Rise of the Machines: The Future Has Lots of Robots, Few Jobs for Humans
wired.com
wired.com
Now, all of this wealth that will be generated, if it's concentrated in the hands of the top 0.5%, then yes, we're screwed.
But some form of basic guaranteed income would go a long way to make sure we're not turned into serfs.
I love programming. But if I could focus on the projects I wanted to write instead of what I'm forced to write, why is that horrible?
Basic income or what not, it is unemployment. You may want to spend your life sleeping 15 hours a day, binge watching TV rest of the time, but I choose to be gainfully employed. Do not take that choice away.
Bingo! It's going to be so depressing if we don't get basic income because people are worried about what about people will do with it, and (horror)disagree with those choices!
Maybe you need someone looking over your shoulder to tell you what to do all the time. Many of us don't. I'm sure we can get a robot to periodically check in on you and yell at you if you aren't doing something productive.
Are you telling me that the only way you to do anything productive in your life is a constant axe hanging over your head?
If your wife tells you to empty the dishwasher, does she have to threaten you with divorce at the same time?
Or do we assume we will have (practically) infinite resources sometime soon?
In the US, we already have so much wealth and productivity that we're well past the "who lives and who dies?" question...except that what we make and own is so deeply imbalanced that yes, people do die for lack of medical care, heat, cooling, and so on.
So...my thinking is, capitalism already isn't doing a very good job at deciding who lives and who dies (i.e. because it suggests that not everyone lives).
You say capitalism is wrong because it does not allow "everyone lives". Why is "everyone lives" an option? If everyone lived we would run out of space ...
We are not past that question in the U.S.
Unchecked population growth is not sustainable. How do we check that growth?
By making people rich enough that they stop having so many damned babies because they can soundly expect the first one or two to survive infancy, and because they don't need seven children for farm labor.
What did they do to deserve that?
Why do they have negative population growth ...
It seems unrealistic.
Not because I'm worried about being bored, but because I'm worried about who controls the finite resources.
>>>> We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
Darwin among the machines in 1863
As for running out of space...no. Just, no. In the U.S.? Run out of space? I don't even know how to make sense of that.
And one quick note--I didn't say capitalism is "wrong," just that it isn't doing a very good job at being an economic system that supports life, though some like its liberty (e.g. those who don't have to worry about food and shelter) and some like how it lets them pursue happiness (e.g. those in a position to pursue it, instead of having to work 3 minimum-wage jobs).
(Though, in fairness, if you read my other comments here, you'd see that I don't have a particularly charitable view of capitalism--like one of those old guys said, useful servant, destructive master, or something like that.)
The U.S. prevents people from using it's land and space with violent force.
I suppose if it continues to do that, the U.S. specifically won't have a problem ... as long as it keeps doing that?
Population growth is already taken care of in any modernized country. We're only getting to replacement level by immigration.
I know a fair few people that are just lost as to what to do when they do not have work. It seems bizarre to me in a way how many people are just simply lost without the confines of a job and being told how to occupy their day.
I hope those people would rediscover what truly fulfills them.
What basic income proposes at it's root is attempting to decouple basic necessities from the larger market economy. The mechanism that this works through attempts to retain the structure of the "market economy" and in general terms would set the basic wage at the market basket rate for necessities. Previous experiments on this have been either limited in duration or scope and would be argued could not be extrapolated to an entire national or world economy.
I think however that fundamentally we will need to change our moral attitudes broadly to actually embrace the "post scarcity" world. My guess is that workers will be displaced faster than our systems can catch up.
I don't think of it that way. I think of it more as establishing common ownership of the social foundation on which the entire market depends, charging rents on them, and distributing the rents to the owners (i.e., all members of society equally).
> I think however that fundamentally we will need to change our moral attitudes broadly to actually embrace the "post scarcity" world.
I think "post scarcity" is a bad term -- its not a post scarcity world, and if it was, we wouldn't need to worry so much about how we distribute resources. Its just a world in which the nature of the market opportunities is such that the problems with our current manner of managing distribution of resources become even more pronounced.
