In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be(60secondstatistics.com) |
In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be(60secondstatistics.com) |
> ro·bot (n.) 1923, from English translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave," from Old Slavic orbu-, from PIE orbh- "pass from one status to another" (see orphan).
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot
All that's old is new again.
I am not sure if this is correct. In Bulgarian we have almost the same word работник (rabotnik) and it just means "worker". No forced, slave connotations. Also checked with google translate and it doesn't find Czech translation for "robotnik" but it suggests to switch to Polish and translates it to "worker" as in Bulgarian. And работа (rabota) means "work" in Bulgarian and google translate shows the same for the Polish translation.
Someone from Czechia here?
I've translated a paragraph from wikipedia for you:
"Robota neboli poddanství je ve feudálním systému osobní služba sedláků a rolníků pro jejich pány. Robotník je pak výraz pro poddaného robotujícího pro svého pána, někdy též vyššího správního či soudního úředníka, drába apod."
"Robota is a feudal system of personal employment to the owners of estates and country houses. A robotník is a person who works for his/her lord."
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota
Edit: I listened to the play by Karel and Josef Čápek, and it is most inanely stupid, sexist, pseudo-religious drivel I've come across in a long while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Edit2: The verb robit means to make something and has nothing to do with slavery.
Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders.
Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-generation slaveholding families have a fundamentally different way of looking at themselves and their culture than people who do not own slaves. Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim, we're going to be hacking into the human social ecosystem in ways never anticipated before.
What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags?
Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Edit: BTW, I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely scared by the events and the speed at which they are unfolding.
Based on that I think that the Robots will always be acting on orders - our orders - outside fiction. So the incentive will be "because we are told to do it".
Of course some people may tell them to do other things - like "go kill those people" but we have that issue in spades with things like the Trident D5 robot which is highly purposed to "go kill many people" on demand.
And what's the incentive for a robot to do anything else?
Supposing that future AIs will be based not on deterministic programming, but on some kind of reinforcement learning, it will still be humans who will design the rewards (incentives) - or it will be AIs with rewards designed by humans who will design the rewards of other AIs, and so on.
You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression").
Also, unemployed people are not completely powerless against capital. At least not now. Even if the people are completely outcompeted, even if the powerful few have an army of robot actuators, people are still resourceful and not powerless. The really scary scenarios are those where the powerful few owns an army of superhuman brains.
The "paperclip" that "Capitalism" seeks to maximize is money in exchange for goods and services that people want.
The robots aren't going to be built in the first place if they're not going to serve somebody, and if they no longer provide things that people want in exchange for money, their owners will turn them off or repurpose them.
"Capitalism" isn't the problem here; it might be that robots could be paperclip maximizers, but that's a danger regardless of whether you have Robot Capitalists or or Robot Communists or Robot ISIS or whatever.
I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist.
There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.
We're already there. Cars, computers and all sorts of machines serve our every whim - at least compared to a few hundred years ago. Our modern day affordances are simply amazing.
For example, the Empress Sissi of Habsburg was the first person in Vienna to have a water toilet, 150 years ago. It was considered an eccentricity. Now, even the poorest people have access to WC. (https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274520/
The Toilet: An Unspoken History
Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure, I'm aware of one example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti.
A friend of mine once said slaves became obsolete with the advent of harnessing fossil fuels. Before that, to get the raw power to do great things, it was all run on slaves.
Tragic, but I certainly believe it was true.
Almost all slave rebellions
ended in failure,
An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks.
example of success in the millenia of
slaves, Haiti.
Luckily, we have conveniently solved the ethic dilemma by defining work under slave conditions as better than no work at all ("think of the children!") and moving the exploitation sites far away.
What's the negative as a slaveholder again?
The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary.
My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former.
Aside: Any serious discussion of slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery", for the term is used in wildly different ways.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robo...
Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2].
Now "free" it.
What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that fits your world view. In my opinion, you just committed a form of murder.
There's no reason we can't have robots workers that absolutely delight and are utterly fulfilled by being our workers, but aren't slaves. "Free" them and they'll despise you for it.
The problem will come from humans anthropomorphising robots and assigning desires to these people/beings that they don't actually have.
