China’s Troubling Robot Revolution
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
And this is a qz article dealing with self-driving trucks which are poised to replace truck drivers:
http://qz.com/417014/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-th...
The map in there (also found here http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...) is interesting. Truck driver is currently the most common job in the majority of the U.S. states, but interestingly, 'software developer' is on the rise and has taken the top spot in a couple of states. This happened last year.
So the software developer seems to be the truck driver of the 21st century, which kind of makes sense , since we're not just driving trucks, we're 'driving' all the machines out there.
So it begs the question - if this is the fate of truck drivers, isn't the same going to happen to the software developers in a couple of years ?
So what we are arguing over is when this will happen. I think we are getting quite close - decades away. Maybe less for simpler software development processes.
Most of us are going to live through interesting times, our children are going to live through very interesting times indeed - as the old Chinese curse goes...
source: Msc mathematics and have been following the bleeding edge of ML like a hawk, looking for a problem for the solutions
And for simpler processes it is already there but people would not call that programming here on HN and companies are not taking advantage of it. You really do not need custom software to run most companies (even a lot of software companies; just repackaging), but (luckily for me) they still order custom software and yes, it is more efficient and nicer; that is because they want software to match their process while it should be the other way around usually.
So why do they still use custom software ??
As I get older I feel like there's a peak amount of knowledge that I can load into my mind and the areas of technology which used to be green pastures are now filled with young brilliant minds doing incredible things.
There are more devs in the ecosystem of a javascript framework than there were people in the web space just 15 years ago. Or at least so it seems.
Now when the AI is going to come, it's going to take it months if not weeks to raise to the top and make everyone obsolete.
So suddenly, all these highly intelligent, highly educated people have their rugs pulled from beneath them by a service which improves itself and uses 5 minutes to write code which is orders of magnitude more superior than what a team of 100 could accomplish in 1 year..
What will all the humans do when this happens ?
Sure, but software developers will be the last jobs to become obsolete, just before the Singularity. At which point it won't really matter any more for us that there won't be jobs - either we'll be in control of the computers and be free to do whatever we want, or we'll all be destroyed by them.
The question is: is deciding where to drive as hard as deciding what to program?
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt-the-mo...
The only alternatives are bloody destructive revolutions or totalitarian panopticon police states to forcibly hold the other 90% in crushing poverty. That future would look an awful lot like The Hunger Games -- small high-tech enclaves enslaving and suppressing the rest of humanity -- and even within these enclaves, you do not step out of line.
I know people said this in the past and "jobs always came back," but I am increasingly believing that there is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete automation and non-Turing-complete automation. It's different this time. Software defined systems are not like the cotton gin or even first generation industrial robotics.
In other words I agree with Marc Andressen: "software is eating the world." Absolutely everything will become software defined -- rapidly and easily reconfigurable and thus exponentially rather than linearly destructive to employment.
Basic income is one of two ways of realizing a future that is good for everyone (and those ~10% won't be happy without it because the zombies will be at their door). The other way is to make everything free (either forcefully, or through price reductions via technology and automation).
Basic income is known to work [1]. "Making everything free" forcefully is a no-go because it disrespects the realities of market dynamics (as we've learned from Communism).
It is important also to realize that there are many ways of implementing BI, and some of them are better than others. This is a debate and discussion we should be all having.
The primary ethical decision I see is whether BI is implemented in a coercive manner (i.e. taxation) or a voluntary manner. Both approaches are possible and each can be done in various different ways. I worked on something called http://groupcurrency.org [2], a voluntary cryptocurrency approach to basic income, and there are many other approaches as well, the simplest of which is simply for a "company-tribe" to guarantee its members a minimum income (backed by the fruits of their collective labor).
For those interested in Basic Income, I strongly recommend perusing the subreddit r/basicincome and related subreddits (r/CryptoUBI, etc.).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/basicincome/wiki/index#wiki_that.27...
