It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It's like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it's one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I'd rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without-regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.

False. McAfee will find a corresponding increase in middle class jobs in India and China and elsewhere for the same time period. The narrative that says automation has destroyed the middle class is demonstrably overstated to the point of being close to false. Employers arbitraged labor rates across borders, pure and simple.

This issue is vastly more complex than the scope of the Wired article which suffers from temporal distortion about what has occurred versus what will occur and when.

I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.

I've been thinking alot about this over the course of the last year. Say that enough things get automated that we have massive numbers of unemployed, how do we address that? Instead of dodging the question by exclaiming that it won't happen, we probably should address a much deeper and more fundamental question: Why does the value of a person come from their method of earning a living? We have to detach individual value from choice of career first.

Once we've done that, we really have a real question to answer, and it's deeply existential: Do we really want humankind's story to be about the majority of a population working at dead-end jobs just to buy food and water? Aren't we here for more? I for one don't buy the theory that we will self organize into makerspaces and become "creators". Creativity beyond survival is a luxury when life and death are on the line.

I don't have the answers, but I certainly have many questions. If I had to guess what would happen in the event that extreme A.I. automation puts us out of work, I'd suspect we will organize back into tribes to focus on subsistence. I've found that if you look at the history books, a centralized government isn't the best entity to take care of masses of unemployed people. In large enough countries, people would end up starving in the bread lines.

I think we need to really think about why we're here. Why are we so bent on using automation to complete the tasks of our shitty 9-5 lives instead of building a utopia? People are quick to say that we need to replace a money based economy, but that's too superficial a solution. Money is merely a shared myth used by us to trade our time and value for a symbol that we can use to prove our worth. Until we transfer where the "worth" of an individual comes from, we're going to be in this cycle.

Things change if machines do all the real work and a would-be killer doesn't need any special skills to get deadlier weapons. The unhinged man who rage-kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could, in the future, ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun. Outbreaks of lethal violence might be rarer, since people who are materially well-off are generally less likely to murder, but the rarer killings rooted in rage or ideology could become a lot deadlier.

In a few post-scarcity science fiction settings impulses to violence are stopped with direct human nerve implants linked to a machine panopticon that can halt dangerous actions. I don't consider that a plausible or even desirable future. In my favorite space opera setting, the Culture of Iain M. Banks, killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight running millions of times faster than biological intelligence. That sounds dreamy to me, but it involves a lot of made up Space Opera physics so I don't think it is plausible. Thinking about a future where AI is capable enough to manufacture anything people ask for, but not capable enough to act as benevolent gods, leads to some odd mixtures of prosperity and catastrophe.

Sounds bizarre but totally possible. If you haven't heard of Aleksandr Dugin then it's time to play catch-up, because even if you think he's batshit insane he's quite influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin

People in the developed world have come to take technological progress for granted because of the inexorable economic logic. But with automation, adherence to default axioms about basic concepts like property ownership inevitably leads to most of the capital being concentrated in very few hands, resulting in some sort of modern serfdom. Nationalist programs implicitly depend on autarky, and the goal of nationalism is not maximum collective utility but rather vitalism - continuous improvement through the struggle for survival. Conflict, even defeat, is preferable for nationalists to ennui.

About half of work done today could be automated with technology we already have. All it takes is wider deployment of the most automated technologies. The current phase is not because computers are smarter. It's that they're really cheap. If a computer can do it, it will be cheaper than a human.

Next employment area in the US about to get clobbered: fruit and vegetable picking.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I

Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be. "It's AI I tells you, luddites!"

Technology has done a great deal to make railroad engineers more valuable for instance, because one guy could suddenly move hundreds of tons of goods. Used to be it took an army to do that.

On the other hand we have plumbers, and the amount of work a plumber can do has changed little in a century. There is no plumber who can to the work of a hundred plumbers from 100 years ago.

This causes a market distortion is what is hurting so much of what America calls the middle class. If we deploy AI well, it may correct some of these market distortions. A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. Maybe. If one were to entertain the notion that there are certain jobs we haven't automated enough, which hurts their ability to compete with the value we get from low cost goods and services.

What if the end of humanity will be caused not by a nuclear war but by a peaceful AI that made us zoo animals?

Despite my initial fears, I'm noticing that, like any tool, it simply allows the user to do more with less. My product isn't going to replace conversion rate optimization consultants - it's just another tool they use to provide more value to their clients.

