks, the way it's being used is very applied, it's just an extension of automation... Just like all automation before it - the worth being created by AI is cheaper to create, and therefore _can_ be cheaper to buy, given enough gradual economic impact it also _must_ be cheaper to buy as peoples buying power decreases and the product has no value if it cannot be sold. The net result over time is reduced cost of living.

Note that i've refrained from attacking the easiest thing here which is that: AI is not as clever as the media hype train likes to make everyone think. The chasm between conscious human mind and current engineered NN that is as functionally intelligent as 0.1 fruit flies is astronomically large and n-dimensional we are not talking about something as simplistic as koomeys law here... but the media likes to apply "infinite exponential growth" to every aspect of technology, reality is far more subtle.

Either the AI way will be more capable than a human mind or the human mind will be more capable. Jobs will always exist for the more capable mind... because it is more capable.

If the AI becomea superior to the human mind then you’ll have much more to worry about than jobs.

Plus at the base level there will always be the job of taking care of yourself and keeping yourself alive. If a robot can take that hob then great, that means you don’t have to work anymore.

What AI cannot learn and will never have is an experience of being human. It never can, as you can never have an experience of being a robot. Yes, perhaps one day you can teach it too, but it will be learned, not lived.

Where this experience reflects the most? Art and how it communicates and resonates with you, because you can connect, relate. Even if robots would learn to play jazz like Davis, Coltrane and Parker combined, I wonder if there ever will be that human feeling and reflection of player's experience and life.

Empathy may be another field. Taking care of elders or other people in need. Connecting to the experience of other, relating to it. Knowing, that your life is finite.

Maybe a way how to solve this problem is for us to become more human. Finally, one may want to add.

A few things to consider:

Is AI and robots really cheaper then manual labor for a lot of things?

How close really are we to have AI replace even simple tasks like flipping burgers? What about mopping the floor? Taking the trash?

Why do we work? What do we work for?

> We train machines to see better, hear better, sort faster etc. Any new job will require some sort of skills out the set of skills that can be trained. But the moment you create this job, it will be automated, because a machine can do it better and faster.

Except that you haven’t cited any skill that is currently (or in the near future) better performed by a machine than by a human –maybe sorting but that’s a rather limited skill in itself–.

The big "Oh shit" moment will be when AI and robots can perform any task a human can perform better and/or cheaper than a human can, which would make it fiscally unwise to pay a human for any kind of labor. Even if humans could still be better at creative pursuits (such as writing, music, and art, until AI possibly betters us at that too), that is not feasible for 99% of people to survive on.

Eh, I have some pretty terrible data collection and matching work that cannot be done by a computer due to needing to understand similar words, what is in a combo, what is important in a combo, or the strange situation where things are free after you pay for an upfront cost.

Ive made attempt to automate this, but I find that constantly the rework needed is too extreme and incomplete.

These things are the future of employment. This problem is non-trivial as my hires dont understand and struggle for a long time. It takes teaching them for them to 'get it'. Still we have to make decisions.

Labor will be automated, this is good.

The future will be using minds, even uneducated minds will be put to use.

Would you ever go see a robot performer[0]? Like, a robotic comedian, or a robot ballet dancer, or a robotic football player? Would you ever go see a robotic therapist if you're suicidal? Would you let a robot feed, and raise your infant? Would you get guided through a third world country on a mountaineering expedition by a robot? Can a robot write/perform an entire feature film? Would you watch a late-night talk show of one robot chatting with another robot?

Would you let robots run a country? Or a state? Or a town?

> A little thought experiment: Let's say humans are capable of 100 skills. Skills can be anything from: driving, seeing, hearing, reading, walking, carrying, drawing etc.

Can a robot be more human than human?

Am I going to fall in love with a robot? Will the robot show perfect empathy? Will they become enlightened?

[0] Captured! By Robots! Doesn't count. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zvU165DEYc

Not only that, but consider how many jobs we could create if only we banned the use of combine harvesters, tractors, various machines in factories all over the world etc.

Yep, every boss that there is would replace their employees with a single computer if they could, it's basic economics not a single doubt about it, 99.99% would do it in a heartbeat. The thing is that wasn't a problem for hundreds of years cause computers/robots couldn't do most of what humans do, but as computers get everyday closer and even better at what humans can do, this artificial balance we call capitalism of what humans can do and what other humans are willing to pay for it starts to crash as the former are no longer needed; and we realize that capitalism is an anarchy of sorts, just that it was mostly stable for a few centuries so it kind of works but soon it will not.

> Yes, billions. Not Millions.

Well if they even agreed on millions, that would still be an improvement over the current thinking, i.e., if one type of job is eliminated, a new type of job would magically appear and we'll keep living in the same rainbows and unicorns economy that we are in.

Socialism or barbarism, eh?

We had the technology to build human-level artificial hands in the 80s, I remember seeing it in movies and on PBS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Circuit_(1986_film)

We arguably even had the knowledge to build the neural nets to run them. Had more people been exposed to functional, declarative and data-driven programming back then, I think it would have seemed straightforward to wire up large networks as spreadsheets. Sadly, most of those older approaches have been replaced with opaque and buzzwordy approaches that bury concepts in terminology.

Arguably there was no market back then for AI. But I think what really happened is that AI arrived simultaneously with neoliberalism and supply-side economics which treat workers as commodities. Rather than letting everyone replace themselves with robots and keep their paychecks, they were instead forced to work longer and longer hours for less pay and compete with companies overseas that have few labor or environmental protections.

The problem isn't the technology, it's the political climate that can't see beyond jobs and so-called handouts. Which means that alternative societies are going to have to tackle problems all at once rather than piecemeal. There's going to be tremendous pressure to undercut human-oriented economies that focus on self-actualization over the mundane tasks of running the daily rat race (just like we've seen with organic, high efficiency, solar, wind and recycling being disincentivized).

> We arguably even had the knowledge to build the neural nets to run them. Had more people been exposed to functional, declarative and data-driven programming back then, I think it would have seemed straightforward to wire up large networks as spreadsheets.

The problem back then was computing power, not people not being exposed to these paradigms.