As is only appropriate, given the word's etymology.
> 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).
> from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,"...
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.
There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up.
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.
With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale?
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.
> Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim
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/)
History completely disagrees with you though. The Roman empire. Biggest, most successful, longest lived empire that ever was? Built on slaves. The net benefit to them of using slaves vastly outweighs any downside that you can point to.
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.
> Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders.
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.
"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position."
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.
Indeed, Singapore where the new kiosks are almost ubiquitous, it's not uncommon for a cashier to have nobody waiting for them, but people still use the kiosks. 100% of the time when there is at least one person in line, I'll use the Kiosk - as all the orders are funneled into the same process queue. I particularly like the Kiosk because you can hyper customize every element of your order without confusion.
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)
I do think that automating cashiers at McDonald’s would be a big mistake.
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.
Ah, but the backend system already exists; it's what is talked to by the registers the cashiers were using. Likewise, the registers themselves are already running software 90% equivalent to the kiosk's software—same view controllers, different views.
> And they will be able to provide better and faster service.
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.
You know, I'm not sure this goes into the automation category—this is more of an operational improvement.
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.
The basic technology to serve people fast food without human interaction (the Automat) has been around for longer than fast food franchises. Fast food franchises invest vast amounts on process optimization and kiosks are still at the experimental stage (and still with human food delivery!).
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.
That would be the case for a restaurant that doesn't have any computerised systems already, but in a McDonalds the process is effectively just turning the till around to face the customer and letting them use it themselves.
> You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare.
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.
Please, use NFC to push my order blob up to my private storage device, so that next time I visit I can tap my phone and /send/ the order back in to the system. So much the better if it's json or xml and editable offline. (Obviously validate either way...)
Hence they'll be to sell people junk food even faster with better service? And more people will become more fat and sick in the long-term? coca-cola + humber = parapapapa. I'm loving it. McDonalds.
Automation will turn capitalism will turn into somewhat benevolent corporate city-states. Imagine a city run by a corporation which tries to automate, and optimize everything that is not its core business. To make the employees and their families happy, the corporation will provide the best care (child, health, environment) possible. In time this will turn some of these city-states into efficient, clean, healthy, happy places to live, but only relatively small groups of people will be able to enjoy it. Some of these city-states will be very dystopian and people living in there will be miserable. Technological and societal progress in these "utopian" cities will be much faster than in "dystopian" which will possibly lead to wars.
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?
> 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.
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.
This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.
It can be both. The fact that we say "it's cheaper" doesn't preclude "it's more ethical" especially when everybody agrees already that the presented alternative isn't ethical.
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.
Sooner or later, the robots and AI will be able to provide 100% of humanity material needs. AND The very nature of each societies will be shuffled by that new reality.
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.
> 1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ?
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.
Oh- you ask these questions before eradicating religious extremism? That new way of life is even more 'sin' for them than what we have now with all sexual and liberal revolutions.
Assuming all newborn people will be smart and logical and will never fight for their local tales is an utopia by itself.
>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.
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.
The consequences for societies that define the status/value of their members based on their employment/job will be disastrous. In, let's say, 20 years robots most likely will have overtaken agriculture, manufacturing and driving - by far the biggest job providers.
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.
Dear Leader is already busily preparing military and domestic border enforcement positions for underemployed citizens to fill to counter the coming influx of climate and economic refugees.
I agree. In agriculture, the revolution has already taken place though. Even supersize tractors navigate themselves. A farmer can get by with a lot of machines and only a few extra hands, most of the time.
Have there been any societies that use something else for status where life wasn't horrible? I can think of schools and prisons where status comes from made-up reasons that exist only as a way to provide status and have net negative value to the society. I hope there's something besides jobs that can give people purpose while also not being harmful, otherwise we'll create our own harmful status games.