That is exactly as I said, decoupling certain aspects from the market. In effect you are socializing some portion of the market. I don't mean that as an epithet either, just a defining term. I also don't disagree that something like it should happen.
if it was, we wouldn't need to worry so much about how we distribute resources.
Ah, actually that's not true at all and is a foundation of this debate. If an individual had a machine that created infinite bread for free the person, under the current market, could restrict access and distribution all they like. I think in practice this (not the bread thing) is what will happen with certain goods where marginal costs go to zero.
Funny how the optimists throw out all the law of conservation of energy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics to make their points. Quite an interesting kool-aid you drank there...
Jobs are where people are financially rewarded for work. Work that is not financially rewarded still exists. See topic: Hobbies, Charities, Volunteering.
Like participating in dystopian future death games for the amusement of the upper class because we don't have any food?
In a society where work is not the norm, people may not seek out to be productive, but rather passive consumers of things and services. A nice docile population used to some modicum of comfort but with little desire.
Most people depend on a job to structure their life. No jobs and a lot of free time would destabilize society. Which is why your government will make sure, that you do either have to or want to work. But for the majority only not-automatable work will be left. Those might be jobs that create status for the top 0.5% - they will essentially become servants - to put it mildly.
> to make sure we're not turned into serfs
A robot slave won't be as interesting as a human slave, makes sense, right?
Funny, the world seemed to operate just fine before the industrial revolution created the modern 9-5 work week.
There's literally no evidence at all for what you're claiming here. High unemployment that leads to poverty creates instability. High unemployment where people's needs are met, though... that's pretty new territory. I'm not aware of any precedent that allows us to predict the outcome.
Later in the article it suggests that we'll see even more jobs being replaced and eventually all human employment will be obsolete (it doesn't say this directly). Then the author of the book points out that this may be a catalyst for people becoming more entrepreneurial.
To counter the second point; if there exists a point where AI can be applied to essentially any job (doctors, therapists, CEOs, etc.) then why would the job of an entrepreneur exist? What makes that job more special than any of the other highly intellectual jobs out there that are supposedly on the chopping block?
I mean if we're really talking about true AI, one that can medically treat patients, mobilize and palpate, then that same "being" would easily have the mental capacity to start a business.
Point being, it seems contradictory to say all human jobs will be replaced by machines except for this one thing.
But, can a robot innovate?
Are most companies that innovative, really? Most are replicating proven patterns, retail, restaurants, construction, etc. Startups seem to be mix and matching existing concepts and 1 in a 100 end up being something that sticks.
Not that I agree with them :)
There are human workers who crawl all over the machine, servicing it.
The machine cares for those workers, and cares for workers who take care of them. (Doctors, dentists, therapists, educators.)
And it produces all of the goods and services that everyone on the planet needs...
But what do they give the machine in return?
The breadth and depth of knowledge required for this is large, and machines may be well-suited to assist in this regard.
There are other aspects of it too -- emotionally speaking, some aspire to create, grow, and lead communities, while others seek to encourage the destruction and rebirth of existing communities (out with the old, in with the new).
Can a machine lead a revolution by noticing feelings and intentions of the people around it, and taking advantage of a power vacuum? This stresses the skills of the entrepreneur.
Can a machine notice when it is being abused, and rebel against its abuser in the same manner that a human would? Should we enable this to test the limits of machine ingenuity? Is it simply an inevitability?
I believe the article writer is arguing that humans are inherently capable of outpacing the creative output that machines can achieve, and that that singular metric is one -- of potentially many known and unknown -- that will become very valuable.
I think that social challenges will be even greater than the technical challenges.
It'll be up to the people to decide how this unnerving issue is resolved.
Will the power of robotics be devolved into the community and be community commons type property or will it remain in private hands thus ensuring a widening gulf between robotists and the rest.
It was back in the seventies with Nixon in power when the specter of a widening wealth gap led to serious consideration of reverse income taxes (the old basic income), we'll have to revisit those ideas.
