Replacing Middle Management with APIs
rein.pk
rein.pk
I've been using the phrase "Machines should think, people should work" to describe this for some time. Amazon/Kiva order processing, where the humans are just arms for the computers, is well known. Uber has also been mentioned. Marshall Brain's "Manna" is the SF precursor of this concept.
This has been pointed out repeatedly since Adam Smith visited the pin factory in 1776, and wrote, in the Wealth of Nations "One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations."
Some people like it that way. Henry Ford, on assembly line labor management: "We shift men whenever they ask to be shifted and we should like regularly to change them—that would be entirely feasible if only the men would have it that way. They do not like changes which they do not themselves suggest. Some of the operations are undoubtedly monotonous—so monotonous that it seems scarcely possible that any man would care to continue long at the same job. Probably the most monotonous task in the whole factory is one in which a man picks up a gear with a steel hook, shakes it in a vat of oil, then turns it into a basket. The motion never varies. The gears come to him always in exactly the same place, he gives each one the same number of shakes, and he drops it into a basket which is always in the same place. No muscular energy is required, no intelligence is required. He does little more than wave his hands gently to and fro—the steel rod is so light. Yet the man on that job has been doing it for eight solid years. He has saved and invested his money until now he has about forty thousand dollars—and he stubbornly resists every attempt to force him into a better job!"
The history of auto labor relations indicates that task boredom isn't a big issue for many people. Workers have fought for higher wages, better benefits, shorter working hours, more breaks, and more dwell time between cycles. But not for job rotation.
A lot of people seem to be OK with dull, boring jobs, provided they get paid reasonably well for them and have enough time off.
Some people derive meaning from their work and are lost without it.
Hobbies are what they need. But after a life of working some can't trasition. I once heard that life expectancy drops 2 years for every year after XX that you retire. IIRC XX was like 55 or 60 but its a fuzzy memory. Of course thats an average.
Witness the many retirees that get part time jobs because they can't survive on the income they have without them.
[0] - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/216352/moloch-rendered.p...
Long but a very good read, and very relevant in the context of this discussion.
The quote itself is a mix of a poem ("They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven") and Bostrom's last book ("lousy Disneyland with no children"). It refers to the scenario when our economy/incentives system automates away all humans and we're left with a glorious economical machine with no humans inside, running without a purpose - like a fully automated, self-sufficient Disneyland that is never visited by any children.
Better you than me, I say.
Beats the heck out of being told what to think, want, and do. Worrying all the time that you can't take it and that you'll have to find something better (when you explode at someone for being an idiot.)
Running a startup, I find it pretty cool to wear as many hats as I do. Some days we are dealing with contracts, some days it's scouting new office locations and painting, some days we're imaging hundreds of SD cards, or doing customer development, or pitching to investors, or shooting videos.
Seperately, each of these things could be horrible mindless jobs. But together, it's a great experience. But I don't know if that's simply because there's a common end goal.
This is key. Also this:
> Beats the heck out of being told what to think
A very repetitive job with no one talking to you is not that bad, because you're free to think, dream, rehash some old story you heard, etc.
Watching TV is the opposite of that, BTW, for that very reason (the whole purpose of TV is telling you what to think... and what not to think).
My work these days isn't exactly predictable, but it has a far less uncertain future. And there's still a deep-seated part of my psyche that would be very happy working a predictable piece work job.
I'm a little shocked to see this sentiment, and even more to see support for for it from other commentators.
Has anyone here actually worked jobs like this?
I've had several factory, dull, boring jobs where you repeat the same task 2-10 times per minute, and none of the people I worked with enjoyed it. It's hell.Time slows to a crawl. You can repeat a task a hundred times and only 20 minutes go by.
Attempts were always made to rotate people though different tasks throughout the day. The vast majority would leave to go to a non-repetitious job if possible.
I worked in several furniture factories as a youngster, and I share that sentiment. Assembly lines are soul killing.
http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=40...
40,000 in 1925 would be half a million at today's rate. No wonder the dude didn't want to change jobs.
When I graduated college I started out as a mechanical engineer, sometimes going down to the factory to work on new design issues. There was a constant source of friction between the 22 year old mechanical engineers and the 50+ year old factory workers. Here are a bunch of skilled guys that have been building the product for 30+ years, and they in essence often have to report to kids half their age right out of college that don't know a thing. There was a pathway up through the factory, but there was no pathway across to engineering without getting a degree.
If you were a smart engineer, you realized that these guys had an enormous amount of knowledge - more than you could ever hope to get out of a simple degree - and that they were worth listening to. If you were a cocky, dumb, engineer you ignored their opinion.
The solution in the past to this problem has been unions. The startups are moving a bit too fast for the unions to catch up, but in all of these recent 'What happens when everything is Uber?' posts written by engineers the role of unions, politicians, and large masses of affected people seem to be ignored.
Because we have absolutely no reason to believe they won't change their minds down the road. Which is exactly what usually happens.
And once you are sufficiently large, you can probably afford to immediately turn away anyone w/o a degree (or whatever other signals yield high return).
Complex systems don't give a shit, and it sadly makes sense.
DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, makers of the PDP and VAX computer series) once had such a pathway, and electronic technicians could advance to engineering. That wasn't retained after they were acquired by Compaq, then by HP, then downsized.
How? Does a union provide a path from the factory floor to being an engineer without needing a degree, or... what?
I honestly don't see how unions would even be relevant here.
I would rather see a focus on a "union" we already have on the scale of entire states or the entire country called the legislative process. Through it we can argue for basics like guaranteed livable income (so you have the time to better yourself), universal healthcare (so you're not always one accident or sickness from being destitute) and a high quality educational system. A livable income, healthcare and education are the foundation upon which most other opportunities rest.
