New Wave of Adept Robots Is Changing Global Industry | Hacker News Reader

New Wave of Adept Robots Is Changing Global Industry

nytimes.com

39 pointssew3 comments

In addition to reading the article (which is good), I recommend that everyone watch this to get the perspective of various thinkers on the topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOoHRircmhM&feature=playe...

It starts getting especially interesting around 1:00:00 when Cowen and Ford start talking. A few things:

- The idea of "personal shoppers" being a growth area seems dubious. With recommendation and predictive desire systems getting better all the time, I think this is probably a no-go.

- Nannies might be a growth area for a few decades, but decent AI will likely obviate the need for these as well. I'd give this one 50-50 odds over the next 4-6 decades.

- Basically everyone on that panel endorsed the guaranteed income. The fact that people from so many different perspectives had their policy prescription converge to that is really striking.

- This also brings us back to the "how do we occupy the unemployed masses?" question yet again. Arts and leisure activities will likely not need much support from society, as they will just happen. Sports might (stadiums, etc.) Other things we'll probably be looking at will be extremely powerful, long-lasting, side-effect-free (or tolerable side effect having) drugs. That road of course leads to wireheading, but I think that denying that as a possibility now is extremely naive.

A cultural shift will be required, as several people in the video make clear. Having one's self worth (and respect of one's peers/society) be defined by a traditional support-one's-livelihood "job" is going to have to disappear. Demonization of those "lazy parasites and slackers" is just not going to work in a future where much human labor is not needed.

Another thing this brings to mind is the effect on the labor market for those still in it (programmers, robot designers that cannot themselves be replaced with robots, etc.): a great deal less unemployment, at least for a long while. For those skills that are essentially not able to be automated any time soon (let's stay over, the next 50-100 years) those that stay in the labor market will not be doing much competing for open positions. It may in fact be an employee's market in those cases where someone is not simply their own business.

Other good articles on the topic:

http://buzzmachine.com/2011/08/05/the-jobless-future/

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why-work...

(referenced in the NYT article)

Edit:

If you haven't read Autor's work ("The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market "), I highly recommend it:

http://economics.mit.edu/files/1474

One of the difficulties for a society with large numbers of unemployed is that the consumer and media culture creates aspirational needs: people want stuff, and since its not being given to them and they can't earn the money to buy it, they become frustrated. Drugs are one escape from this problem, as is attainment of a higher consciousness (that you don't really need stuff to be happy). But it seems that many people avoid the first (to addictive levels) without having the second, and so end up frustrated and angry.

"the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today".

This may have interesting ramifications, specifically around economic theories, labor, migration of some jobs back to the US etc. How will the world look like in 10 years from now with robots, artificial intelligence etc.?

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