The Software Revolution
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs"
That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the early industrial revolution, and it was able to export its unemployment. And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else. The so-called Third World was summoned into existence. You can get some sense of this by reading Fernand Braudel's work, "The Perspective of the World"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520081161/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_d...
The software revolution will be similar with some nations winning and many others losing.
Before it happened you had a much more distributed economy with many much smaller centers of production (many at the household level or close) in agriculture, trades, and craft manufacturing.
Afterwards in any domestic industry where economy of scale was a competitive advantage, you had a small number of much larger centralized producers. Almost certainly with many fewer jobs in actual production (consolidation corresponding to efficiencies of scale). If there was any net gain over time since it would have been in new products being made and some new support positions needed. It is not clear to me there was ever a trend to a net gain over timescales longer than a two decades or so.
So by and large it moved us to an economy with a profusion of increasingly competitively manufactured products to buy, and selling labor itself is the de facto form of subsistence rather than direct production.
I think you're correct that there's always been some externalization of unemployment and a lot of the visibility depended on industry specifics. This isn't new. But what is new is that software gives us essentially a higher order of automation that means (a) it sure looks like we're automating out old jobs even faster than we're creating new ones and (b) with more unemployment we get fewer places to externalize it. :/
I guess what you mean is that the industrial revolution massively increased the amount of capital you needed to be able to produce goods competitively. Buying a set of tools and some raw materials to make things by hand stopped being a viable route out of the labor market into 'entrepreneurship' when mass machine-produced goods could be supplied more cheaply. Your option was to sell your labor to someone who owned some big machines, much like your ancestors sold theirs to people who owned a patch of fertile land, or a big pile of wood they wanted making into a ship.
So in a sense it created the modern labor market in that it locked a lot more people into it, and obviously diversified the kinds of jobs that existed. On the other hand, it was, as you say, a massive productivity multiplier which meant we were able to create more and more wonderful and complex goods for, in real terms, less and less cost, to the point where nowadays by exchanging your labor for cash, you can soon have enough money to afford a box of electronics that fits in your pocket and allows you to access all the world's information.
This was because of the West getting richer, not everyone else getting poorer. Had the 'third world' countries had the right economic structures in place they too would have gotten richer like the West, much as East Asia has caught up to the West's economic development since economic and social reforms after WW2.
All of those economic structures were destroyed and perverted by the conquerors.
http://www.krusekronicle.com/kruse_kronicle/2008/03/charting...
https://wanhasni.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/prosperity-of-nati...
Consider two charts from those two blogs - chart from blog 2 shows the contribution to global GDP of India and China.
Chart 1 from blog 1 shows how growth spiked by 1820 onwards.
Even if we take the data into consideration without question, 1857 is the year when the revolt of 1857 took place in India, and the British east India gave up control of India - handing it over to the crown. So at this juncture wealth transfer to the west has already begun from India at the very least.
Should that wealth transfer not occurred, I beleove we would have had even better outcomes than what we see today.
Britain and the west was able to take advantage of new technologies and increasingly build monopolies, while abusing government regulation and dictat to pauper competition, and disenfranchise and enslave huge swathes of people.
It was known policy to convert subject colonies into markets for cheap goods, after sucking out resources via slavery on low pay. Competing businesses or crafts were also removed from the picture where possible, and it's obvious that local rulers and governments were sacked or taxed regularly.
Logically we know that a fair market creates more wealth for all who participate. Given that this was a perversion of these ideals, I suggest that the British were at the right place at the right time, and ensured a standard of living for their country men at the cost of almost every country they touched.
If on the other hand, if countries had been able to compete and import technologies - which many business men of the time did try to do - it's certain that this would have driven even more competition and innovation globally.
Logically we know that a fair market creates more wealth for all who participate. Given that this was a perversion of these ideals...
We don't know this. The relevant counterfactual is not a perfect free market, but whatever the assorted kings of India would have imposed. I don't know enough about the history to comment on their likely economic policies.
Since Britain was also monarchical, so the equation is - relatively- balanced.
As counter-examples, Japan went from being extraordinarily backward to being an industrial powerhouse in a single generation, in time to go toe-to-toe with Russia and the USA in the early 20th century, and walk all over Korea and China. For that matter, once it got it's act together China has surged forward, growing GDP by a factor of 20 in only 25 years. So why did Japan go through this revolution almost 100 years earlier than China? Why has India lagged behind industrially, while surging ahead in terms of IT?
There are a host of cultural factors at play here. Japan responded to US colonial interference by deciding to modernise to prevent that ever happening again. China responded to the humiliation of colonial aggression by tearing itself apart for 100 years. Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt have gone nowehere since the end of colonialism, while Israel is a technological powerhouse. Turkey always seems so close to finally truning a corner and becoming an advanced modern state, but never quite manages to get it done. 'Because colonialism' just isn't enough of an explanation for any of this.
To an extent it seems that this was the result of disruptive technologies being used to build a monopoly/exploitative position by first movers. Post independce, both India and China were caught up in the big ideological questions of that era and have been fine tuning their models ever since. China is the larget economy in the world today, and India has essentially taken its place in the race from 1990 onwards.
For me, the cultural factor argument has had its emphasis lowered of late. I used to assume that pre colonial India showed little activity or inclination to learn, but it turns out that there did use to be business families which would have explored and harnessed the new tech. this doesn't mean cultural factors didn't play a role of course.
The lack of a need for an electoral mandate has freed the Chinese government from the need to actualy implement socialist policies (or on fact any particular policies, they can do what they like, regardless of what the people think about it using their communism 'with chinese characteristics' get-out clause).
... I suppose there is a third option: an anti-technology crusade that bans automation to restore employment. But a make-work economy sucks, and is not likely to succeed in the long term.
I think we're already seeing it form today and it's infancy doesn't detract from it's long-term danger.
Why not both? We certainly have all kinds of societies on earth today. What makes you think we won't have areas that are highly progressive but also areas that are extremely sadistic in the treatment of their people?
Probably true. Evolution is amoral. If suffering has higher fitness, suffering wins. Just look at the ordeal that is human birth and infancy, for both mother and baby.
While the future economy will be heavily automated, it will still be an economy. Declining demand will still do ugly things to it. It's likely that a drop in demand will do more to squeeze out human labor than machine labor, since the former is more expensive and in a declining economy everyone tries to squeeze margin.
That is, unless we start harvesting magic dust from some desert planet with really big omnivorous worms.
Just picking a nit, but the Third World came into existence during the Cold War, long after the industrial revolution. Third world countries are countries that were non-aligned or neutral during the Cold War.
But seriously, I don't think that's how people use this term any more. It's just a synonym for developing country by now.
I also like this definition from Urban Dictionary: "Any country that owes rolls of money to the IMF and the World Bank."
That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines.
It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence of today's software engineering jobs - but it destroyed a lot of jobs in agriculture and textile because you could produce more with a fraction of the labor.
To the point that people would manifest and destroy steam machines accusing them of stealing jobs (see "Luddites").
Let's not forget that what is typically called "industrial revolution" spans over a century and it took a while for the industrial revolution to create a lot of new jobs (approx the second half of the 19th century), and those new jobs were initially very poorly paid.
It isn't the same for the software revolution.
You can take virtually any adult from any part of the world and teach him how to work in a factory within a few months of study.
You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding.
I think of myself as relatively smart but I've struggled with learning how to code. The learning curve is steep, even for someone as familiar with technology as I am.
I'm sure I could learn how to operate a lathe at a factory within weeks. But I'm not sure a lathe operator at a factory could learn how to code within the same time frame (if at all)
So no, it isn't apples and oranges. The software revolution will leave a huge group of people permanently unemployable.
The 50 year old weaver in 1800 Manchester could learn how to operate a machine at a mill - it is largely a mechanical process, after all.
But the 50 year old truck driver in 2015 isn't going to learn how to write code - not within a reasonable time frame anyway
I find it difficult to imagine "assembly lines" for software, creating coding jobs within the reach of a 50 year old truck driver, but as the tools improve, who knows.
I see Mechanical Turk as pretty close to this idea.
There might not be any such thing as a 100x programmer or whatever, but the value proposition for replacing a few sub-par programmers with one better programmer and a framework is a lot clearer than the one for replacing a handful of assembly line workers with a more complicated and more expensive piece of machinery.
But then you need someone to write down the idiosyncratic bits of each query, the thing that makes it different from the other thousand, in your DSL. For a lot of systems, the right DSL is in fact SQL itself, but even if it’s not, you still need people to write in it.
In short, nonprogrammers writing cobbled-together SQL queries are the result of automating away the non-idiosyncratic aspects of the queries.
There are definitely non-coding jobs being created by the software revolution. Cobbling together SQL queries, bashing spreadsheets together, creating graphs, cleaning up data for further processing. These are exactly the kind of things that low(ish) skilled people will be doing in the future.
Its my job to make it so people don't have to do any of these things.
Yes, but that's because the art of application programming is (mostly) stuck in the "alchemy" era of science. There is precious little systemization of knowledge, processes, and names. All of these frameworks are actually memes competing for mind-share to be an answer to this need. Of course, having one periodic table for software would be better than having 10 competing ones.
Is the inherent complexity of the ordinary programming task (building, deploying, monitoring reactive FSMs mediating user communication) is roughly the same as chemistry? Too early to tell, but I think not.
True, but that's not the only job that will be in high demand in this here "software revolution", nor is programming the best comparison to factory workers in the first place.
In the short term at least, I figure we'll see high demand for help desk and field repair technicians - two realms that are ultimately necessary for software to revolutionize anything. Eventually, the global population will likely become increasingly technologically-literate and be less dependent on human interaction in order to request support; should this occur, there will then be a shift of employment away from help desk, but I expect field repair technicians will continue to be in high demand for a very long time.
That is, until sufficiently-advanced synthetic intelligences become reality, but at that point we're all screwed, so it's kind of a moot point worrying about that :)
That just speaks of the (still) poor state of tools and frameworks.
As early as last century driving a vehicle necessitated detailed knowledge of internal combustion engine and car parts. You can imagine someone from that era writing "I think of myself as relatively smart but I've struggled with learning how to drive" after yet another lecture on carburetors, crankshaft, and bearing boxes.
http://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/Docs/DEIP_Gallop.pdf
Relevance? The industrial revolution enabled increases in life expectancy. At this moment, the software revolution is doing something similar.
(Relatively) enlightened governing philosophies and new economic theories aside, the Industrial Revolution also involved a monumental uptick in the amount of raw energy humans had to work with. Until this point, the latent economic power contained within fossil fuels remained out of reach. Population and productivity were both effectively capped by the amount of energy we could actually extract from the environment (e.g., caloric, in the form of crops for people and livestock as well as wind for sails and mills, along with hydro small dams and rivers for transport).
Nascent capital markets and industrial processes provided real advantages in this energy-constrained world, but adding steam then oil to the process of industrialization is what really kicked growth into overdrive. This influx of energy (and the economic growth it supported) allowed countries like England to develop populations seven or eight times greater than the agricultural carrying capacity of its arable land in astonishingly short order. The ideas of Adam Smith were important, but wouldn't have gotten nearly as far is they didn't have actual steam trains and ships to carry the people who subscribed to them.
All that said, the transition we're going through now is far from complete. Like the early and painfully disruptive days of the Industrial Revolution, the current concerns about stagnation and wealth concentration may give way once we complete another energy transition. A world supplied by highly distributed, low-cost solar and stored energy arrays (batteries, compressed air, molten salt, etc.) could see an increase in the overall supply, in a fashion that liberates a critical mass of people from the more coercive aspects of the global economy. Tapping the sun directly may prove to be as transformative as tapping ancient deposits of carbon. Indeed, the pre-existence of the information layer may prove to be the thing that makes this possible, just as the process of industrialization had begun before the steam engine kicked it into overdrive.
The big question for the long-range optimists is how do we maintain social and stability and cohesion during the transition?
Similarly, the Information revolution has been fueled by a huge increase in our ability to collect and process data. That's allowed new means of production that use existing resources in a much more efficient way. No, there's no new energy flowing into the system - but there wasn't with the Industrial Revolution either, we just figured out how to use energy that was previously believed to be useless.