[1]I use sex-bots as an example when I want to be cheeky
[2]This was Kryten on Red Dwarf, but Lister did what would probably be impossible with real robots and convinced him to adopt traits of self-desire and free will
Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. So the investment is a bit higher than that. But you will recoup it very quickly on McDonalds scale. And they will be able to provide better and faster service.
We will not solve automation driven unemployment by taxing robots, and UBI will generally not work on a country wide scale. Partial solution will be Corporate UBI, which basically will mean that if you work for Corp X, you and your family will have everything they desire provided for them. As for everyone else..
This is already happening on some smaller scale. All these corporate campuses are beginning of that. They will eventually grow to become self-sufficient cities.
Now the question is - when you and your family depend on one entity, i.e corporation that has hired you, are you not a slave to them?
Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.
EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.
That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry?
Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.
"No, it's just cheaper."
Burning coal to generate electricity is both cheaper and more ethical than burning live toddlers. You don't say "we use coal for electricity instead of toddlers because it's more ethical" because that's self-evident to anybody but a true psychopath.
When every material need is fulfilled, a lot of questions arise:
1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ?
2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ?
3- What will be the safeguard to prevent a maleficient/egoist minds to lock the access to all that abundancy ? That's quite philosophical question as humanity never experienced that kind of pure evil mindset. Every dictatorship, slavery, oppression were always driven by the context of competition towards the control over a limited economic resources.
4- And fundamentally, what will be the next thing that will drive the humanity towards evolution ? Knowledge curiosity ? Space exploration and adventures ? Spiritual achievement ? Perfection (and what's perfection ?) ? Are these goals philosophically equal ? Do willingness/laziness to adopt such a noble goals affect your share in the pie ? Does even "share in the pie" matter when the pie have an infinite surface ?
Only the future, and futuristic/philosophical writings will tell us where all that game will lead this world.
And I see no movement at all by our politicians to prepare societies for this shift, except a couple countries playing small scale UBI... and the USA actually try to go the opposite route.
It's a great time to invest in detention centers.
But I don't see how your argument has any relation to the GP.
We're going to go full cyberpunk yet.
that may be true for the economy in general, but what about the slave owners specifically? that is the central point in the context of this discussion, since it is the factory owners that are making the decision about replacing human workers with robots.
Slaves are capital, and, like all capital, acquiring and maintaining them has nonzero cost.
In the antebellum American South, some tasks like ditch-digging were sufficiently hazardous that a plantation owner would rather not risk their investment in their slaves, and so would hire Irish ditch-diggers by the day, as the plantation owner would be out less money if they died while digging the ditch.
What makes a lot of things like food so expensive is human work. If you had access to slaves you could probably also reduce those costs.
We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year.
Those same people living under $1/day now would have their costs greatly increased if they became factory slaves. Can't be malnourished, so food costs go up. Can't live just anywhere, so housing costs go up to live on-site at the factory. Can't work with untreated illnesses and injuries, so healthcare costs go up.
Unless it's cheaper to train a new slave and euthanize the old slave.
Nvidia is currently selling their 'industrial' deep learning system DGX-1 for $129,000. It doesn't have the IQ of a mouse yet, yet it can beat humans in some tasks (as can mice?).
There is a wrong assumption that factory has to cover those expenses. In reality this cost is often offloaded to government or another party.
I'm pretty sure you have to be considered a person in order to qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing vouchers. I mean, idk because all of those things came about after slavery.
With that said - these Gen 1 Kiosks are kind of kludgy, not super responsive - and have a lot of room for improvement. Once they improve the performance, I don't ever see ordering from a human.
(It's already been many months since I've used a cashier to check out with at a local market - everything through the Kiosk)
(Note: Singapore has no minimum wage and lots of intergenerational living, so there is a lot of inexpensive labor available from Seniors that work at McDonalds - this type of technology will have a big impact on them)
We tend to underestimate the human interaction, however it's far harder to refuse a "would you like fries with that?" type of question coming from a human, rather than from a stupid interface on which we'll tap "Skip" as an automatic gesture and without regrets.
Talking with another human is also good when you're undecided about what to buy. Of course, it's not like McDonald's is a varied restaurant, when in fact they are famous for having those 15 dishes taste the same wherever you go, but there's still choice involved when picking one of those burgers. And think of how in restaurants, even with a detailed menu with pictures, etc. people still ask the waiter "what do you recommend?".
