Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Romans did collect taxes for using a bridge 2.000 years ago.
There was the alternative of crossing the river yourself or hiring someone to do it(ferrymen).
I have been working in automation for a while. It is true that companies could fire more and more people and replace it with robots because they are less expensive.
It is also true that now people could compete with big guys much cheaper because robots will become dirt cheap. We are starting to see with 3d printers(that are robots themselves).
War has started, big guys are ok with people playing with toys in their basements, but want to make it illegal for small guys to compete with them.
This is what software and business patents are about. Only big guys, most of whom were in the past little guys , creating a legislation in order to make it impossible for newcomers to do with them what they did to others in the past.
Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment among farm hands. On the other hand, rich countries would not have the same standard of living they have today if half their labor forces were on farms.
Anyway, consumer's hunger increases with productivity increases. In 20 years, when even more robots than we already have are deployed, we will all want more complex, highly integrated stuff, requiring the same amount of employment to produce.
Anyone who doesn't believe me, think back to the days before interchangeable parts. We could live that way today and have lots of free time, but we apparently don't choose to. We have higher standards, want more diverse food, more complex entertainment, cleaner everything, fancier, more decorated houses, vehicles with more features.
Additional robots - on top of the ones of which we already have lots of - won't take away jobs, they will deliver us finer consumer items and health standards.
EDIT: I'm not some ranting nut job
http://www.freetradedoesntwork.com/
IAN FLETCHER: Libertarians simply don't know their history. Take out a $10 bill and have a look at the portrait on it. Alexander Hamilton, founding father and intellectual architect of American capitalism, was a protectionist, and protectionism was American policy from Independence until after WWII.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/free-trade-does...
CGP Grey had a decent video explaining some of the points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Compulsory sterilization for those unable to fulfill the needs of their children is a thing even today.
Well, that or we could destroy capitalism as we know it. But only dirty socialists want that to happen here on Hacker News.
In ancient times (only a few hundred years ago, actually), peasants were ruled by kings and nobles. They owned next to nothing. They couldn't choose to change jobs or careers, couldn't choose to move to another place. It wasn't just difficult to find opportunity and turn it into prosperity--it was not allowed.
Then a few people decided that human beings had innate, individual worth, and that no one person was better or more important than any other. They realized that people should be able to determine their own destiny. They realized that no one sitting in an ivory tower or behind a desk should be able to rubber-stamp someone else's life out of existence. So now we have constitutions and democracies and capitalism. It's not perfect--people are still greedy and power-hungry--but it's a million times better than it used to be.
Then in some parts of the world, some people got the idea that the nebulous idea of the greater good outweighed what was good for any one person--the "greater good" being determined by a few intellectuals or bureaucrats--and that individual rights were rightfully trumped by the rubber-stamp of a government wonk. As a result, tens of millions of people were stamped out of existence, and millions died fighting wars over it. Some of those governments failed, while others linger to this day.
And yet, there are still people today who want to take us back into the dark ages, where a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk can tell you where to work, where to live, whether your illness is worthy of healthcare, whether you're eligible to live or die, whether you're allowed to have a family, whether you're allowed to seek a better education...
What is wrong with you?!
Someone needs to put together a multi-volume set of horror stories from those who have lived under communist and socialist rule. But even that probably wouldn't convince these leftists that it's a bad idea, because they always think, "Yeah, but we can get it right This Time." As if human beings--the ones who comprise the government--have changed for the better. The arrogance and hubris is off-the-charts, always thinking that they know how to fix the systems that have allowed the evil impulses of humans to flourish and slaughter millions of innocent people.
Maybe we should buy a few islands, throw them together, and let them fight it out to make their utopias. After a few decades, they'd be ready for freedom again.
But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D
Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.
There will never be a scenario under any circumstances in which labor is free. It rests on a principle that guarantees that: energy will never be free, nor will all the other requirements such as materials, buildings, et al.
Human wages for a clerical role: ~$60,000 a year.
EC2 m4-10xl instance for a year: ~$13,000
The lack of a need for breaks, management, HR, bathrooms, kitchens, break rooms, lighting, HVAC, 60+ sq feet per employee... The costs for maintenance, energy and R&D are suddenly small peanuts; you can do a lot of R&D for the difference between the cost of a human and a machine.
Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market.
Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem.
Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.
If so, that's good news, because it means that your business is in a position to alleviate the economic nightmare scenario we are all worrying about.
