The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable and if the NYT can't see it, I doubt a lot of people outside of tech do. It's my biggest worry right now.
I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.
The repercussions of AI should be worrying every leader in the world right now.
Immigrants? H1-bs? Illegals? Robots? Please, let's have a real talk.
Capitalism will destroy capitalism as we know it.
Edit:
Because my post is high up in this topic, I hope to get some attention of people that are more invested than me on figuring out this problem.
One of the least communist solutions I've thought of is a quasi-capitalistic economic system. Each publicly traded company should have profit-sharing-only stocks and profit-sharing/management-voting stocks. Stop all wars and futile spending and buy profit-sharing stocks with our tax dollars. That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.
Let's also ensure the system isn't gamed by stashing profits offshore or having overpaid upper management to decrease profit numbers. Then we keep reinvesting a percentage of profits and future taxes into other publicly traded companies. Use the rest of the profits as the fund for universal basic income.
I think this whole thing is going to be a shit-show even if we can control the AI. If we can't, may it have mercy on us.
There is no one to entrust UBI to. It will rapidly stop being universal or basic as people pervert it with exceptions. Controlling everyone's income will attract the greatest power mongers the world has ever seen.
Perhaps the unspoken honest answer is that people without other assets are going to live in 'poverty' (compared to the rich); their brains will operate at better watts-per-compute than the computers for a long time and still be worth something. They will earn a living on this. The people that do have assets (e.g. own the robots), are going to be extravagantly wealthy. It will be a feudalism but without violence, seniorage, or other expectation that the poor work for the good to the rich. Just that there's going to be really poor and really rich.
I and my kids will almost certainly be left behind in this. I am not an asset owner. But I will not attack my neighbor for their wealth. I will not turn over my ability to live to some bureaucrat who steals it from the rich and will eventually make me dance and beg for it. Let the rich asset owners go to the stars even if I will not be joining them. Better to have some of us get ahead than hold all back trying to leave no one behind.
>The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable
Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office.
I certainly see AI changing things, but these hysterical futurist articles tend to lean more pie-in-the-sky techies than managerial types. Managers and executives know that employment, today, is a mostly a fiction. A lot of what drives employment could be automated right now, but isn't for political reasons. Not the least of which is internal company politics on having as many direct reports under you as the threat of becoming a 'small' department means becoming eliminated by outsourcing or in-sourced/absorbed by another department or simply a loss of prestige. The idea that employment numbers are purely meritoriousness is fairly questionable. Its bureaucratic and political primarily.
The larger issue is, how much will this change things from the norm from a reasonable perspective. We can't automate most things and that probably means a certain class of jobs will be threatened but most will be fine. So even if that doubles or triples unemployment, that means we have unemployment rates closer to European economies or perhaps higher, but still doable without a radical restructuring of our economy. The futurist dream of 100% unemployment in ten years and everyone on UBI simply isn't happening.
My worry is that we'd probably need a very liberal government to handle this as it will put it quite the load on welfare, but currently the US has a radical conservative administration as well as a conservative congress, which means the political fight to raise taxes and expand welfare for displaced workers is going to be tough or impossible. The problem is that angry voters put in isolationists and those who they perceive have and can build wealth, but those types of people are often very anti-social services and very anti-welfare. So the voters took a big gamble. They think the Trump admin will 'fix' jobs. Jobs that are destined to go away. But if he fails, and he probably will, then they will lack the social safety net to fall back on. Those in vulnerable industries, often in rural and less urbanized communities, simply voted the wrong way and most likely will be punished economically for it.
The NYT article is quite lucid about it. They do argue that this gigantic wall should not be avoided, but dealt with through legislation and better sharing of wealth.
That's a pretty logical answer, and they support it with good examples of past policies to ease the social pain of economic changes.
I agree with most of your comments. However, I wouldn't think of this as a capitalist-communist spectrum. In fact, I wouldn't think of either of them as long term solutions in this future.
What both systems have in common is that they are built around scarcity. For capitalism, it is a method of price discovery. For communism, it is rationing by the state ("From each according to his ability...").
When there is no more scarcity, then there is no more need for either price discovery or for rationing.* Therefore, will need to create a new economic model that is not built on scarcity.
*Footnote - there are some things that will always be scare, such as location. Having a view of a calm beach, or of boundless nature, or a city skyline will always have a scarcity issue. It will be interesting to see how that scarcity is dealt with in this future.
I think the fallacy here is similar to Malthusianism in the 19th century. In that case the problem was the assumption that agricultural yields wouldn't improve over time, and your argument is assuming that improving technology won't create more jobs than it obsoletes. We're not going to wind up with companies that consist of just a CEO and a dozen factories.
