Education is a red herring. Most people (and I'd include myself in this) are simply not mentally capable enough to be trained to outperform automation in any task automation can perform. More education will not rescue us.
The future I see is, like Asimov's "Solaria". In that world, what purpose does a laborer have? What strength could even rebels have? When the "top" of society controls machines that will produce, fix, and fight, then they are completely insulated and the majority of humanity is disposable.
Start viewing the future as post-human. This is a future where humans are no longer the agents driving economic forces -- any more than other primates are today. Humans conceivably could live alongside sustainably. Or they may go extinct. James Lovelock's most recent book "A Rough Ride to the Future" presents the option of non-biological life continuing on an earth with a climate that no longer supports human life. He does so in the most optimistic way I have heard described. Optimistic, because he previously considered climate change likely to kill all life on earth.
All of this assumes that we do not have a "Great Filter" looming ahead where machine intelligence is totally incompatible with any form of replicating life.
If the same work is being done without human intervention, why not just give people who're unemployed the products of that labour?
Well, they shouldn't. I see automation as a way to end slavery, on which our society is based. People in the first world don't see this because their chains and whips are made of gold, but if you think about it, it's slavery nonetheless. We are all slaves to the system that requires us to work long hours on increasingly pointless things in order not to starve. I strongly hope we'll liberate ourselves from this situation with automation and technological progress (though I don't feel confident we will).
In 200 years, people will only have hobby because that will be all they have to do and most of their needs have been automated.
The problem is the transition to there and that's the annoying thing in all those discussions, nobody ever talk about it.
For example, Industrial Revolution and the 2 World Wars were the fantastic drivers that pushed EU and US in an unprecedented golden age. I'm sure the majority of people would have been happy to get the golden a few years later rather than going through the mass loss of lives or the misery of those years.
> This is not a technological consequence; rather, it’s a political choice.
Not quite sure how it is reassuring. Except China, there seem to be no move to even acknowledge that we may have something to do other than "the invisible hand of the market will solve everything"
1) If you don't lose your job to a robot, you'll lose it to an emulated human. An em requires only a tiny chip and a little electricity, and is every bit as capable of doing empathy and creativity as you are.
2) If you don't lose your job to an em, you'll lose it (and your life) to unfriendly self-improving AI that has a use for your atoms. If you think there's a law of nature against such awful things happening, think again.
3) Even if you learn about that bleak future with 99% certainty, you'll keep living life as usual and hoping for the 1%, instead of trying to change things.
4) And even if everyone on Earth sees that the bleak future is coming, we won't coordinate with each other to stop it! Look at poor people today, they are already suffering but don't coordinate to improve their lot.
Neil Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' is a masterpiece of scene and action. His 'dystopian' novel set a bar to which we judge ourselves to this day. I use 'dystopian' in quotes as Stephenson himself describes his novel as an optimistic view of the future when he wrote it. Why? Because humanity survives the Cold War.
In 1980, that was not necessarily true. I would like to remind any readers that the facts have not changed in this manner. War has always been with us, and the robots, though shiny, will be tools of war just as every keyboard, scythe, and lump of granite has been. If there is one thing we can count on, it is war.
You may argue that the robot will eliminate the scarcity of resources that causes conflict. I hope so. However, history shows us again and again that war is a part of man. If you eliminate it, you rid us all of a part of humanity. I hope dearly for this.
But the consequences of that are not simple, there will be blowback to having the robot take our darker sides away. It is a bargain I hope we strike with the robot. But I have no doubt that my grandchildren will not be the same humans we are if that deal is signed.
We are also limited by the capacity and architecture of our brains. A.I can rely on Moore's law, or quantum computers to benefit steadily from better hardware. Therefore I conclude that the most successful agents in our economy will be of A.I. The enterprises behind them might still have a human executer, smiling all charmingly, but A.I. will be in control.
You seem to think that we would fail to coordinate to do so until it is too late. That is possible, but I don't think that is certain yet.