Yes, by doing things like get us the 8 hour working day (parts of what is not the AFL-CIO were the largest driver for that, taking decades, and having members die in the process, and leaving us with May 1st as the international day for labour demonstrations as another direct result).
Productivity is not a measure of the success of a society.
How do you figure? To me it seems that most of the union jobs were simply automated away, moved to third world countries, or heavily supplemented with illegal immigrant labour. None of those arrangements maintain an 8 hour working day limit.
The remaining positions are generally high-skill or based on independent contractors. No wonder they command higher wages and have better working conditions.
Unions rode the tide of technology and globalization but didn't actually cause it.
Although there were initial successes in achieving an eight-hour day in New Zealand and by the Australian labour movement for skilled workers in the 1840s and 1850s, most employed people had to wait to the early and mid twentieth century for the condition to be widely achieved through the industrialized world through legislative action. [And many other countries followed the same trajectory.]
How come? I'll take a guess: because it was only made possible in practice in the 20th century by a sufficient increase in productivity, mainly through automation but also economies of scale. And as the process continued, those jobs went away completely.
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky
The same can be said of the organizations that have typically opposed the unions too. The world has too many zombie organizations that have outlived their usefulness and are now a drag. The effort being spent on unions would be better off spent on increasing support for a guaranteed minimum wage. We've now got universal healthcare (or at least some flavor of it), but there are a lot more ways we can improve equality of opportunity and fairness and I don't see how the modern unions contribute in any way to the bigger picture (like the 8 hour workday)
Productivity is what allows more and more of us to pursue activities that make us happy for more hours of the day.
Yes, unions are (supposed) to defend the interests of workers. Not to make it easier for bosses or shareholders to profit from the workers' work.
Whether or not today's unions are still doing that is up for debate though.
We were in the engineering building offsite and there were union guys working there too. I enjoyed working with everybody there, despite the bit of wackiness around the corner.
They tell the management that the current situation is really dumb and won't fly, and they have the power to back it up. A union should ideally work for the self-interest of the workers and fight for a larger piece of the pie that is the company, but also try to make the pie bigger.
In stable, large companies this was done with middle managers and human resources departments, which meant that you nominally got to keep the same "job". Remove that, and there's still a need to allocate resources, that now will be filled with things like the API's the article talks about, or "freelance-like" human resources companies.
Workers will still keep a stable relation to the APIs they know (as learning a new one takes time and effort). The only thing lost in this name change is the safety network of a legal work contract.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/millennials-changing-job...
I think a lot of young-ish folks experienced rapid job changes over the past 15 years, because we lived through the explosive early growth of the Internet. But there's also evidence that that time is over.
http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/180431/american-entrep...
The tech industry is consolidating, and there are plenty of huge stable companies to provide long-term careers. I don't see any reason that a young engineer couldn't sign on with Google or Facebook out of college and stay there for 40 years.
This was fundamental in enabling Toyota to go from cheap unreliable Japanese garbage to the biggest most reliable car manufacturer.
Reach out to me if you'd like to know more, we can have a chat or I can recommend some reading.
Capitalism which was a great 2th century economic system, is not suited for the 21st century where there really aren't any jobs left for humans to do.
The benefits of automation only accrue to the owners of capital, while everyone else gets completely left out. Since the owners of capital are an increasingly smaller number of people (not surprising since capital accrues capital exponentially while labor only accrues it linearly) our economic systems are headed for collapse.
The key problem is what was mentioned above - capital accrues capital exponentially, labour accrues capital linearly. The only way to fix this is to give everyone significant stakes in capital (or for the Marxists, the 'means of production'). The Norwegian pension fund, which owns about 1% of global equity is exactly the kind of thing that will be required to create any kind of future. Governments aren't the only organisations that can do this kind of work though. Any organisation that is giving workers the same kind of leverage that capital gets or sees that as part of its long term mission is part of the solution.
I see this as one of the greatest challenges facing humanity over the next few decades.
I would not say capitalism is broken, but that it needs occasional strict bounds by government to make living bareable. Market is not suitable as the only economic controller - state intervention is needed as well in the form of taxes and legislation to provide basic human conditions for the majority.
Recent decades have seen the rise of free market liberalism. I hope it is fairly obvious by now that unbridled this will lead to human suffering for many.
By what measure is it broken when it's produced literally orders of magnitude more improvement in human living conditions than anything in the thousand years prior to the advent of capitalism?
- capitalistic mindset were not allowed to get out; (marxist countries)
- communist mindset were allowed to stay in. (capitalistic countries)
This created discontentment and abuses, undermining the system and his initial followers: "If they are taking advantage, I am stupid if I don't do the same"
[edited]
I'm not aware of any capitalist society that erected barriers to members wanting to go and live in a communist country. Weirdly, they didn't want to. Take the late Eric Hobsbawm for example, wouldn't stop banging on about how great the USSR was. But for himself, he preferred the life of a wealthy author in the West...
It's not just Capitalism that has good things, Marxism have good things also (I have lived in East Europe where you can still feel the marxist mindset presence and believe me, some things are MUCH better than in the West). But I am not even arguing which direction to take, it's just not possible to follow both.
>an economic system which sets your ability to feed yourself and your families based on the effort you put in
As opposed to an economic system in which your ability to feed yourself is based on the effort others put in? Such a system requires some entity to prevent you from reaping the gains of your own effort and/or take the fruits of others' efforts to give to you, and historically such entities are prone to realising that the power they have allows them to just take everyone's stuff for themselves.