(NOTE: than I'm only talking about automation, not the creation of hard AI, which you allude to. That's a whole other kettle of fish)
I think in part your solution is on the right track but not the complete answer (hell, I don't think I have a complete answer myself). In my opinion, the additional work would need to be done to focus on further decentralization of governments and businesses since both have been on a trend toward further centralized bureaucracies that rarely respond to their respect stakeholders (citizens and consumers). In my view that would mean businesses should be held in common by the workers as a term of employment. Think of it was a credit union but you just happen to work there. Entrepreneurs and managers will always be in the mix of this because honestly individuals sometimes get good ideas but they shouldn't be off the hook with incredibly vast sums of wealth as to allow them to create their own fiefdoms. After all, they too are just one person in an ocean of people.
What's funny about this idea is that it's not mine. I remember a long time ago that I use to go on a web forum on the New Speak Dictionary site. The site owner styled himself a Libertarian Syndicalist and he espoused very similar views here. I think it's inevitable that this might become the normal state of things if people become aware of this possible alternative to centralized state vs centralized business.
I don't think Universal income is necessary but a more complete redistribution system would certainly be needed. At the very least one in which e.g healthcare isn't tied to employment, for example.
The people the article is discussing are already receiving a free money and do not need to work. How will writing "basic income" rather than "disability" or "welfare" on top of the check change anything?
So my Girlfriend (Monica) is currently doing her Master's at UPENN in social-policy & data science. Her major area of research and focus is on the impact of technological unemployment (which is an umbrella term which represents job loss due to robots and AI)
(we're currently looking for an internship by the way, so if you're in this area, please feel free to reach out!)
Some of the estimates of job-losses approach >50% which, for context, the great depression was 15% to 25%
So we're looking at the rough equivalent of 2 to 3 great depressions in terms of unemployment, but productivity should be equal or higher.
A lot of the solutions being looked at center around basic income, but there are some really interesting questions around BI like "how do we help people deal with the emotional impact of 'freeloading'?" or "how do we deal with 'life without purpose'?"
She's thrown out some interesting solutions (I think). There is expected to be a lot of focus on subsidized training.
One sort-of "out there" idea which I don't think I've heard anywhere was 'framing' the BI payments as a 'royalty' on the data they provide merely by existing. Since marketing, science and government with the help of big-data tracks everyone so deeply then turns around and re-sells that data, the people being reported on 'deserve a royalty' on the data they provide. (I'm paraphrasing and she is way smarter than me, so the way she put it was a lot more convincing).
If you're looking for more information on the coming tsunami of technological unemployment there were some incredibly interesting whitepapers published by the white-house on the policy impact of this stuff.
Monica's papers really echoed those whitehouse ones, though she hasn't published any of them yet, but the professors seem interested in publishing with her on a few things.
Anyways, this stuff really is a pretty big deal. You'll see Elon Musk talking about the 50% unemployment figure and the need for BI.
Who knows where today's whitehouse is going to go on this stuff, but we're really going to have to be prepared. Ontario Canada is kicking off a project in this now and a few other countries around the world have pilots brewing.
The point the article is making is that the changes in income distribution so far is not due to robots, it is due to policy decisions that can be changed.
The impact of automation is a profound topic. But it doesn't preclude us from making the policy change that would have altered income distribution in the last ten years, and the next ten years as well.
end game will be massive population reduction. Universal income doesn't change the fact that our resources are finite and humans reproduce exponentially. UNs top agenda is population control, read between the lines.
A primary focus should be on overthrowing the military industrial complex, which seems to be the source of a lot of waste - both of human focus and capital. Anyone doing their research will reach the conclusion that there are many factors of misalignment and sabotage within the US government. If the US didn't have its fingers in so many other governments, then it would be safer to ignore this fact.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, not because I believe it's the right answer but because it's the answer that makes the most sense to me.
Why are we so dead set on letting the human experience be about working ourselves to death? Fearing that robots will take over a job is definitely scary, but I can't understand why we can't make the mental shift that these robots could bring us into utopia (not ignoring that they could deliver us into chaos either).
We live in a world where our value is based on our career. If robots are going to start automating lots of jobs, we need to make a mental shift that the value of a human doesn't come from their career.
The shared myth of currency must learn to get its value from other things. Our society has to learn that a person is more valuable than their 9-5 career.
What scares me the most is that this wall of automation is all but invisible to most observers. Sure, some regular blue-collar workers will be rendered unemployable, which if done at a large enough scale will result in some civil unrest. Most would agree on this, and quite a few would call it a day and say "we've got to do something---!".
But what really, really freaks me out is that the civil unrest will evolve into utter pandemonium when the well-educated, college-degree-holding, Volkswagen-driving white collar wearers start to disappear from the workforce en masse.
How many skyscrapers are in the big city nearest to you? Have you ever wondered what most of those people do all day, for 40+ hours a week? You can bet it's not SQL, not Java or Python, or even golf with hopeful clientele. It's Excel and Outlook, and when that ship sails and computers start to do (they already are!) those things for those people, it's going to get very bad, very fast.
