Reads like this are slowly convincing me not to buy into the world of mortgages and debt and to just live the rest of my life paying for everything in cash. I tried to buy a house last year with my wife but the market exploded where I live and suddenly houses were 40% more expensive from last year.
So we still rent, which makes me feel incomplete. Like I'm kind of failing my duty of bringing the Canadian Dream to my family. But I gotta tell you, seeing 45% of my before tax income going into savings feels amazingly liberating. I stopped calling my savings a "down payment". It's now, "two college funds and 3 years of unemployment."
I feel in total control of my future this way, but I also feel like I'm feeding into the apocalypse paranoia. I won't actually need this unemployment cash will I?
Interesting article but I think the premise that workers are buying tech stocks because they fear automation is incorrect. Gallup found 13% of Americans thought that their jobs would soon be replaced by automation[1]. In fact you usually find more people worried about immigration than automation[2]. Maybe people /should/ be more concerned about automation but they just aren’t right now.
This “theory” for equities growth is a joke. There is a very simple reason for it and plenty of non-tech baskets show the same 2 yr (or longer) pattern.
Simply put, cash and cash equivalents are generating historically low returns. So you put your money in equity.
(And if you are a retiree you put it in stocks with dividends. Look at the growth in dividend-generating stocks like energy, mining and metals and it makes FANG look shitty. This is fixed income portfolios trying to achieve their needed goals.)
Ironically, it’s GDP growth that will stop the music, because enough of that will generate inflation and make it rational to hold something besides US treasuries. In fact it’s already starting to happen for non-US markets (although slower than all the hedge fund smarties thought, therefore the complete bath they’ve taken the last year).
The length of our equities boom is inversely correlated with GDP growth. This cycle is (much) longer than the historical average simply because real growth has been so low. Normalize against aggregate growth over a cycle and we have a year or two left in the current one (assuming job, GDP, wages etc continue to be anemic - if they pick up rapidly things will rapidly shift).
Have fun trying to own the robots after we've allowed proprietary licenses and leasing to takeover anything with a CPU attached.
Ownership is important, which is why copyleft is important, and its time to recognize how integral the four freedoms are to the future I think most of us want.
15 years ago all the software jobs I worked at were retiring clerical workers with software (oh you have 15 people doing spreadsheets ? We can automate that and you won't need them for the same report generation).
So this has been going on a lot longer than the article supposes. Yes its true that the sophistication of the automation, and the breadth of its reach (with robots / gig economy) is higher than before, so it will affect more jobs, but it will also create new jobs managing the automation (the same way people found jobs using Excel to manage those spreadsheets from previously more manual ways to do reporting).
In other words, this is the normal destructive (and positive) cycle of capitalism. It is always painful for people who adapt slowly, and provides opportunities for those willing and able to jump into the development and use of new automation tools.
> In this context, the FANG stocks are not a gimmick or a fad, they’re a f---ing life raft.
Note that if you are employed in one of those companies, you should think twice how you'd want to invest in them, because you're actually putting a bunch of your eggs in one basket.
I keep remembering those poor Enron employees whose retirement funds were mainly in stock of Enron itself, so that they were both unemployed and financially ruined when the scam fell apart.
I just don't buy it. I understand I'm in a minority, so let me indulge myself and explain, for a moment, why I think AI / Robots are nothing to worry about.
My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have.
My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a tool for a Human overseer, and that might replace some workers.
I don't believe AI will effectively deal with:
1) Cultural concerns. e.g. Appropriate imagery in advertising.
2) Major strategic considerations when faced with an uncertain future. (Physical war, trade war, geopolitical events, natural disasters).
3) Legal frameworks, as they are not well defined.
4) Human relationships. e.g. Don't make Alice and Bob work together.
5) Intuitive leaps. e.g. Rubics cube.
6) Empathy.
The reason I believe this is not because I believe in a soul, or anything mystical, but because I believe that the nature of our brains, our senses, our learning experiences, and the evolutionary processes that got us here can not be matched by our technology.
I think this means Robots / AI will not independently create new businesses, new products, build factories, kit out factories, buy other robots, produce marketing, deal with customer services, returns, courts, investors, regulators, suppliers and so on.
I can imagine products that will exist forever, like, rope, or cutlery, or plates, and someone automating a factory to produce these commodities. But they will still use humans to manage product development, supplier and customer relations, advertising and security, and, probably, looking after the robots.
I think that Robots / AI will at best become a tool for people to use, but the power will remain with Human employees.