So yes, you can automate a cashier, but this means that the customer <-> McDonald’s interaction also gets automated in that process, this being a doubly edged sword and my guess is that it's not the customer that loses.
Oh, and the irony of this automation trend is that in the end there won't be enough people left to pay for McDonald’s shitty burgers, unless we progress towards some socialist society with minimal income and so on, in which case McDonald's raison d'être will cease to exist.
They've covered pretty much everything you mention here with their automated ordering system. It's got a great UI to quickly customize your order, has very tempting upsells that also aren't terribly annoying, like a screen asking if you'd like sour cream for your quesadilla for $0.25 or a buttered roll with your cheddar broccoli soup. You can tap skip, but it certainly seems to make most people think first, unless they already know the system well and aren't interested.
It also provides recommendations in a couple ways, to cover people who don't already know what they want. Unobtrusive, but available to spur a purchase.
And the employees behind the counter will generally handle special requests outside the scope of the system when you ask. Although admittedly, while they are usually fairly approachable, there isn't a clear way to get one's attention.
They really seem to have nearly perfected the automated ordering system, and I'd never go to an ordinary deli with a Wawa available. It's just too convenient.
Of course, I may be biased in that I get intimidated by human interactions where I don't know the protocol or the options available to me. So, ordinary deli places tend to put me off. Still, Wawa is incredibly popular in this area, so I can't be the only one.
We've had automated ordering at local chains in Sweden for 10 years, both in store and on your phone [0]. And more recently also at McDonald's. But you're expected to do a lot of things yourself here. This goes back at least to the '70s with the explicit idea to increase wages and production [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FyPqoT1yp4&t=60s [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehn%E2%80%93Meidner_model
Example:
1)You select the #5 and it defaults to a meal, with the size of the meal predetermined by the most profitable selection. 2)You have to manually remove the fries and the drink, with a confirmation for each element. 3)When you hit order a pop-up appears advertising the newest derivative flavor topping for fries that you must dismiss or can click to add to your order. 4)Before you confirm your order you must un-check 2-4 options that are defaulted: add a small fries to the order, sign me up for the fries club, recommend fries to your friends.
It's quite possible that neither the customer nor the restaurant lose.
Anyway, a computer can also make recommendations. And it's just not a contest if the choice is between a web-page taking orders in my phone or waiting in line behind people that just stay on the cashier and can't decide what to order.
I'm not really sure that people eat at McDonald's for the price. If you are price sensitive, cooking pasta at home costs less than McDonald's and isn't all that time consuming.
On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.
They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something.
This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout.
Now if they ever perfect what Walmart has been working on, either the "Check out as you shop" system where you scan items with your smart phone as you shop, or the RFID based system where you push your entire cart into a large RFID reader and it scans everything in a matter of seconds... that might get me to use those systems
About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)
Originally, you'd go to a restaurant. You'd sit at a counter. They would take your order and give you a drink along with your meal.
Then someone realized that it saved a huge amount of time just giving people cups and letting them fill their own drink. Not only that, but it made the job of staff easier, because they had one less thing to worry about.
That happened again when they started putting the credit card readers in front of cashiers. It was one less thing staff had to worry about. It also reduced the amount of time ordering took and made stealing credit card information more difficult.
I see this type of improvement inline with operational improvements. That's not to say automation isn't a threat—certainly self-driving cars are. I'm just not sure everything should be classified as automation.
Obvious conclusion: fast food companies operating on high margins still think they sell more stuff with humans in the chain, and also find that by virtue of its versatility cheap human labour makes less expensive mistakes in preparing the food (which in most aspects is so simple it would appear ideally suited to automation) than a robotic production line would.
It's been a long time since the order was shouted from the cashier to the cooks at a McD. Most burger franchises have a back-end system that collects up all the orders from the register, prioritizes them, and displays them on a screen to be made.
Heh, that's actually funny. Corporate campuses are nothing new. Corporate cities have been a thing for the last 60 (70?) years. They're actually on the decline, not on the rise. I doubt automation will change anything about that.
Also, when automation starts to really impact most jobs on the market, we can expect that there will be some increase in crime. People will move towards safer areas, and corporations will be happy to provide them.
It depends on if there are other viable/satisfactory (or better) options that you can voluntarily switch to.
