At my last job, something I tried to push unsuccessfully was a company-wide automation initiative.
Imagine a company-wide incentive structure for automation whereby if you automate 90-100% of your job, you receive massive bonuses. If you completely automate your job, the bonus could be the entirety of your annual salary as a single payout. Or perhaps a combination of bonus and equity.
So now you're out of a job. But if you can automate other jobs in the organisation, you also get bonuses.
Eventually the majority of the company becomes automated, hopefully generating the same or greater revenue and value for customers, with less overhead costs. Which is great for any stakeholders who can continue to receive revenues, but terrible for employees. So it would be good to include some kind of equity and/or revenue sharing model. The sell could then be "hey, let's all work together to automate this company, we'll get bonuses for doing so, and when the whole thing is automated we can continue to receive income while sitting on the beach".
This sounds like a cool idea - if and only if everyone coordinates to it together fairly, which seems extremely hard to achieve. I can see tons of caveats, e.g.
- If you automate away your non-tech co-worker (someone who can't contribute much to the automation of jobs other than his own), will he get the bonus? If so, how do you assure people doing the automating won't feel treated unfairly as the non-tech guy just got bonuses for doing nothing?
- If someone automates you away, will you get anything? Will you be angry?
- If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away? (assume for a moment that you have the most difficult to automate job in the company)
I mean... this could work if you'd manage to set up incentives so that everyone in the company works together and not against each other. But I'm not sure how to do this, especially in a way which doesn't leave anybody feeling he's being treated unfairly.
The problem there is the perceived unfairness that occurs when someone else in the company, sharing your approximate job, puts you out of work via automation.
How do you compensate those who lose their jobs as a result? What if they were also trying, but just happened to not be first to succeed?
It's a really cool idea though. (As a manufacturing engineer in a fairly old-fashioned company, I am currently trying to automate as much as possible; no idea yet about individual bonuses since I'm <1 year on the job)
It's hard to change the status quo, specially when there are paychecks directly involved.
At a company I worked for, after they realized that things couldn't go on anymore without massive automation, their first approach was to introduce it into the infrastructure lifecycle and require all new infrastructure to be heavily automated. That allowed the legacy stuff to die slowly without much disturbance.
Another different idea entirely would be spin off a subsidiary with those ideals and slowly migrate the work there. Perhaps too much work, but if the situation is desperate enough..
> Instead, my job will be outsourced to a datacenter. Everything I do professionally, from reading and giving feedback on specs to estimating development schedules to architecting and typing in the code and writing unit tests to reviewing others' code, every one of these things will be subject to automation. We can't do it now, of course, not at any price.
The whole thing derives from these flawed premises. Machines are incredibly dumb. Even these machine-learning wizz-things. They can do statistics, inferences, correlations. That's very very far from enough, especially for something like programming, which we can see as turning a spec into code. First, one still has to write a spec (so the "programming" isn't totally gone). Second, it means you essentially need to have "solved" natural language processing; as well as have assigned semantic values to linguistic constructs. Good luck with that.
At this point, I feel compelled to point out that humans don't agree on the meanings of what they say. Most of the time, humans can't write software that meets a spec. That's because of ambiguity, and machines are way way worse at dealing with that than humans are.
I think the error is simply to think the current rate of progress will keep going (and actually even the idea that there's been an acceleration of progress in AI recently is an illusion -- what we're seeing is increased application). It's the same error the fathers of AI made when they assumed everything would be solved in a matter of years. That's where the expression "AI winter" comes from.
> Machines are incredibly dumb. Even these machine-learning wizz-things. They can do statistics, inferences, correlations.
Do you think human brain does something more? All we can do is statistics, inferences and correlations, and we do it poorly.
Moreover, there is an even bigger problem than 100% automation of everything - namely, the automation of 50% of jobs. What are we going to do with half of the society being unable to find any job? And that most likely includes your or mine parents, siblings and friends, who will no doubt come to us techies for assistance. And if current trends continue, it's 10 years away, not 100.
I think the idea that programmers will be replaced by software-writing AI programs is silly and unrealistic, but that isn't to say that programmer jobs are secure. What's really going on is that developer's tools are getting better.
