Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).
Search is another word for artificial intelligence.
Email means a universal way for people to communicate.
Lunar bases & flying cars aren't ambitious, they are just expensive.
Personal robots are here now in vertical spaces[1] and there are at least 200,000 cyborgs walking around now[2]. I think both these areas are worth working in, but I think you underestimate the ambition of a word like search.
A startup that can chip away at what makes these things so inefficient is going in the right direction. Looking for inefficiencies, such as with present day email, is a good way to find a direction.
Economics is still at its heart the study of the problem of scarcity. Economies, and all economic activity, attempt to alleviate or manage that problem.
I also agree that a cheap lunar base would be a wonderfully ambitious project!
TheCowboy is right: Economics is still at its heart the study of the problem of scarcity.
Does it even matter? It matters if it means our fully automated jobless future is penury and starvation instead of the post-scarcity Culture we're looking forward to.
I find it amazing that the difference between tasks like washing cloths and cleaning toilets is so small for humans and so huge for machines. We've had washing machines forever, but we're still cleaning our toilets manually.
And cleaning is just one of a large number of tasks that require similar kinds of intelligence. If robotics is able to close that gap, the world changes more profoundly and more quickly than ever before.
All of a sudden, most of the jobs performed by untrained people will disappear without replacement. The current thinking is that tasks that get automated are replaced by "higher level" tasks, but I think that's not actually what happened.
Automated tasks have largely been replaced by other tasks that are equally simple for humans but more difficult for machines. As a result, most people are still doing work that anyone can pick up in a week.
If that gap closes, we're in for a pretty difficult but ultimately wonderful transition. People have been crying wolf out of fear of this transition for hundereds of years. This time it's for real. Even if humans find new things that aren't yet automated, the transition will be too fast for at least a generation.
Humans can do wonderful things when the alternative is to starve or lose their habitat. It is not different this time, it will not be different the next time, nor any time after that. Won't happen until we have a perfect AI which can do all jobs. Then, and only then, will humanity take a permanent vacation.
a) The transition will happen more quickly because the kind of intelligence you need to clean a room is very broadly applicable. It affects almost all manual tasks at the same time.
b) Contrary to earlier transitions, there will not be many tasks left that untrained people can perform and that are similar enough to the old ones. A farmer can go work in a factory. Most cleaners will not become artists and entertainers within their lifetime.
I don't think humanity will ever take a permanent vacation. There will always be something that humans want from other humans and there will always be something to exchange as payment.
And while it is true that a farmer can go to work in a factory there is very, very little overlap between these two professions (could a factory worker go tend a farm and survive? Unlikely) -- just as there is little overlap between cleaning toilets and being a cashier in a shop.
Oh and cashiers are not going to be replaced by the same AI that can clean a bathroom, do the dishes and wipe the floor.
I've said this before, but I keep repeating my viewpoint. At some point, we will have automated too many of the "useful" things to do for there to be enough work in the private sector for everyone. There are only so many cars, houses, gadgets and foods humanity needs, and the efficiency in producing these things just keeps growing. I'm not saying that we are headed for a dystopia where no one has a regular job - quite the opposite - but during a transition period a lot of people will be without work. Arguably this is part of the reason joblessness is so common in the US today. We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives, and hopefully contribute with some creative pursuit.
A lot of people will find this transition difficult, because a lot of people simply have no direction in life and just keep doing rote work. When the rote work gradually disappears, they will have to find something sufficiently engaging to do with their lives.
Some interesting reading:
http://www.wfs.org/content/postemployment-economy
http://www.impactlab.net/2011/10/11/post-employment-era-huma...
Rather than a tax system that gives them pretty much no incentive to get a job (if you were essentially paid to do whatever you wanted to do, would you want to get a job?), it would probably be better to have government enforced jobs (IE: you want money from the government, you need to work for them until you find a regular job. Otherwise, you get nothing).
What if you want more money than you can get through this system? Then you have to do work that pays. Money and status works relative to your peers, so there's an incentive to earn more if your peers are richer than you. I don't see that this is a problem if the society is wealthy enough.
So you're saying the government should hire all the unemployed? That sounds like a surefire way to make even more people unemployed in sectors that have to compete with the government's army of cheap laborers.
Jacques Attali in his 1990 book "Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order"
Still quite relevant, though I'd alter the quote to say "virtual boat people" since jobs are turning out ot be anywhere where you have an internet connection.
Have you watched: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=audakxABYUc ? (Rory Sutherland's TED talk 'Life lessons from an Ad man').
Particularly the note about luxury trains.
Fundamentally, robots are made out of expensive stuff, metal, earth minerals. It can be recycled, but it's expensive, and not 100%. Humans, on the other hand, a pretty cheap, we run on carbon, oxygen and water.
In the future, it might make sense for robots to do stuff they're best suited for (e.g. very hard, dangerous work in human-unfriendly conditions (e.g. spaceship repairs in outer space)). However, unless we discover a way of making robots dirt-cheap and 100% recyclable, it will probably be humans cleaning the ship from the inside, no robots.