FWIW I agree that the "communes of the future" will be businesses, but I disagree that the businesses of the present are the same as the proposed communes of the future. Current businesses are specialized and have customers different from their employees. "Commune" businesses would be relatively generalized and have employees as their primary customers. It's a substantially different structure and, I believe, one that provides considerably fewer opportunities to reliably deleverage large chunks of the human population.
The point isn't to eliminate trade, markets, capitalism, or even jobs. Just the opposite, I would imagine. The point is that a hypothetical "extremistan" future in which most people struggle to eek out a living presents a business opportunity which has historically failed to take off due to the limits of manufacturing technology. If someone can make this business opportunity work, it will act as a relief valve to alleviate extreme poverty.
Aren't those called "communities", i.e. towns and cities? More specifically, ones before the advent of railroads and cars, where trade was geographically limited to the immediate surroundings. Except in your "commune" version, everyone in the town works for the mayor, and they have to apply for membership before they can move in. Sounds like some form of distributed communism.
Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave.
No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates.
Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners.
We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.
At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this.
I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.
Your job security is MORE guaranteed even more than before.
All the online MIT lectures still have a high bar in terms of understanding what they talking about.
You cannot just do quantum mechanics by watching some online videos.
The online materials ( Internet, Forums ), increases the size of your market.
Notice the exponential rise of cost of college education. Its driven because more people are understanding the importance of studying in Uni. You will be surprised by how many people in the world still do not know basic arithmetic, and are still growing potatoes.
Its the american idea that winner takes all but that is very false.
Its about raising the average.
If we took a time machine and transported you 200 years in the past your worth to society would be of less importance since people would think you are a crazy person or a witch.
As no one would understand your work, notation, etc.
This is why as more and more of the 3 billion people that still operate outside of the mainstream economy enter it the value of the people doing average work in the mainstream economy increases.
Sorry, i get these random thoughts in my head sometimes! :P
[1] http://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictu...
What happens when programming becomes routine? I expect there will be a very scary moment when we all realize that someone with the right resources has discovered the right learning algorithm, before all of us plebes die.
At this point it's basically "We welcome our computer overlords." and not only programming will be at risk.
In other words, as some programming tasks becomes routine, many more non-routine tasks become available to us.
Assuming the sheer level of interconnectedness and computational ubiquity where every conceivable piece of matter used by humans out there has a bus or exports a remote API for most of these far-fetched AGI apocalypse scenarios to work, it's probably wiser to worry about crippling cyberwar way before AGI is even a consideration.
In programming languages, there has never been a push toward easy programming. Everyone thinks it's great to make people do useless work to become an expert before being able to achieve anything. Elegant, simple, obvious syntax like Python that is suitable for beginners makes programmers scowl: to the point that they would like to require users to learn a new non-obvious meaning for a semicolon, and put it at the end of each and every instruction they write. (Just one of many, many examples, other examples being library and package management, nature of error messages, interfaces, API's, etc etc etc. Everything is about making things harder, to the point that you would be mistaken for thinking that "require user to spend more than 15 seconds interacting with documentation before achieving what is obvious and easy using our solution" is a design requirement.)
I would say that a lot of programmers could program their job out of existence if they wanted to.
> They all float the idea of basic guaranteed incomes for everyone, or tax credits to supplement low-wage workers.
Yeah, just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach. It's so disappointing to see otherwise smart people ending up with these kind of conclusions.
What will be left for humans to do? Art? Sex work? We might be able to build robots to do that as well.
Robots may become more versatile, but the day they can be as versatile as humans is not going to be in your or my lifetime. I hope you realize that, unless you are a member of the "Church of Singularity" :)
Early retirement wasn't an option for those farmers - they had to find a way to support themselves or their families. As a result they took up desk jobs (many of which are, in the broader view of things unnecessary) in the city. When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? Into manual labor? That's pretty ripe for automation as well.
The service industry is not going to be replaced by robots anytime soon. Many jobs wont even be replaced because robots wont be economical enough to do so (hairdressers robots anyone?).
And the more you have robots out there, the more you will need maintenance people, industries to manufacture robots, and the whole lot of engineering that goes with it. Because, like it or not, we have not discovered a way to do super smart robots than can design themselves just yet.
And just like farmers got more education in order to do desk jobs, the ones at the lower end who get more educated to do the jobs that are needed, because you know, the job market is dynamic.
