100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over (2013)
hyponymo.us
hyponymo.us
So, probably a guy will own all the agricultural automation, another one the warehouse automation, another one the software, etc.
Then there will also be the resource owners (probably states or big landlords). Since resources are finite (land, minerals), the automation owners will need to pay for these.
Among these folks, there will be an exchange of money.
So, for the rest of us, if we don’t own some resource, the outlook does not seem very bright. Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.
You'd have to abolish tax heavens and loopholes first.
Historically that never had good results, because the people who want to seize the wealth and the power are exactly those who shouldn't have it and be trusted with it, so you're exchanging one set of oligarchs with another set of despots.
If we ever reach 100% unemployment, the working class (in which I inlcude all that depend on wages to live) will lose its only leverage in today's world: its labor. This is bound to make the situation very dire, very quickly for the vast majority of the population (>99%). I see only two solutions:
* Either the owners push for some kind of UBI to buy social peace, leaving us with just enough that we don't hang them.
* Or they rely on robocops (or regular cops) to keep us in line. In which case it's either rebellion or slow extinction for us.
My preferred solution would be to install a new political system that ensures fair redistribution of products and good management of natural resources, which I think is easily achievable in a world of AGI and robots.
The billionaires can always do what they've always done and pay half the poor people to shoot and oppress the other half if things don't go their way. As long as you keep the people with guns well paid, you're good.
Dividing the lower classes and pitting them against each other has always been successful in conquering them and preventing them from uniting and rising up again the ruling elite because collectively, people are stupid and easy to manipulate against their own interests, like cattle.
In my mind, I still think 100% unemployment would mean a lot of people who live today in relative comfort, and are therefore complacent with oligarchy, would get very mad. Even if bought by billionaires, I doubt they'd retain the same quality of life as when the economy needed them.
And I don't see billionaires isolating themselves forever in gated communities, what's the point of being this powerful if you live in a golden cage? Look at Musk, he's the richest man in the world, and could just chill in the shadows but is constantly seeking attention and recognition.
My prediction if we get there is that the "AI" will present us with a seemingly 'benevolent' solution.
"AI has solved everything. Climate change. Limited resources. AI can fix it all. Everyone except a select few must stop ... reproducing."
It's like when a large organization wants to reduce headcount and they do it with buyout packages and retirement.
> Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.
Pre industrial revolution, labor was in a sense cheaper than it was during the industrial revolution, and one genuinely interesting set of professions that existed then was house servants. Butlers, maids, cooks, under butlers and so on. It would not be inconceivable to see the return of these kinds of jobs? Ones where the value of human labor is so low that working for someone with wealth in their own home is common?
The menial tasks component will probably be automated away. Which leaves the emotional labour. Put another way, our job will be to be liked by the people with power. Liked enough to be kept around.
The only job left in the future is that of the pet.
So, for most people, no change from the job they are already doing?
or something new that an ai or machine hasn't managed yet, and something that have not been imagined today. And why not prostitution, if it comes to it?
And with the automation being so widespread, goods would be so cheap that the meagre taxes paid would sustain the costs of food stamps, basic living necessities, etc.
I wonder, I wonder... I think there is certain prestige companion jobs that might exist. But your AI girlfriends and why not sex dolls with perfect bodies tailored to taste can do lot of the lifting.
Then again, child bearing and rearing might be viable "occupation". After all having lot of kids have been always been popular in certain classes.
The optimistic? Hold out until the chance come. In thousands (millions) years of human civilization, not a single civilization can stay eternal. That kind of civilization will perish too, if not the humanity to perish first, especially because Murphy's law (if something can go wrong, it will, and usually at the worst time).
And IMO that kind of civilization will still have a long way to arrive, and we're more likely already dead before it arrive. Because that one Murphy's law, and limited resources for automation. In an area where infrastructure is not yet sufficient, usually human are the best to handle the job.
1. Capital owners need us as labour units. 2. Capital owners need nation state as the guarantor of their rights to accumulated capital. 3. Nation state needs us to legitimise itself.
AI/robotics kills (1). How the system will rebalance from here?
I think history can be read as a history of human obsolescence. Even the powerful people who thought their values and ideas were important thrown on the scrap heap eventually like everyone else.
Luck is living a whole life without experiencing it personally.
It's an interesting situation to consider in a fictional story, except we already have real-world proof of this NOT happening the way some authors envision it. We already have machines that can beat master players at Chess and it hasn't led to people giving up on chess - not playing it, not learning it.
I have so many side projects I need to finish and my day job keeps interfering with them.
I love helping other engineers build cool stuff and teaching them how to better wield Python.
This is a prediction that has been made for a long time but has never been realized.
Also with the end of abundant energy, our descendants may have to work much harder than us.
Written in the 1930s about the far future world of 1975.
There is no point to owning a warehouse if no goods flow through it. There is no point to owning vast tracts of farmland if the food it produces is not purchased and eaten. An empty office building has negative value. Etc.
UBI is an interesting idea to deal with such a situation, but is guaranteed to fail because there is enormous incentive for the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.
So what will happen? Massive wealth destruction, unevenly distributed. What will that cause? The wealthy to go to war against each other.
Your one and only job is to figure out how to avoid becoming collateral damage.
If you make it through to the other side (if anyone makes it through to the other side), your existence will be more highly valued than it is now.