We're going to need to do some more serious big thinking about more than "work", which is too narrow now. We need to figure how how we're going to "occupy" people in the transition from post-industrial/service/information technology society to a roboticized, post-scarcity, arts and leisure society. If handled poorly, "social unrest", mass protests, and outright violence may be become a regular part of the landscape, what with millions of always-idle, impoverished people just sitting on the sidelines, ignored. How long could this last? One hundred years, perhaps? That's a really long time to have constant social upheaval.
Sci-fi has dystopias full of rebellious robots, human vs. robot warfare, grappling with what it means to be sentient, etc. but have startlingly little that deals with a much more realistic question: what does a society where human labor is being made redundant look like in terms of day-to-day human behavior? Over the coming years, the consequences of mass automation and even "stupid" AI are going to come to a fore.
Ok, so what are things we're going to need to do? Encouraging the arts and music, competitive games, and various leisure activities, are probably a given (and not much encouragement is likely to even be necessary, since many will do these things on their own given the ability to do so.) The other piece of the puzzle is the one that's really going to need a great deal of thought: how do we support them, and just as importantly, how do we run an economy where 40, 50, 60 of the population does not work (and thus, under the current system, have no income)? The most obvious answer is to move towards a massive expansion of what we currently call the "welfare" state along with planned population policies (hard, but probably necessary.) The big difference? We'll be not just supporting jobless people, but the economy itself (we can call it econofare or something.) What kind of economy can you have with few consumers? Not much of one. It will require a completely different perspective, one where it's not a bunch of unfortunate (or lazy, depending on your perspective) jobless people, but a bunch of people we essentially pay to be consumers. Items which are scarce will need special handling for sure (hopefully things like food and shelter can be made superabundant sooner than later), but for everything else, it'll be all about simply keeping the flow of money going. The main policy prescription here is the tax-free guaranteed income, like they have in certain Scandinavian countries (someone else in these comments mentioned this.)
That all said, the two types of jobs I would put on "won't be automated anytime soon" list:
1) Jobs that exist to make others feel powerful/superior. Waiters, house-servants, massage therapists. They do have jobs that could certainly be automated, but you don't get the same feeling of "lording over" others with robots that you do with people. Robots /will/ do these jobs for many, perhaps even most people on a day-to-day basis, but there will likely still be people who pay for this as an "experience."
2) Interdisciplinary generalists (i.e., modern Jacks-of-all-trades.) This job isn't a single "job" at all, but a collection of jobs requiring the understanding and ability to synthesize knowledge from different (and sometimes disparate) areas. We will continue to automate parts of specific types of cross-discipline "tasks", but we won't be automating the big-picture viewers.
I almost added a section on robots, but the talk was already long enough and I figured 7 was enough to illustrate my point that ambitious startup ideas are frightening.
Robotics actually, is an area where something huge seems right over the horizon. I'd certainly bet on the next game changer coming from robotics before any equally revolutionary activity comes from search or email.
I don't necassarily disagree with what you do say about the two, I just don consider advances in these areas terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
What is the grand scheme of things?
You instead see "frighteningly ambitious" and assume your own term which is in the realm of science fiction (cyborgs, personal robots, &c.). Robotics, incidentally, may be a frighteningly ambitious endeavor but only if you are considering something like autonomously scraping and repainting ships or actuation in camera pills: personal (autonomous) robotics won't happen in the near future (see iRobot Corp).
So, assuming the author's definition of "frighteningly ambitious", search and email are important because they are problems people have now. If search weren't a problem, Union Square wouldn't have funded DuckDuckGo, and more to the point, DuckDuckGo wouldn't be growing. (I also have the exact problems the author describes with Google -- for the past 2 years I've had a problem with Google.) If it hasn't been shouted by Fred Wilson and Paul Graham enough: they have pain from dealing with email. They would throw their money at you if you offered a way to make email less painful. Maybe instead of spending two hours every day with email they could spend one hour with new/email and they could have a spare hour a day with their kids -- how valuable is an extra 14 whole days a year to these guys? How many people hate spending so much time on email who have means? Probably enough to make it worth investigating the problem. For what its worth, I'm frugal as Franklin and I would actually pay for email (i.e I wouldn't accept any common free email service because they aren't even worth $0.00 to me for a variety of reasons).
Look at Star Trek. Other than the spaceship itself the most impressive things are the technology the people use. The Siri-like computer interface, iPad-like computers, Skype-like communications technology, etc.
The same could be told about computer in the 1950's, I am talking about the famous misquote : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquot...
there was a world market for maybe five computers
If fossil fuels aren't going drive cars in the future its going to be something else. Fuel cells or Electricity.
If IBM had thought or if any body else would have thought how difficult it was to create computing power to derive any meaningful value. We wouldn't be having computers today.