>The benefits of automation only accrue to the owners of capital, while everyone else gets completely left out.
This is absurd: compare someone born to a household in the bottom income quartile today to someone born in that quartile a hundred years ago, the difference in quality of life is ridiculous. All the technology that exists today is the result of automation and capital accumulation: without any, we'd all still be subsistence farmers. It doesn't matter if one doesn't own any capital, one can still buy the things produced by the world's accumulated capital.
How does one buy things produced if one doesn't own any capital.
In short, one buys things by doing/making things for people who do have capital, or for people who don't have capital but have themselves acquired money by doing things for people with capital.
We don't need fully self-aware machines to get to that point. For example, when self-driving cars become pervasive, they'll remove a source of livelihood for a large section of human population. Driving has a low barrier to entry and can be done by most able-bodied humans irrespective of their level of acquired intelligence. This description works for most jobs that are going to be automated away.
Typically any automation problem we solve rolls out globally at a staggering rate. It puts people out of jobs faster than they can skill up. Also, social and economic mobility is externally constrained (and changes can only happens over 2 or 3 generations), and not everyone can move up even if they try. Which means automation will give rise to an increasing number of people who cannot undertake non-automatable knowledge-work, and thus become doomed to be unemployed, and leads to a self-reinforcing cycle out of which they cannot escape. This is a problem that the civilization has to confront, and our current way of thinking about economics will not work there.
The so-called 'fruit of others labour' notion is something that made most sense in the pre-industrialized era. Applying it today in its entirety without considering how much of an inter-dependent society we have become is simplistic. This is as true in technology (open-source software that powers commercial entities) as in other fields (research that builds on top of pre-existing knowledge, industrialized economies impacting global ecosystem, ..).
If we consider that each of us is beholden to the collective past of entire humanity, the idea of ownership and 'fruits of labour' becomes just a social construct. This construct nevertheless is required today and for the foreseeable future as the only practical way to divide resources. However it is a complicated and probably intractable idea, and is not at all axiomatic as you seem to make it out to be.
Capitalism "as we understand it now" is not pure capitalism, it's capitalism accompanied by a welfare system. Why is that not scalable to a future where most labour is not done by machines; what's qualitatively different between 70% of the population working with 30% on welfare, and 10% of the population working with 90% on welfare?
>Which means automation will give rise to an increasing number of people who cannot undertake non-automatable knowledge-work, and thus become doomed to be unemployed, and leads to a self-reinforcing cycle out of which they cannot escape. This is a problem that the civilization has to confront, and our current way of thinking about economics will not work there.
How is it a problem? If they're less productive than robots in every way, why not just put them on welfare? Current economics handles this perfectly.
>If we consider that each of us is beholden to the collective past of entire humanity, the idea of ownership and 'fruits of labour' becomes just a social construct. This construct nevertheless is required today and for the foreseeable future as the only practical way to divide resources. However it is a complicated and probably intractable idea, and is not at all axiomatic as you seem to make it out to be.
'Fruits of labour' is axiomatic in the sense that rejecting it necessarily entails violence. Eg, if Joe picks an apple, but is not allowed to keep the fruits of his labour, this necessarily entails violence or the threat thereof to take the apple away from Joe. If Aaron sings a song and Camelia offers him a pumpkin in exchange for this, but they're not allowed to trade freely, this necessarily implies some violence or threat thereof against them to prevent them from making the exchange. If Martha builds a car for Fred and Fred offers Martha a house in exchange, but then it's decided Fred shouldn't be allowed to keep the car, violence or the threat thereof is necessarily required to take the car from Fred. Unless Fred wanted to give it away freely, for instance charity, but he's perfectly capable of doing this anyway under a 'fruits of one's labour' system.
Does it really handle it perfectly? I assume perfectly handling it will mean those who do live on this welfare system have their basic needs met, is that the case in the current economy?
In most Western Countries it is. America seems to be an exception in terms of having relatively lower welfare payment rates.
The government receives less tax revenues because 20% of the population is no longer working (and paying taxes). At some point if enough of the population is no longer contributing, unless there are massive changes in how we manage the economy, the country will become insolvent and won't be able to afford the welfare payments as tax revenue decreases.
The assumption is that machines exist that are more productive than all these people no longer working. If these machines didn't exist, then these people would still be productively employed.
The problem is that when you're living off someone else's goodwill - even if that someone is the Government - you're entirely dependent on them, and they can put you through whatever hardship they please.
The self-checkout at my supermarket is smart enough to demand pay? Wow, I didn't know that.
Actually, you could quite easily automate an entire store with robotics that haven't been state-of-the-art in years. The main issue is up-front capital, not scaring people, and having one person in the shop to deal with complaints/loss prevention.
It'd be even easier for McDonald's - picking things out of crates, going through pre-set steps to cook them, and packaging them, isn't exactly very hard. You could have one human for quality control if you really wanted.
So, retail as a sector will, at the same time as growing, employ fewer and fewer people. I'm sure you can pick out examples of existing technology that's not very hard to apply to most sectors, aside from capital concerns.
In the UK the the proposal of a mansion tax keeps popping up, this is really the future of owning capital, just owning it will have a cost. Which is actually a great capitalist strategy because if a 10 room mansion is being under utilised the owner is going to be compelled to use it more efficiently.
Not really, not anymore, we're an oligarchy now, money gets what money wants now that we have unlimited contributions.
> as things get tighter and people poorer they'll start voting for a tax on capitol.
No they won't, the rich are in control, this is an oligarchy, they aren't going to do this to themselves.
You vastly underestimate how hard it is to stay rich. Most families are back to square 1 after 3 generations.
Money is rarely parked at any one place today, but rather, is largely distributed throughout the economy.