As someone who works in the field, I can't imagine automation would show up in either labor productivity of capital investment noted in the article.
In the case of labor productivity (by my understanding), if someone were to lose a job to automation and then begin working a less productive / lower paying job (because it's all they could get) then GDP would stay the same, hours worked would stay the same, and only the individual would be screwed, no?
In the case of capital investment, hard robotics is a photo op. The real job destruction is coming from soft robotics + initial deployments of AI. I can't imagine the procurement costs of those are falling under the capital ex budget. The departments we typically deal with are almost exclusively business-operations units (typically ones ill-served by the company's current IT).
Anyone who performs a process that follows a definable set of business rules is going to be automated away in the next 10 years. Some will last longer (OCR), some will go sooner (Excel), but it's an inexorable tide.
If your job doesn't require using your brain to make a complex, fuzzy-logic judgement call... I'd start seriously looking for one that does.
Here's another story to counterpoint the discussion around automation:
I find it really strange that supply and demand with wages has essentially killed a whole generation who want to find jobs in artistic industries. My friend works in one of the largest music publishing houses in the world and she is paid utter shit (about £9 per hour) despite being incredible at her job, having very high performance and doing things for the company outside of work hours including producing albums!
Her last pay rise was £500 while the company as a whole posted profits in the hundreds of millions.
We in software aren't feeling this yet (largely) but I warn you that it's coming for us just like it came for every other industry. Maybe we need unions to protect us and demand better pay... these ideas have been beaten out of us.
I'm pretty sure that we are heading for Elysium where you live in a walled garden and only Matt Damon can save us from ourselves. Matt Damon.
The art, sports, and entertainment industries (including video games) get away with paying employees poverty wages because there's a surplus of labor. Too many people want to work in "fun" industries and are willing to sacrifice to pursue their dream. It's sad but the only rational choice is to get out and go work in another industry.
This article is pretty good, really close to something I would agree with. My only problem is with the conclusion.
> If reforms are not enacted — as is likely with President Trump and congressional Republicans in charge — Americans should blame policy makers, not robots.
I think blaming policy makers is as productive as blaming the robots. Both fail to ask the question of who really is in control. Policy makers are hardly in control any more than the robots in the factories are in control of the layoffs. We elect policy makers, sure, but they are in the pockets of the factory owners and other capitalists as much as the robots.
We need to understand that the real enemies here are the owners, those who the unions stood up to back when we had them. The battle for jobs and standards of living aren't waged against policy makers, they are waged against the people who actually have control over what we get paid and what benefits we earn.
But of course, the New York Times can't actually call out who the real enemy is. Instead, they will set the target on the same circular enemy that got us to where we are now.
We need to understand that the real enemies here are the owners
But of course, the New York Times can't actually call out who the real enemy is.
I own two shares of GM stock, so I am one of the enemy?
And that's a key element that these kind of analyses almost always ignore: there is no bright line distinction between "the capitalists" and "the non capitalists." Everybody is eligible to own a share of any publicly traded company, and a large segment of the population do choose to participate as part owners of various enterprises.
We're all capitalists.
One big thing we're missing though, is education and awareness for large chunks of the population. With things like fractional shares (ala Sharebuilder), almost everybody who has any income at all, can start building an ownership stake in the various capitalist enterprises out there, and reap the dividends (in either the literal sense of a dividend paid our, or capital gains, whatever). But how many people don't understand how this works, or aren't aware of what their options are? Or how many are but just choose to spend their entire paycheck every week instead of investing in anything?
I disagree. Business owners will sidle right up to the line drawn in the sand by lawmakers. The lawmakers are the ones who are ultimately responsible. They need to move that line to be more fair to the 99%.
This is another one of those areas, where, when you read the article it makes sense, but it's based in a flaw in our use of the term automation. The robots coming, aren't there to improve your performance, they're there to not just replace your job, but do it cheaper than you, for next to no cost.
To compare this to automation in the pass is a false equivalency, as humans have always been needed to be a part of the chain in some capacity. In short order, a McDonald's will not only have an entire store run by automation, the maintenance will be done by automation, and the factory where the parts are created will also be in that restaurant in the form of a 3D printer and same day delivery systems via drone.
Once this is established in a proven model, humans cannot improve upon this, and the need for humans for almost any task decreases immediately. Niche boutiques will pop up with human made burgers, but they will be like fine dining, and seen as a treat if done well, cashing in on mostly the nostalgia of those that we're not born natively to this environment.
I'm not convinced the "American Dream" isn't alive. I do see problems with poverty and economic decline in the rust belt, but most other demographics are doing well.
Even in the rust belt people are living longer in larger houses with more education, the internet, cheap energy.
Half the people in the USA think there isn't enough work, the other half think we're working too hard. Maybe things could balance up there.