I work in business development in the public sector. First we did digitzation, turning paper archives into something digital. Then we started standardizing and connecting the archives while improving worker interaction with them. These days we're doing automation.
None of this has led to people getting fired. It has cost a massive amount of jobs though. All unnoticed because we simply didn't rehire for positions when someone retired because the digitization hadn't eaten whole workflows but only 5 minutes here and there.
The next thing we're going to do is AI. We've already begun the proofs of concepts. We've gone through 6 million case files with 5-70 page documents, and sorted them in a particular way. A process which too 25 full time jobs half a year to do. Our proof of concept AI and 1000 servers in azure, did the same thing in 5 hours.
Computers didn't really change the office landscape like robots did to the assembly lines. AI will.
At one point in our history, one of the most important jobs in a large city, was removing the endless tones of horse shit from the streets every day. Cars made those guys as obsolete as AI will do almost everything.
Sure there will be new jobs as well, but technology stopped creating more jobs than it ate almost 10 years ago, and it's an exponential curve.
It was some article here on HN a while back that framed this much better for me.
It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree.
There's lots of stats like Ikea factories making 17x the bookcases they did in 1985 but with the same number of staff. But even in our technical and development niche, look at something like Instagram. They went from idea to billions of users with what a decade ago would have been a laughably small staff.
The future is the top 10% of staff executing with an army of automated services at their command to do the work that 90% of their colleagues used to do.
I'm unsure how you would expect humans to do better with cultural concerns or strategy in the face of uncertainty. We're known for routinely making mistakes in both of these domains - just look at POTUS for a case study.
Computers can already infer sentiment, not to mention recognize patterns extremely well, and are likely trainable to provide example feedback to any given cultural current. Is culture really any more diffuse than something like conversation, which computers already do reasonably well?
Furthermore, it seems odd to suggest that computers would have trouble in numbers games like war/trade war/resource allocation. These are essentially reducible to games, and with Go out the way, it doesn't seem that figuring out the best tariffs to pass or best places to bomb would require much more logic.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I think your conceptions of the limitations of machines are founded on essentially nothing. There's little, philosophically or scientifically, in the way of physicalist/functionalist conceptions of the mind that supports your viewpoints!
There's little reason to doubt, in my eyes, that our brains are extremely complex machines, running on electrical impulses and neurotransmitters, to produce responses to stimuli. As such, I don't see why you would privilege our machines over another machine. Why is our learning experience different from that of a machine? Do we not learn from trial-and-error, from explicit (social) rule-programming, from inference? Is evolution really at odds with computers? Some ML algorithms already boast "evolutionary" traits. And are our 5 senses really so sharp? What about beings who "see" all EM radiation or feel rumblings deep in the earth, like a seismograph does?
Reducing employment by 10% would be catastrophic for the US economy and will cause massive social unrest, not to mention the effects in developing countries where people who have just been pulled out of abject poverty in the last generation will suddenly see those opportunities disappear again.
Now remember truck drivers are the most populous single occupation in the US, and commercial trucking is expected to be largely automated within 20-30 years by most major shipping companies.
We don't need an science fiction style singularity to destroy our world, just a couple of small changes in the fringes will be enough.
Trouble is, there's a bunch of people out there who have no aptitude for those things, and have neither the desire nor the means to acquire that aptitude, and/or don't have the means to sell this aptitude for enough money for bare necessities.
What do they do?
This isn't a rhetorical question, I don't know the answer, and I'm kept up at night for the coming storm.
>>1) Cultural concerns. e.g. Appropriate imagery in advertising.
This seems to assume advertising will continue to be aimed at humans. Why would it be? Why would purchasing stuff not be done by AIs in the future as well? In that scenario, things like culture would become irrelevant, as marketing AIs would advertise products/services to purchasing AIs.
I'm not sure what a Rubics cube has to do with intuition. But solving a Rubics cube is so firmly within the realm of doable that no one is going to call it AI anymore.
Machines didn't take all the jobs in agriculture either, but they changed the society from >90% of the population working the fields to <10% what we have today. Imagine what would happen if a similar development would affect all kinds of work. Even if structural unemployment is "just" 40% our current social system would be wholly inadequate.
You may want to elaborate on the "can not be matched by our technology" aspect. I'll try.
An "80 IQ" manager will fail at the list of six tasks, and a "120 IQ" manager will be a success, by most peoples analysis.