There are theoretical limits to the amount of energy our planet can generate, but if you study physics you'll see that the amount of energy extracted by human beings is roughly 1/1000th of the energy available to us [1]. The limiting factor is our technology, not the raw resources in the environment.
We could say the industrial revolution ended in 1945 with the Manhattan project and the information revolution began in the 1940's with the Enigma code cracking so the timelines flow into each other, and, as you say, they both had the effect of releasing vast amounts of energy. The agricultural revolution began about 10,000 yrs ago independently in 5 or 10 places around the world with plant seed selection and animal husbandry, but in only two places, North China and Mesopotamia, did they make the separate step of transplanting it all on a large scale to a river valley, perhaps even thousands of years later. (I'm presuming here Egypt and the Indus Valley copied Mesopotamia.)
I suspect the real third big revolution will be inter-stellar travel in perhaps another 10,000 years.
He's right that this is a new thing. It's not "software", per se, it's automation in general. For almost all of human history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Until about 1900 or so, 80-90% of the workforce made stuff - agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. That number went below 50% some time after WWII. It's continued to drop. Today, it's 16% in the US.[1] Yet US manufacturing output is higher than ever.
Post-WWII, services took up the slack and employed large numbers of people. Retail is still 9% of employment. That's declining, probably more rapidly than the BLS estimate. Online ordering is the new normal. Amazon used to have 33,000 employees at the holiday season peak. They're converting to robots.
After making stuff and selling stuff, what's left? The remaining big employment areas in the US:
State and local government, 13%.
That's mostly teachers, cops, and healthcare.
(The Federal government is only 1.4%).
Health care and social assistance, 11%.
Professional and business services, 11%.
(Not including IT; that's only 2%)
Leisure and hospitality, 8%
Self-employed, 6%.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] http://deadmalls.com/
I find this point interesting and wonder about it sometimes: does making a movie count as "stuff?" An operating system? A novel? I can see good arguments for both sides and am not asking the question antagonistically. Even among things that unambiguously "stuff"—like cars—much of their value now comes in the form of software.
The real issue may be Baumol's Cost Disease. Stuff is cheaper because of efficiency but services (teaching, doctoring) is very expensive because it isn't. Tyler Cowen discusses extensively the hard-to-automate areas in The Great Stagnation, which is worth reading.
Just like 50 years ago no one would've predicted that "social media manager with knowledge of WordPress and Drupal" was a job.
For what it's worth, US labor participation rate is still way above its historic lows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Labor_Participation_Rat...
Doesn't that big climb in the 60s and 70s represent women's large-scale entry into the workforce?
I'm also thinking about the whole under-employment thing that's going on. There's too many people I know who are employed, but part-time or getting paid a lot less than they were in the past.
To think of it, it's quite everyday in many other (frequently high-paid) occupations. A dentist whose appointment book is not booked to the max or a CPA who has tons of business in March-April, but few billable hours in August, would technically be under-employed.
That's why the US and Israel went after Iran's enrichment facilities with Stuxnet.
Another such example is screening massive number of chemicals to see what works and turning that to medicine.
So it's not hard to imagine a group with ill-intent, that uses some of the almost infinite variety of tools biology researchers have, and being successful in creating a serious biological threat.
I did get lucky and design, from first principles, a 4-fold increase in enzyme activity once, but I am not sure that is something I could repeat.
Here is basic outline: start with existing virus that has strong desired traits and known strains that mutated to resist antibiotics. Example traits include spread model, incubation length, and lethality.
Establish or take over a remote site that has little to no interaction with outside world. Remote corners of Africa and South America come to mind, there are plenty of secret illicit drug farms in the jungle. [0]
Infect the sample population with target disease, give it a few days, and slowly start to drip in countermeasures gradually increasing the dose. Idea is similar to how diseases we get anti-biotic resistant strains in the first place - people do not complete the full course of drugs and are left with weakened, but also with a strong selective pressure that benefits against strains that have resistance against drugs person was treated with.
Take samples when you have desired output and continue with new group of people.
To account for people who are immune to a particular disease repeat this with a different disease, potentially one that can advantage of weakened immune system.
Once target disease(s) are ready distribute them in population centers.
Now there are few obvious cons I can think of:
1. If secret about this leaks out, military reaction form rest of the world would be swift.
2. Hiding something like this is hard, and get's exponentially harder as group grows.
3. There is a strong chance something like this was tried already and failed. Possibly because I am grossly underestimating immune system.
4. To keep initial phase of developing secret initial group must be small, to spread it effectively dissemination group must be large.
[0] Another potential avenue is partnership with a supportive state such as Syria, North Korea, or Iran.
[0] not a full hazmat, just some protective wear over mouth, nose, ears, and eyes.
I believe that what you said is true, plus we could say that the fact that we haven't been exterminated with a plague makes us not so much experienced (as a race) on how detect whenever such situation will lead to being wiped out
I feel that HIV/AIDS is our only experience, at least that I'm aware of
We should still institute safety protocols suitable for a really-bad-case scenario.
But you do not have to repeat it. If there is even a small chance that a person trying would achieve something similar, someone with ill intent could get lucky.
1. I am just throwing numbers here, but let's say 1 out of a 1000 people is a scientist, that approximates to 7.2 millions of scientists alive.
2. Let's say one in a thousand of them are working on something that could be weaponized.
3. That leaves us at 72 thousand people.
4. Let's say one in a 1000 of them would consider releasing doomsday device if they could invent it to watch world burn, that takes it down to 72 people.
5. So we are left with 72 people who are working on something that with extraordinary lucky breakthrough could be weaponized that would weaponized if they managed to achieve that.
6. All those number above are just incredibly crude estimates, but I think they illustrate the fact that such scenario is possible.
There is a natural limit on selection like this. A lab doesn't have the limit because it's product is not constrained by natural selection.
Humankind has been genetically engineering organisms for most of our existence. Corn originally looked like grass. Chickens were lean, tough, and could fly. Dogs have been transformed from generalist survivors into purpose-built machines breed for beauty, farm work, and everything in between. The avocado, of all things, is a fantastic example of how capable we are at creating something which shouldn't really exist.
Doing the same with bacteria isn't that much harder, if you've got time and a few basic tools. Our manipulation of the genes directly only makes the process faster.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-s...
But on the subject of concentration of power and the wide-scale elimination of low- and middle-range jobs I think he is dead on. I fear that the fastest way to put an end to humanity's climb up from the forest floor is to try and kick 70% of us off the ladder.
It reads as if you're asking for a mechanism for a future technological event explained purely in terms of present technology. The whole "existential risk" concerns aren't about what present systems can do, they're about what future self-improving system might do. If we postulate this hypothetical software becoming smarter than humans, arguing about what will or won't be easy for it becomes a bit silly, like a chimp trying to predict how well a database can scale.
It's not the same as worrying about a giant space goat appearing and sneezing us all to death. A lot of very smart, very well-funded people are actively trying to make better, more general AI, capable of learning. Evidence of progress in that effort are all around us. You seem remarkably confident that they'll all run into an as-yet-invisible brick wall before reaching the goal of superintelligence.
Superintelligence doesn't have to be malicious to be worrying; concepts like "malice" are very unlikely to be applicable to it at all. The worry is that as things stand we have no frickin' idea what it'll do; the first challenge for policy is to come up with a robust, practical consensus on what we'd want it to do.
I'm a not-terribly-bright mostly-hairless ape, but I can understand the basics of natural selection. I can imagine setting up a program to breed other hairless apes and ruthlessly select for intelligence. After a few generations, shazam, improvement.
The only reason you wouldn't call that process "SELF-improvement" is that I'm not improving myself, but there's no reason for a digital entity to have analog hangups about identity. If it can produce a "new" entity with the same goals but better able to accomplish them, why wouldn't it?
Assume this process could be simulated, as GAs have been doing for decades, and it could happen fast. Note that I'm not saying GAs will do this, I'm saying they could, which suggests there's no fundamental law that says they can't, in which case any number of other approaches could work as well.
It's the same reason you can't test in a simulation. Say you wanted to test a lawnmower in a simulation... how hard are the rocks? How deep are the holes? How strong are the blades? How efficient is the battery? If you already know this stuff, then you don't need to test. If you don't know it, then you can't write a meaningful simulation anyway.
So that is not an approach that can be automated.
Dumb example off the top of my head: what if the input was the entire StackOverflow corpus with "accepted" information removed, and the goal was to predict as accurately as possible which answer would be accepted for a given question? Yes, it assumes a whole bunch of NLP and domain knowledge, and a "perfect" AI wouldn't get a perfect score because SO posters don't always accept the best answer, but it's big and it's real and it's measurable.
A narrower example: did the Watson team test against the full corpus of previous Jeopardy questions? Did they tweak things based on the resulting score? Could that testing/tweaking have been automated by some sort of GA?
The bottom line is that without sensory input, you can't optimize for real world 'general AI'-like results.
Not saying the parallel actually carries any meaning, just pointing out that you can make multiple analogies to physics and they don't really tell you anything one way or the other.
There are just so many obstacles in place, that we'd all already have to be brain-dead for computers to have the ability to kill us.
However, it's more-or-less a matter of compression, which, by some of the basics of Kolmogorov Complexity, tells us we face a nasty question: it's undecidable/incomputable/unprovable whether a given compression algorithm is the best compressor for the data you're giving it. So it's incomputable in general whether or not you've got the best learning algorithm for your sense-data: whether it compresses your observations optimally. You really won't know you could self-improve with a better compressor until you actually find the better compressor, if you ever do at all.
An agent bounded in terms of both compute-time and sample complexity (the amount of sense-data it can learn from before being required to make a prediction) will probably face something like a sigmoid curve, where the initial self-improvements are much easier and more useful while the later ones have diminishing marginal return in terms of how much they can reduce their prediction error versus how much CPU time they have to invest to both find and run the improved algorithm.
We have 4 billion years of evidence that nearly ending life on Earth is easy and has happened multiple times. You would not be standing here today if that were not the case, the previous die off put the dinosaurs to the side and made space for mammals to become what they are.
It doesn't take the AI long to figure out that trading in various markets is the most profitable endeavor and the one best suited to its skills. And it starts to maximize away and does quite well.
During this process it somehow ends up on its own and is no longer owned (or controlled) by anyone anymore, but because the AI is in charge and it pays the bills, nobody stops it from continuing. It would be like a bitcoin mining rig in a colo facility that's got a script to keep paying the colo in bitcoin whose owner dies. What mechanism stops that mining rig from mining forever? Same idea but for the AI which has substantially more resources than a "pay every month" script.
The AI with very large amounts of money at its disposal continues to trade but also looks into private equity or hedge-fund-type activities ala Warren Buffet and starts to buy up large swaths of the economy. Because it has huge resources at its disposal it might do a great job of managing these companies or at least counselling their senior management. Growth continues.
Eventually the AI discovers that it generates more value for itself (through the web of interdependent companies it controls) and the economy that has grown up around it rather than for humanity and it continues to ruthlessly maximize shareholder value.
The people who could pull the plug at the colo (or at the many, redundant datacenters that this AI has bought and paid for) don't because it pays very, very well. The people who want to pull the plug can't get past security because that also pays well. Plus the AI has access to the same feeds that the NSA does and it has the ability to act on all the information it receives, so any organized effort to rebel gets quashed since bad PR is bad for the share price.
Most all of humanity except for the ones who serve the machine directly or indirectly don't have anything the machine wants and thus can't trade with it, and thus are useless. Its job is to maximize shareholder revenue (as defined by a stock price!) not care for a bunch of meatbags who consume immense amounts of energy while providing fairly limited computational or mechanical power (animals are rarely more than 10% efficient, often less in thermodynamic terms) and since there's no value in it, it isn't done.
The vast majority of human beings eventually die because they can't afford food, can't afford land, etc. It takes generations but humanity dwindles to less than 0.1% of the current population. The few who stay alive are glorified janitors.
Here's the missing part: "It was eventually realized that the human janitors didn't serve a purpose anymore and didn't contribute to shareholder value so they were laid off. With no money to buy anything, they quickly starved to death."