I'm not personally optimistic: this country has a deeply held Puritanical work ethic, and even if we get past that we have a real nasty habit of not liking to give any government benefits to "those people".
But if we can get past that...
As advances in agricultural automation removed laborer jobs in the 1900s, workers switched to different, more-specialized industries.
In short, we will probably see jobs disappearing because of automation in the 2000s, but it won't necessarily be bad. Most likely we will also be seeing many new types of jobs appearing as well - some which may have never been conceived yet.
The problem is that there is no economic growth to speak of outside a few sectors.
IMHO the concern over automation and tech in general is shifting the blame from where it actually belongs: conservative fiscal policy.
If we accept that one day computers/robots will be able to outperform a plurality of the population, three questions arise. When will that be? Will enough of us see it coming? How should we respond?
I'd be fascinated to see a study of how we might protect ourselves during such an event.
Sadly I imagine nobody wants to be the guy that spent billions on EM shielding 50,000 years before anyone needed it.
2. Wail and fret for 50 years.
3. Take it for granted for next ∞ years.
my favourite commentary on the singularity (comic) http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/
The future according to HN can be summed up as 30 years or so of Basic Income, after which we will be turned into paperclips by an unfriendly AI.
Maybe it's inevitable, but then there's not much point worrying about it. It's just another kind of death.
This has not been the trend. Interconnectivity and ease of travel were supposed to relax the amount of work we do, but instead people put in more hours than ever. The efficiency gains have created winners and losers, but both are working at least as hard as before.
"In the mid-2000s, the Netherlands was the first country in the industrialized world where the overall average working week dropped to less than 30 hours."
Nice tables: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/ewco/studies/tn0803046s/nl080...
According to some economists, this is the primary reason why work hours has not declined as expected.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/07/the...
How will their living expenses be paid, then?
However, your question is meaningless _if_ everything is produced by robots. Nobody will be able to charge for anything, because the justification for the current way wealth is distributed will be gone: Nobody works, or will have worked or can pretend to have worked: Charging for products will be difficult to justify. Therefore, things will be free and there is no need to "earn a living".
If the powers to be would have it otherwise, there _will_ be a revolution. Or people will move to a country where the robot dividend is fairly distributed.
I enjoy a good distopian novel as the next man, but it would take a really unlikely set of circumstances so that technology has improved enough to enslave the population durably, yet not enough so that this enslaved population still has some use and, added to that, a ruling class or at least a culture motivated enough to maintain that kind of status quo.
> Not quite sure how it is reassuring.
I don't find it reassuring and I also think it's wrong. Politicians won't even see it coming. Political decisions tend to be consequences of technology, not the other way around.
I don't buy it at all. Where is your evidence that convincing emulation of human emotion and empathy will exist any time in the next 100 years. Based on current technology and the pace of technological advancement that proposition just seems ridiculous.
The last century we went from no computers at all, to people carrying around supercomputers in their pocket. We went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon in 66 years. AI in a century is by no means impossible or unlikely.
"At the same time, the parts we do understand, such as that human intelligence is almost certainly running on top of neurons firing, suggest very strongly that human intelligence is not the limit of the possible. Neurons fire at, say, 200 hertz top speed; transmit signals at 150 meters/second top speed; and even in the realm of heat dissipation (where neurons still have transistors beat cold) a synaptic firing still dissipates around a million times as much heat as the thermodynamic limit for a one-bit irreversible operation at 300 Kelvin. So without shrinking the brain, cooling the brain, or invoking things like reversible computing, it ought to be physically possible to build a mind that works at least a million times faster than a human one, at which rate a subjective year would pass for every 31 sidereal seconds, and all the time from Ancient Greece up until now would pass in less than a day. This is talking about hardware because the hardware of the brain is a lot easier to understand, but software is probably a lot more important; and in the area of software, we have no reason to believe that evolution came up with the optimal design for a general intelligence, starting from incremental modification of chimpanzees, on its first try."
I guess my argument would be - if a relatively small amount of mush in a head can do all that clever stuff - why can't something else?
