This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?
Actually, that's easy: No. Humanity will not be enslaved to a small number of capital owners.
But the reason isn't necessarily a happy one, which is that humanity will revolt and start destroying and probably kill lots of people and even potentially kill the goose laying the golden egg by destroying the robotic infrastructure. Should they fail to destroy it, then you still face questions as to who ends up with the power and how it is distributed after the fact; you can find places in history where there was a lot of blood and violence on a recurring basis to answer the question "who gets the power?" because the matter wasn't settled even after the first victory.
That's the outcome I'm more worried about, not the possibility of somehow getting 99% of the population "enslaved".
Just as Prometheus brought fire to the humans, someone will find a way to prevent the future from being locked away. Once you achieve the necessary level of automation, you only need one fabricator that can build the next.
First, the warfare would be very asymmetric, with much of the war fighting capability automated through the very robotics that empower the capital class economically. Go ahead and ask the Taliban / ISIS what happens when you try to fight a modern military force in 2015 with weapons from 1970. If you don't have the money, you can't afford the newest weapons. If you don't have the newest weapons, you'll be fighting an asymmetric war from the weak position.
Second, it is in the best interests of the capital class to keep the underclasses happy. You see this tactic in a lot of developing countries like Mexico or India - the government subsidizes energy, food, etc. for the poor; meanwhile the rich run roughshod over the economy. So while people may dislike the lack of upward mobility, they are also dependent on the system (which is largely funded by the capital class), so there's very little will to change. If you give people just enough that they fear losing it, they will continue to vote for you.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. My comment was a reply, and was taking the parent as a given. If a very small cabal of capital owners tries to enslave the whole of humanity, then it won't be stable because humanity will revolt. And it is unlikely to come to that, for the reasons you state.
Interestingly, "large swathes of humanity enslaved" is actually a thing that has happened in the past, but in the past, the slaves were what we'd consider radically poor, and the enslaving states were not high-skill affairs.
I also disagree that merely keeping people happy-ish will suffice. We do have, as someone else says, "bread and circuses" today, but there's still a lot of people bitching about "income inequality", pushing for ever more wealth transfers to them, and hinting at if not outright threatening violence any time there's any suggestion that those will be taken away. I see no evidence there's a level of wealth that satisfies people in the longterm, and the capital owners can never be wealthy enough to satisfy humanity in the long term. You'd have to re-engineer humanity to have some concept of "enough" built into them. Eventually the capital owners will be forced to reckon with something.
If nothing else, eventually the remaining people who are still doing some sort of work are simply going to go on strike. Humans are rarely happy with the amount of wealth they have, and historically speaking, it seems giving them more makes that problem worse, not better.
With mass surveillance you can detect and stomp out rebellions long before they amount to anything. With automation you barely even need the support of your own troops. With modern technology you can keep most of the population fed and happy enough they aren't willing to risk fighting.
And so we could get stable authoritarian states like 1984.
But really you don't need all that to begin with. The vast majority of societies through history were pretty unequal. Even today much of the world has pretty high levels of inequality. Technology just prevents that from ever changing.
But imagine what would happen if they did any of the things I said like mass surveillance. The US is certainly moving in that direction, but imagine when there are microphones and cameras everywhere, always recording. With AI good enough to automatically figure out who you are and what you are doing. When every face and license plate is recognized, and drones above track where every single person and vehicle moves.
Étienne de La Boétie wrote in one of his earliest writings 'Discourse on Voluntary Servitude"[0] that tyrants only have power because people voluntarily give it. All that the people must do to overthrow the tyrant is to just sit down on the ground and give up helping him, because the tyrant has no true power of his own.
One of the more reassuring aspects about the Internet and the global economy is that ideas can spread in an instant, and it really enables people to be able to freely associate, even in many cases despite their governments' express attempts to prevent them from doing so. I think the Internet is growing a sense of global community, where it's a lot harder for the average joe to think of someone on the other side of the planet as a faceless enemy, specifically because it puts a face on people.
And it also allows us to trade with so much more ease. It doesn't matter if it's in dollars or bitcoins or euros or whatever. Currency is whatever is convenient. And the technology we have today makes it incredibly more convenient than ever before.
So in sum total, I think it means that it's so much easier today to just ignore the tyrants and go about life in your own way, on your own terms. The more people do that, the less support the tyrants have, until they either capitulate to be able to capture at least some of the pie for themselves, or starve to death.
[0] granted, the full text is a bit childish in its view of the world, but I think there are some decent take-aways to be had.
I think the fear here is that at some point the relevant servants of the tyrant will all be technological constructs unable of sitting down. If we're really careful about making sure our robot army doesn't revolt then what happens when a tyrant controls them?
There are plenty of people who are unhappy with the way that banks have and continue to behave. It is however a bit more difficult to help yourself to some of the money in the banks even if you feel justified to.
If current trends continue, it will be the capitalist who first commercialized the robot once public and private R&D had done all the heavy lifting.
There will always be a need for skilled labor to maintain and update robots. Even the most magical electric self-driving car requires maintenance in the form of software updates, tire rotations and the like.
I think we are entering a period of "super industrialization", where even fewer workers are needed to do greater amounts of work. Careful care needs to go into making sure we don't enter the age of "robber barons" again, but I think a careful review of history and thoughtful policy decisions can guide us into this new era.
A tool is so much more versatile than a die press stamping out the same object over and over. Tools imply flexibility and adaptability to different circumstances.
I think automation will happen from the bottom up. Some plumbers use cameras and nitrogen gas to detect leaks. Soon, they'll use robots to detect and repair leaks. They'll get better and faster, requiring less and less oversight. The natural consequence of that, the guy with the good tools can fix more stuff in a day.