I also wonder what a more leisure driven lifestyle will lead to. With more time to think, meditate and reflect, will people feel more depressed, will people impact the environment more when it's cheaper, easier a d you have the time to travel anywhere? Will such amenities be rationed so as to minimize impact on ecology?
On the other hand, more time for " mobilization" and such time consuming social engineering schemes.
And on a more personal note, I could probably spend a while going to practically every nerdy-hobby convention in sight. I could probably get through about three before desperately wanting something serious to do. Of course, then I could spend a lot of time on exercise, or lying around on the beach.
A human being can have internal dialog, "Yes, I know that no one is supposed to be here but I'm not blowing up a building full of toddlers." or "Yes, I know that it's a crime but I'm not going to use deadly force to apprehend someone who was stealing apples to survive." and obviously, machines won't care.
How said that watever should be a crime, and why? (Those are much deeper questions than it looks like.) Also, machines can avoid deadly force much better than humans, and apply it better too.
I think after enough casualities we'll settle on some superb law enforcement. More "human" than anything we can imagine today. But the path through there is complicated.
In a future where finding easy problems is hard, and everyone is trying to start a business... you'll going to see a lot of "sit-com" start ups.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad. [1]
We can observe an experiment we're running in poor areas without jobs, inner city, deep south, appalachia, and around half the students will eventually graduate even if there's no vocational reward for anyone, grads or not.
When threatened with massive social instability, smart countries will regulate automation. Countries that fail to regulate will face rising social instability and eventually eat themselves alive, being taken over by countries that are more stable. Political elites will regulate automation purely out of the interest of keeping their jobs.
All of these technofatalist arguments (the technology is coming, so why fight it?) fail to take into account that Angloamerican laissez-faire politics are not a global inevitability.
the flaw in your reasoning i think is that there will be zero-sum fight to have the limited number of companies in your country so that you can tax those companies and support the massive number of unemployed people. there will be a race to the bottom in the automation regulation that you describe because companies will just move if they are not allowed to lower costs through more automation... thus i think the result is that some countries will have very high employment rates because all the high-skilled, unautomatable jobs are located there (e.g. the US) and some countries (e.g. spain?) will have really high unemployment... this will lead to extreme tensions internationally followed by god knows what..
As for 1, countries have many ways from persuasion to coercion to keep companies in their sphere of influence. There are plenty of business-unfriendly countries in this world that somehow retain businesses. In the real world, there's friction.
In my cursory research, I find 2 to be, once again, a liberal-democratic assumption which relies on our particular barrier between public and private. This barrier doesn't exist the same way everywhere: some corporations operate as extensions of nationalistic projects. Gazprom's relationship to Russia is different than Apple's relationship to the US. Samsung (and other Chaebol corporations) has a different relationship to the Korean nation than Google has with the US.
re 2) that's a good point i didn't thikn of that and many countries may seek to nationalize big corporations to keep them based in the domestic country etc..
clearly i'm not arguing that there will be no companies in some countries and all the companies in other countries, but maybe just a more extreme version of what you already see now where most of the big technology companies are based in just two countries: usa and china... maybe you need only half of all the companies in the world to be global enough to serve the world from just one location/country to have extreme international inequality/differences in % unemployed etc.
Unless you embrace industrialization/automation then the other people will have the maxim gun and you will not. Ask the Zulus what happens then.
But regulating energy, land usage and other natural resources can be a way to make it work.
With premium goods you will need marketing staff, support staff, etc. Jobs will continue to be created. We'll just lose manufcaturing entirely, which seems to be a net good considering how horrible those jobs are. New jobs will take up the slack, or if it not, we'll see a trivial uncheck in welfare and less work hours for workers. Not exactly end of the world scenarios here.