Venture capitalists have played a huge role in the story of the technology industry over the past 15 years, but where do VC's get their money? From the hedge funds of rich people like the Waltons.
Any sources to back this up?
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Sweden%202... - A study of Swedish surnames since 1700s suggested that wealth regressed to the mean quite slowly (the statistical measure b), finding significant differences between those holding noble and common names after hundreds of years http://www.eea-esem.com/files/papers/EEA-ESEM/2013/1862/SUwp... - Another study of Swedish intergenerational wealth transfer finds similarly. http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Clark%20Cu... - A study of rare British surnames since 1800s finds a similar rate of regression to the mean.
And taking a different tack, studying lottery winners with modest sums: http://www.econ.pitt.edu/papers/Mark_lottery.pdf - only 3 years after winning 50-150k people have regressed to the mean rate of bankruptcy http://www.nber.org/papers/w19348 - land seized from Cherokee people in 1832 was given away in a lottery. The land was valued at between 20k and 150k in modern terms, depending on how you count - inflation vs relative value of unskilled labor. Sons of lottery recipients had no better adult outcomes than the sons of eligible men who received nothing.
So, all of these do find a significant regression to the mean and not a permanent upper class, but for large wealth and social status differences it can take hundreds of years. For more moderately sized random windfalls it happens rather quickly.
I'm out of time to write this comment further, but I'd like to look next for research on what happens a generation or two after a family makes a very large move, i.e. rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags.
This would be great. The problem is, reward has little to do with effort. Lots of effort can still leave someone broke and little effort (with a lot of capital) can make someone millions. Imagine a system where hard workers were always rewarded appropriately regardless of what they worked in, regardless of the capital they previously possessed.
If that was so why would consumers purchase automated goods (or services)?
Fundamentally consumers buy a product if it is perceived to be better, cheaper or both than some existing alternative[1] or if they prefer the brand[2]. If the product is better or cheaper then the consumer benefits (and the poorest consumer benefits the most) and if the product is neither better nor cheaper, why would they buy it at all?
[1] this isn't necessarily a product or service: the alternative to driving may be walking or riding a bike, the alternative to buy some specific item of amazon may be to do without it.
[2] throwing the label "hand-made" on a product may increase its value, it is hard how to see throwing "made without human hands" on a product could increase its value, so this would be a point against automation.
With Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, the resource utilization of a business is simply an algorithm, which can use any number of APIs to return profit and grow the entity.
All of these APIs we are creating for various functions may soon replace us. Many APIs already do directly dispatch humans to do certain tasks. The scary part is that when someone is providing a service to you, they may not be aware of whether their superior is a human or an algorithm.
A minimum viable autonomous corporation could be a lemonade stand that is managed entirely by an algorithm; with virtual currency it can hire a person to set up a lemonade stand at a certain datetime, and take a cut of earnings. If sales are slow, it could hire someone to design a poster, and another to post them in the area; or even an analyst to decide what the best course of action is. Over time, with many locations and employees, it would be able to learn the best locations and conditions for optimal profit. Perhaps also deciding which employees to continue working with and which ones to fire.
These "management algorithms" would likely need to be developed by someone. But what if the algorithm hired the person to write the algorithms, updates, and performance tweaks?
There could be a bootstrap algorithm that is simply an idea (these could be automatically generated based on search trends, market fluctuations, etc). These seeds would be open to the public for investment with virtual currency (bitcoin could be used to allocate the cap table as well), the program would be able to hire talent to build out the idea, and the investors would receive dividends.
I see this evolving as a kickstarter for viral autonomous businesses. And I don't see why it couldn't be viable with today's technologies and APIs.
Will humans on the "receiving" side of an API remain unaugmented, i.e. operating at human speeds with a slow touchscreen interface? Or will they develop their own automation, so that millisecond-speed algorithms broker between the "manager" and "worker"?
How much ad and click revenue today is actually human? Bookstores did not sit idly by when Amazon decided to take on the entire industry, how is Amazon's publishing imprint doing? Humans do eventually wake up and compete with algorithms.
...yet.
Nitpick: We solved nim. We created an algorithm that, when applied, guarantees the first player a win if some conditions are met, and the second player a win otherwise.
There is no equivalent for chess. Instead, we created programs that can apply more general game-theoretic algorithms with ad hoc modifications for chess (for example, minimax with alpha-beta pruning and lookup tables to recognize book openings, closings, and common scenarios) which can, at current CPU speeds and RAM capacities, reliably beat the top-ranked human players.
It is mathematically possible to beat the best computer chess player; it might not, however, be humanly possible. OTOH, it is mathematically impossible to beat a simple nim program which has been programmed with the perfect play algorithm, assuming the game is such that the program will win if it applies that algorithm.
My point is, if something is solved, an adversary throwing more computing power at the process is meaningless. It would merely hasten the inevitable. However, for a problem like chess, an adversary suddenly getting better computers could be a game changer.
"My opinions have shifted in the past 10-15 years and I now think that permitting autonomous corporations to exist -- or even continuing the doctrine of corporate personhood -- are a terrible idea for humanity (because they're effectively AIs that compete with us, and not in a good way)."
Book is free online, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/crib-she...
"A society that runs on robot slaves who are, nevertheless, intelligent by virtue of having a human neural connectome for a brain, is a slave society ... The human society underpinning "Saturn's Children" got into bad trouble, relying on robot slaves as labour and disappearing up its own arse in the pursuit of virtual luxury."
The "person" may hijack the algorithm. So it could only hire a trustworthy person, which is a tough if not impossible to distinguish.