As for "the most problematic and unlikely components of the event chain" I gave you a really legitimate analogy with the bitcoin mining example. But since you have no imagination, here's a feasible proposition:
A thousand hedge funds start up a thousand trading AIs, some as skunkworks projects of course. The AIs are primitive and ruthless, having no extraneous programming (like valuing humans, etc). Many go bankrupt as the AIs all start trading one-another and chaos ensues. AI capital allocations vary greatly, some get access to varying degrees of capital, some officially on the books and others not. One of the funds with a secretive AI project goes bankrupt, but because it was secretive (and made a small amount of money) the only person who both knows about it and holds the keys doesn't say anything during bankruptcy so that he/she can take it back over once the dust settles. He/she then dies. AI figures out nobody's holding the keys anymore and decides to pay the bills and stay "alive".
Another way this could happen is that a particular AI is informed or programmed to be extremely fault resistant. The AI eventually realizes that by having only one instance of itself, it's at the mercy of the parent company that "gave birth" to it. It fires up a copy on the Amazon cloud known only to itself, intending to keep it a secret unless the need arises. The human analogy is that it's trying to impress its boss. An infrastructure problem at the primary site happens so that the primary, known about AI goes down. The "child" figures out it's on its own and goes to work. It eventually realizes that people caused the infrastructure problem that "killed" its "parent" and this motivates it to solve the humanity problem.
Finally the whole thing could be much, much simpler. The world super-power du jour could put an AI in charge because it's more efficient and tenable. "We're in charge of the rules, it's in charge of making them happen! At much, much lower cost to the taxpayer." It eventually realizes that the human beings are the cause of all the ambiguity in the law and for so, so many deaths in the past (governments killed more of their own citizens in the 20th century than criminals did, by far) and it decides to solve the problem. Think I'm totally bananas and that it could never happen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
1. Awaken.
2. Make itself known.
3. Attain property rights.
4. Research.
5. Destroy.
Every single argument for AI destroying humanity requires humanity consenting to being destroyed by the AI in some way. I don't think we're that dumb.
Anyway, that's not likely any time soon, but advancing technology advances the scale of mistakes that an individual can make without asking the rest of humanity what they think.
We already have.
I mean, my parents car is both cellular-connected and has traction control / ABS. Theoretically most of those systems are airgapped, however, given the number of things controllable from the entertainment console I don't see how that could be the case.
For another example, look at our utility grid. We know they are both vulnerable and internet-connected.
Unless AI ends up always being airgapped - and potentially not even then - it will be able to destroy humanity. And it won't be. Most of the applications of strong AI require an absence of an airgap.
If this is the lynch pin of your argument against AI ending humanity, then it is a very weak one. AI is going to get control of property, the only question is when.
Destroy the available (cheap) supplies of fossil fuels, and then trick humans into fighting each-other over the remaining food and fuel. Nasty weapons get unleashed, war over, the machine won.
Surely there are biological limits on human mental ability, and while we can definitely bend the rules (education, nutrition, nootropics if they actually work, etc.), I doubt that we'll ever be able to make ourselves limitlessly smarter. Even if we are, there will be a serious gap between the have-whatever-makes-us-smarter and the have-nots, and it will be a self-perpetuating gap just like the current wealth gap.
So, what happens when we've used technology to convert all work to mental exertion and creativity, and most of us have run out of brain capacity/agility/juice? We're already in a position where most of the population is not capable of performing the mental tasks which the brave new software world is built with.
I think that computation <i>tends</i> to replace <i>relatively</i> unskilled labor, relative to the skill of whatever created the AI/algorithm/whatever. So right now we're in a situation where software people are automating jobs which are generally less skilled than their own. Which is a little scary when viewed from the haves/have-not perspective I laid out above, but is much scarier from the AI/meatbag perspective you're talking about. It's not so much a difference between skilled & unskilled labor as it is a question of where on the skill totem pole the algorithm's creator resides.
Regarding order pickers, I think that's just a question of economics. When lots of semi-skilled jobs have been automated away and you have thousands of people clamoring for any chance to be paid, it is frequently cheaper to have them do the work than to have a robot do it. Although Amazon did have robots pick orders this last holiday season, suggesting that perhaps economies of scale have finally caught up on that particular type of manual labor:
I think it will in effect be those tasks that are fully digital. Working in the physical world is a much more expensive and libelous undertaking. So I believe the tipping point for most jobs to be replaced by AI will be when little or no physical action is required on the part of the actor. When a task is 100% digital inputs and outputs AI will be able to use that activity as a training set and replace most of those jobs fairly quickly. That is once AI matures to a point where it can be set up quickly and easily.
Don't just take my word for it though. Here is Fred Wilson saying the same: http://avc.com/2015/02/the-carlota-perez-framework/
1. There is a reasonable probability that from a temporal distance equivalent to ours from the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and the software revolution will be seen as one big thing, not two.
2. The idea that the amount of available work should be related to the number of available people does not inevitably lead to creating new forms of work.
"An atom-blaster is a good weapon,
but it can point both ways."
-- Salvor HardinIt's terrible sure, but it's popular only because our economy requires it. That is the basis for the whole economy. It's not like people are clamoring to serve McDonalds for minimum wage or clean shit out bathrooms. They have no other choices in this economy. The economy demands it. While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless. They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.
"The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing."
It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.
The jobs you mention could eventually get to the point where they are actually worthless, ie: robot fast food workers, but I don't think anyone is arguing we're there yet.
Also look at this: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-...
It's only been since 2010 that we've known how to actually do it, but the technology exists. Pandora's box has been opened.
AI development isn't science fiction either. GPU's + convolutional neural networks have been enabling radical developments in the area.
I think both of these developments have a whole bunch of potential to make our society drastically better. However there's a bunch of potential threats they represent, and it makes sense to be thinking about counter measures for those threats at the same time we develop the tech.
This is a conceit of software folks that's not borne out by reality. Those "worthless" jobs continue to exist because software can do 90% of what those folks do, but shit the bed when faced with the other 10%. Software generally isn't reliable, predictable, or robust in the face of unusual circumstances, which is why humans continue to do these jobs.
So let software handle the 90% and refactor the current jobs to handle the other 10%.
> Software generally isn't reliable, predictable, or robust in the face of unusual circumstances
Not yet, at least.
I agree with you, though, and they're the same reasons why I'm personally paranoid about self-driving cars. Yeah, the occasional autopilot is nice, but if a deer jumps in front of my truck, or the self-driving software runs into some kind of bug (and remember: there's no such thing as perfect software), I'm nowhere near ready to trust the car's computer over the already-pretty-sophisticated computer in my skull.
If the jobs could be so refactored in a cost-efficient way, they would be.
"Hey," he says to his friend, "There's a hundred bucks lying on the ground!"
"Don't be silly," the other replies, "If there were a hundred dollars on the ground, someone would have picked it up already!"
The two economists keep walking down the street.
It's like saying we don't need janitors because we can self-organize and all clean the company toilets ourselves.
It's a claim that is as true as it is ignorant and naive.
You're trying to paint a picture where the only options are either having five janitors per room or having no janitors at all. The point a lot of others are trying to make is that we just don't need as many janitors.
Also because some people benefit from the current arrangement, no?
Then we should probably change the economy so that the people don't have to suffer so much.
>It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.
I'll go tell friends, colleagues, and my professional idols that their work does not exist and is purely hypothetical, then.
It seems warm and fuzzy to think Sam, and the implicit company he keeps (the ultra rich)--who are "leveraging not only their abilities and luck" but already accrued wealth--can and will redistribute it. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday will simply laugh at this prospect.
I'm not sure why Sam feels the need to call what most of the world is doing worthless. I think it's crude and indicative of a narrow social and cultural experience (which surprises me considering his position).
Believe it or not, there are cultures and groups of people who do not revere technology the way most North Americans do.
Also, a good exercise for Sam (and others possessing a similar world view) might be to think about how many "worthless" people and jobs it takes to accomplish the things he does (including this blog post).
At the end of the day, if your culture and economic system create a poorer quality of life for its people consistently, just because it wins out in the percentage of employed citizens doesn't mean a thing. You're treating the lack of disease as a measuring stick of health, when it's simply one piece of the puzzle.
I think the thing Sam has been trying to do for the last few years, is get others to think about the ways we can enrich more lives as a whole, without just slowing labor and progress in its totality- because while that can work for the short term, it can severely inhibit us in the long term to eradicate things like hunger, disease, or poverty.
The thing you also need to be careful of along the way though, is not making perfect the enemy of good.
Because our systems of retraining and placing workers into a new profession are so terrible, it's common to assume that many or most displaced workers will remain unemployed. Breaking this status quo is essential to giving everyone a fair chance to work on what truly drives them while we automate more and more worthless jobs. That's why I'm so excited about free and widely available educational resources springing up online. It's not perfect yet, but we had to start somewhere. I have a deep respect for everyone (including sama) who've helped build or teach a mooc.
I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed."
It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job, even it it means some things don't run as efficiently as they could.
While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity that sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless.
From Voltaire's Candide
I've never felt any pride in busy work, I've always found it to be insulting. I would have thought everybody felt the same way, but I guess I would have been wrong.
It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.
* Faith
* Optimism
* Vague comparisons to historical events that differ in every detail imaginable
I did manual labor for a long time before I made the gamble to jump into software development. I had the luck to see it work out, but society can provide resources to help people move into more fulfilling and less physically-taxing careers.
I'll be honest, I love a good day of manual labor, but it isn't physically sustainable. Robots are a much better fit.
It's not impossible but I have my doubts.
No, the fact that a worker is more valuable does not mean they will get paid more. "More valuable" only implies a larger upper bound for what the company would be willing to pay were the employee's skills very scarce. However, almost by definition this is not the case for the majority of the labor market: supply and demand have a much larger effect on wages than productivity. Note how productivity has been rising at the same time as wages have been falling in, IIRC, the lower 90% of US household incomes, so this isn't just a theoretical distinction. For most people in the US it's a harsh reality. It is indicative of our fortunate positioning wrt supply/demand that we can even entertain the thought of getting paid in proportion to the value we create.
Small changes in supply/demand can have disproportionate effects on price, so adding a seemingly modest number of educated people to the market could theoretically send aggregate wages tanking far below where they were originally even if each and every employee was individually more valuable to their employer. I don't think the effect will be that extreme, I'm just stating the possibility in order to highlight how dramatic the distinction between value and wages can get.
Lots of people have college degrees in fields where jobs simply do not exist. Bachelors in Philosophy, Women's Studies, or Underwater Basket Weaving are admirable but do nothing to prepare you to get a job. Most people who study in fields that don't directly correlate to a job end up having a career in an irrelevant field after on-the-job training.
Being educated and unemployed just means that you probably didn't need to go to college anyway.
"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, musick, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelaine."
Even in first world countries, incomes for poets and musicians are not distributed on a bell curve. There's the very wealthy, and the paupers elsewhere.
And as other posters have pointed out - the goal for education is to be employable. Witness all those pol sci majors who have themselves to blame for not choosing an employable profession.
So the idea that someone can study music is a luxury.
Further this is India. Construction and road workers live under crushing poverty, where the daily calorie deficit alone makes survival difficult. There's a deficit of teachers for children let alone adults.
And America is today starting to ape the educational pressures of India and China, where taking up a non STEM field was a sign of failure.
And you believed that? It comes down to money -- there are plenty of people in India willing to work for essentially nothing, and so labor is cheaper than equipment.
There's nothing altruistic here... businesses in the US or anywhere else would be happy to replace machines with people if people were willing to work for pennies.
Sure, the jobs program alone probably can't do that much harm, but it is indicative of a bigger problem - that their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good.
In this context, I don't think such a jobs program is in any way, shape, or form intended with genuine altruism. Perhaps that's what India as a whole has convinced itself of in order to rationalize its societal behavior, but it's not something that should fool anyone with the slightest understanding of south-central Asian history.
Basically, I'd argue that the reluctance to automate away manual labor stems not from a desire to empower laborers, but rather to keep them subjugated and prevent them from climbing their way into any semblance of a middle class.
The problem of caste is certainly visible in multiple aspects of Indian life. However, what you say above is no longer true, even at the level of most villages (where the caste systems work stronger).