Surely, an intelligent but inadequate AI would be mentored like an intelligent but inadequate human manager. We have millennia of experience proving humans can't do that successfully. Therefore if we invent an inadequate AI, regardless of being close to human performance, we know we can't improve performance to make them useful. We play games with re-rolling the dice, but the clock time and human labor time make that too expensive (although it works for mere numerological metric number optimization problems). We play games with pretending that the history of flipping honest coins implies something about the honest coin although it implies more about self delusion and statistics. We play political games where the leader is useless but at least the leader is our guy, our kind of people.
Sure, for the sake of argument, I'll take it on faith we can build a mentally disabled AI manager. But we know based on centuries of experience we have no idea how to "fix" a mentally disabled manager into something successful. This is not necessarily a complete black pill. A developmentally disabled AI might, if its merely disabled and not evil, be handy to provide minimal supervision to small children or animals in a safe controlled environment. Its just not going to be very useful.
Maybe rephrased, that's nice that some believe we can run a marathon, and maybe we can get part way, but if we absolutely know based on substantial experience we can't upgrade an athlete to run the critical last 100 feet to break the tape and finish, then why bother? Or if we have to build a bridge 1010 feet long if in separate experiments we know we can't extend a bridge past 1000 feet long then it doesn't matter if we have faith or belief that we can build it 10 feet or 950 feet or 999.9 feet because we know once we hit 1000 feet we have no idea how to get it to 1010 feet based on centuries of trying really hard using off the shelf cheap self reproducing biological bridges of 1000 feet length.
My greatest fear of AI is it will turn political and we'll no longer be able to talk about the science and technology of AI; it'll just be another dog whistle signal for one side or another, like many other topics "discussed" here on HN. Kool kids will have the right blind faith, the enemy will have the wrong blind faith.
A correction to the history of retirement schemes.
Retirement schemes go back a lot farther than acknowledged in that article. The most popular to have lots of children in the hopes that one would take care of parents in their old age. But then you having things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine.
Sure, but Tontines didn't originate in the US (or at least the UK) and therefore there's no need for the author to consider them part of world history.
Why not just seize the means of production? Private (real) property is ultimately rooted in the theft of the commons. This has historically been justified using two assertions: that people don't value what they don't own, and that nobody does anything except for profit. Both are highly questionable, yet when counterexamples are offered they are generally dismissed as 'the exception that proves the rule' or some equally irrational rhetoric.
Our existing economic paradigms are demonstrably flawed. Just as feudalism tried to restrain the creative forces of capitalism but eventually collapsed, capitalism is arguably restraining the creative forces of (socialism, participativism, something we haven't got a good name for yet). We are familiar with many of the potential pitfalls - excessive bureaucracy and various flavors of authoritarianism - but have yet to fully systematize the desirable alternatives of open source culture. Perhaps what is needed is a general theory of economic networking that incorporates lateral as well as hierarchical structures.
In the capitalist interpretation, "seize the means of production" translates to "start your own business and out-compete your competitors". Or put another way: just own the damn robots.
"Private (real) property is ultimately rooted in the theft of the commons"
If only somehow I could capitalize on everyone who believed this nonsense. I would sell them shirts, but for them to receive them would be ownership of private property and therefore a "theft of the commons".
Can I ask what piece of technology you stole from "the commons" to write that comment? What was the brand?
Duplicate the means of production. If we really end up in a world where robots make the products and robots make the robots, then the means of production are information products that can be copied like software. (And there will be open source robots too, but copying without permission is the fallback position if commercial robots are too patent-encumbered to reimplement by legal means.)
I wouldn't steal a car... but I wouldn't feel a bit bad about having a machine build an identical copy of a friend's car for me.
Like all things this well written on this topic I feel like it hits the nail on the head and misses a few things because it’s an article by necessity must paint in broad strucks so let me say this:
It’s completely right that automation/ robotics will accelerate the displacement of workers and cause upheaval. Certainly owning the productive fruits of this will make one very rich.
What won’t happen is that these will displace those who service unmapped or poorly systemic mapped things. For instance: in the last 15 years there have been techniques to attempt to automatically curate wine. Most either fail or pivot. Why? Because chemical composition is only ine facet in the high end. Remarkably software still does not do a great job here as tastes are subtle and hard to train in a model or algorithm. It so far can only get n times better than average but never tops an expert human curator in the high end. Will it some day? Maybe. On an infinite time scale yes it will but I wouldn’t quite go dumping my high end wine skills quite yet.
Which brings me to my point: automation is great for irredeemable or trainable repetitive processes but still an infant at more complex things like the example given.
In turn, if you can carve out a niche that is unusually hard to model and train you may be okay. Unfortunately that’s not 90 percent of jobs I reckon.