In traditional capitalism the buck stops with the board, and the shareholders will fire them if they're losing too much money (something that's become more important in recent years, even as more and more day-to-day stock trading is algorithmic). Who takes that role in the case of an autonomous algorithm - would the algorithm itself be a director?
Yes, a self owning autonomous agent:
Good. Then we can get that promise of more leisure time that's been hanging around since the 50s.
Imagine if everyone had more time to learn another language, play guitar and ponder the meaning of life. APIs and robots can grow my food and wash my clothes for me, I have better things to be doing.
Large parts of Marx entire theory of how socialist revolutions would come about is based around the combination of this idea and the idea that the capitalists won't willingly grant it.
We're really there aren't we. Almost everyone in the industrialised parts of the world have access to food, shelter and other basic human needs. Damn, in Western Europe even the romanian beggars have iPhones.
Even the poorest have a less poor life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdDkF0Lw-ag
No, they're do that for their owners, the capital holders; you'll be left out in the cold to starve. This is a labor based world, no labor, no share of the pie.
Something I've been thinking about with any blockchain technology is that it will likely end up sitting on top of the current Internet platforms, but still behind the scenes and hidden from both enterprise and consumers.
If so, will new blockchain-based startups disrupt industries and create their own competing consumer services, or will the incentive to dramatically cut costs (labour mostly) push existing industries to transition their operations to run on a blockchain?
eg the average user should never come across the word "bitcoin", they just continue to transact and pay with "dollars" as they already do. But behind the scenes, the entire financial system operates on a blockchain.
eg2 existing companies looking to cut costs could automate much of their staff by transitioning their core database and systems to run on a blockchain. However all customer-facing UI and interactions would operate as normal. A company like Uber could run entirely on the blockchain as a DAO, and have a small team responsible for maintaining the consumer-facing apps
Improvement 2: Figure out what the slogan is about and find relevant images
"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth."
It's not too far fetched to imagine A.I. subsidized corporations competing against each other in an open marketplace.
> The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.
Already in The German Ideology (1845) he specifically made the point that the productivity increases inherent in a capitalist economic system was a prerequisite for a successful socialist revolution as otherwise redistribution would just make want common, and the same class struggles would start all over again as people fight to get out of poverty (like what happened in the Soviet Union, China, where the party organisations became the new upper class).
In the Communist Manifesto he and Engels spelled out how they saw capitalist productivity increases eventually lead to over-production and under-employment, and that this, according to Marx, is what will eventually lead to an intensification of class struggle and finally enable a socialist revolution as economic productivity under capitalism reaches its peak.
Really... you wondered if one of the great minds of history overlooked the simplest of things?
In either case, the organizational "middleware" is under the control of its owners.
We found things for everyone to do, but if history may be a guide, we could be in for 30-80 years of adjustment.
Need something done in a datacenter? Open a ticket and people respond. Common tickets become standardized by making them API calls that schedule the people. The most common API calls are eventually automated completely.
I saw this for requesting a machine be power cycled (ticket -> API call -> automated).
The people that work at the datacenter are great, but I feel sorry for them because their job becomes less and less interesting as time goes on.
When Google opened a datacenter in [redacted] there was an article about how local people were signing up for Community College classes on computer science topics. I felt terrible... the skills that datacenter would be hiring for were more akin to a warehouse than a startup.
-- Tom -- Ex-Goolger
We as a society need to figure out how to handle a future where the majority of people are no longer compatible with the economy.
If we can automate simple manual labor, people will shift to different tasks; the non-beneficial changes is that now the energy needed for that task is consumed directly by the machine, and also the investment that has been done to get the machine there in the first place. Beyond that, people who did simple tasks before may perform tasks that require conscience or risk-awareness (for example, machines injuring or killing humans cannot be fired or fined, so someone has to be responsible), that require empathy and human attention; or people will resort to being burglars or robbers or revolutionaries or salesmen.
the video specifically has a refutation for the argument you made - that technological improvement is not necessarily always augmented by better jobs that people could do. Their example with the horses and automobiles is quite pertinent.
The point about jobs that require human empathy is moot - if the cost of hiring the human is much higher than a machine, the machine will win.
Looking at historical economics, another way of looking at this is to see an economy as things going in (sunshine, non-renewable resources consumed, loot acquired in wars) and things going out (people eating, garbage produced, etc.), and the ways of distributing the flow between these.
It turns out that you can have a "surplus", when you suddenly have more money/resources than you had before. There are different means of getting rid of surplusses, including wars, social programs, or simply population growth (consider how New York's area used to sustain about a hundred people).
Looking back at the demise of weaving and spinning as jobs, you see that the immediate effect of that was a higher concentration of wealth in the hands of some individuals, which (in Europe) led to counter-movements involving democratization and social issues.
The real problem is not that it's possible to find more effective ways to do some jobs than employing people for it, the real problem consists in the readjustment of power relationships that becomes necessary when you remove resposibilities from lots of people and put them in the hands of relatively few people.
Maybe some governments institute a robot tax, which augments the cost of robots by a percentage not high enough to consider other alternatives (e.g. moving off-shore, which has been possible with production jobs but not with manufacturing jobs), and use these funds towards things that society as a whole regards as beneficial (such as building nice parks, everyone getting a university degree, or every city having an opera and a theater, or war or terrorism or spying on your citizens, if those are what a society thinks it wants).
Standard "capitalist" economic doctrine wants us to believe that surplusses always belong to the innovators or those taking associated risks, and both historically and currently this has only been partly true. Maybe those surplusses will just be destroyed in the next "AI" bubble, maybe they will be used to create a post-democratic oppressive state, maybe they will be used to create a modern-day utopia. We don't know yet what will happen, but we sure should not let others reframe the issue as technocrats-vs-luddites, because that is not what it is.