Languages, debugging tools, version control systems and bug trackers are all rapidly reducing the number of developer-hours required to implement a given program, which we should expect to reduce the size of the programmer workforce eventually if we can't find new things for them to do.
It is possible that we will find enough new problems for programmers to solve to counteract increased productivity, but for many applications, most of the general problems that one would hire a programmer to do already have reasonable-quality solutions. I think we'll see smaller and smaller teams of hyper-productive developers working on a shrinking set of increasingly esoteric projects, or things with a single specialized use (like calculating taxes for that particular year).
If we dealt rationally and benevolently with it, 100% unemployment would be an age of abundance... almost a post-scarcity society. I do not expect to see it soon, but I think it's possible. If technology continues to advance at the same pace it has for the past 50 years and if we can engineer our way out from under the impending fossil fuel energy crunch, I'd say it's probable within the century.
Even before things get as extreme as effectively "100% unemployment," I could certainly see a massive drop in the need for labor. We may already be seeing the leading edge of this.
It wouldn't mean nobody would do any work, but it would mean that basically everyone would be a trust fund brat and able to work on whatever they want.
Truly intelligent beings would do that.
But so far we aren't known for being that intelligent. We will probably continue with means-justifies-the-end market fundamentalism, maybe with a bit of ham-fisted wealth redistribution done in an unfair and inefficient way thrown in to keep the masses from rioting too much.
Indeed. Our real problem is that of coordination, and that there is no easy path from here to there - if we keep just following the market's lead hoping it will magically solve everything, we're not going to get to that age of abundance.
Historically speaking, most of the philosophical question never got an answer by philosophy. They just tend to become obsolete as science advances -- and I consider any question regarding strong AI to be half philosophical by nature (100% unemployment can only happen with strong AI, otherwise we'd spend the last 0.0001% or whatever it is and focusing on developing strong AI)
With that in mind, there are a note: from what I've gathered from actual Machine learning and AI researchers, anything that resemble strong AI is not just far away, but ridiculously far away.
On a less tangent point: a lot of our economic system, and assumptions are based on a scarcity of resources (human labor is one of the scarcity). By the time automation could really take hold and realistically take over most of human's work, it seems to me that there are many things to be concern about rather than employment, and they depends on whether the model of economy is a scarcity or an abundance one, and whether it's actually sustainable or not etc.
AI comes up a lot but in my opinion there is no guarantee that it will ever actually exist.
AI is by definition is artificial and the lines between artificial and non-artificial will be blurred very soon as BCIs come around.
If we take all deceased people's brains and throw them in a pool of goop that allows them to talk to each other and connect them to a BCI so that they can communicate with the rest of the world, is that Artificial Intelligence?
I predict that we will have ultra-intelligent humans/transhumans and advanced AI might or might not ever come into existence.
As expected, DARPA is leading most of the BCI research programs at the moment. I'm not sure how I feel about Super Soldiers and modifying humans, that's a huge topic in itself.
That same concern existed 150 years ago and the truth is that we are still working the same amount of hours as before. We just don't do the same things for living.
There will always be jobs to do. Most of the manufacturing and repetitive jobs can be automated, but there will always be jobs that only humans can do. For instance, food can be processed by a machine, but I prefer to pay to see how a sushi master prepares each Nigiri for me. Or, would would someone prefer a massage chair rather than getting that massage from a human? Music? Arts? Design? All that things can be done by machines, but we will always prefer to get them from a human. Our lifestyle will change. Objects will loose value because they will be extremely cheap to produce and our jobs will be more focused towards services to other people.
What concerns me most is the inequality and how the richness produced by machines will flow though the society. With that level of automation in the industry it will be really easy for a few people to control the production of all the goods.
But this is something that has to be solved by the politics.
The human mind, while having less data storage, and being drastically slower for some types of problems, will stay significantly faster than computers at other types of problems.
We merely must learn to better teach those brains (matrix upload?), extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators) and utilize them for the problem sets they excel at.
> The human mind ... will stay significantly faster than computers at other types of problems
This is controversial. Semantic tagging of photographs used to be something that was done much better by the human brain, but all of a sudden it seems like computers are catching up fast. I hesitate to say there's any one domain that we won't be able to tackle algorithmically/via machine learning in some way.
> extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators)
My phone is already my artificial memory enhancement. Communication is via a high latency, unreliable interface, but it's (for all intents and purposes) an extension of my brain ;)
I'm happy to see people thinking about this sort of stuff.
I foresee a Constitutional Amendment limiting the amount of computational power any private person or entity can own. Each person, upon birth, would be granted a certain allotment of computational capacity. This computational capacity can be hired out, but you collect it's paycheck. If you take this to the logical extreme, everyone could own the robot that replaces them at their job, and live out their life collecting it's paycheck.
Check out Marshal Brain's "Manna", where the concentration of wealth nightmare scenario is taken to it's logical extreme. (I don't find the scenario very convincing, but the thought to get it there was useful.)
I really can't imagine 100% unemployment, because I think there will always be a demand for actual human people in some roles: hairdresser, waiter, singer, prostitute, masseuse, athlete, actor, croupier, etc.
Will robots/AI be good enough to do all these jobs? Sure, they might even be now. But as long as some people want to be sung to / served by / entertained by an actual flesh-and-blood human, there will still be employment in those sectors. In fact I wouldn't be surprised in the far future if those service positions were the most valuable in society, since that's where real scarcity will be.
Maybe some of these jobs won't be replaced with a robot, but will become completely irrelevant/unnecessary?
Instead of having a robot hairdresser, what if cutting hair wasn't even a thing? e.g. maybe we'll all get holo-wigs that let us change hairstyles as easily as profile pictures.
Similarly we don't talk to switchboard operators to enter URL in the browser addressbar. We've got AI that does it better and doesn't judge :)
Sure and there will always be some demand for horses for various purposes but the total demand for horse labour is way below its peak in 1915. Do you foresee any future technology which might reinvigorate the demand for horses?
Sometimes it is forgotten that what is of 'value' is what is inherently scarcer. Today, it just happens that there is a shortage of automating agents (programmers, AI scientists etc.), once this opportunities (STEM) become common, they won't hold much value, and humans will value what is the next scarce thing (Hand crafts, Arts ? The future will tell)
We also need to remind ourselves, that the rich cannot feel rich without an army of poor underneath them. I can guarantee having the very rich people shielded from the rest is actually not an evolution of our race.
This whole thing - I can see it coming and am fully convinced that it will. I just can't work out how to leverage that insight for personal benefit (not millions just modest advantage). Feels a little weird for once I'm ahead of the curve & recognise it as such but still can't seem to leverage it. My profession isn't anywhere near AI or even tech so it's a little difficult.
That's exactly what I feel too. Having this knowledge allows me for slightly more than just telling people that the end is nigh. I don't see the way to either leverage that knowledge to safeguard myself and my friends/family, or (preferably) do something to safegurad the society at large. It's easy for me to notice now when people around me, or even I myself do the Moloch's bidding, but I can't see a way to contribute to fight against it.
"You and I and everybody else, if the present trends continue, will be selling what we do to the highest bidder."
That's how its supposed to work. The problem here is not "selling what we do to the highest bidder", its the "You and I and everyone else". If you are competing against "everyone else" then the highest bid is going to be pretty low.
The article alludes to one core bastion of economics - "the invisible hand", without mentioning another - "as humans, we are creatures of infinite wants".
With that in mind, a computer can never truly replace a human, as there would never be a purpose in creating a machine that 'wants' things that are different to its owner. Along the same lines, as robots fulfil each current human want, new wants will simply emerge.
A trite example - A robot that cleans my floor satisfies a current want, but I want a robot that cleans my whole house - every surface. After that's fulfilled, I'm likely to want a robot that can reconfigure the house based on my predicted needs, and after that, a robot that works in conjunction with others to make sure my preferred dwelling config is available in the right place and the right time every night. I'm likely to keep working in my job to have this, and my career will no doubt evolve to reflect the group need that people have for these robots.
The selfless robot in Interstellar is a realistic scenario - incredibly helpful, but programmed to want what its owners want. Imagine endless configurations of that - I think it's a likely future.
'Stupid' machines have been replacing humans since the industrial revolution, but humans have just taken a position higher up the chain. The article claims that 'smart' machines will end this process - I disagree. The greed of human nature will mean we always have to work.
