Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs

The people that are too old to learn new skills are going to need to end up on social security [and capital will need to be taxed for it]. For everyone else, there will need to be a permanent safety net [basic income, continuation of existing welfare programs on a larger scale, or something like that] and heavily subsidized post secondary education for any skillset that is desirable in that new economy [which will have to come out of capital's share as well].

Otherwise, we'll just end up with more crime and bloodshed.

Some of those , like arts and philosophy and exploration and adventure would not generate an income, and would be done for free/fun.

Some others like science[1] and large parts of creativity[2] might be highly automated, requiring only a few experts.

Fields that aren't highly repetitive(like many types of programming) and things that require a human touch(which computers also seem to attack[3]) might be more resistant to automation.

[1]http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148614-automating-scien...

[2]http://www.computerandvideogames.com/453386/no-mans-sky-proc...

[3]http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/a-video-ga...

But it's not a very likely one. Spontaneous AI is almost impossible, primarily because we design and control the substrate. AI is very very hard, and when we get there, it will be very unlikely that it turns on us, or at least not for a millennia or two. This fear is a result of some seriously good sci-fi stories, but not a lot of logic or fact,

"But with that access, with those tools in the hands of billions, it is hard to believe that the result will not be a widespread global unleashing of creativity, productivity, and human potential. It is hard to believe that people will get these capabilities and then come up with … absolutely nothing useful to do with them?"

This is an assumption that is, simply put, false. We have had the tools to do amazing things for a long time but we haven't done nothing amazing with them, we just adapted them to our existing realities. Technology didn't revolutionize our lives, it was slowly integrated into them and adapted to our previous lifestyles. Maybe the author should read this piece to get a dose of reality: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140110-technologys-greates...

We already see this with solar panels in Hawaii.

But the principal reason people don't use more solar is that oil and gas are much cheaper now. Nat. gas in particular is quite cheap. And tracking gasoline prices ( as a proxy for oil costs ) from the early '80s to now, those prices generally did not keep pace with inflation.

I think that we're short on jobs mainly because of poor instrumentation in our monetary policy. Scott Sumner and the other Market Monetarists have built on Milton Friedman's work and believe that the wrong metric is used to steer monetary policy.

It might be uncharitable, but the Right seems to prefer a shortage of jobs in the service of the exceptionalism myth and because there's a fairly panicked fear of inflation. The Left seems to prefer the signalling to be gained from fiscal support. Sumner purports to explain the stagflation people use the memory of to drive the fear in terms of... monetary policy.

So the politics of Market Monetarism seem bleak. But there are examples of countries other than the US using a more MM approach and not having the same suffering.

I am USAian but I think it's foolish to think the US is immune to processes that work in other nations.

These elite IQ guys like Andreesen in coastal bubbles are totally out of touch with broader society. They really don't grasp that a huge fraction of the population is not going to be training up for the services and digital economy, because that's not realistically possible.

Some kind of guaranteed basic income or national dividend is a more efficient way to ensure that people who haven't accumulated capital get treated humanely.

One of the biggest problems with online voting is coercion. If a bad guy can stand over you and watch you vote, he doesn't need to hack the computers. He just needs to threaten to hurt you (or your friends, family, etc).

Even ignoring that scenario: we might be talking diminishing returns, ie are you really going to be much happier with billions as opposed to millions of dollars, and if so, how much happier? Are you really going to want to work 40 hours a week and have the disposable income to go with that if you can already live 5X more extravagantly than we do today by working 10 hours a week?

Your claim here is based on the utterly false dichotomy that says that helping someone's self image (cutting their hair) and improving their emotional state (saying nice things to them) are not useful.

These things are all useful, it's just that the ones you decry are higher up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's a good sign: it means that our lower needs are already being met so we can focus on higher desires and aspirations.

Personally, a world where most people spend their "work" helping other actualize themselves instead of scraping rocks out of mines or digging up food and barely subsisting sounds like a pretty good improvement to me.

> The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes)

As prices tend towards zero, it's no longer conspicuous consumption. The whole point of conspicuous consumption is to show your wealth by throwing it away. You can't be a conspicuous consumer of Taco Bell, and if automation leads us to a world where granite countertops cost as much as a fast food burrito, then choosing one is just a matter of personal preference and self-expression.

> and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers).

You say that like it's a bad thing, but you could also lump therapists, psychiatrists, counsellors, and many clergy-members in there too. What's so bad about a job that helps someone's emotional well-being?

To me, it will be more like the 0.001% who controls the robot-making-robots and their 0.099% sidekicks/enablers ripping off the 0.9% who control the robots doing actually useful stuff, and deflecting towards them the anger of the other 99% once the tricking down does not show up.

Oh wait... no need to have any robots in this tale.

Bear in mind that rug weaving was considered too complex and intricate to be automated, until it was. Also bear in mind that humans used to build cars in factories, now robots do, and that the very term "computer" used to refer to something a human being did, rather than a machine.

The complexity of the necessary systems don't need to appear all at once, but can be built on top of, and feed off of, one another. You replace jobs piecemeal -- first the simple labor-intensive jobs, then complex manufacturing, then automate logistics. At some point, autonomous cars are delivering goods manufactured entirely by robots on behalf of autonomous corporations.

Eventually, as technology and AI improves, you could have creative works done entirely by machines, or almost entirely. Movies written, directed by, starring, composed, engineered and distributed entirely by AI, with books and music and toys and everything.

There's no evidence that it's too difficult, but plenty of evidence of things once considered impossible, which turn out now to be commonplace, or taken for granted.

That being said, there is nothing inherently impossible to prevent robots from being deployed in large quantities. Not the kind of robots you see in SF artwork - capable of displaying human-like levels of agency, creativity, wit, etc - but dumb little machines that can repeat the same dumb little task once, and twice, and a million times without a single error. That has been done many times in the past with varying degrees of success. The problem is that is the increase in speed/accuracy of little task does not produce an economic return large enough to justify the automation, the automation will never get implemented.

As a matter of fact, if the total economic return of the little task is not large enough, the task will not get done either manually or automatically. Paul Graham has already written about how changes in perceived social value of a given line of work has rendered it obsolete with no need for technological disruption whatsoever.

So there are several thresholds in the set of all economic activities at any given time. Below the outermost threshold the task will be procrastinated away until the whole environment changes and makes it irrelevant. A little above that there is another threshold that makes a task impossible to make a living out off, but not unimportant enough to be ignored for ever... so you have a lot of unpaid labor done on the sides to take care of that (think domestic chores). Then there is the formal economy with several layers of skilled and unskilled labor.

At each layer, robots can eat a chunk of that... depending on the technical and economic feasibility. By example, we have Roomba robots to clean the floors because the task is relatively easy and can be solved for a price people is willing to pay. On the other hand, we do not have (yet) robotic spiders that pick up, wipe and put back every random trinket in your living room without breaking anything because the task is too complex (but might turn out to be solvable in the future). And we do not have refrigerator-stove hybrids with robotic arms that pull ingredients out of cold storage and cook homemade meals because even though the problem is relatively well defined the price would be so great that few customers would be able to afford those, and it will probably continue to be so regardless of advances in technology.