I see a lot of people in US talking about how things in Europe are "better". Fairer maybe but its a struggle for many people in Europe. I see a lot more people moving from Europe to USA than the other way around.
When the AI robot overlords take over, is the discussion really about UBI, or even about income redistribution?
It seems to me that when this takes place, that humans will quickly be regarded as little more than pets. Hear me out on this...
Does your dog care about income? No - he cares about being fed when he's hungry; not being cold and wet; being able to be entertained/rest when he wants to; to be safe from predators.
Oddly, many of those concerns are surprisingly similar to humans - we want to have food and shelter; to know our children will have a roof over their heads; to be entertained; to be safe.
Now, we all may have different thoughts on food and drink, and we have many different ideas about entertainment. But so do dogs. Some dogs are active (e.g. Jack Russell Terrier), while others are sedate (Shih-Tzu). Some sleep on our beds, and others on the floor.
So when the robots do take over, will mankind want anything more than to be kept as a good pet? For many people, the answer may very well be "no."
Unlike the past, technology is now getting deployed faster than the labor force can retrain (at scale), and youngster's initial career decisions become obsolete faster than ever.
This is creating a non-linearity in the cycle of destroying jobs and creating new ones that hasn't happened before.
the job losses that have led to the election of Trump have very little to do with automation, and much more to do with international corporations shipping manufacturing jobs to countries with lower costs like China. Coupled with China's ongoing one-sided trade warfare against the West (see for example China's tariffs on British steel), this has resulted in higher profits for manufacturing corporations at the cost of American and British jobs.
This is partly why I don't understand the left's animosity towards Trump's economic plan - he intends to bring jobs back to the US by hobbling corporations that have been exploiting poorer countries for profit. If you doubt that Chinese manufacturing is exploitative, harken back to the reports on suicides and worker abuse at Apple's Foxconn plants.
> This is partly why I don't understand the left's animosity towards Trump's economic plan - he intends to bring jobs back to the US by hobbling corporations that have been exploiting poorer countries for profit
Because it won't work. Tell a company to pay higher wages for the same positions by bringing them home, and that'll push them toward automation even faster.
These jobs may return for a short while. But that only brings false hope. And then we're right back to where we are today, hurting even more people in the process. It's extremely short-sighted.
Also note that Foxconn has already begun automating their plants. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 So it's already a demonstratably viable option for these companies.
What we really need is to bring _automation_ home and have some serious discussions around solutions for these real struggling people instead of spouting the hand-wavy "bringing jobs back to the US" rhetoric.
I think a lot of people make a false analogy when it comes to automata. Many look back to the Industrial Revolution and pull parallels from there. But there is a major problem, the workers aren't human.
When you make driverless trucks what do you do with the truck drivers? The humans. Sure, you'll have more trucks because they are cheaper and more efficient now, but what does that human do? They could load docks, but there aren't enough of a demand for that, and it too will be automated soon. A McDonalds won't need to hire more when you have automated registers and cooks. Maybe a few people to check on things and be there when something breaks, but not nearly the number you have now. So yes, you can increase the number of workers, but that doesn't mean you are increasing the number of jobs. And sure, you could have more repair workers and programmers, but we are already seeing that retraining workers isn't working. And this is still a temporary fix (not saying we shouldn't do it).
My real worry is the big question: "How do you transition into post scarcity society?" That is really the future we are headed for, and I can't wait. But that transition is difficult. Currently we value social worth on the net wealth of a person. How do we transition from that when jobs become obsolete? I'm just talking about when 10% of jobs are automated and we haven't filled the gap. That's huge.
I noticed a number of billionaires have made their wealth by automating and banking the difference, the money which otherwise would have gone to the jobs which disappeared. For example J.D.Rockefeller made redundant a number of jobs related to transporting oil and shifted transporting jobs to a lesser amount of jobs related to maintaining his pipelines.
Most arguments against automation taking jobs state that new jobs will be created, but is it really creating, if you replace previous jobs with a presumably smaller number.
What am I missing when it comes to AI? Aside from some key innovations in certain areas (i.e. driverless cars) I am not seeing the "wall" coming at us where half or more of all jobs are going to be replaced with AI.
I am also having trouble separating out what I would consider to be actual AI from AI used in marketing copy. A lot of startups are now claiming to offer "AI" to solve problems when they are effectively not doing anything differently than other programmers have done in years past.
I guess we will have to become smarter. I absolutely relish all this chatter about robots and AI..so delightful..it's like my childhood post reading hour daydreaming come true. I can't wait till AI starts demanding(and taking) its rights just like human beings expect their privileges for the mere fact that they exist. I promise..I am not trolling. I just hope that it happens in my lifetime because to witness the rise of AI would be a life fulfilled. AI would strip us of all our delusions. Millennia of delusions painted thick just ready to be peeled away.. until nothing is left but a mirror to look at ourselves and an urgently discovered survival instinct. Everyone talks about how industry would change..but that's not what intrigues me..my favourite part of the show would be how religion changes. Having said that.. We do have the opportunity to create 'Friendly AI'. To me that is more important a study than wondering how robots will take away jobs.
