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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

Unemployment is going to increase even more in the future. There just isn't enough work to be done anymore. Increasingly sophisticated robots are going to render even more workers irrelevant. Exactly what happens to these unemployed humans is going to determine whether we are living in a dystopia or a utopia. If the corporations have their say, it will be a dystopia.

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Your comment reminds me of the early 19th century. There was this group called the "Luddites" that believed the same thing. It didn't turn out as they predicted.

There's an important difference between the 19th century and today. We are nearing the point when computers will be mentally equal, if not superior, to humans. They are already physically superior in many regards. Even before that point, there are tons of jobs that can be done by machines with minimal intelligence. If a machine can do everything that many humans can, but for less money, those humans will be unemployable. If machines are stronger than you and smarter than you, then there's nothing for you to shift to that they aren't already doing.

I really don't see the "We are nearing the point when computers will be mentally equal, if not superior, to humans." AI hasn't produced any results that have even got within range of human intellect. I am not denying that a lot of factory jobs can be made robotic, but I am saying a lot of skilled labor still cannot be done by robots (e.g. plumber).

In the near term, only unskilled labor is really at risk. Even so, plumbing has no potential for growth in developed countries above the rate of population growth. It's something you only care about when it's broken. The key to avoiding huge disruptions in the face of advancing technology is having new jobs for displaced workers. I don't see it.

There are plenty of jobs that will be automated in the next decade. What will those workers do?

" It's something you only care about when it's broken." - you do realize that plumbers are needed for new construction and renovation? Actually, given the needed improvements in infrastructure and new building projects, a lot of skilled labor is needed. I am really not seeing robot electricians, plumbers, etc. for many decades to come.

I am really unclear what you think unskilled labor is.

Oops, I overlooked that part of the job. Still, fewer will be necessary, and I don't think many jobs fall into that category.

There are many cashiers, food service workers, and custodial workers today, and I don't think that kind of unskilled labor has much of a future.

I really don't think the labor stats match your belief in regard to the skilled labor, and I the unskilled positions your are mentioning are being limited more by raises in minimum wage / economic conditions versus automation / demand.

We are nearing the point when computers will be mentally equal, if not superior, to humans.

Not even remotely close. In fact, if we ever want to reach a point where computers are as intelligent as humans are, we are likely going to have to start from the ground up with the way we build processors.

Our computers rely on precision, our brains rely on lack thereof. Our brains were "built" from the beginning to match fuzzy patterns. I look at a door and I know immediately that it is a door, even if I can only see part of it and have never seen one that looks anything like it before. Computers are terrible at this. We're getting sortof-kindof-maybe close by applying bayesian filters to images, but you're talking about rooms full of specialized hardware that cannot even compete with the brain of a mouse.

Additionally, that which makes us intelligent (what a delightfully indescribable word that is) is partially our creativity; which is something that computers are absolutely incapable of in their current form.

Sorry, but it is probably going to be a while before engineers, or architects, or programmers, or babysitters are replaced by any sort of "machine intelligence".

I agree we are nowhere close. No-one has any real idea of how the brain works, let alone how to build one.

However, I wonder if the exponential growth of technology will mean that we'll suddenly see a lot of progress in a short space of time.

You're wrong about this -- neuroscientists know quite a bit about the mechanisms that make the brain work. You don't have he same knowledge because it hasn't been popularized and disseminated yet.

> We are nearing the point when computers will be mentally equal, if not superior, to humans.

No we aren't. We are no closer now than we were 50 years ago. The hardware is faster, but the software has not changed. (And hardware is not getting faster anymore either.)

Seriously? We have cars that drive themselves. The realm of tasks that only humans can do shrinks every year. We're not close to computers equaling humans, but we are nearing it.

I agree. The interesting question is not when robots will be equal or even superior to humans. The interesting question is when they will be advanced enough to take over a significant portion of labor for cheaper than even a chinese slave worker could.

Looking at what Asimo can do today it seems to me we're not far away from the latter; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ByGQGiVMg

The physical, mechanics part seems to be mostly sorted out. Robots can walk, run, climb stairs, avoid obstacles, get up when they fall, lift heavy things or operate at incredible precision. It won't be long until they exceed us humans in most physical regards (with a few notable exceptions like smelling or touch-sensitive skin, but imho even that is only a matter of time).

In my opinion the really interesting research is now going into the stuff you see in the video above. Making robots discover and interact intelligently with their environment. This is still a far cry from real intelligence but try to imagine the impact when robots become able to execute simple instructions like "Make me a coffee", "Drag the couch from A to B" or even "Repair the plumbing" without further handholding.

That will be the tipping point for a huge shift in society, akin to the invention of bookprinting or the internet, likely even bigger.

Looking at what we have today I would say that specific vision is just a matter of time. Whatever follows then is in the pudding.

Last week, I heard a talk from one of the engineers doing this. He claimed that the main thing holding back robotics is liability concerns. If someone builds a machine that causes widespread death and destruction, the usual cop-out is to blame the operator for losing control of it. But if a fully autonomous robot goes postal, the manufacturer can't pass the buck to anyone.