> I'm likely to keep working in my job to have this
You are assuming that humans will remain better at developing towards the remaining non-automated desires of humans. That is unlikely. When a robot is able to reconfigure your house to meet predicted desires, you will probably (and most people will certainly) no longer be relevant in any job that you (or they) are capable of performing.
Anyway, that doesn't matter. What matters is that even if you are a super elite engineer that can compete a few years longer than the average joe, that doesn't fix the problem for some % >50 of the population that are already being rapidly obsoleted.
You're rather missing the point; when robots are intelligent enough to replace you, you won't have a job nor will anyone else. All your new wants will handled by robot works, if you can still afford them now that you're out of work. This idea that there's always new work for humans will not hold once we have AI; that's the whole point.
I think there has to be some kind of massive leap before we get to that state, regardless i we'll get creative freedom to do whatever we please and excel in things we might not have been interested in earlier as they had no "economic value".
Obviously its going to be a journey before the masses will get used to not working as they have been all their lives.
There's that old joke about a Lisp programmer who's looking for a job - "will write code that writes code that writes code that writes code for money" ;).
Google has cars that are about to kill the entire transportation industry. Amazon already reduced the workers in some of its warehouses to biomechanical grabbing hands; all higher-order functions are performed by robots. No, I don't think we're giving too much credit to robots.
Just because it happened twice--from ag to factories from factories to service--doesn't mean there will be a huge new need for employment. In the past, human consumption just increased. I'm not so sure there will be a need for all that much more consumption. If the promise of near human level AI occurs, we'd need to have exponential growth in consumption to keep up the pace.
Also, a lot of those jobs disappeared forever in the third world and never came back. Ag jobs were never really replaced with manufacturing job. Only now are some third world countries getting manufacturing jobs. If they are replaced with automated manufacturing those coding, engineering, and management jobs will go to the first world.
So maybe it works out for America and Europe. But someplace like Indonesia and India get permafucked yet again by a new industrial revolution.
Agriculture provides for the basic needs of humans. What do humans do once their basic needs are met? Some of them go on to do meaningful things that expand the human condition, such as devoting themselves to the arts and the sciences. The vast majority of them turn to zero-sum status games.
This is a serious problem, because the more physical wealth can be provided by robots, the more those status games necessarily become about obtaining power over other humans. This puts capitalism, as an enabler of this kind of status games, on a path to escalating conflict not just with democracy but with human rights.
Of course, many would say that this is already happening. For now, the conflict is simply at a level where human rights violations and everything that goes with it can still be exported to third world countries.
This argument keeps coming up. The problem is this is based on exactly one data point. So saying "historically..." is hardly relevant!
The automation that is happening now has never happened in the history of the human race. You simply cannot extrapolate from past events and say it'll be like that again.
There is little doubt that there is work for everyone. Problem is if there is profitable work for everyone.
For example, you will find countless people to help dig various archeological site, help processing the various museum collection still hidden in boxed, ...
Also "historically" is misleading. Historically the industrial revolution was one of the worst period to live - the conversion of those 90% to the industry was not a happy story. And the post-war golden age was after the worst wars ever.
We are also dealing with some hard limit this time. On the production side, we are hitting earth physical limit on about everything. Even on the consumer side, we are hitting some limit, even for virtual activities, there are only 24 hour a day for you to consume.
History is good to remind you to be optimistic. However, history is not a solution: some guy in 100 year may look back at this period as another great time in human history, but that's down to us find the details on how to achieve it.
Yes, but automation is getting better. "Historically always been the case" is a deceptive panacea. It isn't inconceivable to imagine that it might start eating into knowledge-based work even more, continually shrinking the percentage of the population that is employable regardless of talent or education. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing (10 hour work weeks anyone?), unfortunately, the current world economy isn't set up to handle this transition well.
The difference is, previous automation replaced human muscle. Today's automation replaces human brain.
Of course, it does it gradually. So you see low-skilled jobs disappearing, and no useful jobs being created in their place. As this process continues, I expect we'll be facing a growing number of people trapped in poverty who have no means and abilities to retrain themselves for jobs with more skill requirements.
[+] [-] treelovinhippie|11 years ago|reply
Imagine a company-wide incentive structure for automation whereby if you automate 90-100% of your job, you receive massive bonuses. If you completely automate your job, the bonus could be the entirety of your annual salary as a single payout. Or perhaps a combination of bonus and equity.