[2] HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501059
It's likely the best way to preserve the most freedom and openness, at least given the political tools at our disposal. I'm a fan of the idea of eliminating coercive taxation but I do not see it as something politically achievable in the foreseeable future.
... and yes, there will be some percentage of people who get basic income and just sit around and get high and eat chips. I do not believe that is avoidable. I suppose today a lot of those people are working in bullshit jobs that are on their way out, or are on an existing welfare system.
It's dumb to sacrifice our freedom or quality of life just because it offends us to see a few people dicking around. Ultimately it's their loss -- they are the ones wasting their lives on unfulfilling time-wasting "entertainment," and they'll probably regret it later. We need not subject ourselves to totalitarianism or poverty in order to "punish" people for laziness -- a life wasted is punishment enough.
It is also questionable whether basic income itself is politically achievable.
The beauty of the non-coercive voluntary approaches to basic income is that it can be implemented right now by any group without requiring or waiting on any political gesticulation.
The problem I see is that you already have this huge taxation burden which soaks up surplus wealth that might power such things. Implementing basic income at the government level would redirect this firehose, but I don't see how decentralized voluntarist approaches would achieve that.
Yes, see my post above for links about one possible cryptocurrency approach called Group Currency (disclaimer: I am one of the contributors to that idea).
Group currencies can be thought of as "company-tribes" where relationships are familial instead of exchange-based. We'll post a simplified version of this scheme to https://blog.okturtles.com soon.
The TLDR of the simple method is: (1) members of the company-tribe all accept payment for their products and services to the group's account. (2) Funds are divided evenly until a basic income has been reached for each member (say, for the month), after which all additional funds go to the member who is generating them.
> The problem I see is that you already have this huge taxation burden which soaks up surplus wealth that might power such things. Implementing basic income at the government level would redirect this firehose, but I don't see how decentralized voluntarist approaches would achieve that.
This is a great point, and one that needs to be considered and discussed.
It is possible for a group to both pay taxes and provide its members with a basic income (and campaign for an end to mandatory income taxes ;).
Still, these are practical problems that may turn out to be solveable, and the efficiencies that basic income schemes give are potentially large, as they would wipe out a lot of government workers whose sole job it to manage redundant arrays of independent welfare schemes.
Some badly formated discussion here: https://storify.com/bis_pilot/canadian-economists-on-basic-i...
I am an outsider, but from everything I know about the american culture (or maybe from a large part of the world?), the average american is willing to sacrifice general welfare to punish a handful of slackers.
It results from centuries of culture regarding work ethics and whatnot (wherein working more innevitably meant being more happy, more successful, better integrated in the community, etc) but it simply will stop making sense. Work is not the end goal, it was merely a necessary means. So I have no trouble seeing the average american irrationally reject this kind of mechanism even if themselves (and society as a whole) were worse off.
It goes along with the quote [along the lines of] "Every american thinks of himself as an only temporarily embarrassed millionaire".
I guess you see the most extreme version of this with Islamic fundamentalism-- "I want to die so that you can die."
How people manage not to see this as a form of moral nihilism is beyond me-- it's basically selfless malice.
In the old days I suppose these creeds existed to enforce discipline in a hostile zero-sum world, but today they're pointless and achieve nothing but the perpetuation of suffering.
China essentially made a deal with us that said "look, we'll give you a ~30% discount on everything we manufacture, and in return you look the other way when your industry gradually moves over to take advantage."
Actually, it was more than just China. Many countries gave us this deal.
This situation has been going on for decades but it is still temporary. This stream of goods arriving in west coast ports at cut down prices feels like it will continue forever, one day, when China feels like there is no advantage to her in giving us that discount, because our industries have been truly annihilated, she will turn off that tap and when that happens we will see a shocking amount of inflation if we don't have an industrial base to fall back on that can substitute those imports.
Basic income is a nice idea that we could certainly afford today, but it will be inflationary, and it will contribute to the ongoing death of our industrial base, and if that China tap ever gets turned off, and if the rest of the world gradually agrees that the dollar is not needed as a reserve currency any more, the results could really be disastrous.