The other sure fire bet us to only deal in Veblen goods. The value there being exclusivity, which I reckon will never stop being a thing
There an article somewhere which breaks down the types of automation, into a useable manner.
Theres automation of tasks which free up labor to do MORE work - so if you were a bricklayer, and were bottlenecked by number of hands, the wheelbarrow would be a force multiplier.
Theres removal of jobs with less useful jobs, so the chef got replaced by the burger flipper (not really, but I can't think of a good example at the moment).
And finally removal of jobs entirely, with no need of replacement.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel, Player Piano, we are introduced to a future in which only engineers and managers have gainful employment and meaningful lives. If you’re not one of the engineers and managers, then you’re in the army of nameless people fixing roads and bridges. You live in Homestead, far from the machines that do everything, and are treated throughout your life like a helpless baby. The world no longer has a use for you. Anything you can do a machine can do better, and you are reminded of this all day, every day by society and the single omnipotent industrial corporation that oversees it all.
He wrote this 65 years ago. It couldn’t have been more apropos to what we’re witnessing now than if had he written it this morning, right down to the nostalgia-selling demagogue who seizes the opportunity to foment rebellion amongst the displaced and disgruntled. When millions of people start seeing their purpose begin to erode and their dignity being stolen from them, the idea that there’s nothing left to lose starts to creep in.
The fact he wrote this 65 years ago yet the labor force and population have grown in lockstep, augers against this. https://staticseekingalpha.a.ssl.fastly.net/uploads/2011/12/... Why would companies, especially in an economic environment that is so competitive, keep employees that serve no purpose.
Buying and holding shares of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft ,which are are not only leading this techno revolution but profiting immensely from it, is one the best ways to capitalize on this trend, which is what I have been doing for the past few years (along with owning Bitcoin). I don't however agree that automation will mean the 'end of jobs'. It's not that robots will take all the jobs, but rather the labor market will become increasingly bifurcated, with a 'creative class' at the top and the low-income service sector jobs at the bottom, without much in between. There is significant demand for service sectors jobs, of all skill levels, including skilled technical jobs such as coding, teaching, consulting, and engineering. But also huge demand for hospitality jobs; however, many of these jobs may not pay as much as the jobs they replaced, or bring much personal fulfillment.
(you'll have to change the dates to get the full picture. Works with a POST so I can't link to it. Note that unemployment essentially is labour force - jobs. Hence, the weakest members of the jobs force are counted double. Also, discouraged workers are discounted (and the rules for discouraged workers means they are essentially anyone unemployed for more than some months). The real unemployment rate, discounting double jobs and including discouraged workers is somewhere between 9 and 16%)
The short of it is that the job market froze, with a few bubbles in between, at around 1984-1987 or so, at an unemployment rate of around 8% or so and has been slowly but very steadily increasing since. Even the rate at which this is happening is increasing. The government, of course, has changed definitions again and again to show better numbers, but so far they don't go all out China on us (ie. the real data still appears to be published by the government, unlike in China where we know 15 million people were fired last year in several provinces due to protests and violence resulting from it, but this is not reported anywhere in government data)
Granted, that's still not quite the story of Kurt Vonnegut, but keep in mind that we're about 30 years into a phase in history where jobs grow slightly slower than population growth. This could be accelerating, or it could simply be that under Obama there was no real jobs recovery despite "extraordinary measures" by the Fed.
This is a pretty crappy read. Lacks real data and also unwillingness to look outside of the tech bubble, seriously what serious AI work is apple or Netflix doing? Its as if the author started with the conclusion and wrote up whole thing to justify it. For large parts most of the tech people at Google/FB are involved in getting more people click and buys ads. And Amazon are involved in getting people to buy more stuff and reduce the costs of handling and shipping them. So, if the logical conclusion that many visionaries in these thread are saying is true that 90% will be useless then these companies will have nobody to serve and will collapse before we reach that point anyways. Secondly, let's believe this is true then if an economic system which does not benefit majority deserves to be overthrown by any means even violent and rise of trump is a step in right direction. Third, if the tech companies are so smart then how were they caught with their pants down when a foreign power used their own infrastructure and technology to help elect a leader that they ostensibly opposed. Finally, the fundamental reason for the current stock boom is simply liquidity and lack of asset classes outside of stocks which give meaningful growth. This is not just limited to fang or usa but seen in many stock markets. I actively invest and trade in India where the markets are hitting new highs and the only reason right now for this is that in most places it is very hard to get a good return plus there is excess institutional & industrial capital since they are not optimistic of the growth and thus not investing in augmenting capacities or production. So investing in stock market seems the only alternative. One of the reasons for this liquidity is central banks around the world have been pumping money. This will end when the excess liquidity is pulled out from the global financial system.