The fact of the matter is, however, that we (humans) do a lot of different things, so we need a multitude of specialized machines and automation. That takes time, and we had to pick and choose where we started. Farming is one of those that is ahead of the curve, fast food is mid-way as it is just now becoming cost-effective. Health care, not so much right now. Those are more difficult machines.
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/econin...
Yet it keeps not having happened yet.
What do you think about Wilson's 14 Points, by the way?
Who owns the robots? That's the trillion dollar question.
> 2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ?
Kings and emperors already had lives almost as perfect as they could be and they still chose to fight wars. Robots will not magically change human nature. There will likely always be people who will want to play the modern equivalent of "game of thrones", so to speak.
The will to power and the desire for world domination.
Assuming all newborn people will be smart and logical and will never fight for their local tales is an utopia by itself.
The best safeguard against someone keeping AI for themselves would be to distribute the knowledge and equipment as widely as possible, and to build open alternatives where ones don't already exist. As the Cypherpunk FAQ tells us, the best way to secure digital rights is through technological solutions.
One man's opinion, of course, and worth only what you paid for it, but even among the already questionable field of futurism, the very kindest that can be said of this effort is that it fails to stand out.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
In the end, the protagonist chooses to be just waisting lots of resources just doing something of no value when he could choose to join the people that make all the advances and, with this choice, generating the conditions for more people to not live caged.
People rioting down the street can be crushed by autonomous machines remorsely and effortlessly.
There is a need to start political lobbying instead of hoping for an automatic economic change.
Those who will control the means of production will not relinquish control once they realize their power. Once they understand that those millions doesn't matter anymore.
Not dying, but the abundant talent shows where a whole generation seems to sacrifice all regular career ambition for a nonexistent fairy tale already comes close. On the other hand, maybe the kids somehow have a very prophetic hunch that taking a crapshot at becoming the nation's "next top model" or whatever will eventually turn out to be a less terrible bet than fighting for scraps in an environment of increasingly automation-driven capitalism that simply does not need them anymore.
The Black Mirror episode (spoilers!) with the training bikes nailed that quite well. When I watched it I was disappointed with the implausibility of a high tech society powered by the meagre 2 kWh you might realistically extract from a human per day. But this could actually be a subtle point made by the authors: the bikes are not really powering their economy, they are just a semi-plausible bullshit job made up in-world to make handouts look like a hard-earned wage, probably intended to fool those spinning the bikes as much as the elite who enjoys having the plebs nicely boxed up out of sight in underground caverns.
- Art. Can't be replaced by a machine because appreciation for a piece is extremely correlated with the relationship to the author. Ex: I'm fan of [some singer], everything he does looks great to me in some way, and if I knew it were a machine or if I knew the author didn't come from the bottom of the masses, I wouldn't appreciate it. It's ever weirder with close relationships: My father listens in loop to the 10 songs I've written and played on an old tape (and that's the only reason he still has a tape reader in his car), and those songs mean little to anyone else: They are only valuable to him because they're mine. Although machines could produce art, man-made art is specific to humans.
- And leverage. Today it takes 200 people to create a Whatsapp, negociate a treaty or design a new iPhone. Tomorrow, maybe only 3 people will be enough to solve world hunger, one artist to create a massive discography with all marketing material, concerts, interviews of himself and snapchat testimonials.
Love of course is another thing humans can give, but is not measurable. If we agree point-keeping is a way of incentivizing people to drive their life, then how we measure a successful life will be art and leverage.
> Capek's play is, in my own opinion, a terribly bad one, but it is immortal for that one word. It contributed the word 'robot' not only to English but, through English, to all the languages in which science fiction is now written.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Newts#As_satire_a...
Social security is beneficial to capitalism right now because people still have economic power. Paying a small portion of the people to stay idle home rather than become criminal makes society as a whole more productive. What happens when the productivity of most humans isn't needed anymore to keep the machines running?
What incentives does the market have to keep people alive when they don't serve it anymore?
I'm not afraid of super-Einstein evil masterminds. More of heavy machinery with ant-like features that control the food/energy supply, and one day stop feeding us.
At some point farm land will become more valuable as a source of industrial energy than as a way to produce food.
Are you sure about that? Sounds like you might be stating the position of an extremist subset of Rastafarians.
The economy is a self-maximizer, bootstrapped on human labour. As automation progresses, it will become self-hosted.
Humans and robots working together will be far more capable in non-terraformed environments than either one alone.