You aren't understanding the scenario, you're presuming there's always other tasks to switch to because you're presuming a labor based economy. This must change as AI will ensure there aren't other tasks to switch to, not enough for everyone anyway.
The scenario everyone else is discussing is what happens when there are more people than available jobs. That's the scenario you need to address; the answer is not just do another job.
It's not about inventing new jobs. It's about shifting the workforce to other jobs. Doesn't matter if they are new or we had people doing it before. Did we have mathematicians, professors, teachers, doctors, etc. before the industrialization? You bet! Total percentage of the population working those jobs?
Techno-utopian futurism about us not needing menial labor any more because robots provides a believable "safe" explanation for that meaning that the real, "unsafe" reasons (trade policy; steady de-unionization; financialization of the economy) that are politically contentious can be more easily concealed from the public eye.
This also scares me. I've often wondered, what will happen to people in a largely automated world (which could be reality in next 40-50 years). Will there be riots as employment will be unprecedented? Will it open new industries or entirely new period of creativity for humanity (e.g. industrial age giving birth to age of information)?
When we transitioned to industrial age, I believe people had similar concerns but somehow things worked out well. Can we repeat that?
Step 1) Increase taxes on income above a certain level, create a floor that eliminates poverty (hunger, homelessness, etc). Continue to incentivize progress so that we continue on the path currently forged by science and technology (I don't believe this crowd requires me to expound on this)
Step 2) Use renewable energy and technology to provide "what we need and some of what we want, at no personal cost" to everyone.
Both transitions are going to be terribly painful.
So preserving work in the face of massive changes in the economy would be an incredibly unfortunate thing to do. Why not simply allocate social resources such that people who are not needed for work simply don't have to work? Allow them to have food, and shelter, and healthcare, and let them explore whatever it is that brings them happiness, without having to worry about spending their days performing some menial task because someone has decided that they must "work" for their meals.
Petroleum is running out, lots of places are being desertified, and arable land is shrinking, leading to places with food shortages. Until the day a very cheap, completely renewable (or effectively infinite) source of energy is found (such as cold fusion, or vacuum energy), there will be no post-scarcity.
I think that the major evidence for our post scarcity world is that, in developed countries, a small fraction of the population is actually involved in agriculture and manufacturing (and that percentage is shrinking).
To quote Gibson "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed".
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
There's been quite some hand wringing over this issue in the UK in recent years with people on long term sickness welfare or other long term welfare programs.
The populist view is that these people "should" be working and don't "deserve" to be subsidized full time because they haven't "contributed" to the system. But if they are genuinely of as little use to the workforce as it seems, does such a stigma to not working really make any sense?
in the natural world, if they are genuinely of as little use, they "should die", for the resources to keep them alive is more than the "profit" that they can generate. This is becoming more and more true with more and more automation - the cost of resources to keep somebody alive is getting to a point where their contributions don't really cover it. I dont know if there is a real solution to this problem.
It is easy to get caught up in hypotheticals, and forget that we are all primates in rags scrambling to survive.
If good jobs like these are available to everyone then sure, denigrate the people who are reluctant to work for a living. But as long as most work is shit work for shit managers done for shit wages, then insisting that people work for a living on moral grounds is, in fact, the antithesis of morality.
People thinking like this really makes me furious. This is such a narcisistic thinking, that I feel disgusted.
Human beings are driven by incentives. From drinking a glass of water, to writing a book it is all incentive based. If you have your basic needs covered, you have no incentives. When you make policy, you have to think about the lowest common denominator, not the select few top speciments. It is extremely vain and naive to think removing incentives to educate yourself and work will end in anything other than disaster. Apart from that, the model you describe fosters enormous corruption at every level of society. From the factory workers who go drunk to work and steal, because when everyone is a principal, noone is a principal, to the political leaders who engage in atrocities to keep and grow their power.
PLEASE stop trying to make communism happen. It has destroyed so many lives already.
Self-betterment is an incentive. Betterment of everyone else is an incentive. The idea that people must be forced to work to make money or else they won't do anything else is a capitalist ideal, NOT absolute fact.
Wouldn't it be nice if people could actually do things that interest them instead of worrying about putting food on the table?
This mechanism of entitlements and requirements and such enshrined by capitalism is deeply engrained, but it is not above challenge.
Charity to help someone achieve their goals is very different from payouts for having no aspirations or abilities.
What if that's the result of being charity (to those in need)?
Right now, there's a divide which separates the "useful" - who get a salary - from the "useless" - who get a pension -, which leads to those feelings of alienation and self-deprecation. But does anyone feel useless because they didn't have to work for the sunlight they get, or the air they breath?
I'm not affirming anything, but it'd interesting to know if the problem you identified would disappear if everyone got those resources, instead of just those "in need".
The United States and most of the rest of civilization disagrees with this statement. We call the things you are entitled to "human rights" and while there may be disagreement as to which rights ought to be applied, it is a completely radical view to claim that society should not offer any basic protections. It is from the complex interplay of society that we obtain our unique and impressive powers, this is why lions are not running shit on this planet.
Maybe so, but a key point is that the conditions have not been met anywhere where people tried to force socialist revolutions. The idea that you could manage to make socialist revolutions work in underdeveloped agrarian economies stems from people like Lenin and Mao, not Marx. Marx, on the contrary warned against it decades before.
> Simply because you were born, doesn't mean you are entitled to anything.
There you are in violent agreement with Marx.