If the barrier to using machine learning were high, then I would be concerned that the benefits would only go to few. But since very powerful APIs will be increasingly cheap and democratized, the barriers will be quite low to reap the benefits of these technologies.

We often get caught up in the technical minutiae of machine learning, but you already don't need to be a deep learning expert to take advantage of, for example, cheap speech recognition APIs. This lowered barrier to entry will only accelerate.

But, then again, I'm an optimist. :-)

This book is very good for anybody wishing to understand basic economic theory and see many examples throughout history of this exact debate taking place over and over and over again: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ (see the chapter "The Curse of Machinery").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4

So yes, human revolution may come first.

Also it would allow people to be more capable to scale multiple tasks, for instance: instead of being a taxi driver you become the manager of a driver less taxi.

- Real estate (Landlord): I'd suggest you save money and start buying some property. Dump some sweat equity into certain markets and you may have something here. AI can never beat the ultimate constraint -- land.

- Environmental science: AI is great, but I doubt computer vision and robotics will become good enough to replace foresters and the like anytime soon. If you live in a wooded area, it may be worth it to start investigating it. Plus, it's healthy to walk around in nature anyway. Double whammy.

- Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.

I highly recommend reading both books, because more perspective is needed to think abouy this than just "what machines can and cant automate"

To me, capitalism is not about free markets, it's about debt markets. Maybe that's because the only capitalism I've ever known is ideologically restricted. Its champions are often hypocrites of their religion, where income from rent is deemed productive while work done by a mother in taking care of her children is consumptive and indebted.

Employment isn't even the end all be all, we would be much happier with 50% employment and greater levels of wealth.

Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. It's almost a way of taking an industry and redistributing the wealth.

But now we're talking about in the span of 5-10 years at most. We're starting to get to the point where the bottom end is bumping against how long people spend in college.

As it approaches 3-5 years, what happens? How quickly can people shift, retrain, and re-educate themselves for the new tools, concepts, or fields that are now open to them?

I don't think anyone has any answers.. but it's a line of reasoning we should explore.

My guess is that computer programming will be the new blue collar manufacturing job.

were they wrong tho?

Every step in industrialization has hurt a lot of people, and their number is increasing every time. This time it's going to be millions.

I don't know if that's enough for a critical mass of sorts for some huge revolt, it may be.

1. Automation in the past has been good at increasing worker productivity, and making new avenues of work possible. This is true going forward too. But each new generation of technology isn't "something we've seen before", it's a new thing with new consequences. Technological development isn't cyclical, so estimating the impact a new technology will have on the impact previous technologies have had is a poor model. This isn't to say the consequences will be bad, just that they're hard to anticipate. For the most part, the historical perspective is probably right though.

2. Automation in the past has been very effective in improving worker productivity, but developments in AI and robotics are looking at ways to supplant workers (i.e. electric cars don't improve our ability to drive, it removes our need for drivers). While in the broad sense this trend is good, and people will over time shift into new industries, it is going to be disruptive. Timelines will have a big impact on the shock. New industries won't spring up over night.

3. The timeline for this level of automation is much shorter than previous automation trends. The shift in agriculture happened over generations. The shift caused by driverless cars will likely happen in less than a decade. Add to that the efficiency of market pressures we have today - once one business is able to shift entirely to an autonomous fleet and save money over their competitors, all their competitors will have to follow suite to remain competitive. Entire industries could be displaced, and those workers will need to move somewhere.

4. This is more hypothetical and longer term, but it gets at what I think is the general fear around automation. Imagine we develop the ability to automate any unskilled job (whether through broad automation improvements or development of an actual general-purpose automaton). The primary factor in whether a business would choose to employ that automaton over a human is cost. The automaton is a once-off fixed cost, whereas a human is an ongoing cost. Once the cost of the automation is lower than paying a salary, humans will no longer be employed in that role.

5. Following from this, if it's the unskilled jobs that get automated, where do those workers go? At this stage, even if automation is creating new lines of work, why wouldn't that work also be automated? Basically, once we automate unskilled work, we never need unskilled workers again. In order to find work they'll need to skill up, which takes time and money. And if it takes a year to train a worker to a level that they're a net benefit, why not invest that money instead into automating the skilled work too?