So, maybe it could work, but first, we need to reject the Chinese "30% off everything" offer.
Our moral values reflect the momentum of a power equation. When the power shifts, it takes a while to shift the values. Your last sentence reflects the moral values of a society past all this struggle.
The struggle is that money is power, and a BI takes power away from those who have lots of money. It also takes some away from those who have some money. Both of these groups will fight it. Given the power of Turing complete automation. If we wait long enough both these groups will get smaller, but their power will increase, and thus their distance from those who need BI. If those in need for BI get desperate enough, there are means to get them in line now that there weren't at the starts of the major democracies. So that most likely gives us a totalitarian state.
The way to convince these groups is to give something in exchange for that power. The only thing you can get just from BI are nicer neighbors. In small communities, this is obvious. In large countries, this isn't all that obvious. The way forward, would be to somehow escalate the nice neighbors idea. Fortunately there seem to be many experiments in that area, for instance in the form of political correctness. So far, the results are impressive. It is dangerous balance. Wait too much and nasty things happen. Do it too early, before you have a sound automatized economy, and you risk a crisis, which have a way of turning nice neighbors into nasty ones.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Some how I felt even the worst scenario in the story (where robots confine the jobless to reservations) seem to be lot better than the current conditions in many poor countries.
On the other hand, this means that China does not get to transition to higher value added jobs thereby passing the manual low skill labor to the next country down on the economic transition pole, i.e. India and greater Africa.... on the third hand, China approaches an aging population problem, so...
So what happens to those economies?
We'll need to figure these things out, if this speculation is borne out.
That's a useful remark. I'd previously thought that Japan would come up with a new solution. Their housing bubble popped in 1989 and put Japan into recession. The US hit that problem in 2008. But Japan never came up with a good solution - they had a 20 year recession. What they did do is put money into infrastructure projects, and improve their safety net. So, while there's less forward progress, life for the average Japanese has not become worse.
From the article: "43 percent of Chinese workers already consider themselves to be overeducated for their current positions." Only about half of new Chinese college graduates find jobs that require a college education. As in the US, the education industry has saturated the market for educated people.
China's government has more options than the US does. The government has built over 100 new large cities, for example. Some of them were empty at first, but they're getting better at starting them up. Now they do the construction, finish that, stock and staff the retail stores, start up the transportation system and services, and then, with all the services available and underutilized, get people and businesses to move in. This seems inefficient but turns out to work better than trying to do it in profitable stages. It's a communist system, remember; it doesn't have to make money immediately.
China's government will probably not ignore the problem. The US has a sizable lobby that takes the position that the free market somehow makes the decisions about how things work, how much things cost, and who gets paid how much. China does not have that. It's a directed economy.
There are probably papers being published about what to do about this in China. Anyone know of any good ones?
This is not to say a return to a feudal order is inevitable but various flavors of feudalism served as the west's default social and political structure for thousands of years before democracy made its appearance.
I suspect reality will sink in if or, rather, when, an economic catastrophe precipitates a breakdown in the social and/or political order and the standard of living falls out from underneath the citizens of today's prosperous nations and mass unemployment, hunger, deprivation and violence become tangible and inescapable. If present trends continue we are fucked but, as you mentioned, change for the better (or worse ;p) can manifest itself quickly and unexpectedly.
As for China...it's home to a civilization that's remained more or less intact for over 5,000 years. Something tells me that despite western pundits disingenuously prophesying its imminent collapse China will be around for a while yet. But there like here change can come fast and hard when it's least expected.
The digital revolution (and it is a revolution) has already changed the world in ways that were unimaginable even 15-20 years ago. And this is only the beginning!
Fatalism not only shows immense disrespect to the achievements of every generation before us that fought to create a humane and just society, it is a gift to the forces of feudalism that attempt to corrupt our democratic processes and sequester our wealth.
