I'm running some astrophysics code from that resource now. This is awesome. B) Thanks for the heads up!
19 karma · joined February 3, 2015
Like GitHub but for publishing scientific data and code.
And what people seem to miss is that every task - even the task of raw creation or idea generation - can be considered trivial once you sufficiently understand the process behind it. Any job or skill can be broken down into easily digestible bits, and once that's possible the system can be automated and scaled.
Hell, company generation is the same way. Look at Y Combinator. They've created a system that generates companies in a very automated, predictable fashion. They have an algorithm for making companies successful. It isn't 100% successful (yet) but any self-aware system will improve itself over time as the process is better and better understood.
So while I would obviously prefer to be running Y Combinator than assembling brooms in a factory, I'm not sure you can consider one more valuable or "worthy" based off of whether one is more "free" or not, especially if your definition of freedom is something that can't be automated - aka reduced to an algorithm.
And to be clear, there's still plenty of opportunity. Something like 3 billion people are supposed to come online in the next decade, there will be tremendous opportunities to create solutions for problems we can't fathom. But my point is those solutions can be implemented by a fraction of the programmers that used to be needed.
And while there will lag between VR becoming popular and its design process becoming automated as well, it will still happen.
I also don't think this is necessarily bad, I'm just trying to point out that the conventional wisdom of "if we send people to STEM fields we'll keep the traditional economy intact even with automation" is not a long-term solution. The logical end-result of current tech trends is you imagine something and it appears in front of you almost instantaneously, no coding required.
As others have said, raw creativity will take precedence over technical skills, and most realistically we'll need a basic income and severely reduced workweeks.
Look at Django. If you include the hundreds of open-source modules with everything from messaging to billing to social media already coded, you can string together web apps in an hour that would take whole teams months and months from scratch.
Within the next decade or two I'd estimate that programming will hit its peak employment and start to decline as more and more work is automated.
I absolutely agree that we are in a great position to influence debate. If anything needs to be disrupted, it's the political system. I wish more folks with our skill sets were interested in tackling something like that.
And while I agree that economic systems can and should be changed as we shift towards a post-labor society, I'm worried about political obstacles to that. Even in the height of the worst recession in 70 years, we couldn't get Congress to approve food stamps for people out of work. How are those same politicians going to feel about cranking the work week back to 20 hours and tripling the minimum wage to make everything balance out? And if companies end up having to pay the same in labor costs to offset their automating, then what's the point in them automating? Will we actually see automation-enabling technology (3D printing, robotics, etc) hit their own peak and slide backwards in the face of higher fees/social unrest/political change/etc etc etc?
It's a trickier situation than you're giving credit.