"Manna"[1] as well. While I don't like the writing style, I love the story. Especially since it shows AI gutting middle management in an interesting way before robotics is mature enough to do all the dextrous tasks.
Interesting investment thesis, but isn't there a better way to hedge yourself than buying tech stocks?
That's just a huge bet on a tiny number of cyclical revenue sources: online shopping, online advertising, cloud services, iPhones, Microsoft Office, and Windows.
What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans. Take food service for instance. No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots. Human interaction is part of the experience and part of the value. (At McDonald's, by contrast, the humans don't add value and could easily be replaced.) The "human touch" is going to become more important, not less, as automation increases.
A certain amount of compute capacity should be given with citizenship to each individual. It is fixed. You get to use that capacity however you want: some on your phone, some on your laptop. If you want to run an internet business that uses a lot of compute capacity, then you'll need to rent it from other individuals and consolidate it under your control.
I came to see if people were talking about the robotics and automation ETF cited in the article and if it would be a good idea to buy at this point, but seems that everyone is having philosophical conversation instead of a investing conversation :-p
[+] [-] Waterluvian|8 years ago|reply
So we still rent, which makes me feel incomplete. Like I'm kind of failing my duty of bringing the Canadian Dream to my family. But I gotta tell you, seeing 45% of my before tax income going into savings feels amazingly liberating. I stopped calling my savings a "down payment". It's now, "two college funds and 3 years of unemployment."
I feel in total control of my future this way, but I also feel like I'm feeding into the apocalypse paranoia. I won't actually need this unemployment cash will I?
[+] [-] matthewbauer|8 years ago|reply
[1]: http://news.gallup.com/poll/216116/few-workers-worry-tech-ma...
[2]: http://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
[+] [-] sulam|8 years ago|reply
Simply put, cash and cash equivalents are generating historically low returns. So you put your money in equity.
(And if you are a retiree you put it in stocks with dividends. Look at the growth in dividend-generating stocks like energy, mining and metals and it makes FANG look shitty. This is fixed income portfolios trying to achieve their needed goals.)
Ironically, it’s GDP growth that will stop the music, because enough of that will generate inflation and make it rational to hold something besides US treasuries. In fact it’s already starting to happen for non-US markets (although slower than all the hedge fund smarties thought, therefore the complete bath they’ve taken the last year).
The length of our equities boom is inversely correlated with GDP growth. This cycle is (much) longer than the historical average simply because real growth has been so low. Normalize against aggregate growth over a cycle and we have a year or two left in the current one (assuming job, GDP, wages etc continue to be anemic - if they pick up rapidly things will rapidly shift).
[+] [-] mooreds|8 years ago|reply
As someone in a situation similar to the 45 year old he mentions, I worry about being displaced. Not every day, but every month or so I wonder.
What a fascinating thesis. I wonder what happens when the 'replacement fear' buy collides with the 'boomer retirement' sell?
[+] [-] arca_vorago|8 years ago|reply
Ownership is important, which is why copyleft is important, and its time to recognize how integral the four freedoms are to the future I think most of us want.
[+] [-] aorloff|8 years ago|reply
So this has been going on a lot longer than the article supposes. Yes its true that the sophistication of the automation, and the breadth of its reach (with robots / gig economy) is higher than before, so it will affect more jobs, but it will also create new jobs managing the automation (the same way people found jobs using Excel to manage those spreadsheets from previously more manual ways to do reporting).
In other words, this is the normal destructive (and positive) cycle of capitalism. It is always painful for people who adapt slowly, and provides opportunities for those willing and able to jump into the development and use of new automation tools.
[+] [-] Terr_|8 years ago|reply
Note that if you are employed in one of those companies, you should think twice how you'd want to invest in them, because you're actually putting a bunch of your eggs in one basket.
I keep remembering those poor Enron employees whose retirement funds were mainly in stock of Enron itself, so that they were both unemployed and financially ruined when the scam fell apart.
[+] [-] arichard123|8 years ago|reply
My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have.
My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a tool for a Human overseer, and that might replace some workers.
I don't believe AI will effectively deal with:
1) Cultural concerns. e.g. Appropriate imagery in advertising.
2) Major strategic considerations when faced with an uncertain future. (Physical war, trade war, geopolitical events, natural disasters).
3) Legal frameworks, as they are not well defined.
4) Human relationships. e.g. Don't make Alice and Bob work together.