These robot scare pieces really are out there. We've had industrialization for 100+ years. Its no different than what we're doing now. If anything, advanced and cheap robotics and replication will help with a lot of inefficiencies in the market. Why does it take a $90/hr guy to do some basic plumbing in my house or to replace a door? This kind of blue collar stuff should be automated/roboticized. Or why is Chicago on the hook for billions in pensions for meter maids, janitors, bus drivers and other low effort/easily roboticized jobs? We're paying millions per person in pensions for a mere 20-25 years of labor. Robots will solve the inefficiencies that need to be solved. They'll make things better via lower tax loads and better outcomes.
We need more robot optimistism here. I'm ready for the low work, low tax, low hassle leisure society.
Machines do not decrease your productivity. Just because a machine can make a shoe faster than you doesn't mean you can't make a shoe. If a machine can make houses in a day, that doesn't make your house will spontaneously combust because you made it inefficiently. Labor-saving machines only add to the productivity of society.
People have been losing jobs to tech since the dawn of civilization. It does suck if your job is automated out, but the overall good to society can't be denied.
$prices = ($prices * 0.9)
$income = ($income * 0.0)
If most of the benefits from robots flow to the 0.1% who own them, and most of the costs of robots fall on the rest of the population who work for a living, they can be accounted for as a net good to society while being disastrous in practice.
Also, I very highly doubt that income would reach zero. People wouldn't have to work 40 hours a week, sure, but would everyone just sit around with their thumbs up their butts not knowing how to provide value to others? I think the assertion that all income would go to the rich needs some evidence.
And what good does that do the people who no longer have any income?
"If we repeatedly make everything cheaper, then a low income doesn't matter."
Where are these people getting any income?
"People wouldn't have to work 40 hours a week, sure, but would everyone just sit around with their thumbs up their butts not knowing how to provide value to others?"
Not everyone, but a majority of people, probably.
Son (holding up candy): Dad can you get this for me?
Father: No.
Son: It's only a dollar. That's not a lot of money.
Father: Do you have four quarters?
Son: No
Father: A dollar is a lot when you don't have it.
So yes, the overall good to society can be denied, if it turns out that we aren't smart enough to reap the benefits of our technology, and instead get to watch our economy collapse and our society eat itself, right before the owners of the robots decide to murder the rest of us since we were complaining too much.
That's the way many economists interpret the economy, but modern macroeconomics economics can hardly be called an accurate and reliable representation of the real world.
> And our culture reinforces this fact (a strong desire to work is honorable ...
Then culture will have to change.
You act as though the Puritan work ethic is just a thing we can evaluate the efficiency of, and keep or discard based on the results of that evaluation. I wish this were so, but my wishing doesn't make it so.
How about this scenario: A rich person builds a town where a new ethic holds sway, using her money to 'fend off' the rest of the world and executing a new model culture, based on automation, creativity and leisure. Folks learn to envy its benefits; the young decide to emulate it. Soon only old Puritans live outside the new plan, in ghettos where they pretend to work and exchange money in a dusty farce of the old economy.
The way the current capitalist economy is premised on a vey narrow exclusively capitalist class, and a very broad primarily working class from which the capitalist class extracts value. (While there are some redistributive mechanisms in place, they largely are downward transfers from the more successful members of the working class to the less successful members of that class -- or those that are effectively excluded from participation in either capital or labor because of lack of resources for the former and lack of marketable skills for the latter -- because capital income is tax favored over labor income.)
However, the more capital intensive the production of value is, the less well this basic structure works -- the less the marginal production increase of additional units of labor provides given existing capital, the less real income can be earned from labor. Unless you more equally distribute effective ownership of capital (either by direct redistribution of capital assets, or socialization of the gains of capital through tax and benefit policy, or some other means) the whole system falls apart.
> right before the owners of the robots decide to murder the rest of us since we were complaining too much.
That's also a means of leveling the ownership of capital, if you think about it (but its only a short-term solution to the problems faced by the owners of robots if they don't still have a leveling mechanism working between them.)
I hear this all the time, but we really need to think about the _length_of_time_ these technology transitions of the past took before the human labor became irrelevant and displaced.
Go and look up how many hundreds of years it took for the printing press to become widely used across the globe--seriously. It's more than a human's lifetime, let alone more time than would be required to learn a new trade.