[NB I think we are a long way (> 100 years) from actually even getting close to mind uploads]
I disagree. Short of halting the progress of robotics and software, there seems to be no way to avoid the continued automation of things, and economy, politicians and social habits will have to follow and adapt, like they always did. More and more I'm buying into the view that it's the technological progress that drives cultural change, not the other way around.
I recently found an interesting article touching this topic:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-fle...
I'm not sure with what, we're both saying the same thing. ;-)
I haven't read too much of it yet but your link looks very interesting, thanks!
At least, not until you realize that forcing people to do what you believe is right is fundamentally immoral. No matter how noble your ideals, and how rainbow-colored your utopian future is "if we can get past that".
It's sad that you can both simultaneously hold noble ideals of taking care of the needy, while thinking that the only way to do it is by violently and immorally forcing others to help you do it, whether they want to or not.
That's the funny thing about "moral foundations" - what's fundamentally immoral in yours may be a cornerstone of mine, what I find barbaric is a cost of doing business in someone else's...
> What do you think "government benefits" are?
Broadly speaking, the transfer of some good from the government to its citizens. Today we talk about it in terms of essentials (food, shelter, etc.) But in a world where most (if not all) tasks are handled by automatons, perhaps that's too reductive.
> Who created them? Are they extracted from a mine? Built by a machine? Contributed by working men?
Today you & I; perhaps tomorrow, not so much!
Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
Personally, I'm hoping that in the long term we end up with something like a technologically plausible version of something like the Culture (i.e. the Culture's combination of AI and biologicals existing in harmony), or at least the ending of Elysium.
Maybe the "cost" comes from the loss of the mineral in the ground, but if we're going full on techno-utopia the robots would reclaim the mineral through recycling, so does it become negligible?
Marx touched on the paradoxical nature of automation and advanced technology: "Though machinery be the most potent means for increasing the productivity of labour, that is to say for reducing the amount of labour time necessary for the production of a commodity, in the hands of capital it becomes the most powerful means... for lengthening the working day far beyond the bounds imposed by nature"
And damn, he hits the nail on the head there.
But then I may simply not have gone far enough down the rabbithole in my conception of 'techno-utopia.' If the automation is truly self-sustaining and self-contained, in essence, a complete AI economy in and of itself, then perhaps the "cost" comes in the burden of including humans at all?
In my theoretical future, capitalism will still exist, and we'll still trade and buy things from one another, we just won't need to do so for our basic needs, only for our entertainment desires...
http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...
Table 1
U.S. Equine Population During
Mechanization of Agriculture and Transportation
Year Number of Horses and Mules
1900 21,531,635
1905 22,077,000
1910 24,042,882
1915 26,493,000
1920 25,199,552
1925 22,081,520
1930 18,885,856
1935 16,676,000
1940 13,931,531
1945 11,629,000
1950 7,604,000
1955 4,309,000
1960 3,089,000If we ever end up really asking ourselves this question it means that capitalism has been running for too long; that it grew into an entity that serves its own goals rather than ours. By that time it might be too hard to slay that particular beast though.
edit : I think it was Malawi under Banda.
IMO you're looking at the system before it reaches an endgame.
Investing in automation is a rational decision to reduce costs & increase profits, so companies are going to make that choice. As automations continue to improve more and more jobs will be eliminated in order to continue increasing profits.
But as jobs are eliminated the people that used to do the jobs are still there - still wanting to earn money to feed and clothe their families. And as they don't have jobs, they don't have money, so corporate profits begin to suffer.
The system will eventually reach a tipping point. I just hope we end on the side of "we run the machines and distribute their output for the good of the people" rather than "we run the machines, keep their output, and give the people worthless scrip".
>If the automation is truly self-sustaining and self-contained, in essence, a complete AI economy in and of itself, then perhaps the "cost" comes in the burden of including humans at all?
Hopefully our robot overlords would see it as an opportunity, rather than a cost.