5) Intuitive leaps. e.g. Rubics cube.
6) Empathy.
The reason I believe this is not because I believe in a soul, or anything mystical, but because I believe that the nature of our brains, our senses, our learning experiences, and the evolutionary processes that got us here can not be matched by our technology.
I think this means Robots / AI will not independently create new businesses, new products, build factories, kit out factories, buy other robots, produce marketing, deal with customer services, returns, courts, investors, regulators, suppliers and so on.
I can imagine products that will exist forever, like, rope, or cutlery, or plates, and someone automating a factory to produce these commodities. But they will still use humans to manage product development, supplier and customer relations, advertising and security, and, probably, looking after the robots.
I think that Robots / AI will at best become a tool for people to use, but the power will remain with Human employees.
[+] [-] eksemplar|8 years ago|reply
None of this has led to people getting fired. It has cost a massive amount of jobs though. All unnoticed because we simply didn't rehire for positions when someone retired because the digitization hadn't eaten whole workflows but only 5 minutes here and there.
The next thing we're going to do is AI. We've already begun the proofs of concepts. We've gone through 6 million case files with 5-70 page documents, and sorted them in a particular way. A process which too 25 full time jobs half a year to do. Our proof of concept AI and 1000 servers in azure, did the same thing in 5 hours.
Computers didn't really change the office landscape like robots did to the assembly lines. AI will.
At one point in our history, one of the most important jobs in a large city, was removing the endless tones of horse shit from the streets every day. Cars made those guys as obsolete as AI will do almost everything.
Sure there will be new jobs as well, but technology stopped creating more jobs than it ate almost 10 years ago, and it's an exponential curve.
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|8 years ago|reply
It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree.
There's lots of stats like Ikea factories making 17x the bookcases they did in 1985 but with the same number of staff. But even in our technical and development niche, look at something like Instagram. They went from idea to billions of users with what a decade ago would have been a laughably small staff.
The future is the top 10% of staff executing with an army of automated services at their command to do the work that 90% of their colleagues used to do.
[+] [-] hasbroslasher|8 years ago|reply
Computers can already infer sentiment, not to mention recognize patterns extremely well, and are likely trainable to provide example feedback to any given cultural current. Is culture really any more diffuse than something like conversation, which computers already do reasonably well?
Furthermore, it seems odd to suggest that computers would have trouble in numbers games like war/trade war/resource allocation. These are essentially reducible to games, and with Go out the way, it doesn't seem that figuring out the best tariffs to pass or best places to bomb would require much more logic.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I think your conceptions of the limitations of machines are founded on essentially nothing. There's little, philosophically or scientifically, in the way of physicalist/functionalist conceptions of the mind that supports your viewpoints!
There's little reason to doubt, in my eyes, that our brains are extremely complex machines, running on electrical impulses and neurotransmitters, to produce responses to stimuli. As such, I don't see why you would privilege our machines over another machine. Why is our learning experience different from that of a machine? Do we not learn from trial-and-error, from explicit (social) rule-programming, from inference? Is evolution really at odds with computers? Some ML algorithms already boast "evolutionary" traits. And are our 5 senses really so sharp? What about beings who "see" all EM radiation or feel rumblings deep in the earth, like a seismograph does?
[+] [-] pdeuchler|8 years ago|reply
Now remember truck drivers are the most populous single occupation in the US, and commercial trucking is expected to be largely automated within 20-30 years by most major shipping companies.
We don't need an science fiction style singularity to destroy our world, just a couple of small changes in the fringes will be enough.
[+] [-] twoquestions|8 years ago|reply
What do they do?
This isn't a rhetorical question, I don't know the answer, and I'm kept up at night for the coming storm.
[+] [-] taberiand|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|8 years ago|reply
This seems to assume advertising will continue to be aimed at humans. Why would it be? Why would purchasing stuff not be done by AIs in the future as well? In that scenario, things like culture would become irrelevant, as marketing AIs would advertise products/services to purchasing AIs.
[+] [-] letlambda|8 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what a Rubics cube has to do with intuition. But solving a Rubics cube is so firmly within the realm of doable that no one is going to call it AI anymore.
[+] [-] adrianN|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|8 years ago|reply
You're trolling, right? Intuitive leaps are the bread and butter of neural nets.
[+] [-] VLM|8 years ago|reply
An "80 IQ" manager will fail at the list of six tasks, and a "120 IQ" manager will be a success, by most peoples analysis.