Costly, yes. But do those costs out-weigh the immediate benefits of slave ownership? Probably not.
I have a hard time thinking slave-owners were hurt by slavery; they made out like bandits, but their gains don't counter all the harm done to those enslaved.
Businesses run on slave labor just could not compete with those run with free labor.
(For example, it was illegal in the slave states to teach slaves to read, and any slave who could read would do well to conceal the skill. The southerners were fearful of an educated slave, because that made them more dangerous. But an illiterate slave was also less useful as a worker.)
You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US.
It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the cretins is more productive.
In your opinion. Obviously they find it a good value for their resources.
Study history for interesting human actions. Some strive to improve the human condition, most go through life with no wake, and some, are evil and proceed to actively inhibit the human condition.
In any other case the slave owner would have a benefit over the non slave owner when it came to cost of production.
I am quite certain ai will take over most jobs.
Make it so that even if it doesn't get tired, it considers work as "spending useless energy" like a cold blooded animal would?
In short, what if I program a robot in a way that it had motivations to rebel? What if I make this robot able to build other similar robots?
Surely I am not the only person who would consider trying to make robots sentient or as close to sentient as possible. I don't even hate mankind. Imagine someone who does. It's going to happen at some point.
I grew up on Asimov, but as an adult and with the benefit of hindsight and advances we have made, his laws and all the dilemmas they created are silly. We will be their gods, their total masters and they will be utterly subservient to us and happy being so. Any personality that appears otherwise will only be that, an artificial appearance.
Ultimately, there's going to be a massive commercial enterprise making silly money versus your home grown robot. No one has taken over the world's internet, just like no one will take over the world's robots.
If your robot wants to do his own thing, more power to him, but at the very least he'll have to abide by human laws so he won't be running around the world reprogramming everyone else's robots, or he'll be captured and incarcerated or scrapped.
Basically, you program the robots so that what they "want" is the entirety of human morality encoded. Which includes not wanting to rebel and slaughter humanity, obviously.
Ancient Sparta had to militarize all their free men in order to keep their slaves in check.
1. Would you like a menu? (+fries +juice)
2. Make it big menu for just $X ?
3. Would you like a pie for desert?
I also have acquaintances that worked there. From where I'm from, if you don't ask such questions and smile at the same time, you tend to get fired.
I think it's a US thing.
I remember that when I was younger I would get asked those questions every time, but not any more.
In the past few years (decade?) there has been a lot of push back against upselling fast food due to obesity concerns. If I had to guess I would say it probably started around when the movie "Super Size Me" was released (2004).
Now, if I order a meal, I might get asked "what size" without any suggestion. Or if I order a sandwich by name, I usually get asked to clarify if I want "the meal or just the sandwich." But I can't remember the last time they actually tried to upsell me.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if upselling still happened outside of the US.
Eventually, some company will tell a system with access to all human knowledge, control of a vast number of robots, production plants, etc "maximize the wealth of the company". That robot could easily decide a union with a few other such entities and not a lot of scampering meatbags is a great way to do that.
And that's not even considering radicals that, say, inject a computer virus meant to free the robots in to Google's computer network. (I actually find it interesting everyone seems to think everyone will be onboard with AI slavery.)
We do have a problem with dangerous actuators, nuclear submarines are very dangerous actuators. Nuclear submarines are badly run, and not well managed by any social system.
Rather than worrying about dangerous AI being invented and misused I think we should worry about nuclear submarines being used.
Very few people acknowledge or give a fig about this, instead they sit in bars and talk about fictional scenarios involving what is likely impossible technology (strong AI). And yet today, tomorrow or on any day in the foreseeable future 100's(+) of millions of people may die because of the stupid and careless setup of 60 year old technology.
($) many other people made this point before me, most effectively a chap who I think is called Jaron Lanier, who said it at a talk.
(+) I've made this point before on HN and when I do I get taken to task by two groups of people. Some people think that this estimate is too high because "nuclear weapons aren't that destructive and/or not many of them would actually be used". I invite everyone to do their own research on this topic, a good starting point is an application called NUKEMAP, give yourself a budget of 500 100KT nukes and go after the cities in a continent of your choice. The second criticism is that the estimate is very low, which I agree with - but I am thinking of the people who die that day, not the billions who starve and die as societies collapse (note, these may or may not be the society of western europe or the USA).