But we are here because of greed. And along with all other problems that we face, like global warming, overpopulation, pollution, etc, I think it's going to get a lot worse before getting better.

Some form of socialism is inevitable though, that much is certain. Having guaranteed food, shelter and medical care is a must.

So it seems likely that the distaste for someone not working as hard as everyone else is deeply ingrained in our culture and possibly even our genes.

After such a horrendous event, maybe the US society would start asking themselves why there are so many societies with far less lunatics getting around killing. And after answering that question, US politics and society force themselves acting because everyone agrees "never again"?

I know the NSA and IoT get a lot of criticism here. But this seems like a good usecase for the always connected, phone home systems, with an all seeing eye. :)

"killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight"

As someone who used to work in a warehouse, ai which can detect anomalous orders seems incredibly plausible. Considering they have all been storing data for years, you have plenty of training data. Making something that notices when certain substances are shipped to someone who is not a normal customer seems trivial, if it doesnt exist. I mean the conservation of mass means that the explosive has to come from somewhere :)

Because that's what a working safety net does. It prevents employers from imposing unreasonable terms on employees when their only alternative is starvation, by making that not the thing that happens if they turn down the job.

> There are many ways of designing welfare systems to avoid the "welfare trap" of excessive effective marginal rates of income taxation, of which UBI is probably the least efficient.

I'm going to describe two systems.

In one there is a UBI of $12,000/year and a flat 30% tax rate. In another there is $12,000/year in cash social assistance with a 20% phase out up to $60,000, a 10% tax up to $60,000 and a 30% tax over $60,000.

These two systems are in fact the same, the only difference is that in the second one when the government takes 20% of each additional dollar you earn they call it "phase out" instead of "tax", which leads people to the mistaken impression that increasing that rate (which applies to lower income people) is a sensible thing to do, even though it is identical to raising taxes on lower income people.

The second system is not "more efficient", it is exactly the same. And anything that doesn't look like that is going to be less efficient.

You can give people non-cash, and then you need an inefficient bureaucracy dedicated to busting people who figure out some way to divert their food assistance money into paying their insurance premiums or similar, and at the same time you create an inefficient barter system where low income people subvert that bureaucracy by converting the things that can be bought with government money back into real cash.

You can try to phase out the UBI, but as above that is completely identical to raising taxes on those people, and imposing high marginal tax rates on lower/middle income people is the poverty trap.

Nothing is going to be more efficient than a UBI because a UBI does exactly the thing it's supposed to do and nothing else. There is no inefficiency to remove.

> The only argument which favours UBI over more modest alternate welfare reforms more specifically targeted at reducing benefit withdrawal rates at the margin is the frequently-made philosophical argument that it's fundamentally unreasonable if not immoral to make handouts contingent on willingness to work and pressure them to take jobs

Really it's that if you don't have high phase out rates then you can't make it contingent on working. If two otherwise unemployed people could pay each other self-canceling payments to do each other's laundry or whatever, now they're both "employed". It's trivial to create "employment" between any number of cooperating parties that way. That doesn't happen much now because the government takes most of the "income" from that "employment" in reduction of benefits -- it invokes the poverty trap. If you eliminate the poverty trap but require employment then everyone will magically be "employed" on paper because making money creates eligibility for government benefits rather than reducing them.

And that isn't even fraud -- they really are paying each other and really are doing the thing they're being paid to do. They can even each pay each other to do the thing they each wanted to do to begin with. You don't even need another person -- create a corporation, have it pay you for whatever it is you were doing anyway and then reinvest your "wages" in the company so they have money to pay you again tomorrow. All a work requirement does is create useless inefficiency, paperwork and bureaucracy.

> I'm simply pointing out that few, if any of the people making that argument are opposed to subjecting foreigners to similar indignities if they seek to enter the country

To get in under H1B you have to be a qualified specialist. The purpose is to let in people with in-demand skills. None of those jobs are the degrading McJobs that people only take when the alternative is starvation or homelessness, and the people only qualified to do a McJob aren't "required" to do that to immigrate, they aren't eligible to immigrate at all.

> and moreover the sustainability of a UBI is entirely dependent on people not lucky enough to be citizens needing to work for a living for the foreseeable future.

It obviously isn't, because the money that funds the UBI doesn't even come from them, it comes almost entirely from other citizens in the same way that any social assistance money does.