The concept that machines will become the problem and not people is absurd. Completely absurd. People make the machines and people prevent machines from increasing the quality of life for most people. The only change needed in the progression of technological advance is people allowing labor saving devices to actually save everybody from laboring, not just a few. The problem remains the use of slavery by people to increase wealth.This notion of "we must fear computers because they are going to rule us" is frankly moronic, just a distraction from the inability of capitalists to share the rewards of advancement.
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.
Which will hopefully brings us to an inevitable change in our economics. If technological advance is going to create millions if not billions of unemployed people, the answer won't be rioting down the street and burning all machines in sight, although for many people this will appear the only viable solution.
This can also bring back collosiums where unwanted die for the pleasure of ruling class.
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.
Assuming machines can do everything a human can, what's left to humans and measurable (which is the only things humans can be rewarded for, hence can earn points for) are:
- 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.
My first thought was: "Oh, great! If slave labor is not efficient anymore there will be no more slave workers in the world". On a second thought (and based on our history), that probably will be true, but only because people that today are working just for a plate of rice will starve to death.
It's fairly clear (and distasteful) that economically, slave labor is inefficient because you have to feed/house them or you lose the 'investment'. In contrast, you can pay someone well below a living wage with virtually no penalty. This is why so many people at the low end of the labor pool have multiple jobs.
> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”.
What makes a lot of things like food so expensive is human work. If you had access to slaves you could probably also reduce those costs.
We still have a lot of people living for under 1$ per day on this world. That's a factor 20 off from the cited amount of money per year.
> 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.
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?).
> On the other hand, if institutionalized slavery still existed, factories would be looking at around $7,500 in annual costs for housing, food and healthcare per “worker”.
There is a wrong assumption that factory has to cover those expenses. In reality this cost is often offloaded to government or another party.
Uhh, when they're property of the company and not actually considered people?
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.
kevinr|9 years ago
> 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.
hedonistbot|9 years ago
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?
DanielBMarkham|9 years ago
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.
pygy_|9 years ago
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.
visarga|9 years ago
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/)
mattmanser|9 years ago
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.
_pmf_|9 years ago
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.
aaron695|9 years ago
What's the negative as a slaveholder again?
mtgx|9 years ago
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robo...
rejschaap|9 years ago
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.
ghshephard|9 years ago
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)
bad_user|9 years ago
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.
derefr|9 years ago
kevinr|9 years ago
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.
samsolomon|9 years ago
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.
notahacker|9 years ago
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.
onion2k|9 years ago
coredog64|9 years ago
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.
mjevans|9 years ago
formula_ninguna|9 years ago
6d6b73|9 years ago
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?
oblio|9 years ago
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.
lprubin|9 years ago
It depends on if there are other viable/satisfactory (or better) options that you can voluntarily switch to.
cobookman|9 years ago
BurningFrog|9 years ago
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.
k_sze|9 years ago
"No, it's just cheaper."
thehardsphere|9 years ago
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.
AKifer|9 years ago
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.
gspetr|9 years ago
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.
wruza|9 years ago
Assuming all newborn people will be smart and logical and will never fight for their local tales is an utopia by itself.
juliangoldsmith|9 years ago
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.
tegeek|9 years ago
1. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
mschuster91|9 years ago
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.
omegaworks|9 years ago
It's a great time to invest in detention centers.
manmal|9 years ago
averagewall|9 years ago
ximeng|9 years ago
heynowletsgo|9 years ago
WalterBright|9 years ago
elsewhen|9 years ago
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.
squarefoot|9 years ago
drieddust|9 years ago
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.
tajen|9 years ago
- 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.
almavi|9 years ago
jaggederest|9 years ago
Quarrelsome|9 years ago
legulere|9 years ago
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.
ohitsdom|9 years ago
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.
singularity2001|9 years ago
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?).
[0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html
maxerickson|9 years ago
jgalt212|9 years ago
elastic_church|9 years ago
dsjoerg|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
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thr3290|9 years ago
There is a wrong assumption that factory has to cover those expenses. In reality this cost is often offloaded to government or another party.
thehardsphere|9 years ago
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.