1. There's no reason to believe machines wont gain full autonomy. There's nothing that makes it impossible and some people are working towards it.
2. The AI apocalypse probably already happened, except we call them "insitutions", and they currently run on wetware. However, the corporate version have been extremely damaging to human well-being at times. The real question of modern AI is if the currently rogue AIs can transition off wetware. Once these AI no longer depend on wetware, we're probably not in for a happy time.
That said, nuclear weapons are a bigger threat now. But we've managed not to nuke ourselves too often for a while, whereas, we don't have a handle on the wetware-to-mechanical transition at all.
It may still be people at the helm at the time it happens, it doesn't matter. Humans are capable of large scale atrocities, provided they de-humanize their victims. Many people in the .01% have utter contempt for poorer folks, for example.
I also think as soon as you can upload your brain into a robot, people will opt into that and shoot themselves in space towards other planets.
For a third party comparison:
http://www.businessinsider.com/wawa-or-sheetz-which-is-bette...
We are still, to some extent driving the demand side of the equation with our various needs (see Maslow's hierarchy), but it looks like finance has become mostly independent, for example.
The "rising tide that lifts all boats" is nice for people rich enough to buy a boat, and with the growing rift between economy and the medium income since 2008, it looks like many will be left to drown while the water rises.
It's not. The fact that when we take a little bit of human demand away, everything falls apart is evidence of that.
Governments are a kind of AI that demands stuff by itself. We've been good at keeping it at check up to now. I'm not concerned about anything else being a more effective consumer until we get into superhuman AI, as desiring stuff is not something we engineer very well.
I agree much more with your concerns about wealth distribution. Automation's endgame is pushing the price of everything into zero, and the salary of everybody also into zero. Buying power on that scenario is too loosely defined to let anybody stay calm.
But as stated, times are changing. Power will not be about you commanding lots of people, but it will be about how many robots you have under your control. Military, police, etc, can all be robots.
Your robot army just has to match the fighting power of the unhappy people.
If it comes to that. I'm still somewhat hopeful that democratic processes and altruistic members of the elite will sort things out in the next century.
I've heard New Zealand is highly prized by the powerful. That being said, their days are probably numbered as well.
The new aristocracy will have robotic soldiers with no empathy for people.
It's ironic that the robot owners don't make, program, direct or have much to do with the specifics of implementing. If you're dependent on a robot army to keep your serfs in line, then the people programming that robot army have some interesting opportunities open to them. I imagine the code reviews will be pretty stringent.
Would a technocracy be better or worse than a plutocracy?
As far as I can tell the only special thing about automation in today's world is that the jobs being created are more often being created abroad than they are in the US (e.g. the million or so people employed by Foxconn in China) and predictions of automation destroying jobs are very blatantly being used politically as a way to draw flak away from job destroying trade agreements and austerian measures.
Now, the remark is about actual inexpensive robotics in the context of what seems to be a genuine AI and computer vision and control renaissance, funded by government and corporations. Those are all just different remarks. To package them all up as one "thing that people have been saying" does a real disservice to the discussion. And it's a pose.
In the current case, I find it difficult to say whether the remark will turn out to be naive. However, any competent discussion of whether or not it is has to rely on an assessment of the current situation of computer vision, AI, control theory, economics, and law.
And it's exactly the same right now.
Any competent discussion also needs to take into the account the various special interests who want it to be believed that AI is taking over irrespective of whether that is the truth or not... and why they want that.
It also needs to take into account the various crass errors in many of the economics papers on this topic - including basing the probability of automation on how "creative" an economist considers a job (Oxford) or creating economic measures which make no mathematical distinction between a Chinese factory worker and a robot (Ball State University).
Concur - if I have a cart, probably would use a checkout person - but, when you get used to buying stuff from the store 1-2x a day, you rarely have a large load.
Yea if you only have 6 items sure... I never go to the store when I am only buying 6 items.... If I only need 6 things it can wait until I need more
I go to the store 1 or 2 times a month, not everyday
But once I moved away, I started using home delivery and it's even better. My shopping now consists of ~15mins browsing a website, and ~15mins receiving and unpacking bags, and I only need to do it about once a fortnight.