So now you're out of a job. But if you can automate other jobs in the organisation, you also get bonuses.
Eventually the majority of the company becomes automated, hopefully generating the same or greater revenue and value for customers, with less overhead costs. Which is great for any stakeholders who can continue to receive revenues, but terrible for employees. So it would be good to include some kind of equity and/or revenue sharing model. The sell could then be "hey, let's all work together to automate this company, we'll get bonuses for doing so, and when the whole thing is automated we can continue to receive income while sitting on the beach".
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
- If you automate away your non-tech co-worker (someone who can't contribute much to the automation of jobs other than his own), will he get the bonus? If so, how do you assure people doing the automating won't feel treated unfairly as the non-tech guy just got bonuses for doing nothing?
- If someone automates you away, will you get anything? Will you be angry?
- If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away? (assume for a moment that you have the most difficult to automate job in the company)
I mean... this could work if you'd manage to set up incentives so that everyone in the company works together and not against each other. But I'm not sure how to do this, especially in a way which doesn't leave anybody feeling he's being treated unfairly.
[+] [-] CarVac|11 years ago|reply
How do you compensate those who lose their jobs as a result? What if they were also trying, but just happened to not be first to succeed?
It's a really cool idea though. (As a manufacturing engineer in a fairly old-fashioned company, I am currently trying to automate as much as possible; no idea yet about individual bonuses since I'm <1 year on the job)
[+] [-] craigyk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtirloni|11 years ago|reply
At a company I worked for, after they realized that things couldn't go on anymore without massive automation, their first approach was to introduce it into the infrastructure lifecycle and require all new infrastructure to be heavily automated. That allowed the legacy stuff to die slowly without much disturbance.
Another different idea entirely would be spin off a subsidiary with those ideals and slowly migrate the work there. Perhaps too much work, but if the situation is desperate enough..
[+] [-] udfalkso|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] norswap|11 years ago|reply
The whole thing derives from these flawed premises. Machines are incredibly dumb. Even these machine-learning wizz-things. They can do statistics, inferences, correlations. That's very very far from enough, especially for something like programming, which we can see as turning a spec into code. First, one still has to write a spec (so the "programming" isn't totally gone). Second, it means you essentially need to have "solved" natural language processing; as well as have assigned semantic values to linguistic constructs. Good luck with that.
At this point, I feel compelled to point out that humans don't agree on the meanings of what they say. Most of the time, humans can't write software that meets a spec. That's because of ambiguity, and machines are way way worse at dealing with that than humans are.
I think the error is simply to think the current rate of progress will keep going (and actually even the idea that there's been an acceleration of progress in AI recently is an illusion -- what we're seeing is increased application). It's the same error the fathers of AI made when they assumed everything would be solved in a matter of years. That's where the expression "AI winter" comes from.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
> Machines are incredibly dumb. Even these machine-learning wizz-things. They can do statistics, inferences, correlations.
Do you think human brain does something more? All we can do is statistics, inferences and correlations, and we do it poorly.
Moreover, there is an even bigger problem than 100% automation of everything - namely, the automation of 50% of jobs. What are we going to do with half of the society being unable to find any job? And that most likely includes your or mine parents, siblings and friends, who will no doubt come to us techies for assistance. And if current trends continue, it's 10 years away, not 100.
[+] [-] elihu|11 years ago|reply
Languages, debugging tools, version control systems and bug trackers are all rapidly reducing the number of developer-hours required to implement a given program, which we should expect to reduce the size of the programmer workforce eventually if we can't find new things for them to do.
It is possible that we will find enough new problems for programmers to solve to counteract increased productivity, but for many applications, most of the general problems that one would hire a programmer to do already have reasonable-quality solutions. I think we'll see smaller and smaller teams of hyper-productive developers working on a shrinking set of increasingly esoteric projects, or things with a single specialized use (like calculating taxes for that particular year).
[+] [-] oconnore|11 years ago|reply
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-...
[+] [-] api|11 years ago|reply
Even before things get as extreme as effectively "100% unemployment," I could certainly see a massive drop in the need for labor. We may already be seeing the leading edge of this.
It wouldn't mean nobody would do any work, but it would mean that basically everyone would be a trust fund brat and able to work on whatever they want.