Surely, an intelligent but inadequate AI would be mentored like an intelligent but inadequate human manager. We have millennia of experience proving humans can't do that successfully. Therefore if we invent an inadequate AI, regardless of being close to human performance, we know we can't improve performance to make them useful. We play games with re-rolling the dice, but the clock time and human labor time make that too expensive (although it works for mere numerological metric number optimization problems). We play games with pretending that the history of flipping honest coins implies something about the honest coin although it implies more about self delusion and statistics. We play political games where the leader is useless but at least the leader is our guy, our kind of people.
Sure, for the sake of argument, I'll take it on faith we can build a mentally disabled AI manager. But we know based on centuries of experience we have no idea how to "fix" a mentally disabled manager into something successful. This is not necessarily a complete black pill. A developmentally disabled AI might, if its merely disabled and not evil, be handy to provide minimal supervision to small children or animals in a safe controlled environment. Its just not going to be very useful.
Maybe rephrased, that's nice that some believe we can run a marathon, and maybe we can get part way, but if we absolutely know based on substantial experience we can't upgrade an athlete to run the critical last 100 feet to break the tape and finish, then why bother? Or if we have to build a bridge 1010 feet long if in separate experiments we know we can't extend a bridge past 1000 feet long then it doesn't matter if we have faith or belief that we can build it 10 feet or 950 feet or 999.9 feet because we know once we hit 1000 feet we have no idea how to get it to 1010 feet based on centuries of trying really hard using off the shelf cheap self reproducing biological bridges of 1000 feet length.
My greatest fear of AI is it will turn political and we'll no longer be able to talk about the science and technology of AI; it'll just be another dog whistle signal for one side or another, like many other topics "discussed" here on HN. Kool kids will have the right blind faith, the enemy will have the wrong blind faith.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|8 years ago|reply
Retirement schemes go back a lot farther than acknowledged in that article. The most popular to have lots of children in the hopes that one would take care of parents in their old age. But then you having things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine.
[+] [-] pgeorgi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|8 years ago|reply
Our existing economic paradigms are demonstrably flawed. Just as feudalism tried to restrain the creative forces of capitalism but eventually collapsed, capitalism is arguably restraining the creative forces of (socialism, participativism, something we haven't got a good name for yet). We are familiar with many of the potential pitfalls - excessive bureaucracy and various flavors of authoritarianism - but have yet to fully systematize the desirable alternatives of open source culture. Perhaps what is needed is a general theory of economic networking that incorporates lateral as well as hierarchical structures.
[+] [-] white-flame|8 years ago|reply
I think the term would broadly be "post-scarcity society".
[+] [-] richk449|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if anyone has tried that before. I guess I will go read a history book and find out.
[+] [-] uoaei|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colemannugent|8 years ago|reply
"Private (real) property is ultimately rooted in the theft of the commons"
If only somehow I could capitalize on everyone who believed this nonsense. I would sell them shirts, but for them to receive them would be ownership of private property and therefore a "theft of the commons".
Can I ask what piece of technology you stole from "the commons" to write that comment? What was the brand?
[+] [-] philipkglass|8 years ago|reply
I wouldn't steal a car... but I wouldn't feel a bit bad about having a machine build an identical copy of a friend's car for me.
[+] [-] taberiand|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_wizard|8 years ago|reply
It’s completely right that automation/ robotics will accelerate the displacement of workers and cause upheaval. Certainly owning the productive fruits of this will make one very rich.
What won’t happen is that these will displace those who service unmapped or poorly systemic mapped things. For instance: in the last 15 years there have been techniques to attempt to automatically curate wine. Most either fail or pivot. Why? Because chemical composition is only ine facet in the high end. Remarkably software still does not do a great job here as tastes are subtle and hard to train in a model or algorithm. It so far can only get n times better than average but never tops an expert human curator in the high end. Will it some day? Maybe. On an infinite time scale yes it will but I wouldn’t quite go dumping my high end wine skills quite yet.
Which brings me to my point: automation is great for irredeemable or trainable repetitive processes but still an infant at more complex things like the example given.
In turn, if you can carve out a niche that is unusually hard to model and train you may be okay. Unfortunately that’s not 90 percent of jobs I reckon.
The other sure fire bet us to only deal in Veblen goods. The value there being exclusivity, which I reckon will never stop being a thing
[+] [-] intended|8 years ago|reply
Theres automation of tasks which free up labor to do MORE work - so if you were a bricklayer, and were bottlenecked by number of hands, the wheelbarrow would be a force multiplier.
Theres removal of jobs with less useful jobs, so the chef got replaced by the burger flipper (not really, but I can't think of a good example at the moment).