The other option is we won't have cars.
But, I remember when google was first released. I thought the search engine market was already full with yahoo and alta vista dominating at the time. Who knew?!
But at any count what companies seem like or appear to do doesn't matter to your company. What matters is what they are and what they do. If they seem scary, good, that will only serve to keep others from trying to beat them -> less competitor for you.
Now go forth and conquer.
And the personal robot is already being worked on, but instead of a single humanoid robot (which I always considered to be a bad approach), they're small and specialized.
"In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF
That's 54 jumbo jets a day.
I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.
Secondly, there is certainly money to be made in solving the problem, if you're not a truly lazy thinker who bases his conclusions off what he hears in TV news soundbites:
http://www.gizmag.com/go/4418/
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/clean-water-...
http://www.waterforpeople.org/programs/how-we-work/initiativ...
http://www.unwater.org/downloads/Sanitationisabusiness.pdf
http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/family/green-inventors-solar-sa...
Lastly, I'm sure that TOMS and Warby Parker would be interested to hear that there's no money in helping poor people gain access to shoes or glasses, as well.
Sarcasm: it's dangerous (but sometimes useful) on the internet ;)
Disease are a serious case.
But its shameful that at this stage in the evolution of human kind we have people dieing of hunger and malnutrition.
One of the core problems the world faces going forwards is resource supply - water, food, fuel. It's long been predicted that the next large-scale war will be over water supplies; there are already a number of simmering conflicts that go back to access to water.
Why are we running out of resources? Significantly, because there's too many people for the resources we have.
Why do we have too many people? Explosive population growth over the past 100-150 years, particularly in the last 50. World population has gone up nearly 50% in 25 years.
What's historically been the best way of arresting population growth? War; kill lots of people. Hmm, not really an acceptable plan. What's the next best? Education, in particular female education.
Now, at its core I agree with your point that the list was under-ambitious. Well, let's refine that - only parochially ambitious. So let's go big. We want a sustainable, long-term end to hunger and world peace.
What do we do for that? Give a man to fish - teach a man to fish. Food parcels and free medicine are a sticking plaster - necessary in the short-term, insufficient in the long-term. Fair trade helps but alone is improving their position at the bottom of the supply chain. Get improved education and access to knowledge though and we enable a long-term culture shift that both better equips the presently impoverished for the future and attacks the root causes of the resource instability that currently so impoverish them.
Which is where projects like OLPC and the Indian tablets are so important, and where (if done properly), the startup idea to replace universities is the biggest and most important on the list. Take it all the way and it's not about knocking down Yale and Harvard; it's about world peace and an end to famine.
Replacing universities doesn't help the developing world, not really, because the education would have to be tailored to them.
If you want to read a book about one of these problems (sanitation) and how aid efforts tend to go totally haywire for the same reasons OLPC does, read The Big Necessity.
The needs are more basic. People require self-sufficiency in the basics before having a tablet computer is going to help.
Agree with you on female education… especially also business education and entrepreneurial loans. In this vein, there is a great charity here: http://www.girleffect.org/question
And there is that Indian entrepreneur who developed affordable sanitary pads for women:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/entrepreneur-a-passion-per...
Note that this wasn't a charity effort, but a social entrepreneurship effort. And pads are important. Women are not just uneducated, they are hampered even when healthy.
Finally, many people in developing countries have a cell phone which they can use via SMS to determine market prices for their farmed produce etc., which is already a great boon.
I personally know some folks, who grew up in Africa, who are doing great & interesting things to serve these people where and how they are, not by assuming they need somebody to come in and "revolutionize" them. (Which will inevitably fail.)
At present, why don't they get education? Is it that they don't want it? Aside from a few communities actively holding back education, by and large they know the benefit and want education. The present model doesn't work for them though; the communities are frequently rural and some distance from the provision of education, the families are operating in the subsistence economy and can't afford to release the children to education.
Technology can help attack this from two fronts. One, it enables distance learning at the time of the student's convenience. Education need not be directly opposed to family responsibilities this way, the two can be more easily dovetailed. Education can also more easily be tailored to individual needs; by removing the need for geographic concentration to provide the required training, more appripriate education can be delivered.
Two, education is a (potentially fundable) need on such a scale as to enable transformational economic change society-wide. So much of the economic disadvantage is down to lack of information and poor access to markets from the impoverished communities. An infrastructure to enable distance learning on a whole-society scale is just as able to provide general community information and revolutionise access to markets. Think eBay's had a tranformational effect on some businesses? Wait until you see what the same thing could do to third-world subsistence farmers.
Transform education through technology-based distance learning. The easiest starting point for that is tertiary education in the west, which shows high demand but poor utilisation of possible technological effects coupled with high costs from the incumbents. Then use that infrastructure to achieve the really transformational change, by educating the third-world poor.
Our goal has to be to make the world a better place, not simply to make a few of us more more money than we can spend.