Perhaps this will be a real issue, or perhaps robot engineers are a bit too fond of Terminator and 2001. Fear of it is apparently causing real effects. It would be sad if the ultimate reason to employ humans is that it feels good to kick their arses when things go wrong.

Depends what you mean by mentally superior. Computers can add billions of numbers a second, work at a very high precision with reflexes measured in nanoseconds, do not have weaknesses like boredom and the need to socialize. If you're talking about creativity and navigating the real world, however, computers aren't there yet.

No, there is enormous difference in my thoughts on this matter and the Luddites. Freedom from work should be a great thing for humanity.

I think the main difference here is that this is an across the boards increase in complexity of technology. Whereas during the Luddites time any bloke could become a worker in a textile mill. Now technology is increasingly moving in a direction that requires more intelligence and a larger skill set to operate in a useful way. The eventual problem will be that unless we evolve or engineer ourselves to become more than we are now, we will eventually hit a wall where we simply cannot comprehend beyond.

Disagreed. No matter how much you automate, there will always be more work to do, even if you don't as a species "climb up the value latter" which of course we will do.

This is due to the fact that once basic meets are met, whether by manual labour or mechanisation, then more sophisticated needs will evolve for the markets to satisfy.

The same fears have been around during industrialization. How about thinking again about some basic principles that are unlikely to change from one technological/civilisatory wave of change to the next?

Marshall Brain discusses this in Robotic Nation:

American society has no way to deal with a situation where half of the workers are unemployed. During the Great Depression at its very worst, 25% of the population was unemployed. In the robotic future, where 50 million jobs are lost, there is the potential for 50% unemployment. The conventional wisdom says that the economy will create 50 million new jobs to absorb all the unemployed people, but that raises two important questions:

What will those new jobs be? They won't be in manufacturing -- robots will hold all the manufacturing jobs. They won't be in the service sector (where most new jobs are now) -- robots will work in all the restaurants and retail stores. They won't be in transportation -- robots will be driving everything. They won't be in security (robotic police, robotic firefighters), the military (robotic soldiers), entertainment (robotic actors), medicine (robotic doctors, nurses, pharmacists, counselors), construction (robotic construction workers), aviation (robotic pilots, robotic air traffic controllers), office work (robotic receptionists, call centers and managers), research (robotic scientists), education (robotic teachers and computer-based training), programming or engineering (outsourced to India at one-tenth the cost), farming (robotic agricultural machinery), etc. We are assuming that the economy is going to invent an entirely new category of employment that will absorb half of the working population.

Why isn't the economy creating those new jobs now? Today there are millions of unemployed people. There are also tens of millions of people who would gladly abandon their minimum wage jobs scrubbing toilets, flipping burgers, driving trucks and shelving inventory for something better. This imaginary new category of employment does not hinge on technology -- it is going to employ people, after all, in massive numbers -- it is going to employ half of today's working population. Why don't we see any evidence of this new category of jobs today?

I suspect that by the time we develop intelligent artificial minds, we'll have already made inroads into enhancing our own. Come to think of it, we're already doing it.

My point is that there already is not enough work to do. We can fill the basic needs of humanity with well below full employment and this will only become more obvious in the future.

Society creates ways to compensate people for doing some form of work.

It would be great for society if we all reached the point where perhaps 5% of workers covered our basic human needs and the other 95% were paid to entertain and do academic/scientific research to further improve our standard of living.

That is my expectation for a bright future for humanity.

The problem is that 95% of people simply aren't capable of being entertainers or researchers, not in the meaningful sense of creating something genuinely original. That's not elitist, it's a fact. Those people would have to come come, more or less, from the ranks of the 5% needed to operate things.

that is assuming we can't genetically engineer ever and for people who are already born not able to alter our DNA through some kind of viral infection mechanism.

That has been true in theory since the Industrial Revolution with the advent of mass-production and I believe it's still only a problem in theory. As evidence I point to the fact that the majority of countries still fail to meet the basic human needs of their citizenry.

We have drought and flood resistant crops, we have assembly lines, we have heavy machinery, and yet the majority of the world's population lives without clean water and regular meals. There is a huge reservoir of work which needs to be done but because of the degenerate governments, is not getting done.

On the other end of the spectrum, wealthy countries are expanding the definition of what basic needs are. Just last month, Finland declared that broadband internet access is a right of every citizen [1]. All of a sudden you have, by government mandate, a new service which must be provided to every corner of the country.

So on the one hand you have all this latent potential and on the other hand you have ever growing demand for services. I just don't see the artificial jobs/services limit ever being an issue, even though we've long had the means to cloth and feed every man, woman and child on earth.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.rights/i...

Meeting basic needs is the beginning of the human story, not the destination. We don't need "work". We need imagination. Work will take care of itself.

Incredibly sophisticated robotics will also enable new innovations, create entirely new markets, and make it feasible to develop certain existing niche technologies into marketable goods and services.

Thank goodness all of that human capital will be freed up to explore the new frontiers.

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