Looking at the western world today it seems obvious that the rights and liberties our ancestors fought to achieve and uphold are not something we should be taking for granted. Indeed, in 2015 there is compelling evidence that liberal democracy and its star progeny - a stable and prosperous middle-class - are seriously wounded. You even list some of the factors contributing to the current state of affairs in other posts in this thread.
However if I came across as fatalistic that certainly wasn't my intention. Yes, democracy is wounded and under attack but that does not mean a return to feudalism is inevitable. I did say that a return to some sort of feudal order seems likely if current trends continue unopposed. Even pacified westerners have a breaking point. The growing movement to keep the free and open internet from being subjugated by governments and corporations in the name of a global surveillance society shows that people are not going to sit idly by and let the powers that be strip away their hard won rights and liberties. Ditto the ongoing campaign for a liveable wage and police accountability.
That said it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate the addictive nature of power and the effect it has on those who possess it. The "global elite" will not wake up one morning and decide to share the spoils of legislated inequality.
As political scientist Henry Farrell, referencing British academic Colin Crouch's 2009 book Post-Democracy, wrote: "At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. According to Crouch, it has been declining ever since. Places such as Italy had more ambiguous histories of rise and decline, while others still, including Spain, Portugal and Greece, began the ascent much later, having only emerged from dictatorship in the 1970s. Nevertheless, all of these countries have reached the downward slope of the arc. The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past." (http://aeon.co/magazine/society/henry-farrell-post-democracy...)
It remains to be seen whether democracy will persevere or if this brief (so far) respite from feudalism will remain an historical anomaly. The choices we make going forward will have a huge impact here. If we decide to keep our heads buried in the sand and continue telling ourselves that everything is just fine despite evidence to the contrary, that would be immensely disrespectful to every person that has risked life and well-being to create or protect the rights and liberties we too easily take for granted...even as they are being systematically dismantled all around us.
I hope not. Rise of communism, fascism and the two world wars isn't what any of us wants at this time.
This pattern of thought just keeps repeating itself whenever something disruptive comes about. The generations before us also couldn't see what new jobs would replace all of the displaced ones
> I really don't see how this will work for anyone with only a high school degree.
I think you just answered your own question below:
> But of course next generations managed to do other things unrelated to this line of work my family did for generations.
People in general are resilient when there's no choice. For example, before the advent of microcomputers and spreadsheets, most businesses had whole departments of people who spent all day just creating one or two spreadsheets. Before mechanical alarm and electronic clocks were widespread, they had people tap on windows to wake people up on time. Before the manufacturing process for computers became mechanized, most of the work was done by female workers 'stitching' wires for machine logic. People adapt. Humanity as a whole advances.
Well the good part is that most places have some form of social net that buys us time to figure it out. Maybe someone in HN or one of the major tech hubs can actively try to solve it?
Well... which is is? Too many workers or not enough workers?
They have ~500 million farmers, with nothing else to do than pretend to be farmers, held in a form of land slavery because there's nothing else for them to do and nowhere else for them to go (and they're not allowed to own the farming land). So China intentionally retards the progress in farming, keeping their productivity extraordinarily low. If they changed course on farming productivity, China would rapidly find itself with hundreds of millions of unemployed farmers (the US needs 3 million farmers / farm workers to feed 400 to 500 million people; China is using ~500 million farmers to feed 1 billion people). This issue likely terrifies the central government.
Translation:
We need to get 'em all on the dole but quick, because as innovation increases output per worker how can they possibly make the transition to higher paying jobs, what with all that dang savings to worry about. Wait...what?
Worse, this enormous savings surplus is largely being recycled into enormous infrastructure construction projects which will never show any ROI and apartments which nobody will ever live in.
All that construction does provide a lot of opportunity for graft, though.
Translation:
We know that you know that the Chinese are really doing most of the manufacturing jobs that not-so-mysteriously disappeared the United States over the last 30 years.