Truly intelligent beings would do that.
But so far we aren't known for being that intelligent. We will probably continue with means-justifies-the-end market fundamentalism, maybe with a bit of ham-fisted wealth redistribution done in an unfair and inefficient way thrown in to keep the masses from rioting too much.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NhanH|11 years ago|reply
With that in mind, there are a note: from what I've gathered from actual Machine learning and AI researchers, anything that resemble strong AI is not just far away, but ridiculously far away.
On a less tangent point: a lot of our economic system, and assumptions are based on a scarcity of resources (human labor is one of the scarcity). By the time automation could really take hold and realistically take over most of human's work, it seems to me that there are many things to be concern about rather than employment, and they depends on whether the model of economy is a scarcity or an abundance one, and whether it's actually sustainable or not etc.
[+] [-] dm2|11 years ago|reply
AI is by definition is artificial and the lines between artificial and non-artificial will be blurred very soon as BCIs come around.
If we take all deceased people's brains and throw them in a pool of goop that allows them to talk to each other and connect them to a BCI so that they can communicate with the rest of the world, is that Artificial Intelligence?
I predict that we will have ultra-intelligent humans/transhumans and advanced AI might or might not ever come into existence.
As expected, DARPA is leading most of the BCI research programs at the moment. I'm not sure how I feel about Super Soldiers and modifying humans, that's a huge topic in itself.
[+] [-] leereeves|11 years ago|reply
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6t6t6|11 years ago|reply
There will always be jobs to do. Most of the manufacturing and repetitive jobs can be automated, but there will always be jobs that only humans can do. For instance, food can be processed by a machine, but I prefer to pay to see how a sushi master prepares each Nigiri for me. Or, would would someone prefer a massage chair rather than getting that massage from a human? Music? Arts? Design? All that things can be done by machines, but we will always prefer to get them from a human. Our lifestyle will change. Objects will loose value because they will be extremely cheap to produce and our jobs will be more focused towards services to other people.
What concerns me most is the inequality and how the richness produced by machines will flow though the society. With that level of automation in the industry it will be really easy for a few people to control the production of all the goods.
But this is something that has to be solved by the politics.
[+] [-] hodwik|11 years ago|reply
We merely must learn to better teach those brains (matrix upload?), extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators) and utilize them for the problem sets they excel at.
[+] [-] Osmium|11 years ago|reply
This is controversial. Semantic tagging of photographs used to be something that was done much better by the human brain, but all of a sudden it seems like computers are catching up fast. I hesitate to say there's any one domain that we won't be able to tackle algorithmically/via machine learning in some way.
> extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators)
My phone is already my artificial memory enhancement. Communication is via a high latency, unreliable interface, but it's (for all intents and purposes) an extension of my brain ;)
[+] [-] javajosh|11 years ago|reply
I foresee a Constitutional Amendment limiting the amount of computational power any private person or entity can own. Each person, upon birth, would be granted a certain allotment of computational capacity. This computational capacity can be hired out, but you collect it's paycheck. If you take this to the logical extreme, everyone could own the robot that replaces them at their job, and live out their life collecting it's paycheck.
Check out Marshal Brain's "Manna", where the concentration of wealth nightmare scenario is taken to it's logical extreme. (I don't find the scenario very convincing, but the thought to get it there was useful.)
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
[+] [-] patmcc|11 years ago|reply
Will robots/AI be good enough to do all these jobs? Sure, they might even be now. But as long as some people want to be sung to / served by / entertained by an actual flesh-and-blood human, there will still be employment in those sectors. In fact I wouldn't be surprised in the far future if those service positions were the most valuable in society, since that's where real scarcity will be.
[+] [-] pornel|11 years ago|reply
Instead of having a robot hairdresser, what if cutting hair wasn't even a thing? e.g. maybe we'll all get holo-wigs that let us change hairstyles as easily as profile pictures.
Similarly we don't talk to switchboard operators to enter URL in the browser addressbar. We've got AI that does it better and doesn't judge :)
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|11 years ago|reply
waiter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBuIhH9aaSA
singer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kM3n64WJmo
prostitute: soon (fleshlight+occulus)
masseuse: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BXJZB2/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...
athlete: http://robogames.net/index.php
actor: there are tons of CGI actors in movies
croupier: slot machines, video poker, etc
[+] [-] netvisao|11 years ago|reply
We also need to remind ourselves, that the rich cannot feel rich without an army of poor underneath them. I can guarantee having the very rich people shielded from the rest is actually not an evolution of our race.