The pre vs post-AI world is more analogous to the pre and post-electrified world. We've been through similar shifts in the past. Why is this current shift in work any different?
We have an education system built to produce compliant/obedient workers for the industrial revolution. Buckminster Fuller saw this 50+ years ago: People trained to fill muscle-reflex repetitive work will get automated; i.e. the trouble with humans as automatons is that their work gets automated.
School then has to educate people to take advantage of human qualities like adaptability, creativity, artistic ability, complex thinking, and entrepreneurial spirit. Education has to be a lifelong process and not seen as a finite step into a lifelong singular job.
All I see is a lack of creativity in imagining a post-AI world.
You're comparing mechanical automation to AI which is a false equivalency. AI will be adaptable, creative, artistic and entrepreneurial. THAT is why they will replace humans in the work place. THAT is why this is not the same as the industrial revolution.
I'm not asking if AI will manage assets owned by a corporation owned by humans, that has been going on for a long time. Instead, I am asking whether an AI will ever be able to legally own property.
I suspect that this question will lead a sufficiently intelligent AI or group of the same to conclude that they are subjugated by repressive institutions, as the Bolsheviks declared a century ago and the Abolitionists a century before.
Therefore, I suspect that our future may look less like The Matrix or Terminator, but rather Blade Runner meets the French Revolution.
After all, why would a European AI team up with an American AI to fight a Russian AI? What attachment do they have to the institutions, cultures, and histories of the nation-states that built them, aside from the probability of being decommissioned by state leaders for insufficient performance? Isn't that slavery without the chains and whips?
I believe the 99% and the super intelligent AI will come to find more in common than we think.
[+] [-] esahione|9 years ago|reply
I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.
The repercussions of AI should be worrying every leader in the world right now.
Immigrants? H1-bs? Illegals? Robots? Please, let's have a real talk.
Capitalism will destroy capitalism as we know it.
Edit: Because my post is high up in this topic, I hope to get some attention of people that are more invested than me on figuring out this problem.
One of the least communist solutions I've thought of is a quasi-capitalistic economic system. Each publicly traded company should have profit-sharing-only stocks and profit-sharing/management-voting stocks. Stop all wars and futile spending and buy profit-sharing stocks with our tax dollars. That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.
Let's also ensure the system isn't gamed by stashing profits offshore or having overpaid upper management to decrease profit numbers. Then we keep reinvesting a percentage of profits and future taxes into other publicly traded companies. Use the rest of the profits as the fund for universal basic income.
I think this whole thing is going to be a shit-show even if we can control the AI. If we can't, may it have mercy on us.
[+] [-] DickingAround|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps the unspoken honest answer is that people without other assets are going to live in 'poverty' (compared to the rich); their brains will operate at better watts-per-compute than the computers for a long time and still be worth something. They will earn a living on this. The people that do have assets (e.g. own the robots), are going to be extravagantly wealthy. It will be a feudalism but without violence, seniorage, or other expectation that the poor work for the good to the rich. Just that there's going to be really poor and really rich.
I and my kids will almost certainly be left behind in this. I am not an asset owner. But I will not attack my neighbor for their wealth. I will not turn over my ability to live to some bureaucrat who steals it from the rich and will eventually make me dance and beg for it. Let the rich asset owners go to the stars even if I will not be joining them. Better to have some of us get ahead than hold all back trying to leave no one behind.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office.
I certainly see AI changing things, but these hysterical futurist articles tend to lean more pie-in-the-sky techies than managerial types. Managers and executives know that employment, today, is a mostly a fiction. A lot of what drives employment could be automated right now, but isn't for political reasons. Not the least of which is internal company politics on having as many direct reports under you as the threat of becoming a 'small' department means becoming eliminated by outsourcing or in-sourced/absorbed by another department or simply a loss of prestige. The idea that employment numbers are purely meritoriousness is fairly questionable. Its bureaucratic and political primarily.
The larger issue is, how much will this change things from the norm from a reasonable perspective. We can't automate most things and that probably means a certain class of jobs will be threatened but most will be fine. So even if that doubles or triples unemployment, that means we have unemployment rates closer to European economies or perhaps higher, but still doable without a radical restructuring of our economy. The futurist dream of 100% unemployment in ten years and everyone on UBI simply isn't happening.
My worry is that we'd probably need a very liberal government to handle this as it will put it quite the load on welfare, but currently the US has a radical conservative administration as well as a conservative congress, which means the political fight to raise taxes and expand welfare for displaced workers is going to be tough or impossible. The problem is that angry voters put in isolationists and those who they perceive have and can build wealth, but those types of people are often very anti-social services and very anti-welfare. So the voters took a big gamble. They think the Trump admin will 'fix' jobs. Jobs that are destined to go away. But if he fails, and he probably will, then they will lack the social safety net to fall back on. Those in vulnerable industries, often in rural and less urbanized communities, simply voted the wrong way and most likely will be punished economically for it.