Funny, the use of iPads instead of servers at many fast food restaurants was one of the examples I was considering using. Hair dresser robots for many people aren't that far out.
> we have not discovered a way to do super smart robots than can design themselves just yet.
Key word there: yet. What do we do when that yet comes to pass?
> the job market is dynamic
Do you believe the job market will continue to provide jobs when it's not profitable to? When a company has to make the choice between a machine and a human, why would it ever go with the human, when the net cost of the machine is lower than that of the human? One machine can replace a minimum of three people (working 24 hours on a job your average worker does 8 hours on), and it won't take three people per machine to maintain them.
Of course, the human could always offer their services at a cost below that of the robot - but I don't believe that is sustainable for the human. As an example, for me to be more economical than a computer for my employeer, I would have to methodically classify over 2,500 tweets to earn a single dollar. And since my employer wants these classifications done in near real time, they'd have to employ most of the town I live in, just to do this one mostly-clerical task.
This argument is often made, but the fact is that the amount of jobs created by robot manufacturing and maintenance will always be smaller than the amount of jobs replaced by robots... after all, if this weren't the case, robots wouldn't be used in the first place because they wouldn't be profitable!
To support your point, if we suffer a similar disruption in employment where the largest occupations start an irreversible downward trend, what sector is going to take up this burden? If you look at the statistics for the current largest employers[2] you'll see a list of jobs where automation has already made significant inroads. To name the three largest:
* Retail salesperson
* Cashiers
* Food preparation and service workers
I doubt that the other large employers on the list could absorb these workers. We just don't have that other large employer to take up the slack as when manufacturing absorbed and made use of former farm labourers. We also don't have the frontier of a new world to provide a second start for families seeking a better future. We've managed to paint ourselves into a corner with our current system and we can either sit here and suffer or bite the bullet and start over.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots
[2] http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_chart...
https://medium.com/@somewhere/how-i-learned-to-relax-and-sto...
Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits or, better, as guaranteed income.
Otherwise funds will accumulate in the hands of a very few and not be put into any productive use - hell, just look at Apple's cash reserves, Apple alone could bail out Greece and even profit from it. Currently, the Apple money is just lying around and doing nothing productive at all.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1246081-apple-does-not-have-...
I don't really get the idea of a robot tax, why make special rules for one particular type of productivity? Should accountants that use better software also pay higher taxes than less efficient accountants that use simple calculators and paper?
The idea of a robot tax is not a rational one. It's based off of an emotional response to the fear of workers losing jobs and income. It will become a very loud, common argument over the next decade. It rests upon the incorrect notion that productivity gains through automation must inherently result in fewer jobs - when in fact, history has proven the exact opposite to be true (the industrial revolution being the overwhelming proof, but there were prior examples including the agriculture revolution). The most productive economies are always among the wealthiest for the median of people, and come in at the lower quarter of unemployment rankings.
Well, we have a lot of "robots" in the house. We can listen to music via Compact Disc robots or mp3 iPod robots instead of employing human musicians to play live music. For example, composer Haydn's job was the "on call" music director for the family estate.
We also run take our C++ or Java code and let our personal desktop robots of file systems submit them to compilers to parse and execute the source code. The acts of "cl helloworld.cpp" or "javac hellowold.java" puts many human punch card operators out of work.
The elevator robots with automatic safety doors and algorithmic braking systems replacing elevator attendants manually closing the gates and guiding the elevator to the right floor. Robot freon compressors replacing ice delivery men. Etc,
I don't think people realize the oppressive nature of all the robot taxes we'd pay unless we listed every "robot" we interact with that replaced human jobs.
These aren't mutually exclusive.
The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers; the rest will be left to fend for themselves - to find another meaningless job with a tiny wage, so they can live.
This, as something of a tangent, is why I support basic income.
People like William Shockley had the idea of paying people not to breed further. If our society really does hit a point where we simply don't have enough jo s, maybe his crazy idea is worth considering. Though hopefully without his original racist tinge.
Making a copy of the software for a robot can be considered as cheap as sending an e-mail. Hardware is hard, but that might change too in the near future.
I'd be interested in how the economics will work, since we already sometimes have silly pricing for software/music/eBooks. Piracy/DRM for robots?
In places like India or Argentina, the median salary for programmers and computer scientists is really low(1/20th of theUS). Its only a stronghold for so long.