Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot? Silicon Valley Is Split

Whenever I see the "positive" prognostications, I wonder if the author is intentionally spinning a tale for their own ultimate benefit, or if I'm just way too cynical. I don't see any way that the advance of automation can do anything but destroy any desirable concept of society. To me, the future inexorably looks like Detroit or Nairobi, not like Tokyo or Singapore.

Education is a red herring. Most people (and I'd include myself in this) are simply not mentally capable enough to be trained to outperform automation in any task automation can perform. More education will not rescue us.

The future I see is, like Asimov's "Solaria". In that world, what purpose does a laborer have? What strength could even rebels have? When the "top" of society controls machines that will produce, fix, and fight, then they are completely insulated and the majority of humanity is disposable.

IMO it depends a lot on the timescale. Give it 100-200 years and all the positive scenario are the likely outcome.

In 200 years, people will only have hobby because that will be all they have to do and most of their needs have been automated.

The problem is the transition to there and that's the annoying thing in all those discussions, nobody ever talk about it.

For example, Industrial Revolution and the 2 World Wars were the fantastic drivers that pushed EU and US in an unprecedented golden age. I'm sure the majority of people would have been happy to get the golden a few years later rather than going through the mass loss of lives or the misery of those years.

> This is not a technological consequence; rather, it’s a political choice.

Not quite sure how it is reassuring. Except China, there seem to be no move to even acknowledge that we may have something to do other than "the invisible hand of the market will solve everything"

Nah, it's not as bad as the article says. It's much worse.

1) If you don't lose your job to a robot, you'll lose it to an emulated human. An em requires only a tiny chip and a little electricity, and is every bit as capable of doing empathy and creativity as you are.

2) If you don't lose your job to an em, you'll lose it (and your life) to unfriendly self-improving AI that has a use for your atoms. If you think there's a law of nature against such awful things happening, think again.

3) Even if you learn about that bleak future with 99% certainty, you'll keep living life as usual and hoping for the 1%, instead of trying to change things.

4) And even if everyone on Earth sees that the bleak future is coming, we won't coordinate with each other to stop it! Look at poor people today, they are already suffering but don't coordinate to improve their lot.

Often, the artist or novelist is a better judge of history than the professor or engineer, as they have the distance to see.

Neil Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' is a masterpiece of scene and action. His 'dystopian' novel set a bar to which we judge ourselves to this day. I use 'dystopian' in quotes as Stephenson himself describes his novel as an optimistic view of the future when he wrote it. Why? Because humanity survives the Cold War.

In 1980, that was not necessarily true. I would like to remind any readers that the facts have not changed in this manner. War has always been with us, and the robots, though shiny, will be tools of war just as every keyboard, scythe, and lump of granite has been. If there is one thing we can count on, it is war.

You may argue that the robot will eliminate the scarcity of resources that causes conflict. I hope so. However, history shows us again and again that war is a part of man. If you eliminate it, you rid us all of a part of humanity. I hope dearly for this.

But the consequences of that are not simple, there will be blowback to having the robot take our darker sides away. It is a bargain I hope we strike with the robot. But I have no doubt that my grandchildren will not be the same humans we are if that deal is signed.

I see a darker future ahead: From a totally cynical but rational and economic perspective I think human labour is cheaper than any machine workforce for many tasks. We reproduce and maintain ourselves, we just need some water and food. We are very flexible and can adapt to any task very quickly. No need to order spare parts made from expensive raw materials. Human labour is only expensive because we have civil rights and we tend to riot if we are treated badly. Take away these two factors and you have a cheap labour army that's getting bigger by itself.

We are also limited by the capacity and architecture of our brains. A.I can rely on Moore's law, or quantum computers to benefit steadily from better hardware. Therefore I conclude that the most successful agents in our economy will be of A.I. The enterprises behind them might still have a human executer, smiling all charmingly, but A.I. will be in control.

Once again sethf hits the nail on the head. The response is entirely up to us.

I'm not personally optimistic: this country has a deeply held Puritanical work ethic, and even if we get past that we have a real nasty habit of not liking to give any government benefits to "those people".

But if we can get past that...

The BLS has this documented fairly well over the past century: http://i.imgur.com/BPNyjM8.png

As advances in agricultural automation removed laborer jobs in the 1900s, workers switched to different, more-specialized industries.

In short, we will probably see jobs disappearing because of automation in the 2000s, but it won't necessarily be bad. Most likely we will also be seeing many new types of jobs appearing as well - some which may have never been conceived yet.

This debate has been going on since the 1960s when jobs started becoming computerized. Yes, lots of bue collar manufacturing jobs were lost then. And workers were afraid of automation. In the 1990s workstations and the internet replace white collar clerical jobs. There are far fewer travel agents and bank clerks now. The newer robots may replace the more sophisticated manufacturing, delivery and service jobs.

If we were having economic growth, it wouldn't matter. Robots would replace mundane labor, allowing people to be allocated to more economically beneficial occupations.

The problem is that there is no economic growth to speak of outside a few sectors.

IMHO the concern over automation and tech in general is shifting the blame from where it actually belongs: conservative fiscal policy.

I think the safest thing to say is that integration of any technology takes time. Even if a technology exists, it won't be ubiquitous immediately.

If we accept that one day computers/robots will be able to outperform a plurality of the population, three questions arise. When will that be? Will enough of us see it coming? How should we respond?

And then, in the next 100 or 200 years, a geomagnetic storm destroys all electrical systems and no one will know how to perform basic jobs because we delegated them to robots.. I know, a dystopian vision, but still possible :)

1. Automate thing x.

2. Wail and fret for 50 years.

3. Take it for granted for next ∞ years.

The question that always occurs to me is, if most people are to be jobless, then who can afford all the products and services provided by the robots?

people often hand-wave that "new technology creates new jobs". but it seems to me there's a simple economic proof that it's true, based on demand and supply. Is there one?

my favourite commentary on the singularity (comic) http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/

I think I'm going to have to stop clicking on these ones.

The future according to HN can be summed up as 30 years or so of Basic Income, after which we will be turned into paperclips by an unfriendly AI.

Maybe it's inevitable, but then there's not much point worrying about it. It's just another kind of death.