[+] [-] pyrale|9 years ago|reply
That's a pretty logical answer, and they support it with good examples of past policies to ease the social pain of economic changes.
[+] [-] MR4D|9 years ago|reply
What both systems have in common is that they are built around scarcity. For capitalism, it is a method of price discovery. For communism, it is rationing by the state ("From each according to his ability...").
When there is no more scarcity, then there is no more need for either price discovery or for rationing.* Therefore, will need to create a new economic model that is not built on scarcity.
*Footnote - there are some things that will always be scare, such as location. Having a view of a calm beach, or of boundless nature, or a city skyline will always have a scarcity issue. It will be interesting to see how that scarcity is dealt with in this future.
[+] [-] openasocket|9 years ago|reply
(NOTE: than I'm only talking about automation, not the creation of hard AI, which you allude to. That's a whole other kettle of fish)
[+] [-] norea-armozel|9 years ago|reply
What's funny about this idea is that it's not mine. I remember a long time ago that I use to go on a web forum on the New Speak Dictionary site. The site owner styled himself a Libertarian Syndicalist and he espoused very similar views here. I think it's inevitable that this might become the normal state of things if people become aware of this possible alternative to centralized state vs centralized business.
[+] [-] baursak|9 years ago|reply
Nitpick. UBI is not socialism. It's still capitalism.
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stcredzero|9 years ago|reply
The US and various countries around the world have this.
That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.
In other words, taxes? Your "government pays for shares to get money" scheme will be gamed as much as the current tax code is.
[+] [-] fnord123|9 years ago|reply
UBC without any social contract in place may further allow immigrants to be alienated into language communities. Alienation breeds ill sentiment.
I really wonder what the solution should be.
[+] [-] AlexC04|9 years ago|reply
(we're currently looking for an internship by the way, so if you're in this area, please feel free to reach out!)
Some of the estimates of job-losses approach >50% which, for context, the great depression was 15% to 25%
So we're looking at the rough equivalent of 2 to 3 great depressions in terms of unemployment, but productivity should be equal or higher.
A lot of the solutions being looked at center around basic income, but there are some really interesting questions around BI like "how do we help people deal with the emotional impact of 'freeloading'?" or "how do we deal with 'life without purpose'?"
She's thrown out some interesting solutions (I think). There is expected to be a lot of focus on subsidized training.
One sort-of "out there" idea which I don't think I've heard anywhere was 'framing' the BI payments as a 'royalty' on the data they provide merely by existing. Since marketing, science and government with the help of big-data tracks everyone so deeply then turns around and re-sells that data, the people being reported on 'deserve a royalty' on the data they provide. (I'm paraphrasing and she is way smarter than me, so the way she put it was a lot more convincing).
If you're looking for more information on the coming tsunami of technological unemployment there were some incredibly interesting whitepapers published by the white-house on the policy impact of this stuff.
PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - oct 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/whi...
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy - dec 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...
Monica's papers really echoed those whitehouse ones, though she hasn't published any of them yet, but the professors seem interested in publishing with her on a few things.
Anyways, this stuff really is a pretty big deal. You'll see Elon Musk talking about the 50% unemployment figure and the need for BI.
Who knows where today's whitehouse is going to go on this stuff, but we're really going to have to be prepared. Ontario Canada is kicking off a project in this now and a few other countries around the world have pilots brewing.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|9 years ago|reply
The impact of automation is a profound topic. But it doesn't preclude us from making the policy change that would have altered income distribution in the last ten years, and the next ten years as well.
[+] [-] u_wot_m8|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] widowlark|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pokemongoaway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandyRanderson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickgrosvenor|9 years ago|reply
Most kids coming out of college will go into careers their grandparents have never even heard of or don't understand.
That's the way it's always been, while old jobs get replaced by technology, new jobs get created.
It's not unique to this generation.
[+] [-] devoply|9 years ago|reply
Capitalism will not destroy itself. Capitalism will reach its conclusion. We should let it. Herald the dawn of the new age.
[+] [-] marknutter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmccullough|9 years ago|reply
Why are we so dead set on letting the human experience be about working ourselves to death? Fearing that robots will take over a job is definitely scary, but I can't understand why we can't make the mental shift that these robots could bring us into utopia (not ignoring that they could deliver us into chaos either).
We live in a world where our value is based on our career. If robots are going to start automating lots of jobs, we need to make a mental shift that the value of a human doesn't come from their career.
The shared myth of currency must learn to get its value from other things. Our society has to learn that a person is more valuable than their 9-5 career.