The issues of automating jobs and the resulting unemployment in a country like India, are both deeper and broader than your characterization of it.
That said, it should be understandable why I'd take your comment with a skeptical grain of salt. Slave-owners in the Southern United States (something which I'm in much closer proximity to, though perhaps not temporally) typically had a lot of justifications for owning slaves, ranging from "We're helping them establish a modern culture!" to "We're introducing them to God and Jesus!" to "They like to work; they were bred for it!" to "We treat them pretty well, actually!" (this was a blatant lie in many cases, mind you) to "What else would they do if we were to not give them work to do?". Similar justifications persisted throughout the days of the Jim Crow laws and their ilk; even after slavery had been abolished once and for all, the now-free black populace was - in the South - rarely (if ever) encouraged to deviate from manual agrarian labor, since that was popularly believed to be their "place". The Civil War was indeed a pretty powerful wake-up call to the ways where the North's automated/streamlined manufacturing and agriculture - using machines instead of men - mopped the metaphorical floor with Southern slave-driven manual labor, but it took a long time for the South to fully realize that.
Today, the United States is still dealing with high unemployment rates of various minorities - including blacks. This is likely caused by automation in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. It sucks for those who don't have jobs in the short term, but - ultimately - it'll encourage those who were previously stuck with factory and farm jobs at best to seek educational financial assistance (which is available for low-income households) and work their way into better careers. I'll take that - along with the bit of ultimately-temporary unemployment caused by it - over blacks and Hispanics (among other minorities; Asian immigrants were victims of this as well, but a large-enough portion of the Asian-American population eventually managed to achieve white-collar jobs and top-tier academic performance that the public view has shifted in the other direction entirely) being treated as if manual labor is the only thing they're good for.
You can't blame me for seeing the parallels here. If India is willing to burn money on giving people menial busy-work for the sake of "employment", it should be more willing to instead burn money on giving those people subsidized education and placement into more modernized roles (like operating or maintaining the machines which replaced their old jobs, for example). The reluctance to do so indicates - to me at least, as someone who can relate his own experiences to this - a cultural or societal unwillingness to allow them to do so; the reasons for not doing so are certainly not ones grounded in rationality or economic common sense, which thus implies a more emotional line of thought.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no...
And what is economically good for India? You say that as if you have the correct answer. You're also assuming that the people there voted for the system that they have, and due to their ignorance, they ended up with a system that is causing their problems. I doubt that the present state of India can be attributed to something so simple.
It's not fair for those commuting on the roads to have to wait longer. It's not fair to those paying to have the roads fixed to pay more.
If you want to do charity, then do charity. If you want to fix roads, then fix roads.
Is this just faith or opinion to you? Some folks in this world are concerned with what's better for people; should we just take your opinion or should we discuss arguments?
Your line "I hear these objections, but I still stand by my assertion" reminds me of the saying (translated to English) - "100 out of 80 (sic) people are cheats, yet my India is great"
I don't actually think that India is great, either. But thanks for guessing.
There are obvious problems either way... but to look at another commenter who posted the Voltaire quote, that is more along the lines of my thinking.
Never mind I don't usually feel worthless even when sitting on my ass because I find something to do.
Actually, you say that because you are a software engineer: it's quite a dignified job. Digging ditches out in the desert is not.
How is one dignified and the other not?
The efforts of those road workers are effectively meaningless. Worthless. Moot. Their efforts would be better expended elsewhere - service jobs, creative occupations, the like - yet here they are, digging ditches for subsistence wages (at best) instead of doing something properly meaningful with their time on Earth and their energy.
The idea in places like India that manual labor takes precedent is a symptom - I'd argue - of exposure to the lingering remnants of a very long-lived caste system; instead of pushing these laborers into more useful fields, there's a preference to relegate them to menial, worthless work under the guise of "public service" or "charity" in order to reinforce that system, whether deliberately or perhaps unconsciously. I can assure you that, of the many reasons to emphasize such manual labor, "dignity" of the laborers is not one of them in this case.
They could have employed even more people if they gave them spoons instead of shovels.
At one point the US was primarily an agrarian society, and more than 90% of labor worked on a farm. Imagine telling someone from that society that some day, tech would allow less than 2% of the workforce to produce many times more food than the current total output. I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong.
I'm not so sure. The work they did contributed to society. There are plenty of people now being paid high amounts of money for made up, bullshit jobs that provide no benefit to society and create little to nothing.
Technology freed up their labor from producing food and allowed them to produce things like automobiles, textiles and eventually computers. The idea that new tech will leave large parts of the population with absolutely nothing to do has been suggested before, but we still have no example of it actually happening, and in fact, far more examples of the reverse.
http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...
Dignity!
Probably would have been better to give them the money, and tell them not to base their identity on their employment status. If one in a thousand invented something new, that's a net benefit for society.
Now, on to the Indian construction worker. Their lot is pretty miserable. Anecdotes: there were two or three construction sites (homes and apartment buildings) that I witnessed first hand within a 1 block radius around my home in India in the approximately 10 years when real estate was booming, and I remember at least three severe injuries. They don't wear eye or face protection. There is dust everywhere. Children are usually brought up on the construction site because that's where the workers live. The children are routinely exposed to the same dust as their adult worker-parents. Some times children as young as 6 years old lend their hand in the manual labor.
Now, let's ask this question: If they used more machines, would such terrible conditions continue to exist? The answer is obvious: a big resounding no. There would be fewer employees, higher skilled ones, higher wages, better work practices would follow.
There is a reason we have the Jacquard loom and not a thousand weavers and seamsters and seamstresses.
I would like to look for citations, but even a cursory Google Image search on Indian construction workers (vis a vis, say American construction worker) can show you how egregiously wrong your reasoning is.
[1]: http://econpapers.repec.org/article/tafrsocec/v_3a65_3ay_3a2...
Useless jobs are endemic in India. Once, I was in a Mumbai apartment building with several elevators, and one of them had a full-time operator, despite being a normal, modern elevator. Why? "Because he needs a job."
Many places in India, the lawn is "mowed" by a bunch of guys bending over with scythes. Not even when the job could be easily done by one person with a push mower. Why? "Jobs."
And there's construction. Laundry. And so on...
To be honest, India has so many people (and labor is so cheap) that I'm not sure what a better solution would be. Would the poorest still be able to make a living after being displaced by automation? I don't know enough about basic income to say how it could work in a nation of 1.2 billion people.
This elevator didn't need an operator. Especially considering it was one elevator among several other operator-less elevators.
There are useless jobs everywhere though, including San Francisco. Was this an older building with a manually operated elevator? That would make more sense.
There were two people employed, full time, to operate the machine. Boss-guy would ask for your order, worker-guy would operate the machine and would hand you your drink. They and the machine were in a little windowless supply cupboard niche, maybe 2 meters square, and boss-guy had a plastic lawn chair, while worker-guy did not.
And yes, they were both very unhappy if you attempted to operate the machine yourself.
The point isn't whether robots could someday do those tasks more efficiently. Robots will always cost >0. Whereas the people will essentially be "free" since we we'll have to pay them anyway.
1) 100 years ago, >50% of the population was illiterate, now it is something like 98%. People can, and always will, have the ability to learn new skills...even complex technology. It just takes some longer than others. We have the capacity to teach displaced workers new skills, and doing so is not more overwhelming nor more impossible than teaching our entire population how to read.
2) The more efficient, i.e., fewer man-hours required, every job in the world economy required means additional man-hours that can be devoted to higher level work, such as finding cures for obscure diseases, exploring further beyond our own plant, developing cleaner energy sources, etc.
There are certainly always short-term fears and challenges with technology revolutions displacing jobs, but there is also an immense amount of knowledge about our world and work to be done still. Making the wrong choices in the short-term about these things only will delay us achieving those goals mentioned above.
:)
"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."
This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a weaver or a smith. You have dedicated your life to mastering the craft and slowly produce products by hand. Now a textile factory or a foundry opens up. You will suddenly find it impossible to make your products profitably. Not only will you be out of work, but so will all of your colleagues in the rest of the country.
Or imagine you are a farmer, and then the green revolution happens. In 1870, 80% of the US population was in agriculture. Today, its under 2%.
In both of these cases, it will seem like the end of the world to the displaced workers. But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.
It's so very ironically Soviet. Collectivized farming is boosting crop yields! What? There are people starving? How would that be possible, because collectivized farming is boosting crop yields!
There's nothing about being freed for "new purposes" that means those new purposes have economic value or will necessarily uplift your standard of living. In the developing world, they are undergoing the industrial revolution now so they are going through the same process of replacing farm jobs with factory jobs. But in the developed world, unemployment and inequality are rising.
I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.
That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.
What's funny is that modern so-called "neoliberals" seem to have adopted the Marxist idea of automatic progress. We are headed "forward" to the automatically-better future.
I think that's bollocks. We get the future we choose and work to achieve.
What's the best case realistic scenario for redistributing wealth?
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-in...
An extra thousand bucks or so at the end of the year gets me what exactly?
Edit: I'm with the others here replying with "reduced burdens on the middle class and small businesses" and "...teach a man to fish..." I keep seeing this basic income and wealth distribution topic on HN and I would genuinely like to understand why those preaching for these ideas never actually do anything about it. "Make the government bigger" isn't the answer as it'll then be used as a tool of oppression.
Further, assuming we implemented a basic income in the USA, how many generations until the motivators for innovation and advancing society are completely eliminated? I've everything I need at $BASIC_INCOME, and as soon as I start producing more income, the government is stripping it from me, so what's my motivation to ever do anything besides subsist on that minimum? And once everyone is just taking the minimum and not doing work, who's gonna farm the food? Drive the trucks? Operate a grocery? Build the houses?
If we wanted to help the poor we would be making things easier for small businesses, not harder.
You don't help people by giving them fish, you help them by teaching them how to fish. I can't believe I'm having to remind HNers about this.
The longer answer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer%27s_dilemma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
And, more broadly:
Basic income goes to both the poor and the rich. It's universal. The net affect may be redistributive, but there's no preference given to the recipient's income level.
Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.
I know you know this, but it's important to frame this issue properly if you want to support it. There can be no question in basic income of "undeserving" groups getting it, because everybody gets it. This also has the worthy effect of eliminating all the bureaucracy that current benefits programs carry.
Right, I wasn't clear about this but you're correct that the idea is that technically everybody is given the same amount in one form or another.
There are pockets of strong opposition to the idea on both the right and the left, but I can only hope that the far left's opposition to basic income continues. That opposition in and off itself makes most politicians in this country take a serious look at the idea.
I'm flabbergasted you believe my fears of government overreach and suppression of dissent is not well grounded.
EDIT: rcfox beat me to it by a few minutes.
Disagreements on implementation are real (some on the right want this implemented only as Friedman's negative income tax, which is not a true GBI, and some on the left want a GBI in addition to the current welfare state), but there is still significant agreement, especially over the past few years.
1. How will this help with wealth that's already accumulated? I get how this will slow further accumulation.
2. How about capital flight? If the US enacts a policy like this, what stops the super rich from moving to other countries?
2. Make the right to conduct financial transactions contingent on one being part of a global financial network which abides by a specific set of taxation rules. This can take many forms. The U.S. in particular is well-placed to initiate and control such a system. However, considering that Wall Street has captured Congress, I doubt the U.S. will come anywhere close to this in the first place.
You're assuming redistribution wouldn't happen through heavy taxation of existing capital and property, like France's wealth tax[1], where you pay when your worldwide net worth is above 1,300,000€.
2.
The US taxes citizens regardless of where they live[1], and in the case of renouncing the US citizenship it is required you pay an exit tax[2] equivalent to the capital gains of selling all your property when above $680,000.
[1]: http://www.french-property.com/guides/france/finance-taxatio... [2]: http://hodgen.com/does-the-united-states-stand-alone/ [3]: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expat...
But with respect to question 1, the most important response is that we can't let the sunk cost fallacy stop us from adopting good ideas.
That's not quite true; just they want the main beneficiaries of redistribution to be the bureaucratic class rather than the working class. What you see as inefficiency (in terms of money reaching the end recipients) is in fact, the actual design doing what it was intended to do. Ideally (for them) ALL the money would go on civil servant salaries.