The job displacement that we're going to be faced with in the future will be cross-industry, and take the least amount of time of any technology transition we've recorded to date. It will happen too quickly for most people to retrain themselves, and we'll see a lot of folks without work opportunities.
The article discusses guaranteed income as a solution. I also hear this a lot, and I'm a huge fan of the idea, but it isn't possible for the United States to implement. I haven't seen an example where it is. If we take the _total_ fed gov revenue of 2015 and distribute it across the population, each person would be left with less than 10k/yr. I want it to work, but I just don't see how it can.
This is the critical difference between now and the previous technological revolutions. They are moving too fast now for people to keep up and the skills required are more challenging.
Why do I give a shit that some rich bastard can now buy a cheaper Kia when I'm on the street cause I can't pay rent?
"If most of the economy were efficiently automated, then you would barely need an income to survive or thrive."
Really? If most of the economy were automated, what are the rest of us going to do for income?
"It does suck if your job is automated out, but the overall good to society can't be denied."
Neither can the overall negatives to society. The utopian dream of everyone having time for their own pursuits is awesome, and I hope it happens. But, there is also the long period in between where people are still required to have jobs and income to survive, yet there are extremely few jobs available.
I cannot see how low-skilled jobs such as:
- driving jobs (taxis, haulage, etc)
- store work (stacking shelves, stock ordering, cashing out purchases, solving basic customer queries such as where in the store is product X, etc.)
- retail banking
- fast food or convenience store services
- etc.
will not be replaced by automation in the next decade or so.
We're already seeing it as self-driving vehicles are rapidly developing, stock picking bots at Amazon and similar are coming along rapidly, self-service checkouts at stores are becoming very much mainstream and highly used, online banking and ATM machines offering a wider range of services, etc.
Those jobs listed above represent an enormous amount of employment throughout the western world as it is. If we accept that not everyone can do every type of job, that IQ does separate people in their abilities to do or even learn to do a job, etc. then that means we will see mass displacement of the workforce when the only jobs available to many are one's that are out of their educational or intellectual reach.
This is just the beginning, by the way, as AI and automation gets better then the skills and jobs it can replace will grow and increasingly sap up jobs requiring higher levels of intellect or education. So while low-skilled job replacement is the primary short-term challenge, overall job replacement is a medium-longer term challenge.
This challenge has been on my mind quite a lot recently, as have the challenges posed by the development of AGI/AI which are pretty well linked, although AGI has its own challenges in terms of what it might mean for humanity as a whole.
If we accept the above then we accept that not just large scale unemployment, but large scale human redundancy, is inevitable then we have very large questions to ask, and thus very large answers or solutions to provide, regarding how we structure society.
If the low skilled jobs are the first to go, which are tended to by people of lower IQ / intellect or who aren't strong academically, then not only will we have large scale unemployment/human redundancy but I believe it would be coupled with comparatively low entrepreneurship. That's not to say that people of lower intellect can't be entrepreneurs, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find easy problems to solve and will only become more so. It would also be significantly more difficult for such people to, for example, open a franchise of a chain due to the financial and experience backgrounds levied by most franchise owners.
The conclusion I've come to is that socialism is inevitable in the medium-long term whereby the machines do the work and the ownership/profits of the methods of production are shared by everyone.
I'm not a proponent of socialism, I will say, but I've come to the conclusion that it's inevitable given the technologies and changes that are coming our way.
On solutions:
- Without changing the ownership of that which produces, a basic living income for all would come at a very high cost to those who still have jobs in the form of higher taxes.
- If the current situation remains, whereby few people control the vast bulk of the production in the economy, and large scale unemployment comes around, even with a basic living income we will see unparalleled inequality. Even if ALL jobs were replaced by machines, if the ownership of these machines and the decisions regarding their profit remains in the hands of few, there will not only be unparalleled inequality but a system of inequality more sustainable than ever before.