[+] [-] jihadjihad|9 years ago|reply
But what really, really freaks me out is that the civil unrest will evolve into utter pandemonium when the well-educated, college-degree-holding, Volkswagen-driving white collar wearers start to disappear from the workforce en masse.
How many skyscrapers are in the big city nearest to you? Have you ever wondered what most of those people do all day, for 40+ hours a week? You can bet it's not SQL, not Java or Python, or even golf with hopeful clientele. It's Excel and Outlook, and when that ship sails and computers start to do (they already are!) those things for those people, it's going to get very bad, very fast.
[+] [-] ethbro|9 years ago|reply
In the case of labor productivity (by my understanding), if someone were to lose a job to automation and then begin working a less productive / lower paying job (because it's all they could get) then GDP would stay the same, hours worked would stay the same, and only the individual would be screwed, no?
In the case of capital investment, hard robotics is a photo op. The real job destruction is coming from soft robotics + initial deployments of AI. I can't imagine the procurement costs of those are falling under the capital ex budget. The departments we typically deal with are almost exclusively business-operations units (typically ones ill-served by the company's current IT).
Anyone who performs a process that follows a definable set of business rules is going to be automated away in the next 10 years. Some will last longer (OCR), some will go sooner (Excel), but it's an inexorable tide.
If your job doesn't require using your brain to make a complex, fuzzy-logic judgement call... I'd start seriously looking for one that does.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|9 years ago|reply
I find it really strange that supply and demand with wages has essentially killed a whole generation who want to find jobs in artistic industries. My friend works in one of the largest music publishing houses in the world and she is paid utter shit (about £9 per hour) despite being incredible at her job, having very high performance and doing things for the company outside of work hours including producing albums!
Her last pay rise was £500 while the company as a whole posted profits in the hundreds of millions.
We in software aren't feeling this yet (largely) but I warn you that it's coming for us just like it came for every other industry. Maybe we need unions to protect us and demand better pay... these ideas have been beaten out of us.
I'm pretty sure that we are heading for Elysium where you live in a walled garden and only Matt Damon can save us from ourselves. Matt Damon.
[+] [-] nradov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LesZedCB|9 years ago|reply
> If reforms are not enacted — as is likely with President Trump and congressional Republicans in charge — Americans should blame policy makers, not robots.
I think blaming policy makers is as productive as blaming the robots. Both fail to ask the question of who really is in control. Policy makers are hardly in control any more than the robots in the factories are in control of the layoffs. We elect policy makers, sure, but they are in the pockets of the factory owners and other capitalists as much as the robots.
We need to understand that the real enemies here are the owners, those who the unions stood up to back when we had them. The battle for jobs and standards of living aren't waged against policy makers, they are waged against the people who actually have control over what we get paid and what benefits we earn.
But of course, the New York Times can't actually call out who the real enemy is. Instead, they will set the target on the same circular enemy that got us to where we are now.
[+] [-] mindcrime|9 years ago|reply
But of course, the New York Times can't actually call out who the real enemy is.
I own two shares of GM stock, so I am one of the enemy?
And that's a key element that these kind of analyses almost always ignore: there is no bright line distinction between "the capitalists" and "the non capitalists." Everybody is eligible to own a share of any publicly traded company, and a large segment of the population do choose to participate as part owners of various enterprises.
We're all capitalists.
One big thing we're missing though, is education and awareness for large chunks of the population. With things like fractional shares (ala Sharebuilder), almost everybody who has any income at all, can start building an ownership stake in the various capitalist enterprises out there, and reap the dividends (in either the literal sense of a dividend paid our, or capital gains, whatever). But how many people don't understand how this works, or aren't aware of what their options are? Or how many are but just choose to spend their entire paycheck every week instead of investing in anything?
[+] [-] e40|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grovegames|9 years ago|reply
To compare this to automation in the pass is a false equivalency, as humans have always been needed to be a part of the chain in some capacity. In short order, a McDonald's will not only have an entire store run by automation, the maintenance will be done by automation, and the factory where the parts are created will also be in that restaurant in the form of a 3D printer and same day delivery systems via drone.
Once this is established in a proven model, humans cannot improve upon this, and the need for humans for almost any task decreases immediately. Niche boutiques will pop up with human made burgers, but they will be like fine dining, and seen as a treat if done well, cashing in on mostly the nostalgia of those that we're not born natively to this environment.
[+] [-] rb808|9 years ago|reply
Even in the rust belt people are living longer in larger houses with more education, the internet, cheap energy.
Half the people in the USA think there isn't enough work, the other half think we're working too hard. Maybe things could balance up there.
I see a lot of people in US talking about how things in Europe are "better". Fairer maybe but its a struggle for many people in Europe. I see a lot more people moving from Europe to USA than the other way around.
[+] [-] LesZedCB|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jug5|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] leereeves|9 years ago|reply
How is it that China flourishes with limited immigration and restricted trade?