Of course AI made progress in the language realm with chatGPT, but I don't see any advance in the realm of consciousness, general AI, emotions, etc.
There was some recent, small progress where the brain of a fly was mapped.
But I don't see transverse research made between cognition, psychology, neuroscience and AI, which is terrible.
Science doesn't even have any relevant insight on a good definition of intelligence that could be transposed into an algorithm.
There is also quantum biology, that argues that many biological systems use quantum mechanics.
Maybe quantum computing will offer new horizons with additional computing power but it will maybe take 20 more years.
Many "intellectual" jobs build things that have never existed before and I have never seen an automation for something that has never existed before.
I have also not yet seen a model create something new that was not already contained within the dataset it was trained on. An astronaut on a horse is only superficially original and does not count as "new".
Of course, I am not omniscient so that may have already occurred but there is so much bullshittery in the "AI" (it's not I) space that any claim that it has occurred should be quarantined into the "likely a lie" zone of of one's brain until there is overwhelming evidence in the amount needed to convince an astronaut who has been in orbit and gazed upon the Earth that the planet is flat.
When somebody starts talking about quantum computing outside cryptography I immediately know that they have no idea what they are talking about. That is because they think quantum computing is a faster general purpose computer, which it definitely is not. Instead it has its own complexity classes [0] and most of the problems we care about in general purpose computing seem to not be in there. This to me strongly suggests that biological brains would not gain any advantage by using quantum computing and are thus very unlikely to do so.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory
The robots will be the software that will slowly start to replace knowledge workers or anyone who works with a computer.
If you conduct your work on a computer someone is already planning to replace you with software. Think about that for a second.
Incidentally also the knowledge workers are typically the higher income classes in a society. When their jobs start getting cut across the board where will they go?
Releasing workers that used to work with computers in offices with no replacement jobs has only one direction and that is to re-train as a skilled worker such carpenter, plumber etc. (Nothing wrong with those jobs), but all that motion and extra surplus of blue collar workers is going to drive down the wages. Also who will be able to pay these workers a living wage? Bezos and Musk and the few other winners of this game called "capitalism"? In this world the humans will become the "robots" at low cost and will essentially be replaceable and only exist to serve those few with still wealth to go around.
I honestly believe in the future we really need to rethink the whole structure of the society (basic income) or else the economy is going to displace a lot of people to the fringes of the society working 3-jobs and living out of a car. (Or just downright slums/streets). And when that happens to enough people and there's a critical mass of people with "nothing to lose" revolutions will start.
The late Marshall Brain had written a short story "Manna" that is very prescient and outlines a few possible alternative futures for the man kind. Unfortunately personally I'm not very optimistic about a "good" outcome.
Yeah, it's a good story and pretty thought-provoking, but it's kind of hilarious how quickly the quality nosedives once it switches to the "good" scenario. IMO you can tell he believed in the "bad" one a lot more and it feels like the good one was just shoehorned in to supply an optimistic option. Which is a bit scary...
Market dynamics + personal ambitions are driving change.
At the same time, we have no means of popular revolution. Drones are automating war, and LLMs can monitor literally all conversations. Bottom-up revolution is futile. To the contrary, it's likely whomever produces the best drones could pull of a corporate revolution.
Market dynamics here centralize power and lead to a natural monopoly. That's perhaps better than competition, since competition pushes for moving fast, which means safety goes by the wayside.
Carpenters and plumbers will be obsoleted by robots too. Robot AI is maybe 5-10 years behind LLMs.
OpenAI was supposed to be the driving force behind fixing this, but it sold out, and is now building Skynet instead of preventing it.
source: I work in the field.
LLMs probably help the same way they help with other stuff. They lower the barrier of entry for newcomers ( good and bad at the same time ).
That said, what are the current hard problems? I don't want to derail the thread, but this is of personal interest.
Industrial revolutions ( as there were several including few not listed in the first wiki entry like green revolution [2] or whatever computer revolution ended up being called)[1] at this core did a lot of things, but in just about every instance the major leap came with a social upheavals[3] even if, eventually, new normal was found. Not surprisingly, related major changes in living conditions also spawned new attempts at governing humans ( socialism and its offspring ).
All this simple background to say the following, those industrial revolutions changed only a facet of the existing social structure. 100% unemployment would likely implode existing social order. The tension resulting from it would quickly become uncontrollable unless quickly channeled, negated, or absorbed..
As you can likely tell, I am pretty pessimistic about our future as a species.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution [3]https://schoolshistory.org.uk/topics/british-history/industr...
Recently, I wanted to learn a new language. I tried to pick some simple projects to start with (e.g. write a compression algorithm, a basic 3D renderer, a lambda calculus interpreter and so on). I realized that LLM could do the work for me and lost my motivation.
But maybe, I could try to write something much harder and use the LLM to help me.
The key difference in AI is the combined investment of industry champions AND nations states on mind-boggling scale. That can cut the adoption from 40 years to 10. Today's graduates would hardly be able to pay their edu debts by then.
New Yorker: https://archive.ph/J3Kex
Wired: https://archive.ph/pNqag
Cyberpunk style.
Or those that plunder Tolkien for their company names will succeed in their Skynet endeavors. Anduril currently seems like a joke, hopefully it stays that way. On the other hand, the satellite network required for coordinating Skynet is already operational.
Hopefully we can collectively ban robots for anything regarding policing, though we unfortunately do already use them on humans in SWAT circumstances.