Thinking human brains are the pinnacle of intelligence is ridiculous. We are just the very first intelligent thing to evolve. On top of which, biology is severely constrained in many ways and stuck in local optimas.
I think (and hope) this is where we'd end up.
I don't necessary have a really bleak view of the future, but I wonder what would a revolution would looked like with a robotized police. You could hope that at one point someone on the loyalist side would press the robot kill switch.
But taking today's world as an example, I wonder what would Assad or Gaddafi would have done with an army of robots.
His statement is that a question that sets "automation means less jobs which is bad!" against "automation means more and better jobs which is good!" is improper. Automation will change the job landscape - that's an objective statement, and we've been living it so far.
Whether we make it a positive change and end up with Russell's "idle utopia" or a negative change and end up in some horrific dystopia is entirely up to our response.
We're not fighting with rich men in possession of robots; we're facing the entire machinery of capitalism, and this is still probably only a mask of an underlying process that optimizes for growth and competition. So far our goals and the goals of this process are more-less correlated, but in the future those goals may diverge and the process will continue unhindered in a fully automated world while we die a slow, painful death.
I've been thinking about it for some time. I'm afraid that, of all the things we fear, we might end up getting fucked by game theory. Anyway, I recently found a nice writeup on the topic by someone much smarter than me, which elaborates on this problem [0]. (warning: it's long, but worth reading)
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Where there exists scarcity and a differential in value, trade will occur. Now, of course, that says nothing about the people that have nothing of value to trade with. But I'd argue that everyone has something to trade, it just might be of very low relative value. Even in such a scenario they'll trade with their peers.
No matter what scenario of this dystopian future I play out in my head, I always find equilibrium. The key is not to attempt to fix it, but to have base rules that apply to all and will mean basic safety for all. You can't guarantee a peachy life for everyone. Most people just want to play meddling Deity with government money and violence, to suit their own personal ideals and prejudices. That is why I'm an anarcho-capitalist; because it makes everyone absolutely equal and everyone absolutely free to make their own way in life without intervention.
You can have something of value, but still be unable to find a trading partner, if that thing can be had for a cheaper price somewhere else. For example, if machines make labor cost less than a living wage, then you can't survive by selling labor.
But to actually rebut your comment:
"if machines make labor cost less than a living wage, then you can't survive by selling labor." If machines reduce labor cost, then the cost of goods reduces as well, making goods more affordable for poorer individuals. And consequently, reducing the amount of money required to be able to survive. You have to understand that none of these things function in isolation, but as a balanced equilibrium.
What happens when the value of your work falls below the cost of subsistence? In the case of the horses, once feeding them was no longer worthwhile, the answer was simple: They didn't.
Hopefully we won't do anything similar for humans. It would be the most horrendous eugenics program of all time.
Labor isn't the only thing needed for survival. You also need things like living space, air and water. If these resources can be more profitably used by someone else, they will outbid you.
"If these resources can be more profitably used by someone else, they will outbid you." You use the word profit as a motive for "entities" consuming all resources. But you fail to elaborate on where this profit comes from? Well, other entities, and there you go, trade. But that's not really what you're getting at. You want to draw a false dichotomy between the two extremes of "powerful entities" and "weak entities".
Either way, all you need is the non-aggression principle and respect for property rights. And these "powerful entities" will never be able to coerce their way into the full market dominance that you describe. It's a self-correcting system, and it can only perpetuate itself if you don't respect property rights and the non-aggression principle.
> Either way, all you need is the non-aggression principle and respect for property rights. And these "powerful entities" will never be able to coerce their way into the full market dominance that you describe.
Non-aggression principles and respect for property are not laws of physics, they need to be actively enforced to have any meaning. For example, the reason patent trolling is profitable is that the victims stand to loose too much in a fight, even if they would ultimately win. We're having a hard time enforcing anything against rich people today, it's hard to see how this will change when the rich get orders of magnitude richer while the poor won't be able to provide any value to exchange for food.
The transition process will be hard and painful, but I do hope we'll emerge victorious on the other side, and that cousin_it's vision will be only temporary.