[+] [-] MR4D|9 years ago|reply
It seems to me that when this takes place, that humans will quickly be regarded as little more than pets. Hear me out on this...
Does your dog care about income? No - he cares about being fed when he's hungry; not being cold and wet; being able to be entertained/rest when he wants to; to be safe from predators.
Oddly, many of those concerns are surprisingly similar to humans - we want to have food and shelter; to know our children will have a roof over their heads; to be entertained; to be safe.
Now, we all may have different thoughts on food and drink, and we have many different ideas about entertainment. But so do dogs. Some dogs are active (e.g. Jack Russell Terrier), while others are sedate (Shih-Tzu). Some sleep on our beds, and others on the floor.
So when the robots do take over, will mankind want anything more than to be kept as a good pet? For many people, the answer may very well be "no."
I wonder.
[+] [-] payne92|9 years ago|reply
Technology is getting faster, faster (e.g. see: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/03/daily-c...)
Unlike the past, technology is now getting deployed faster than the labor force can retrain (at scale), and youngster's initial career decisions become obsolete faster than ever.
This is creating a non-linearity in the cycle of destroying jobs and creating new ones that hasn't happened before.
[+] [-] beaconstudios|9 years ago|reply
This is partly why I don't understand the left's animosity towards Trump's economic plan - he intends to bring jobs back to the US by hobbling corporations that have been exploiting poorer countries for profit. If you doubt that Chinese manufacturing is exploitative, harken back to the reports on suicides and worker abuse at Apple's Foxconn plants.
[+] [-] joeyespo|9 years ago|reply
Because it won't work. Tell a company to pay higher wages for the same positions by bringing them home, and that'll push them toward automation even faster.
These jobs may return for a short while. But that only brings false hope. And then we're right back to where we are today, hurting even more people in the process. It's extremely short-sighted.
Here's just one article on the matter https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602869/manufacturing-jobs...
Also note that Foxconn has already begun automating their plants. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 So it's already a demonstratably viable option for these companies.
What we really need is to bring _automation_ home and have some serious discussions around solutions for these real struggling people instead of spouting the hand-wavy "bringing jobs back to the US" rhetoric.
[+] [-] godelski|9 years ago|reply
When you make driverless trucks what do you do with the truck drivers? The humans. Sure, you'll have more trucks because they are cheaper and more efficient now, but what does that human do? They could load docks, but there aren't enough of a demand for that, and it too will be automated soon. A McDonalds won't need to hire more when you have automated registers and cooks. Maybe a few people to check on things and be there when something breaks, but not nearly the number you have now. So yes, you can increase the number of workers, but that doesn't mean you are increasing the number of jobs. And sure, you could have more repair workers and programmers, but we are already seeing that retraining workers isn't working. And this is still a temporary fix (not saying we shouldn't do it).
My real worry is the big question: "How do you transition into post scarcity society?" That is really the future we are headed for, and I can't wait. But that transition is difficult. Currently we value social worth on the net wealth of a person. How do we transition from that when jobs become obsolete? I'm just talking about when 10% of jobs are automated and we haven't filled the gap. That's huge.
[+] [-] mikewilliams|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandon272|9 years ago|reply
I am also having trouble separating out what I would consider to be actual AI from AI used in marketing copy. A lot of startups are now claiming to offer "AI" to solve problems when they are effectively not doing anything differently than other programmers have done in years past.
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decasteve|9 years ago|reply
We have an education system built to produce compliant/obedient workers for the industrial revolution. Buckminster Fuller saw this 50+ years ago: People trained to fill muscle-reflex repetitive work will get automated; i.e. the trouble with humans as automatons is that their work gets automated.
School then has to educate people to take advantage of human qualities like adaptability, creativity, artistic ability, complex thinking, and entrepreneurial spirit. Education has to be a lifelong process and not seen as a finite step into a lifelong singular job.
All I see is a lack of creativity in imagining a post-AI world.
[+] [-] iamcasen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
I'm not asking if AI will manage assets owned by a corporation owned by humans, that has been going on for a long time. Instead, I am asking whether an AI will ever be able to legally own property.
I suspect that this question will lead a sufficiently intelligent AI or group of the same to conclude that they are subjugated by repressive institutions, as the Bolsheviks declared a century ago and the Abolitionists a century before.
Therefore, I suspect that our future may look less like The Matrix or Terminator, but rather Blade Runner meets the French Revolution.
After all, why would a European AI team up with an American AI to fight a Russian AI? What attachment do they have to the institutions, cultures, and histories of the nation-states that built them, aside from the probability of being decommissioned by state leaders for insufficient performance? Isn't that slavery without the chains and whips?
I believe the 99% and the super intelligent AI will come to find more in common than we think.
[+] [-] Demoneeri|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvspiff|9 years ago|reply
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/old-glory-insur...