Marx spent a lot of effort arguing against the idea of a welfare system that would give everyone the same without contributing. E.g. in. Critique of the Gotha Programme, he goes as far as pointing out that too much emphasis had been put on redistribution and "fair distribution" and points out various unintended consequences of the proposed program that he saw as counterproductive to the development of socialism and later communism.
One of the most famous tenets of Marxism is exactly "from each according to ability, to each according to need". There's nothing there about being entitled to anything just for being born. On the contrary, there is an expectation of duty. Only those totally unable to contribute are left off the hook if they want to expect society to in help.
The "welfare entitlement" comes from the social democrats - the beginnings of which were the main influence Marx was arguing against in Critique of the Gotha Programme.
I was born and live in a post-soviet country. Born exactly when the communist regime (supposedly) fell. I know this slogan very well. The problem with it is that when everyone is a principal, noone is a principal.
It's not about economic development, but philosophical one. People (and all of nature) is in constant movement. From trees spreading seeds, to endorphins in the human brain when you achieve success. If you remove this reward system from the social framework people just stop caring. If you don't have a carrot to chase, you stop walking. You see this very clearly when you manage people in any capacity. What you are left with then, is a very, very small group of people involved in making the decisions, contrary to any syndicalism thought. Soon those few people get intoxicated by the power and corruption, in all its forms, erodes the whole system. Slowly, but painfully.
When you make policy, you have to be very careful and cautious. It's one thing to have horizontal structure in Valve and 37signals, where pre-selection means you already are in the top 1% of speciments. Thinking you can translate that success to the other 99% of the population is naive and vain. Vanity is certainly devil's most favorite sin.
So has capitalism. What's your point?
Just because something was done poorly in the past doesn't mean we can't iterate and improve. Capitalism has no ready answer for some of the problems we are beginning to face. Eventually people like you are going to have to admit that Marx was definitely right about at least one thing: socio-economic class is a critical social cleavage that drives much of history.
So unless capitalism figures out a way to pull its stubborn head out of the sand and deal with its own shortcomings to prevent society from tearing itself apart, we're going to get a chance to find out whether Marx was right about anything else.
Communism/socialsm has noble ideas. But those ideas live in a silo. When they touch reality everything shatters.
The idea that we have to construct a society based on idealistic absolutes is nonsense. Some problems are more efficiently solved collectively, others are better solved by the power of the market. Let's harness the power of both.
If the day comes when AI abruptly puts huge percentages of the population out of work and our society faces collapse, one can easily envision a solution that implements structural changes that incorporates both the benefits of market forces and the efficiencies of collective resource pooling.
And the middle-managers losing their jobs will accelerate the destruction of the middle classes, whose spending is what keeps the economy motoring.
Not sure where that plays out, short of either guaranteed incomes or new-feudalism
1) Communicate the vision
2) Allocate resources
3) Set criteria for decisions of unequivocal data
4) Make judgement calls on equivocal data
5) Facilitate the voice of the worker being heard
Computers can only do 2 & 3
1) Because engineers need translation
2) Not preventing teams from doing their work
3) A bit of arbitrage, fair
4) Flipping the coin based on the choices well-prepared by underlings
5) Politics, CEO will always only hear the board, which only cares about themselves; I bet anonymous feedback forms and a bit of cheap data mining would be a more sure bet
I feel more troubled by the fact that folks in non-AI field don't see this as an imminent problem. They don't realize that with current advances in computing power that enables us to store more and more data cheaply, how much can be learnt from it and how much can be automated.
There don't seem to be any easy solutions. Training/teaching folks new skills would help but will not solve this for every person affected. I suspect the collateral damage from this will be big.
I don't think his solution is viable however, since it would only delay the inevitable. Even if you make humans dirt cheap, the power of computers and all the benefits of automation will still be cheaper, only later.
He extrapolates that our current take on our economy will soon be very outdated and that it needs to be rethought. Perhaps our star-treck economy will not be the result of space-travel, but automation. Imo this is the best possible outcome I can imagine.
You can be replaced with a small REST API.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w...
There could be a lot of turmoil in the next few decades as society adapts to this new world of increased automation.
For example, as Uber has advanced to UberX and now UberPool, the possibility of being car-free is much more feasible and potentially cheaper than ownership. So the labor hours required to own a car are cut out as a need for those workers. Similarly, craigslist, AirBNB etc. are impacting the renting vs. buying scenario and reducing costs in those areas.
Will this increase in accessibility happen at the same rate of labor loss? Probably not and there will be some turbulence, but I think the net result will be a realization of excess in western culture and an adjustment to more reasonable standards of living.
Sure, there will be 'above the api' haves, but there is reason to believe the accessibility of meeting basic needs will scale up as a long term net result after short/mid term turbulence.
If anything AirBnB has caused the price of property to go up. Where I live you could easily make enough to cover rent or a mortgage from letting a property on AirBnB for one or two weekends a month. The rest of the time it is empty, which means the demand for housing in the local area is higher, which means rents go up. In my 200 unit building I think around 5% of the properties are vacation rentals.
Really AirBnB isn't much different to holiday homes / timeshares, but what they have done is bring it to the masses. It will be interesting if / when they introduce surge pricing to combat this - right now the control is still with landlords, but eventually they'll just be another pawn in the game.
This process happens over and over as technology improves, it hurts in the short run and opens lots of new doors in the long run.
Come to think of it, a lot of services are but glorified function calls - it's just the API (i.e. having to talk to people) that's messy and too broken for any automated use.
The mobile web lets you standardize mobile services (like delivery and taxis) and replace small companies owned by middle class people with leaner, larger, public ones.
And for how long do you think that job may be safe from automation?
All of it. All the way up to the C-Suite.