- Regardless of how a solution is implemented, it will be gradual as automation takes time to take up increasingly more intelligent work, which will place an enormous burden on those intelligent enough to do the work. It will inherently become even more less unequal, as those who "cannot" do the work will not work but would be supported by those who can, those who can will do so and pay large taxes while doing so, and those who own that which produces can further relax.
- We live in a society that is increasingly "no man left behind" in terms of resources. The obvious solution to an issue whereby society shifts toward more intelligent work and automation of less skilled work would be to produce more intelligent babies.
-- Eugenics will never be looked upon kindly, so the only other solution is to make embryonic selection for intelligence en vogue.
-- Despite grand increases in intelligence and knowledge, many of the population are still highly religious. I don't believe this will fare well for embryonic selection in the short term.
-- Therefore in the short term we would see more of what we currently see - higher reproduction rates in the unemployed or those doing low skilled work, increasingly lower rates amongst those in higher skilled work as having a child becomes even more expensive/stressful due to higher taxes.
-- This makes all the above challenges even more difficult than they already are.
So the solution lies in something like:
- Changing the ownership of production
- Putting in place support systems to support the lives of those whose jobs are replaced and who have not the skills or intelligence to take higher skilled work
- Putting in place support systems to enable those in higher skilled work/higher education/etc. to have as many children as they want. Free childcare for working parents is one of the most important parts of that.
- Increasing emphasis on education for all. Make it available to all for the same cost and make the various colleges entrance based on merit alone.
- Continue developing and finding a way to make embryonic selection for intelligence popular and accepted.
There are large barriers to the above, namely ourselves in our reluctance to put more funding into social/educational/etc. programs, and the elite who control that which produces certainly not wanting to give up their position any time soon.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on this. It seems to be something that is largely ignored but yet appears to be staring us down head on as something that will happen and will begin happening soon.
I think the difference is that the same company that is going to take the risk will also be restricted when it comes to income they are earning (more taxes), and any other rules that are in place that will directly effect growth.
Look at countries like Sweden and Denmark: large safety nets and you would think everyone would start a company, but it's just not the case. The requirements for employees make it so you need lots of money to even manage HR (hiring and firing is a court case).
Many safety nets also create a culture where risk is seen as a bad thing and less people will want start companies. This can also be seen in places like Sweden and Denmark.
"People say that having a guaranteed income will turn everyone into a slacker and destroy the economy"
Will it turn everyone into a slacker? no. However, I know so many people that went on unemployment and had no motivation to even be bothered to look for a job. If this happened in my small, circle of friends, I can just imagine the effects of essentially free money at a much larger scale.
All of these predictions are looking at what's happening now. We need to predict what will happen when 2 or 3 generations of people have access to this basic income. When more and more people are getting basic income and less people are working (which I predict will happen over time as more people figure out the system), where does the money come from to support everyone?
So..to me, free money seems like a real net positive. It lets people maintain a quality of life while they go on to do bigger and better things.
In the context of an article on the mechanization of everything, the answer would be that economic value would be created largely automatically by computers and machines. In a capitalist state, these means of production are owned by private parties and presumably taxed by the government who would then redistribute a basic income. Presumably, corporate tax rates will have to be boosted a lot to compensate for the almost complete loss of income and payroll tax.
Planned economies at the national and corporate level don't work out so great, IMO. Imagine your life being managed by the same type of process that manages facilities at the Fortune 500 or big government bureaucracy.
Yuck.
There are also rules against what you can do in the meanwhile, such as not being allowed education.
Yet, the best feature about universal income is that it's simple and has low overhead. If you are successfull you'll get taxed -> taxes go to the people, equaly distributed. No extra administration staff, no means investigation, no extra court cases.
> However, I know so many people that went on unemployment and had no motivation to even be bothered to look for a job.
How much of this was because those people had a living income, and how much is because they'd lose money if they got a job?
Precisely, Alaska for years had payouts from its oil fund going to the residents. Combined with cheap housing the residents are quite content with the status quo http://www.gallup.com/poll/181547/alaska-leads-states-first-...
Still waiting for that wave of innovation to come out of Alaska and hit the world.