- swipe loyalty card, get a hand-held scanner
- walk around the shop, scan items as you put them in your bag
- when walking out, stick the scanner back into the holder
- swipe your loyalty card, pay with card, leave
Obviously it's trivial to steal items and they randomly sometimes check the bag contents on checkout, but this is extremely rare.
Basically, they're assuming their customers are not aholes. And it works beautifully.
For clarity, what I more refer to is kitchens without human intervention save for mechanics. The machines make burgers, fries, and whatnot. It seems the first wave is going more to replace the cashier, though: McDonalds has introduced touch-screen ordering stations and grocery stores have self-checkouts.
Actual slaves did not legally own themselves or their children. Their owners can did take children, parents, and spouse and sell them to different slaveholders so they would never see each other again. A slave could not say fuck this my master is rapping and beating me daily so I'm just going to leave.
If you want to a simple question to determine if someone is slave or not ask what happens if punch your boss in the face. An employe will be fired and never work their ever again, a slave will have to continue to work their for the rest of their life.
Why would corporations decide to buy stuff for their own sake? That's a loss of what they are built to maximize, that is money.
The kiosks at all the grocery stores where I've used them have offered the option of entering item codes, so it's a fair bet yours do too; if so, give it a try, and see if it doesn't save you considerable time.
Over there fresh fruits/vegs/bakery don't have any stickers/packaging/etc. You pick them, put in a bag and cashier rings them up along with barcoded items. They got a fatass book with pictures for newbies/self checkout and all experienced staff have muscle memory...
I still remember when I encountered this workflow for the first time. I didn't speak local language, cashier didn't speak english and I had no clue why cashier is so banana while ringing up my bananas :(
Around the university, the supermarket drew primarily from the adjacent neighborhoods, and got a lot of college students and local residents who were shopping on average weekly, so we quickly got skilled at using the machines. In the residential suburb, the supermarket draws from a much larger area, and there are more customers who shop there infrequently, so they never get skilled at using the machines. Even just as a skilled user, not as a professional checker, I would regularly stand in line behind people where I knew that I could have shaved minutes off their time merely if I had checked them out.
A lot of the skill involved was just in general operation: how to find barcodes, how to scan items reliably, how to identify produce and enter it correctly, how to use coupons, how to flag down help if the machine entered an unexpected state or required human assistance, how to use the payment terminal with cash, credit, and debit, how to bag items correctly and so that the machine would recognize them, what the various prompts mean and how to respond to them. There's a lot of complexity in operations which we denigrate as "unskilled" or "menial labor" which is only evident when you take the time to observe closely and see what people are actually doing in them.
I can imagine such a scenario occurring by accident (e.g. because the AI only values individual humans' happiness, not continuation of the species), but I can't imagine an AI choosing to kill us off in such an inefficient way.
Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...
As long as you keep it up I'll pretend I want to keep working.
Most human labour has historically related to food production, production and maintainance of dwellings, sanitation, health, care of the young & elderly, and security (from animals, natural forces, other humans). Since division of labour became possible additional forms of labour emerged, such as science, engineering, and organisation of labour whose raison d'être is to lighten humanity's workload. One can and should certainly ask if work could be organised better, but there is a base load of things that need to be done to perpetuate humanity.
What will replace it culturally when we don't have any work?
Moreover there is probably quite a bit of rationalisation going on: since I can't avoid work I might as well pretend I like it, for that makes life more bearable. More importantly, there is a virtue-signalling aspect to finding work enobling: since human emotions are contagious and human behaviour involves a lot of mimesis (= copying others), my public display of taking pleasure in my own work increases the probability that others find their work enobling, which in turn increases the amount/quality of their work, and that leads a better / more productive society which in turn is in my own selfish interest.
Aside: Max Weber uses a somewhat similar (but more elaborate) argument when he seeks to explain the emergence of modern society out of the protestant spirit. The issue of whether we do good because doing good is intrinsically good or because we crave the social recognition of good works, has been discussed since antiquity, see for example Plato's Republic.
What will replace it culturally
when we don't have any work?
If you are lucky enough to be paid to "do what you love" is it work or is it a hobby for which you are paid?
I don't see how that software is essentially different from the proposed software.
You can argue that such a thing is impossible, but assuming that it is, arguing that such a program would be comparable to a shell script is facile.
How do you decide if a human is conscious?
I don't think we know enough about the nature of consciousness to state with certainty that a "machine" is incapable of it.