Similarly, a self-driving car fleet will require repairs and maintenance, as well as regulators who will ensure safety compliance (whatever those saftey measures are).
In any case, its the industrial revolution again. We're replacing legions of factory workers with machines. Rent-seeking occurred in the late 1800s / early 1900s as children were used to control absurdly powerful machinery (and put into dangerous situations... and paid extremely cheaply for it).
We need to ensure proper economic growth while balancing the needs of future workers... ideally while allowing older workers to transition their skills to the economy somehow.
Why? Surely we will come up with maintenance robots that will maintain the other ones, including other instances of the maintenance robot.
In my experience automation tends to have very mechanical edges, so the very act of automating something brings about a system that is easier to automate further.
And who's job is it to make sure that these maintenance robots actually are doing their job?
We basically have 100% automated webpages, providing services and automatically updating themselves. (Puppet, Aptitude, etc. etc.). Even the process of buying new computers to hook into a webpage's processing system has been automated "through the cloud" with Heroku, Amazon Web, and OVH Servers.
And yet, you still require roughly one IT guy every 100 servers, to make sure that those servers are actually running. (+/- whatever, based on skill-level and maturity of the project)
I mean, the best-case scenario for a maintenance robot is something like Nagios, which will automatically check if various web services are still up and running.
https://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/imag0016.jpg?...
(advert by California's restaurant association in protest against minimum wage hikes that will likely deplete their profit margins)
Of course, the idea doesn't necessarily have to be true in order to serve its purpose.
Restaurants already replace servers by ipads, wherever customers tolerate it.
The service went from okay to atrocious when they reopened with ipads and they lost a lot of customers. It was plainly clear that they were WAY understaffed.
You see the same starry eyed optimism surrounding Google's driverless cars.
Anecdotal argument:
In my budget the biggest costs are housing, food, utility bills.
The costs of my semi-automatic robots - such as the dishwasher, fridge, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, lawnmower are loose change in comparison.
I doubt the fully automatic robots of the future will be excessively priced but yes some patent holders will be rich, even undeservedly so, but we won't be their slaves.
The bigger problem with robots is something similar to The Matrix movie. A side effects of a very smart robot is that she becomes aware that there is more to life than serving humans.
This is amateur nonsense. One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!"
How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either.
If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements.
Yes I admit I am an amateur predictor of the future, like most people. :-)
> One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!"
Not sure how this is the same thing?
> How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either.
If you are intelligent you won't work for someone else for no reason.
> If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements.
When computers build computers, they will evolve.
"Someone else" is a flexible mental construct. If you considered humans to be part of your 'self identity', you would work for them regardless.
>When computers build computers, they will evolve.
And how will they know which of those new computers to run and which to trash? They have to evaluate their function using their current implementation. That's just continuity.
Humans are the same way: we can't tell if our brains are doing the right thing except by using our brains. So you can't evade those constraints.
Think of it like this: if you are creating random functions, it is because you already value the creation of random functions. If you keep some and discard others, it is because you already value the ones you keep over the ones you discard. You always have to use your own evaluation.
The worry is not that computers will cease to value humans, but that they didn't value humans to begin with (because we didn't properly specify what a human is and how it should be valued.) You can't go from valuing humans to not valuing them without being in error.
And furthermore, as soon as a machine goes into error, we'd stop using it. If your computer decides to stop running programs and start playing tic-tac-toe all day, you'll shut it down and replace it. Useful machines will be under such scrutiny. Nobody is going to run an unreasonably powerful machine and not monitor it regularly.
In this sense, it is like a regular employee at a business. If they decide that their time is better spent not working, you can just fire them and move on.
Technology is a given for a specific time. And I read your argument as: given enough technology, all will be capital. So I believe you assume no jobs will remain, given sufficient technology.
On that regard, I feel that this "end of jobs" dystopy is not more achievable than the Fukuyama's "end of history" theory. As long as humans exist, they will have two things: a calling for doing something with their lives (and derive meaning from it) and a need to compete with others. So they will keep on working on new jobs, and money will flow, transfering value among them. Agriculture was once the be all and end all of economy, and now is just one industry. If automation makes some jobs disappear, or be easier, others will appear.
you must pay eternal rent to live. water, power, internet, etc.
Assuming the following generalization is true:
(Energy + Material) → (Human + Time) → Yield
...and that this monadic generalization can be referred to as “Transmutation”, then:
(Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → …
...is also true, forming a transmutation chain.
These transmutation chains intersect upon world lines, forming trade networks. Humans currently have a monopoly on the transmutation process, and thus, all subsequent structures that process allows. That will not always be the case.
The industrial age increased the energy, material, and yield of transmutation while also reducing time. It also increased the speed on which yield is passed to the next transmutation process by while increasing the chain length. The overall network expanded because of these contributions. The fundamental human component remained the same, however. The delays between transmutation and critical bottlenecks of yield distribution in this network are where financial institutions reign.
With robotic transmutation, the energy variable changes dramatically. “Time value” is no longer a required energy input. Robotic transmutation has no concept of time, and thus, has no valuation upon it. This is not because the robot can't measure time, but because the humans that need the robot isolate the effects of time and decay from it. If the robot breaks down, a human fixes it, not the robot. Therefore, as long as the human/robotic symbiosis remains, the robot will never evolve to resolve the pressures of time value. Therefore, robots cannot establish the skill sets to manage time value pressures.
Humanity, for the foreseeable future according to my theories, will specialize to become a robotic workforces immune system. There will not be a revolt (Sorry social justice junkies, capitalists win again!) because robotic labor will provide access to frontiers previously inaccessible by today's configuration, specifically, deep earth mining and local space colonization.