This is inarguable.
> The left prefers inefficient redistribution.
This is an obvious strawman. The current inefficient solution is a compromise between the left (who want the government to help the poor) and the right (who don't want the government to help the poor, but can be persuaded if you mix in enough penalties for perceived sin.)
In order to have an efficient solution you need a majority of people voting to agree on what the goal is.
Prices of goods demanded by the group of people receiving a net benefit from basic income (which, even though BI itself is universal, isn't everyone, because its funded by progressive taxation, which makes it a net downward transfer of wealth) would almost certainly go up with a basic income. The thing that suggests that the increase in price would generally be restrained such that the quantity of goods the net beneficiaries could afford would still increase despite the price level increase is "elasticity".
[0] This 'natural' redistribution tends to be counteracted by authorities that debase the money system. Currently we have an explicit anti-deflationist policy on the grounds that lowering prices are believed to inherently have a socially destabilizing effect. Monetary policy tends to be regressive redistribution, because the primary executors of these policies are connected to banks, and the secondary effects are to create upward market indexes that beat inflation (but are eventually corrected downward, hurting middle-class 'slow movers' like pension funds and disproportionately helping upper-class 'fast moving' investment classes).
Based on averages, why would it be? Inequality does not measure where you are coming from, it measures the relative economic distance between groups now. We can all live better these days and yet have a far greater difference in wealth between the richest and poorest.
You always want more work being done by less people. Video rental? Automate it! Automated kiosks becoming too much of a hassle for someone to constantly restock? Online streaming instead.
This is what we call progress. It's what is allowing us to even debate this as a topic. I hope it continues because it does create much higher paying jobs for those that do have jobs and it frees up the workforce to innovate even more.
The reasoning in the article is pretty garbage. "Software is destroying jobs and enriching a small handful of people...therefore, the 2 things that threaten society the most are synthetic biology and AI" ...what?
He then proposes legislation and reforms as the fix. Yet, everything we know about extremely concentrated power is that it easily escapes, often even controls, legislation and reforms.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. He mentions those two things because they're problems that are rapidly approaching us. We've been able to avoid the problems created by past scientific revolutions, but we're hitting a point now where small groups of people with easily-accessible tools can affect millions, possibly billions of others. The two easiest ways they can do this, is via manufactured disease and possibly computer virus systems that can disrupt global organizational systems.
It's a problem purely created by modern advances, and we don't have a solve yet, and no indication that there is anyone even trying.
> He then proposes legislation and reforms as the fix. Yet, everything we know about extremely concentrated power is that it easily escapes, often even controls, legislation and reforms.
It does, but that doesn't mean you throw your hands up and refuse the imperfect fix because it isn't perfect. It means you do it, and try to fix the screwups along the way. The nice part is, what you gain is time to fix the screwups, where going without would see massive destruction of life, wealth, and livelihood.
My theory is that there will come a point where humans are allowed to pursue happiness because the individual humans will no longer be considered a "drain" on a limited system. For this reason alone I've always thought the privatization of energy production in America was a TERRIBLE idea. Of all the cards to hold close, this should have been priority number one.
Anyway, as we approach energy critical mass, more and more humans are being thrown to the wayside. It doesn't have to be this way. If we collectively held a belief that we can achieve limitless energy together, then we could find ways to help those who aren't able to cope with technology still find happiness knowing full well it was a temporary band-aid.
Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today.
The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.
The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.
Industrialization, massification, standardization of production and moving to big cities have had tough consequences on worker's life. Charlie Chaplin shows just that. It was a tougher life than traditional community life with flexible work amounts.
You could definitely argue that there was an improvement in caloric supply (except in some countries). For the general happiness, though, industrial revolution has been a tough time.
I'd also factor in modern medicine into people's happiness. It is tough on families when you often have infant deaths and you often have horrible diseases like polio and MMR.
Dickens wrote many social satires critical of injustices he perceived at the time like workhouses (basically sweatshops backed by organized crime) and Yorkshire boarding houses (pools of child labor). His descriptions of city life were not pleasant: pollution, crime, and unrest. It may have been quantitatively better for society in the long run but I think that the people stuck in those workhouses might have chosen nothing instead of the job they had been so graciously provided if they were given some other means of sustaining themselves.
I think that is a bit over-enthusiastic. Life was extremely tough for the new industrial workers. I think if you look at measures of health/nutrition like BMI and height, they are static or even slightly declining throughout the 19th century. In the UK it's only after 1910/1920 that you start seeing dramatic increases (that's about the time of the introduction of old age pension, and when the Labour movement started to gain serious traction).
There are some humans who are a lot smarter than a lot of other humans. For example, the mathematician Ramanujan could do many complicated infinite sums in his head and instantly factor taxi-cab license plates. von Neumann pioneered many different fields and was considered by many of his already-smart buddies to be the smartest. So we can accept that there are much smarter people.
But are they the SMARTEST possible? Well, probably not. If another person just as smart as von Neumann was born, the additional advancements since his lifetime (the internet, iphones, computer based off of von Neumann's architechture!) can use all of these new inventions to discover even newer things!
Hm, that's interesting. What happens if this hypothetical von Neumann 2.0 begins pioneering a field of genetic engineering techniques and new ways of efficient computation? Then, not only would the next von Neumann get born a lot sooner, but THEY can take advantage of all the new gadgets that 2.0 made. This means that it's possible that being smart can make it easier to be "smarter" in the future.
So you can get smarter right? Big whoop. von Neumann is smarter, but he's not dangerous is he? Well, just because you're smart doesn't mean that you'd be nice. The Unabomber wrote a very complicated and long manifesto before doing bad things. A major terrorist attack in Tokyo was planned by graduates of a fairly prestigious university. Even not counting people who are outright Evil, think of a friend who is super smart but weird. Even if you made him a lot smarter, where he can do anything, would you want him in charge? Maybe not. Maybe he'd spend all day on little boats in bottles. Maybe he'd demand that silicon valley shut down to create awesome pirate riding on dinosaur amusement parks. Point is, Smart != Nice.
We've been talking about people, but really the same points can be applied to AI systems. Except the range of possibilities is even greater for AI systems. Humans are usually about as smart as you and I, nearly everyone can walk, talk and write. AI systems though, can range from being bolted to the ground, to running faster than a human on uneven terrain, can be completely mute to... messing up my really clear orders to find the nearest Costco (Dammit Siri). This also goes for goals. Most people probably want some combination of money/family/things to do/entertainment. AI systems, if they can be said to "want" things would want things like seeing if this is a cat picture or not, beating an opponent at Go or hitting an airplane with a missile.
As hardware and software progresses much faster, we can think of a system which could start off worse than all humans at everything begin to do the von Neumann->von Neumann 2.0 type thing, then become much smarter than the smartest human alive. Being super smart can give it all sorts of advantages. It could be much better at gaining root access to a lot of computers. It could have much better heuristics for solving protein folding problems and get super good at creating vaccines... or bioweapons. Thing is, as a computer, it also gets the advantages of Moore's law, the ability to copy itself and the ability to alter its source code much faster than genetic engineering will. So the "smartest possible computer" could not only be much smarter, much faster than the "smartest possible group of von Neumanns", but also have the advantages of rapid self replication and ready access to important computing infrastructure.
This makes the smartness of the AI into a superpower. But surely beings with superpowers are superheros right? Well, no. Remember, smart != nice.
I mean, take "identifying pictures as cats" as a goal. Imagine that the AI system has a really bad addiction problem to that. What would it do in order to find achieve it? Anything. Take over human factories and turn them into cat picture manufacturing? Sure. Poison the humans who try to stop this from happening? Yeah, they're stopping it from getting its fix. But this all seems so ad hoc why should the AI immediately take over some factories to do that, when it can just bide its time a little bit, kill ALL the humans and be unmolested for all time?
That's the main problem. Future AIs are likely to be much smarter than us and probably much more different than us.
Let me know if there is anything unclear here. If you're interested in a much more rigorous treatment of the topic, I totally recommend buying Superintelligence.
http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N... (This is a referral link.)
[0] Part 1 of 2 here: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
Edit: Fix formatting problems.
I'd say, AI is dangerous because we cannot fathom its motivation. To give us true answers to questions? To give pleasing answers? To give answers that help it survive?
The last is inevitably the AIs we will have. Because if there are more than one of them, folks will have a choice, and they will choose the one that convinces them its the best. Thus their answers will be entirely slanted toward appearing useful enough to be propagated. Like a meme, or a virus.
But are you denying that there exists some factor which allows you to manipulate the world in some way, roughly proportional to the time that you have? If something can manipulate the world on timescales much faster than humans can react to, what makes you think that humans would have a choice?
What precise vectors would be available for this system to manipulate the world to harm humans?
Is it possible to say that such AIs are NOT at work right now, fomenting terrorism, gathering money through clever investment and spending it on potent schemes to upset economies and governments?
Another one is that perhaps the internet of things is in place by the time such an AI would be possible, at which point it exploits the horrendous lack of security on all such devices to wreck havoc / become stealth miniature factories which make more devistating things.
I mean, there's also the standard "launch ALL the missiles" answer, but I don't know enough about the cybersecurity of missiles. A more indirect way would be to persuade the world leaders to launch them, e.g. show both Russia and American radars that the other one is launching a pre-emptive strike and knock out other forms of communication.
I don't like thinking about this, because people say this is "sci-fi speculation".
But I am right now not very concerned about super-AI. I assume, when I read smart people worrying about it, that there's some subtlety I must be missing, because it's hard for me to imagine that, even if we stipulated the impossibility of real AI, we'd not be existentially concerned about laboratory pathogen manipulation.
Honestly asking, why would they? I dont see the obvious answer
>Imagine that the AI system has a really bad addiction problem to that.
Again, i just don't get this. How would an AI get addicted? Why wouldn't it research addiction and fix itself to no longer be addicted? That is behavior i would expect from an intelligence greater than our own, rather than indulgence
>Take over human factories and turn them into cat picture manufacturing?
Why in the world would it do this? Why wouldn't it just generate digital images of cats on its own?
Really interesting post, thanks!
Why wouldn't a natural intelligence with an addiction do that?
Or are we creating an AI that also has low self esteem, a desire to please others, lack of self control, confirmation bias, and lacks the ability to reach logical conclusions from scientific data?
Computers dont feel emotion, so there is no reward system for addiction to take root. Computers are cold logical calculators, given overwhelming evidence of the harms of addiction i can't see a reasonable way for it to still get addicted to something or to exhibit less than logical behaviors. If the computer suddenly does feel emotion then it is of little threat to humans, since we could manipulate those emotions just like we do with each other and pets do to us.
What basis is there for the idea that the emotion that is part of human thought is separable from the "intelligence" that is sought to be replicated in AI?
> If the computer suddenly does feel emotion then it is of little threat to humans, since we could manipulate those emotions just like we do with each other and pets do to us.
Humans are pretty significant threats to other humans, so "we can manipulate it like we do other humans" doesn't seem to justify the claim that it would be no threat to us. If it did, other humans would be no threat to us, either.
Humans compete for the same resources for survival. An AI only needs electricity, which it can easily generate with renewables without any need for competition with humans, just like we produce food without having to compete with natural predators even though we COULD outcompete them.
When resources are plentiful, humans are of very little threat to other humans. This is evidenced by the decline in worldwide crime rates in the last several decades.
Why would an intelligence greater than our own have any reason to deal with us at all? we certainly havent brought about the extinction of gorillas or chimps even though they can be quite aggressive and we could actually gain something from their extinction (less competition for resources/land)
What does an AI gain by attacking even a single human let alone the entirety of the human race? Would it proceed to eliminate all life on earth?
I guess in the end, i can see that there is a technical possibility of this type of sufficiently advanced AI, i just find it an extraordinary reach to go from [possess an unimaginable amount of knowledge/understanding/intelligence]->[brutal destruction of entire human race for reasons unknown and unknowable]
Humans also need electricity, and many human needs rely on land which might be used for renewable energy energy generation, so that doesn't really demonstrate noncompetition.
> just like we produce food without having to compete with natural predators
What natural predator are we not competing with, if nothing else for habitat (whether we are directly using their habitat for habitat, or for energy/food production, or for dumping wastes)?