[+] [-] Havoc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|11 years ago|reply
That's how its supposed to work. The problem here is not "selling what we do to the highest bidder", its the "You and I and everyone else". If you are competing against "everyone else" then the highest bid is going to be pretty low.
[+] [-] slagfart|11 years ago|reply
With that in mind, a computer can never truly replace a human, as there would never be a purpose in creating a machine that 'wants' things that are different to its owner. Along the same lines, as robots fulfil each current human want, new wants will simply emerge.
A trite example - A robot that cleans my floor satisfies a current want, but I want a robot that cleans my whole house - every surface. After that's fulfilled, I'm likely to want a robot that can reconfigure the house based on my predicted needs, and after that, a robot that works in conjunction with others to make sure my preferred dwelling config is available in the right place and the right time every night. I'm likely to keep working in my job to have this, and my career will no doubt evolve to reflect the group need that people have for these robots.
The selfless robot in Interstellar is a realistic scenario - incredibly helpful, but programmed to want what its owners want. Imagine endless configurations of that - I think it's a likely future.
'Stupid' machines have been replacing humans since the industrial revolution, but humans have just taken a position higher up the chain. The article claims that 'smart' machines will end this process - I disagree. The greed of human nature will mean we always have to work.
Edited for phrasing.
[+] [-] oconnore|11 years ago|reply
You are assuming that humans will remain better at developing towards the remaining non-automated desires of humans. That is unlikely. When a robot is able to reconfigure your house to meet predicted desires, you will probably (and most people will certainly) no longer be relevant in any job that you (or they) are capable of performing.
Anyway, that doesn't matter. What matters is that even if you are a super elite engineer that can compete a few years longer than the average joe, that doesn't fix the problem for some % >50 of the population that are already being rapidly obsoleted.
[+] [-] gnaritas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moe|11 years ago|reply
The question is what happens when we approach the end of that chain.
[+] [-] sparaker|11 years ago|reply
Obviously its going to be a journey before the masses will get used to not working as they have been all their lives.
[+] [-] moe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jtwebman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cranklin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rhino369|11 years ago|reply
Also, a lot of those jobs disappeared forever in the third world and never came back. Ag jobs were never really replaced with manufacturing job. Only now are some third world countries getting manufacturing jobs. If they are replaced with automated manufacturing those coding, engineering, and management jobs will go to the first world.
So maybe it works out for America and Europe. But someplace like Indonesia and India get permafucked yet again by a new industrial revolution.
[+] [-] nhaehnle|11 years ago|reply
This is a serious problem, because the more physical wealth can be provided by robots, the more those status games necessarily become about obtaining power over other humans. This puts capitalism, as an enabler of this kind of status games, on a path to escalating conflict not just with democracy but with human rights.
Of course, many would say that this is already happening. For now, the conflict is simply at a level where human rights violations and everything that goes with it can still be exported to third world countries.
[+] [-] wvenable|11 years ago|reply
The automation that is happening now has never happened in the history of the human race. You simply cannot extrapolate from past events and say it'll be like that again.
[+] [-] gutnor|11 years ago|reply
For example, you will find countless people to help dig various archeological site, help processing the various museum collection still hidden in boxed, ...
Also "historically" is misleading. Historically the industrial revolution was one of the worst period to live - the conversion of those 90% to the industry was not a happy story. And the post-war golden age was after the worst wars ever.
We are also dealing with some hard limit this time. On the production side, we are hitting earth physical limit on about everything. Even on the consumer side, we are hitting some limit, even for virtual activities, there are only 24 hour a day for you to consume.
History is good to remind you to be optimistic. However, history is not a solution: some guy in 100 year may look back at this period as another great time in human history, but that's down to us find the details on how to achieve it.
[+] [-] craigyk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
Of course, it does it gradually. So you see low-skilled jobs disappearing, and no useful jobs being created in their place. As this process continues, I expect we'll be facing a growing number of people trapped in poverty who have no means and abilities to retrain themselves for jobs with more skill requirements.