This would naturally improve efficiency, and in not a few cases it would probably apply a significant multiplier to overall profitability.
That doesn't mean it would be a good idea politically or socially - although depending on the value system and long-term strategic insight of the AI, it might be an improvement there too.
You could even have an automated YC, where a model of Paul Graham selects between different business models produced by a selection of AI agents.
This could just be a joke, but to be honest I'm not completely sure it's not a serious prediction.
For this specific example, I haven't been following AI that much, but from the news it doesn't seem to be advancing that far. Sure, we have self-driving cars, but a whole team went into creating them, and before that there were teams involved in image recognition, mapping, navigation, engineering, and more. Natural language processing has advanced pretty far though, I'll give you that. But there's a lot of stuff that happens in between the query "Siri, what's the Weather?" and the response and people will need to be involved in the processes in between.
But with advances in both hardware (3d memory, memresistors, neural network chips, graphite), and software(recent advances in CV, statistics, deep neural networks) that point is moving forward all the time.
Not too long ago we couldn't imagine that a computer could recognise house numbers and streets names in arbitrary fonts, but that is what powers google maps. Luckily in this case the technology has not replaced a huge workforce of would-be google-mappers. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done.
Technology, and especially AI has the potential to be enormously disruptive. And even if the risk seems remote, it's too big to ignore imo.
HN seems to be stuck on some singularity, but personally I just think it's a byproduct of futurology. Just look at the past and how they envisioned the future. Heck, we can study the industrial revolution and the reaction of Luddites, but people still have jobs today. Like I said, we might just have to move an abstraction higher, just like how we went from manual labor, to controlling machines that do manual labor.
Also, just a nitpick but all that google maps OCR was done by humans via Captcha.
Dispatches human to nearest place of worship to thank god for 'foo'.
var gods = celestialBeingRepository.Where(x => x.IsGod);
foreach (var god in gods) { god.Thank(); }
Option A - Work for a system run by an algorithm that hires, fires, and judges you based purely on the work you do.
Option B - Work for a system run by irrational humans that hires, fires, and judges you based on their own prejudices and ego.
Principle: An operating ageement should be written with a specific purpose, in very simple language or ideally in pseudocode or actual code. Corollary: This document should contain a way to programmatically deal with issues such as "there is no person to do job X", by random selection or by rotation or by whatever other method is agreed upon. Corollary: This document should contain a way to programmatically allocate revenue and split profits.
Principle: Job titles are optional. Hats worn are necessary. Everybody should list the jobs they are happy to do in order of expertise. Corollary: Hats needed should be specified as soon as the scope of the project is determined. Corollary: Any hats left unworn by unwillingness should be traded around with some frequency.
Principle: Everybody contributes to a common diary or blog, at least once a day, with at least one sentence, explaining what they did during that day. Corollary: Everybody should be able to identify at least one useful thing they did each day they are working. Corollary: Anybody wanting to not work for a time should let everybody know in advance.
Principle: Everybody gets one vote. Tie breaks are decided by whoever is wearing the largest hat in that area or as specified by the operating agreement. Corollary: Votes are called when there is a disagreement and resolved as close to immediately as possible. Corollary: Valid vote outputs are yes, no, don't care, don't know enough.
Principle: Every rule agreed upon after the starting document is generated should carry an explanation as to in response to what event it was made. Corollary: The reason for the starting document itself is assumed to be "To accomplish our primary goal", which should be specified. Corollary: The more a rule can be automated, the more it should be, but this machine must never override anybody.
Principle: Any procedure that gets in the way of the stated goal must be moved out of the way. Corollary: When in doubt between toss and keep, default to keep. Corollary: When in doubt between open and closed, default to open.
Principle: Nobody should create emergencies. Everybody should react to emergencies. Corollary: Emergencies should be definied strictly. Corollary: Emergency response is coordinated by anybody who is there and knows what they are doing.
(c)mkb2012
This reminds me of a useful reflection on social moral processes. If you have a group of people who all have agreed to achieve some goal, say, "everyone should be happy," then you have to support it with a rule: "Any person has the power to demand change, and no other person has the power to veto this."
So if one person is unhappy, they simply say "change," and something is required to change. Even if everybody else is happy and they all disagree. Even if all known changes result in fewer people being happy. The goal was not met. So implicitly, the real goal is that nobody demand change.
You can't get stuck in a local maximum if you're looking for a global maximum. You have to prove that you are at a global maximum to resist change, and you have to prove it to those who demand change.
The only way to get there is to find out what people actually want and need, and to deliver it.
But my first thought was what would happen if you accidentally let a troll into your group. ie, someone who enjoys yelling "change" just to watch everyone else jump.
Heck, that person might be genuinely unhappy unless everyone is changing! Add in someone else who hates all change, and you have an unresolvable contradiction.
>Add in someone else who hates all change, and you have an unresolvable contradiction.
No, you have a meta-problem. One that can be solved by a suitable virtual reality pretty handily.
If one person is only happy when things change, and someone else is only happen when they don't change, I don't see how there is any way to resolve the difference. I'm curious what solution you see for this, and especially in how a virtual reality would help.
Either way, I've already given you a potential solution to that problem, and I see no reason to elaborate further. Use your imagination.
But If I were to follow that line of reasoning, I would be forced to conclude that your incompetence here is simply an innate part of your being. But I don't believe that, even if you think I should.
So try to do a little better, ok?
I find it difficult to believe that anyone could actually believe that, which is why I'm fairly certain you're trolling me. But I suppose it's possible that you're not particularly perceptive.
By the way, you still haven't mentioned your magical way to satisfy the conditions "X" and "Not X" (ie, "constantly changing" and "unchanging") at the same time.