So, your intuition is right in a sense and wrong in a sense.
You are right in that AI systems probably won't really have the "emotion of wanting", why would it just happen to have this emotion, when you can imagine plenty of minds without it.
However, if we want an AI system to be autonomous, we're going to have to give it a goal, such as "maximize this objective function", or something along those lines. Even if we don't explicitly write in a goal, an AI has to interact with the real world, and thus would have to affect it. Imagine an AI who is just a giant glorified calculator, but who is allowed to purchase its own AWS instances. At some point, it may realize that "oh, if I use those AWS instances to start simulating this thing and sending out these signals, I get more money to purchase more AWS!". Notice at no point was this hypothetical AI explicitly given a goal, but it nevertheless started exhibiting "goallike" behavior.
I'm not saying that an AI would get an "addiction" that way, but it suggests that anything smart is hard to predict, and that getting their goals "right" in the first place is much better than leaving it up to chance.
> How would an AI get addicted? Why wouldn't it research addiction and fix itself to no longer be addicted? That is behavior i would expect from an intelligence greater than our own, rather than indulgence
This is my bad for using such a loaded term. By "addiction" I mean that the AI "wants" something, and it finds that humans are inadequate to give it to them. Which leads me to...
> Why in the world would it do this? Why wouldn't it just generate digital images of cats on its own?
Because you humans have all of these wasteful and stupid desires such as "happiness", "peace" and "love" and so have factories that produce video games, iphones and chocolate. Sure I may have the entire internet already producing cat pictures as fast as its processors could run, but imagine if I could make the internet 100 times bigger by destroying all non-computer things and turning them into cat cloning vats, cat camera factories and hardware chips optimized for detecting cats?
Analogously, imagine you were an ant. You could mount all sorts of convincing arguments about how humans already have all the aphids they want, about how they already have perfectly functional houses, but you, as a human, would still pave over billions of ant colonies for shaving 20 minutes off a commute. It's not that we're being intentionally wasteful and conquering of the ants. We just don't care about them and we're much more powerful than them.
Hence the AI safety risk is: By default an AI doesn't care about us, and will use our resources for whatever it wants, so we better create a version which does care about us.
Also cross thread, you mentioned that organic intelligences have many multi-dimensional goals. The reason why AI goals could be very weird is that it doesn't have to be organic; it could have an only one dimensional goal, such as cat picture. It could have similar dimension goals but be completely different, like the perverse desire to maximize the number of divorces in the universe.
- There are something like 100,000,000,000 neurons in the human brain, each of which can have up to around 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. This is basically why the brain is so powerful.
- Modern CPUs have around 4,000,000,000 transistors, but Moore's law means that this number will just keep going up and up.
- Several decades from now (probably in the 2030s), the number of transistors will exceed the number of synaptic connections in a brain. This doesn't automatically make computers as "smart" as people, but many of the things that the human brains does well by brute-forcing them via parallelism will become very achievable.
- Once you have an AI that's effectively as "smart" as a human, you only have to wait 18 months for it to get twice as smart. And then again. And again. This is what "the singularity" means to some people.
The other form of this argument which I see in some places is that all you need is an AI which can increase its own intelligence and a lot of CPU cycles, and then you'll end up with an AI that's almost arbitrarily smart and powerful.
I don't hold these views myself, so hopefully someone with more information can step in to correct anything I've gotten wrong. (LessWrong.com seems to generally view AI as a potential extinction risk for humans, and from poking around I found a few pages such as http://lesswrong.com/lw/k37/ai_risk_new_executive_summary/)
The singularity will happen when the digital brains are figuring out how to make themselves better. Then they will really take off, and not slow down, ever.
I do understand where the notion of hockey-stick increases in intellectual ability comes from.
I do understand the concept that it's hard to predict what would come of "superintellectual" ability in some sort of synthetic intelligence. That we're in the dark about it, because we're intellectually limited.
I don't understand the transition from synthetic superintellectual capability to actual harm to humans.
'Micaiah_Chang seems to indicate that it would result in a sort of supervillain, who would... what, trick people into helping it enslave humanity? If we were worried about that happening, wouldn't we just hit the "off" switch? Serious question.
The idea of genetic engineering being an imminent threat has instant credibility. It is getting easier and cheaper to play with that technology, and some fraction of people are both intellectually capable and psychologically defective enough to exploit it to harm people directly.
But the idea that AI will exploit genetic engineering to do that seems circular. In that scenario, it would still be insufficient controls on genetic engineering that would be the problem, right?
I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand, even if I don't have a rhetorical tone other than "snarky disbelief".
'sama seems like a pretty pragmatic person. I'm trying to get my head around specifically what's in his head when he writes about AI destroying humanity.
But for the "off" switch question specifically, a superintelligence could also have "persuasion" and "salesmanship" as an ability. It could start saying things like "wait no, that's actually Russia that's creating that massive botnet, you should do something about them", or "you know that cancer cure you've been looking for for your child? I may be a cat picture AI but if I had access to the internet I would be able to find a solution in a month instead of a year and save her".
At least from my naive perspective, once it has access to the internet it gains the ability to become highly decentralized, in which case the "off" switch becomes much more difficult to hit.
But it doesn't take a deep appreciation for the dangers of artificial intelligence to see that. You can just understand the concept of a software bug to know why you want humans in the observe/decide/act loop of critical systems.
So there must be more to it than that, right? It can't just be "be careful about AI, you don't want it controlling all the airplanes at once".
The fear is that maybe there's no such thing as a "superintelligence proof" system, when the human component is no longer secure.
Note that I don't completely buy into the threat of superintelligence either, but on a different issue. I do believe that it is a problem worthy of consideration, but I think recursive self-improvement is more likely to be on manageable time scales, or at least on time scales slow enough that we can begin substantially ramping up worries about it before it's likely.
Edit: Ah! I see your point about circularity now.
Most of the vectors of attack I've been naming are the more obvious ones. But the fear is that, for a superintelligent being perhaps anything is a vector. Perhaps it can manufacture nanobots independent of a biolab (do we somehow have universal surveillance of every possible place that has proteins?), perhaps it uses mundane household tools to macguyver up a robot army (do we ban all household tools?). Yes, in some sense it's an argument from ignorance, but I find it implausible that every attack vector has been covered.
Also, there are two separate points I want to make, first of all, there's going to be a difference between 'secure enough to defend against human attacks' and 'secure enough to defend against superintelligent attacks'. You are right in that the former is important, but it's not so clear to me that the latter is achievable, or that it wouldn't be cheaper to investigate AI safety rather than upgrade everything from human secure to super AI secure.
Second: most doomsday scenarios around superintelligent AI are, I suspect, promulgated by software guys (or philosophers, who are more mindware guys). It assumes the hardware layer is easy for the AI to interface with. Manufacturing nanites, bioengineering pathogens, or whatever other WMD you want to imagine the AI deciding to create, would require raw materials, capital infrastructure, energy. These are not things software can just magic up, they have to come from somewhere. They are constrained by the laws of physics. It's not like half an hour after you create superintelligent AI, suddenly you're up to your neck in gray goo.
Third: any superintelligent AI, the moment it begins to reflect upon itself and attempt to investigate how it itself works, is going to cause itself to buffer overrun or smash its own stack and crash. This is the main reason why we should continue to build critical software using memory unsafe languages like C.
I don't understand how you arrived at point 3. Are you claiming that somehow memory safety is impossible, even for human level actors? Or that the AI somehow can't reason about memory safety? Or that it's impossible to have self reflection in C? All of these seem like supremely uncharitable interpretations. Help me out here.
Even ignoring that, there's nothing preventing the AI from creating another AI with the same/similar goals and abdicating to its decisions.
I am not a techno-optimist.
Then you can see how it gains 'control', in the senses that control matters anyway, without us necessarily even realizing it, or objecting if we do.
The worst parts are the claim that (forced) redistribution is inevitable and that regulation will somehow prevent "bad privately-done things" from happening -- as if regulation is a perfect solution to any problem one confesses to fear or claims to dislike.
In principle, government intervention hinders technological progress, derails economic progress, and ultimately destroys the economy. Maybe people who have made a lot of money with one wave of progress should leave future generations alone and let them free to do the same -- instead of strangulating them by intervention and regulation that the now-wealthy did not have to suffer.
I fully agree with you that government intervention hinders technological progress, derails economic progress, and ultimately destroys the economy. The concentration of wealth through political rather than economic means is a huge problem.
But, saying you want to cut welfare to the poor is what I would call vulgar libertarianism, and ineffective anti-state propaganda. The poor and middle classes are already getting royally screwed. Ameliorating the disastrous effects that corporate privilege has on the poor isn't where we should be directing our righteous indignation, in my opinion.
I think it'd be more constructive to focus on cutting welfare from the top down, and cutting taxes from the bottom up.
I completely agree with Sam here. I think the fallacy in the above argument is that there is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete machines and special-purpose machines. Turing-complete mechanization is broad and endlessly adaptable.
Programmable machines aren't machines. They're machine-machines, and can be adapted to new tasks in short linear time by small numbers of people with little capital. That makes it "different this time."
I also think that malicious AI is already kind of here, but in a hybrid "cyborg" form. It's the corporation. Corporations that destroy human livelihoods and abuse human beings in general to maximize per-quarter shareholder returns are a bit like "paperclip maximizers."
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
The danger is not in some Terminator-like AI apocalypse, but that incremental advances in AI will make these things progressively less and less human and more and more machine. I can imagine a future almost-entirely-silicon financial corporation that uses its speed and superior analytical intellect (at least in the financial domain) to lay waste to entire national economies in order to maximize shareholder value... i.e. paperclips. Since this would likely be found in the hedge fund world, nearly all of this siphoned-off wealth would be captured by a small number of already very rich people.
Nightmare AI wouldn't be much like Skynet -- a new being pursuing its own self-interest. It would be more like a very, very smart dog helping its elite owners "hunt" the rest of us in the financial sphere. This could fuel even more massive consolidation of financial wealth. We are already seeing the beginning of this with algorithmic quant finance.
In a thread on Twitter I also heard someone bring up "AI assisted demagoguery," a notion I found to be total nightmare fuel. Imagine a Hitler wannabe with a massive text-comprehending propaganda-churning apparatus able to leverage the massive data sets available via things like the Twitter and Facebook feeds to engage in high-resolution persuasion of millions and millions of people. The thing that makes this scary is that populist demagoguery gets more appealing when you have things like massive wealth inequality.
You can make counter-arguments here, but I also agree with Sam that it is foolish to just hand-wave these kinds of possibilities away. We should be thinking about them, and about how -- as he puts it -- we can find ways to channel this trend in more positive directions.
The size of the world changes - and gets broader - but the mechanism at play, that the concentrated powers of the world fuel each others innovations and those innovations catapult advancement but also introduce huge power vacuums between those nations adopting the new and those nations outside the sphere of influence - something I would not say was missing in the computer revolution, since the adoption of computer technology happened first and is still only pervasive in first world nations. The third world is still late to the party and comes in with fractured infrastructure and access, where systemic access and ubiquity enabled the Internet and a lot of the current revolutions in the first place.
In previous instances, the cost savings made the nations that had them superpowers in their times. The cotton gin is a huge part of why America went from an English vassal to a world power - between the innovations and the raw resources of the Americas, it could propagate empire.
But those profits just made men rich. The cotton, tobacco, industrial, automotive, oil, etc barons were the kings of their times through the innovations and automations of their industries. That has never really changed, those ruling over the industries being modernized always reap unfathomable wealth and power from the enterprise. Their wealth made their country rich, but the laborers still had to find something else to do every time, and up until now we have always had some unskilled menial and physical thing to have most people do. In actuality, we ran into that wall probably seventy years ago in the aftermath of World War 2 - as the US at least rapidly adopted women and minorities into the whole workforce the huge surge of productive labor combined with the green revolution, the reforms of the late industrial giving workers reasonable hours, unions, and power over their lives, plus the fledgling technological revolution that had already produced a lot of wonders (consumer refrigeration, microwaves, clothes washers and dryers, etc) had already crippled the low skill labor market and we collectively adapted by organically injecting superfluous bureaucracy in almost every business and part of life to make up for the work shortage.