And finally removal of jobs entirely, with no need of replacement.
[+] [-] paulpauper|8 years ago|reply
He wrote this 65 years ago. It couldn’t have been more apropos to what we’re witnessing now than if had he written it this morning, right down to the nostalgia-selling demagogue who seizes the opportunity to foment rebellion amongst the displaced and disgruntled. When millions of people start seeing their purpose begin to erode and their dignity being stolen from them, the idea that there’s nothing left to lose starts to creep in.
The fact he wrote this 65 years ago yet the labor force and population have grown in lockstep, augers against this. https://staticseekingalpha.a.ssl.fastly.net/uploads/2011/12/... Why would companies, especially in an economic environment that is so competitive, keep employees that serve no purpose.
Buying and holding shares of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft ,which are are not only leading this techno revolution but profiting immensely from it, is one the best ways to capitalize on this trend, which is what I have been doing for the past few years (along with owning Bitcoin). I don't however agree that automation will mean the 'end of jobs'. It's not that robots will take all the jobs, but rather the labor market will become increasingly bifurcated, with a 'creative class' at the top and the low-income service sector jobs at the bottom, without much in between. There is significant demand for service sectors jobs, of all skill levels, including skilled technical jobs such as coding, teaching, consulting, and engineering. But also huge demand for hospitality jobs; however, many of these jobs may not pay as much as the jobs they replaced, or bring much personal fulfillment.
[+] [-] candiodari|8 years ago|reply
Only the reporting has grown in lockstep. The metrics have changed to make this happen. Some of the real story can be seen in these graphs:
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12026620
(you'll have to change the dates to get the full picture. Works with a POST so I can't link to it. Note that unemployment essentially is labour force - jobs. Hence, the weakest members of the jobs force are counted double. Also, discouraged workers are discounted (and the rules for discouraged workers means they are essentially anyone unemployed for more than some months). The real unemployment rate, discounting double jobs and including discouraged workers is somewhere between 9 and 16%)
The short of it is that the job market froze, with a few bubbles in between, at around 1984-1987 or so, at an unemployment rate of around 8% or so and has been slowly but very steadily increasing since. Even the rate at which this is happening is increasing. The government, of course, has changed definitions again and again to show better numbers, but so far they don't go all out China on us (ie. the real data still appears to be published by the government, unlike in China where we know 15 million people were fired last year in several provinces due to protests and violence resulting from it, but this is not reported anywhere in government data)
Granted, that's still not quite the story of Kurt Vonnegut, but keep in mind that we're about 30 years into a phase in history where jobs grow slightly slower than population growth. This could be accelerating, or it could simply be that under Obama there was no real jobs recovery despite "extraordinary measures" by the Fed.
[+] [-] nocoder|8 years ago|reply
This is a pretty crappy read. Lacks real data and also unwillingness to look outside of the tech bubble, seriously what serious AI work is apple or Netflix doing? Its as if the author started with the conclusion and wrote up whole thing to justify it. For large parts most of the tech people at Google/FB are involved in getting more people click and buys ads. And Amazon are involved in getting people to buy more stuff and reduce the costs of handling and shipping them. So, if the logical conclusion that many visionaries in these thread are saying is true that 90% will be useless then these companies will have nobody to serve and will collapse before we reach that point anyways. Secondly, let's believe this is true then if an economic system which does not benefit majority deserves to be overthrown by any means even violent and rise of trump is a step in right direction. Third, if the tech companies are so smart then how were they caught with their pants down when a foreign power used their own infrastructure and technology to help elect a leader that they ostensibly opposed. Finally, the fundamental reason for the current stock boom is simply liquidity and lack of asset classes outside of stocks which give meaningful growth. This is not just limited to fang or usa but seen in many stock markets. I actively invest and trade in India where the markets are hitting new highs and the only reason right now for this is that in most places it is very hard to get a good return plus there is excess institutional & industrial capital since they are not optimistic of the growth and thus not investing in augmenting capacities or production. So investing in stock market seems the only alternative. One of the reasons for this liquidity is central banks around the world have been pumping money. This will end when the excess liquidity is pulled out from the global financial system.
[+] [-] shadofx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sf_rob|8 years ago|reply
1 http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
[+] [-] pdog|8 years ago|reply
That's just a huge bet on a tiny number of cyclical revenue sources: online shopping, online advertising, cloud services, iPhones, Microsoft Office, and Windows.
[+] [-] jboggan|8 years ago|reply
The most pregnant sentence in the entire piece.
[+] [-] Zanni|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_brawling_boo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]