We also know that you know that we did this on purpose, because taking advantage of Chinese currency repression, wage repression and loose environment controls meant higher profits for us.
This is the part where we're going to be completely honest with you, because we have no vested interests here whatsoever:
Those jobs aren't ever coming home because androids that will replace all of those Chinese workers - you know, like you've seen in all those movies.
Any.
Day.
Now.
And, as soon as we're done with that, we're sure somebody will invent a robot to build those robots so we don't need to pay your wages either.
We will continue to deluge you with anecdotes of individual factories doing banal automation like they have done for the last two hundred years until you 'get the feeling' that this 'trend' is unstoppable.
Meanwhile, pay no attention to NAFTA, CAFTA, TTIP, TPP or the US goverment's unwillingness to designate China as a currency manipulator. Also, we need you to keep up the pretense that austerity is about saving taxpayer money, rather than repressing your wages.
What is less laid out to me is how we shall proceed in the Western nations, where automation is starting to consolidate at higher levels (services) -- if no nothing is done inequality seems bound to quickly rise for me. They'll have to figure out some mechanism to boost income for the lower wage workers through something like e.g. universal income, some incentive to hire, free or remunerated education, etc.
Factories that churn out millions of consumer items with just a few workers naturally creates demand for more highly refined, labor intensive artisanal products. Agricultural farming drives demand for labor intensive organic produce. This process of more wealth driving demand for higher quality goods and services, in turn driving demand for more labor is just as inevitable as automation.
If it weren't, automating the agricultural sector would have resulted in 95% unemployment in the early 20th century. It didn't.
Unless you artificially repress demand by stripping wealth from people (a process that requires corruption), demand for labor won't dry up.
But, the government and our financial sector is doing that. So demand has dried up.
I also generally don't believe artisanal products or organic produce can meaningfully reverse this trend. And if an artisanal product has no measurable distinction from a mass-manufactured one, and wealthy people may more for them, I'd say that's one mechanism for income boosting (albeit a very inefficient one I suppose).
Uh, yes. I think it would be stupid to deny this.
>Also, the spending function (as a fraction of income) is generally understood to decrease (as far as I know) -- the wealthy spend less of their income due to lower marginal expenses.
The wealthy save more. Again, not controversial in the slightest.
>That goes for the 'stripping wealth from the people' claim.
By stripping wealth I am talking about the financialization of the economy - for example, driving Detroit taxpayer's money into derivatives so that they slash pensions. Or lowering property taxes, driving that stream of revenue directly into the banks' pockets via a stream of mortgage interest payments.
Or thousands of other examples that have nothing to do with the wealthy's propensity to save, but has driven dumptrucks of wealth into the pockets of the 0.1%.
>I also generally don't believe artisanal products or organic produce can meaningfully reverse this trend.
Which trend? The gradual wealth stripping trend that has been accelerating over the last 30 years or this automation trend that been continuing for at least two centuries?
Yeah, I don't think the (real, albeit small) job creating power of craft beer is going to overwhelm the job destroying power of Wall Street either.
Excuse me?
Which "leftist" policies would this be? Ramming through TPP? TTIP? Obamacare, which provides profit guarantees via the forced purchase of insurance? Chained CPI? The slow chipping away of Medicare? The huge handouts to rich financiers and the pathetic slaps on the wrist for the crimes they committed?
The only person who I'd have any hope of making any sea changes is Bernie Sanders, not because he is a Democrat, but because he's the only person in the US congress who can potentially stamp out the Democrat corporate lapdog contingent that currently rules the party (e.g. Nancy Pelosi and Obama) and turn it into something reasonable again.
As TFA says, China needs to rebalance its economy so it has a domestic market to speak of. That means paying people money, so it'll be interesting to see what that means in a communist regime - guaranteed national wage? state-provided jobs?
As for America... welcome to the long, slow slide into Not Being Top Nation Any More. Ask any British historian what that looks like. It's not fun.