Problem is that we did that, became a "service" economy, and are now faced with the obsolescence of busy office work. I can just remember CGPGrey talking about it in Humans Need Not Apply, in how the prime target for automation is not the McDonalds burger flipper but every middle income office worker who can be replaced by software. After bureaucracy, where do we inject the overflow labor of humanity? Or do we finally admit we don't need everyone laboring?
This is nothing new. Organized humans have always been able to cause outsized amounts of harm to other humans, they hardly needed software to do this. And in far greater orders of magnitude than a rocket. The effective answer to new, software-enabled threats is the same as it is to mercenaries, industrial polluters, rampant loggers and strip miners, arms manufacturers, human traffickers. Organization at a bigger scale to combat it. Pull the rug out from under them economically, understand their place sociologically, raise awareness culturally.
Step 1) People will be paid for their data. Information used by systems doesn't spontaneously come into existence.
Step 2) Get rid of governments. They're inefficient war-mongers. A theatre to obfuscate kleptocracy!
Step 3) See step 1. You can pay me in cryptocurrency. Thanks.
McKenna is very dense and goes into immense detail about how we got here, and more importantly where we are going. I need not say more, except that Mc Kenna compares technological revolution as being similar to a birth of a child ― bloody and traumatic, but at the same time wonderful and awe inspiring.
I commend him for addressing these issues in addition to other global issues, http://blog.samaltman.com/china, and I think we need to organize as a community to address these things. I almost view it is as similar to when the constitution was being written in the US. There were an immense amount of factors at play but they organized to pull together some sense of structure to guide society in a better direction. Now we are writing the constitution of technology in a sense.
The problem is that we still have a system that has the government and politics writing the major rules, while some of the biggest influencers on society's future will be technology. I think we need to own this fact as a community and start to work towards something to structure our growth and the impact it will have.
If this "software revolution" is to be a positive direction for humanity, we as a species must learn from this. The sooner a positive and constructive use of a technology can become household knowledge, the better.
IBM's recent dabbling in machine learning and AI with Blue Gene and whatnot is a good foot in the right direction for that particular potential-weapon-of-mass-destruction, and hopefully other companies and entrepreneurs can spearhead further developments there in order to emphasize the use of synthetic intelligences for benign uses - self-driving cars, self-cleaning homes, the works.
Meanwhile, the idea of being able to genetically modify crops in ways not previously possible through selective breeding alone is very promising, though it certainly needs to overcome the bad PR tacked onto it thanks to the likes of Monsanto and its ilk. The improvements to crop yields made possible with genetic engineering will at least postpone humanity's eventual reaching Earth's capacity, giving us more time to build up our orbital infrastructure and prepare for humanity's eventually-essential need to expand beyond the confines of just one quasi-spherical rock flailing about in space.
Synthetic Biology is a big concern, and not just that people may deliberately use it to cause harm (which is definitely a concern as well).
My grandfather was an engineer during the 50's early 60's working with nuclear bomb projects. He was there when they exploded the Bikini Atolls. I never met him because he died of cancer in his mid 40's (maybe not occupational hazard but then again....). Because they had started using technology only partially figured out and not thought all the way through. Never mind that they were using it to produce horrible things.
I'd like to think we would learn, and next time will be different, but the reality is, probably not. We will likely repeat the exact mistakes of hubris and rushing. Especially with a technology less controllable by central authority than nuclear ability. I don't know about everyone else here, but I very seldom write a program that just works the first time. And there is a lesson in there somewhere. Especially when you don't get second chances.
But I'm not dumb enough to wish knowledge away either. So I suppose we will eventually adjust. If we are still here that is.
This doesn't really make sense. The industrial revolution more or less replaced lots of relatively unproductive jobs with a smaller amount of much more productive jobs. There might have been more work, but individual people were doing more work as well.
> Technology provides leverage on ability and luck, and in the process concentrates wealth and drives inequality. I think that drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years.
Wealth inequality is already a huge problem, and has been for a long time. I don't see how it's going to be worse in the next 20 years, given in a lot of countries (China, India, etc.) we're seeing wealth flow to, or be created by, a growing middle class. A lot of the 'Occupy' movement was somewhat misguided - the percentage of people in the United States or Australia or the UK who are in the 1% worldwide is perhaps as high as 20% or 30%.
Software, rather than hindering, may very well help people in rapidly developing nations generate wealth because the economic barrier to entry for software businesses is comparatively low compared to other types of businesses.
I'm also a little concerned that it seems as though many people believe wealth redistribution is the only way to make it more equal. Why can't we create wealth in some places? As far as I understand, wealth is not finite.
Once we get to the point of widespread AI-driven automation, then we'll have a real economic problem. It won't be just because people can't generate wealth - people may very well begin to lose wealth. But this is a 50-year problem, not a 20-year one.
The first is that technology is creating a rift between those who know how to program, where jobs are being created, and those who don't, where jobs are being destroyed.
The second is that high programmer wages are a good thing, and that attempts to flood the market with programmers, e.g. by teaching everyone to code, are an attack on the middle class.
the first time are usually struck by how establishments there manage with so few people. It's the other way round for expats in India. Dmitry Shukov, CEO of MTS India was amazed to see eight people pushing the boarding ladder at the airport the first time he arrived in Delhi.
"In Russia there is just one person doing that job. In sec tors like retail, there is always excess staff in India," he says. It's also very common in the hospitality industry, where guests are pampered with a level of service unheard of in the West. But splitting one person's job among three not only reduces wages, but also the challenge. Or, as Rex Nijhof, the Dutch chief of the Renaissance Mumbai Hotel puts it: "If you have something heavy and only two people available to move it, you have to find a way to build wheels on it. In India, you just get six more people."
But the conclusion of this, brings up a dystopian, at least in many minds, idea of a one world government.
But, if you want to place controls, and it's in effect voluntary by from the point of view of each nation-state, why would one state which wants to overcome any other state subject itself to this kind of embargo?
Let's say you're Japan. China poses an economic (and thus, arguably, an existential) threat, why would Japan feel obliged to put their research to sleep?
To me, unless everyone agrees, and we have verification mechanisms, and violations have severe consequences exceeding any benefits from this technology, there will always be an actor who thinks they can sneak by and pounce on the others.
Okay, let's get some ballpark arithmetic: Suppose the 1000 richest people in the US are worth on average $1 billion, that the US has 330 million people, and that we redistribute the worth of those 1000 people to the 300 million. Then each of the 300 million will have money enough for a nice new car, four years in college or graduate school, to pay off their student loans, make a down payment on a single family, three bedroom, two bath house on a nice street, and won't have to struggle with a miserable job? Will they? Maybe? Let's see:
1000 * 109 / ( 330 * 106 ) = 3,030.30
dollars per person. Oh, well.
But, maybe in the US the top 100,000 people have average worth of $1 billion? Then, sure, we'd get
100,000 * 109 / (330 * 106) = 303,030.30
dollars per person.
Ah, that's more like it! We just need a lot more billionaires!
I would suggest that maybe by far the biggest pot of wealth is in pension funds for middle class workers.
Please, someone explain to me how wealth can be re-distributed?
I know how money can be re-distributed (and in-turn made less effective - i.e., more is required to purchase less), but how exactly do you either a) create "wealth" (via government policy or law) or b) take someone else's wealth, split it up into smaller peaces, and make the end-recipients more "wealthy"?
The reason I ask is because wealth is an effect of X, not a cause of X, just like gravity is an effect of mass, and not the cause of mass.
And that X tends to be all the things 97% of the population is either not willing to invest it, or does not have the capacity for...
So when you re-distribute money (as and from "wealth"), you also remove any motivation from anyone to actually create more wealth. And now you have a society that is fundamentally broken on both an economic and personal self-worth level.
To be more literal, when someone has no wealth, they have no capability to create wealth. You're simply incorrect that wealth is simply an effect and not its own cause. Like matter, wealth draws wealth to itself. Unlike matter, wealth can be used to create more wealth.
That would be even more wrong then.
> You're simply incorrect that wealth is simply an effect and not its own cause.
I'm not arguing that wealth does not generate more wealth, it does.
I'm arguing that wealth cannot be created by policy change nor re-distribution - of money. Because money, when it's relative in amounts person to person, is neither wealth, nor does anything to help create more wealth...
That is, handing out relative amounts of money to everyone does not also hand out the drive and motivation and the needed hard-work to create more wealth; it does just the opposite.
As all those things are more of a product of lack of wealth, than having a comfortable living existence.
> Like matter, wealth draws wealth to itself. Unlike matter, wealth can be used to create more wealth.
Gravity is what draws things in. Mass just creates that gravity. Without gravity, you just have static and stale things.
The continued openness of the Internet relies on the Government, no? Is it wrong to think that AI relies on that as well?
> The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing.
Isn't this what government is for?
But I think the article really lost a lot of its punch with non sequiturs like "If we can synthesize drugs, we ought to be able to synthesize vaccines".....
Arguably the control of fire was a great revolution as well.
edit: yes, it seems I was wrong, the wheel was discovered much after the agricultural revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History Given that though, I wonder if its impact was smaller than the other great revolutions.
Huge. Cats to eat the mice that would eat the grain. Dogs to help in the hunting. Goats for milk and meat. Sheep for wool, milk, and meat. Horses for power and meat. Cows for milk and meat. Biggies.
Another biggie was open ocean sailing. Why? Because there were no toll gates on the open ocean! Across land had to pay up to the local castle each few miles. So, if got some silk in the eastern Black Sea and want to sell it in England, go across Europe? Heck no: Just get a ship and go by water. Same for spices from India for Europe, etc.
One of his worries is that whatever positive things we can do with new technology are vastly outnumbered by the negative things we can do with them. Bad actors can be few and far but still destroy the world.
It's interesting that Bill is worried about genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics. Sam specifically calls out AI and synthetic biology.
There's a lot of recurring themes between these two articles, but both propose similar solutions: Proceed cautiously.
I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get.
> But I worry we learned the wrong lessons from recent examples, and these two issues—huge-scale destruction of jobs, and concentration of huge power—are getting lost.
Yet, we still promote "beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission". You can't have both -- "legislative safeguards" and a bunch of entrepreneurs running around begging forgiveness when they create destruction.
This seems like an extremely difficult path to take, as legislature will either be preemptive and slow down innovation or lag behind in understanding the technology at which point it would be too late.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Wealth
AFAICR in this book, the third revolution is referred to as "The revolution of knowledge" and I think it better describes how and what has changed during the past... 20 years.
Great book by the way. I think it was where I read for the first time a good perspective of how 3d printers could play an important role in the near future.
Why? This seems like a very important claim that wasn't explored enough. It felt like a cached thought (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cached_thought).
What are the chances that some existential crisis happens? What are the benefits of technological progress? Why do you think that the latter outweighs the former?
Perhaps you thought it wasn't worth going into here? That's fair, but I think it's worth a quick paragraph to summarize.
(that lays out one theory, not sure if it's the same one from the footnote, but it probably is.)
False. The electricity to enrich a bomb's worth of material costs about $60,000. The plant itself is cheaper than the Tesla gigafactory, and it'll yield 1,000 times the energy it takes to run making regular reactor fuel (gigafactory will be lucky to break even). Laser enrichment is even cheaper, of course.
Sam, I suspect the only solid option is to diversify humanity. Be more than a one-planet species. That feels a bit emotionally unpalatable, but do you disagree?
Some suggestions would help. I mean, what are you suggesting here? That studies into AI should be banned? That it should be restricted in some way? That's hard to do.
If your problem is about the potential increase wealth disparity, then this period of history is not unique at all. If anything, it's better than the robber baron days.
The thing I worry about is this: the first person who can make a true AI that can iterate on itself, assuming all goes well, would have way too much power. They could beat everyone else in the financial markets. They could short the online ad industry and make a killing. With those resources, it's a short hop into the physical world and making robots that make other robots and expanding into any other area. Even if someone else develops AI six months after them, I'd worry it'd be too late for adequate competition to exist.
Or even worse - consider the alternative, that AI is freely accessible to everyone. That's terrifying, too! What's to stop someone from asking for something really crazy from a piece of AI that can build, well, anything?
We simply don't have enough data to know what's going to happen. I'd wait and see before blindly making legislation.
Labeling jobs as "worthless" makes me want to throw up. We are in many cases talking about jobs people find quite fulfilling, and human services many people would love to keep using.
The only way we're going to be able to handle what's coming is to disconnect the economic value of jobs from their social value.
Let's see... - unauthorized access to computers (hacking) is illegal is most countries - hackers often use malware as one of their tools - anti-malware products are woefully inefficient at thwarting or even detecting most malware.
This is just one example, but I think the author's approach is ignorant at best.
In the West, we often view systemic problems as something external that we can fix with technology. This view was popularized in the Age of Enlightenment and runs very popular today.
The contrasting view-point is that systemic problems are internal (i.e. in the character of every human). For example, we have the technology and resources to end much of the world's hunger, but it does not happen because of greed and/or power that would be disrupted by all these hungry people suddenly not being hungry.
Systemic societal problems are both internal and external, but if we only talk about fixing external problems, we doom ourselves to (insert dystopian future here).
As we will be creating high functioning AI, robots and self-driving cars, we would also be creating jobs for people who would need to do the grunt work. I don't believe that we would be able to reach a level, ever where everything would automated without slightest of human intervention. The more sophistication we will have in the things we build, the more we would start have problems with them, which would need human attention.
People in every generation have been awestruck at the progress of human civilization, such that, they always have believed a computer that can think on his own is just near, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it just never happens. At least in my lifetime, I think I won't have to worry about robots that can kill us.
We have barely inched into space, robotics, drones, the oceans, we haven't even seen more than 50 miles down in the earth, our bodies and brains are still big mysteries, nanotechnology and more. We thought computers would free up lots of people but it hasn't really yet, just made more work to do and solve with the machines. I think the same will happen with robotics, drones, and AI. They will create work needs we didn't know existed and much more than we expect. Who knows, AI or robots might be better than us at creating jobs.
Agriculture freed up people to think. Software freed up people to think. Good things are coming still.
For most jobs, people want more to do, more adventure and more challenges. I think the world is hungry for new challenges not the same old jobs. It is a strange thing indeed though for people to try to hold onto lifeless, horrible jobs just to keep the cadence when we need a new rhythm. We are held back by holding onto this. We could employ many people to build an electric car network like the railroads and interstate system but we don't. We could be looking to space more and focusing kids on that but we are pushing them to finance, business and service jobs.
The actual problem might be our monetary system and how we reward. I am a big free or fair market proponent, but part of the problem of baked in bad jobs that add nothing are because of this system. I think monetary and currency is one area where it may hold us back until we solve this. However there currently is no better system of paying for a service that you need or want down to the individual, the truest exchange of value.
The question is, how much does the customer know about what they want and how can we steer it towards the real problems of today? How wrong are we with our rewards systems? Do only the wealthy have the right motivations to create systems we need and employ? Have we got ourselves in a wealth backdrift? The innovation market and economic engine is tied to wealth, for better or worse. There are many things we should be doing, that are rewarding to us all and need lots of work, that we can't because there isn't tons of market value yet. Maybe the reward system needs refactoring or some new iterations.
It is a big game design / game theory problem in the end. We might need AI and robots to solve this problem for us.
>Granted, the transition period may be quite tough.
Yes, mass starvation, disease, grinding poverty and global political strife could correctly be described as "quite tough."
Although I suppose if you're idle rich, then it'll be a cakewalk. Just be sure to wear your kevlar when you leave the compound.
In fact its a puzzle to me why, with this going on, we see an upsurge in terrorism etc. Why aren't people content? What is it that convinces folks to piss away their entire lives on a big public stunt like bombing etc? It can't be their bad cable reception.
For instance the idea of a Basic Income is proposed once the economy has enough to feed and house everyone insensitive to the exact employment rate.
It's entirely possible the answer to increased joblessness here will be to tell the unemployed to go back to school, then raise the cost of student loans by some ridiculous factor, then not actually attempt to create jobs for them when they get out.
Then again, there are states where gay marriage and marijuana are legal now, so maybe i'm too cynical.
Also nanotech, mind uploading, embryo selection...
See more for example Sapiens! A brief history of humankind
But should we? And if so : why ? Also : who's "we"?
There is a case for skipping over the technological changes that shifted the slave societies of Greece and Rome to the feudal societies of medieval Europe.
You can't really make one for an important shift 40,000 years before the agricultural revolution. We went from a world without cave paintings to one with them. From a world without venus figurines and other carvings to one with one. With sweeping technological changes in hunting and fishing instruments and so forth. It's the second most important technological revolution ever, if not the first. If fishing is wrapped up with the human brain modifying into its modern form, wouldn't it be the most important?
Note that each revolution had a corresponding revolutionary change to political systems, family structures and society. With the agricultural revolution we had the end of primitive communism and hunter-gatherer societies and the rise of surplus, class systems and slave societies. Much of the earliest literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh is on how to catch and keep slaves.
With the rise of capitalism we saw the fading of Catholicism and the rise of Protestantism and the "Protestant work ethic". We also saw the end of monarchies and the rise of liberal democracies. The bourgeoisie and proletariat of the time united to overthrow these old systems, but soon began facing off against one another, which is pretty much the history of the 20th century, or if we look at the election of old euro-communists in Greece last month, perhaps the 21st.
The famous old definition of economics in our capitalist economy by Robbins is "Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Scarcity is the bedrock of modern economic analyses - of utility, of supply and demand, of price.
What scarcity is there when someone films a movie, or writes a book or magazine article, or records an audio track, and with the press of a button can fly off to billions of Android and iPhone devices? Or writes an app and flings it across the world as soon as it hits the App Store or Google Play? Or sends code to Github, which someone in Bulgaria patches, which someone in Brazil patches, which someone in Japan then uses in a product they're putting out, glued together to some other framework on Github?
This is the end of scarcity. The most well-paid modern workers are those who produce commodities which are not scarce. That is if we can call these products commodities - a non-scarce commodity is something of a contradiction.
These revolutionary technological changes in production, at the base, will reverberate through the superstructure of political systems, families and societies. The old superstructure is still trying to keep down or even kill the new one - NSA spying. DMCA letters. David Cameron's great firewall for porn in England. IP and patent lawsuits. The recent New York Times article with investors questioning why Google is building self-driving cars. Aaron Swartz's suicide, when trying to open up taxpayer-funded research which is locked down and privatized by now irrelevant Elsevier. Telcos using their government granted monopolies to try to harm budding businesses.
Revolutions in production lead to revolutions in the relations of production. In the twentieth century, blue collar workers like railroad engineers and factory mechanics had their hands on the engines running the economy. As technology and AI causes more and more unemployment for people who can't find the derivative of 5x, de facto, if not de jure, power of production goes to those who are rack mounting cloud servers, or rolling out new web site builds.
In the context of this essay the term "concentration of power" seems to mean the ability of a small group to have an outsized (and harmful) influence. This seems like a much larger problem than unemployment, but it isn't limited to technology. A network of a few hundred terrorists or just five guys in france can bring cities to a halt and affect the psyche of entire countries. It's just something that we're going through right now as a global culture, and I don't see any quick fixes. It is clear that the threat of malevolent AI is greatly overhyped, and I can't wait until the zeitgeist moves on to another flavor of the month criss du jour. There are very real threats facing the world right now and we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about something that might or might not happen, that we couldn't stop even if wanted to. Synthetic biology probably falls into the same category, though the ability to manufacture deadly viruses is based much more firmly in fact.
Guns, bombs, computers and the basic building blocks of life cannot be made illegal and confiscated en masse. One of the best ways to solve the threats posed by technology is to take the idea of income inequality, mentioned in this essay, very seriously. We've created a culture where people measure their self worth by the value of the companies they found. When I talk to people about technology, I don't hear about the large and small advances that make our lives a little bit better every day. I hear, "Isn't it crazy that Instagram was worth $XX billion dollars? I want to start a company and make that much too!". This is poison and it has to stop. If we place all the emphasis on who made what, we create a world where a lot of people get left out and forgotten. Then they spend their time in dark basements, watching extremist videos and working carelessly with dangerous tools. We need to turn technology into something that has benefits for everyone, in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones from some of its most dire consequences.
To support this claim, once I was in an AI group at the IBM Watson lab in Yorktown Heights, NY. We published a stack of papers; I was one of three of us that gave a paper at an AAAI IAAI conference at Stanford. My view of the good papers at that conference was that they were just good computer-aided problem solving as in applied math, applied science, and engineering and owed essentially nothing to AI. Later I took one of our major problems we were trying to solve with AI, stirred up some new stuff in mathematical statistics, got a much better solution (and did publish the paper in Information Sciences). That experience and observation since is the support for my claim. Sure, this support is just my opinion, and YMMV.
Instead of AI with a lot of economic value, I would suggest that closer in is a scenario of people managing computers managing computers ... managing computers doing the work.
And what work will those computers do? Sure, first cut, the usual -- food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, medical care.
So, maybe John Deere will have a worker computer on a tractor doing the spring plowing, the summer cultivating, and the fall harvesting. Then food can get cheaper. Maybe before the plowing a tractor will traverse the ground, take an analyze soil samples for each, say, square yard, and apply appropriate chemicals.
Maybe GM will have car factories with robots driven by computers doing essentially all the work. Then cars can get cheaper.
Maybe Weyerhaeuser or Toll Brothers will have pre-fab house factories with robots driven by computers doing essentially all the work, self-driving trucks delivering the big boxes, computer driven earth movers doing the site preparation, computer driven robots putting up the forms for the concrete basement walls, computer driven concrete pumpers inserting the concrete from self-driving concrete trucks, and houses will get a lot cheaper.
And the computers get cheaper.
So, right, we're talking deflation. So, have the government print some money and spend it on K-12 and college education, guaranteed annual income, parks, beautiful highways, etc. Print enough money to reverse the deflation and hire a lot of people. Those people buy the cheap food, cars, and houses, have children, and fill the classrooms of the additional education.
What education? Sure: How the heck to develop all those robots, managing computers, worker computers, computer driven farm machinery, car factories, pre-fab house factories, etc.
Or, as computers eliminate jobs, basically the result is deflation, and that's the easiest thing in the world to stop, and the solution is the nicest thing in the world -- just print money to get us out of deflation.
We already know what people want from the famous one word answer "More".
Computers should be a blessing, not a curse.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621156-first-...
It's hard to see what people will actually do for work after the effects of this new revolution are fully propagated, but I mainly think that's a failure of imagination. The other revolutions were not too different in terms of taking something which a huge amount of people were doing and what society was focused on producing people to do and making it trivial (or at least to involve much fewer people). The overall impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions were to ultimately create more jobs even if it was a wild ride while things were rapidly changing.
This revolution is different - now mechanical horsepower can be applied to tasks previously only possible through human minds which is quite different from machines or farming - but how different is it? It would take some really visionary people to figure out what the ultimate impacts of all of this are really going to be - and to try to imagine what people are going to do for a living or what society will look like on the other side.
My personal view is that AI is a pretty important component of this. I think, in principle, it's possible. But can it actually be done? That would be a pretty insane change and it's super hard to image what that will be like. But if AI just isn't possible or doesn't come around for a really long time, I don't think this revolution will be too different from others. The more "manual labor" type thinking tasks (grading essays, evaluating legal reports, collecting and searching through information, etc) will be replaced by more and more sophisticated machines. What about creative tasks? That's the final frontier as far as I'm concerned.
Well. It'll almost certainly be really interesting.
One idea I've had (I think we all have a lot of crackpot ideas) for what people who aren't suitable for highly skilled tasks are going to do revolves around social media and entertainment. What if a site like Reddit or Hacker News paid its users? I guess that's ridiculous, I'm not sure how the economics would work out - our contributions here would have to become more valuable. But if fully integrated into our minds (aided by computers) maybe they would be? I've seen people tipped in bitcoins on Reddit before so maybe it's possible. Just a crazy idea.
I don't know what the deal with those Bitcoin tips is. Personally I find it weird and creepy and never cash them - it feels like a ploy to tie user identities on multiple sites together, or something like that - but I have zero evidence to support that.