"It could be said that the job of bridge toll collector was invented in San Francisco."
Romans did collect taxes for using a bridge 2.000 years ago.
There was the alternative of crossing the river yourself or hiring someone to do it(ferrymen).
I have been working in automation for a while. It is true that companies could fire more and more people and replace it with robots because they are less expensive.
It is also true that now people could compete with big guys much cheaper because robots will become dirt cheap. We are starting to see with 3d printers(that are robots themselves).
War has started, big guys are ok with people playing with toys in their basements, but want to make it illegal for small guys to compete with them.
This is what software and business patents are about. Only big guys, most of whom were in the past little guys , creating a legislation in order to make it impossible for newcomers to do with them what they did to others in the past.
"Will robots cause unemployment or create new types of jobs and increased leisure time for humans?"
Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment among farm hands. On the other hand, rich countries would not have the same standard of living they have today if half their labor forces were on farms.
Anyway, consumer's hunger increases with productivity increases. In 20 years, when even more robots than we already have are deployed, we will all want more complex, highly integrated stuff, requiring the same amount of employment to produce.
Anyone who doesn't believe me, think back to the days before interchangeable parts. We could live that way today and have lots of free time, but we apparently don't choose to. We have higher standards, want more diverse food, more complex entertainment, cleaner everything, fancier, more decorated houses, vehicles with more features.
Additional robots - on top of the ones of which we already have lots of - won't take away jobs, they will deliver us finer consumer items and health standards.
IAN FLETCHER: Libertarians simply don't know their history. Take out a $10 bill and have a look at the portrait on it. Alexander Hamilton, founding father and intellectual architect of American capitalism, was a protectionist, and protectionism was American policy from Independence until after WWII.
if everything gets replaced by bots, how will the economy run given that much of it is because of employees getting paid and in turn spending that money?
Most interesting possibility: there will be an inflection point in the way we do production & distribution. The capital costs and inefficiencies of distributed production fall every day (internet to distribute knowledge, ever-advancing low-N fabrication technology) while the disadvantages of centralized production increase (capital is becoming more important, labor less important, meaning the average split of the proceeds is ever more extractive). At some point people on the bottom rungs will find it advantageous to work for "communes" instead of employers. Scare quotes because there's a lot of back-to-nature & peacenik baggage associated with the word "commune" that doesn't necessarily apply here -- it's just a different structure for production and employment that avoids the deleveraging effects of forcing people to compete for a spot in a shrinking global pool of jobs. The communes I'm picturing would make heavy use of industrial technology and compete against one another for people by advertising the benefits they offer vs the labor required for membership.
Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market.
Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem.
Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.
This is a major question that has no real answer but can potentially be a big problem. Robots and "the future" are great and all but what is in store for a society that has no work/purpose to do? Some of this stuff I feel requires a closer look with regulation and maybe some checks in morality and weighing what's the greater good.
At some point, we will have to accept that a society based on the assumption that everyone should find a full-time job just doesn't make sense anymore. In Europe this is starting to become obvious, as we have high structural unemployment (very high in some countries) in spite of the jobs we keep just for the sake of it. Jobs like gas station operators or supermarket cashiers are mostly unnecessary and just kept because people boycott machines while there is unemployment, telemarketing could probably be banned altogether with everyone being the happier for it if it weren't for the loss of thousands of jobs, etc. This applies even to some intellectually-demanding jobs (not all): speaking against my own interest as professor in a small university, I often wonder if all the teaching we do is necessary when any of my neighbors with a PC is a couple of clicks away from lectures by the top professors at MIT.
At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this.
I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.
Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave.
No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates.
Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners.
We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.
> But they note that the boundaries of what counts as routine and non-routine are moving all the time. It was once thought that driving was a skill so complex it couldn’t be automated only to see it turned on its head by Google and others.
What happens when programming becomes routine? I expect there will be a very scary moment when we all realize that someone with the right resources has discovered the right learning algorithm, before all of us plebes die.
This shouldn't be downvoted, it's a legitimate question: what if non-programmer domain experts had sufficient tools to program whatever they wanted done. This actually has happened on the cloud: no small sized organization needs to set up their own servers. Server maintenance has become literally done by robots. (Someone wrote a script, the script does the maintenance and abstracts the server hardware away from you.)
In programming languages, there has never been a push toward easy programming. Everyone thinks it's great to make people do useless work to become an expert before being able to achieve anything. Elegant, simple, obvious syntax like Python that is suitable for beginners makes programmers scowl: to the point that they would like to require users to learn a new non-obvious meaning for a semicolon, and put it at the end of each and every instruction they write. (Just one of many, many examples, other examples being library and package management, nature of error messages, interfaces, API's, etc etc etc. Everything is about making things harder, to the point that you would be mistaken for thinking that "require user to spend more than 15 seconds interacting with documentation before achieving what is obvious and easy using our solution" is a design requirement.)
I would say that a lot of programmers could program their job out of existence if they wanted to.
At that point in time, the robot understand the real world well enough to implement it in software and make your software and real world exceptions match up.
At this point it's basically "We welcome our computer overlords." and not only programming will be at risk.
A lot of programming has become routine. Think of all the programming involved to build even a 1/10th of the functionality of what can be created, literally, in a single command. Yet anyone who is acquainted to programming and web dev would say that running the Rails generator does not obviate the use of programming. And for those who are relatively experienced, this automation is a huge benefit, allowing the programmer to focus on designing more features and expending more of their creative energy on non-routine work.
In other words, as some programming tasks becomes routine, many more non-routine tasks become available to us.
> They all float the idea of basic guaranteed incomes for everyone, or tax credits to supplement low-wage workers.
Yeah, just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach. It's so disappointing to see otherwise smart people ending up with these kind of conclusions.
> just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach
Early retirement wasn't an option for those farmers - they had to find a way to support themselves or their families. As a result they took up desk jobs (many of which are, in the broader view of things unnecessary) in the city. When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? Into manual labor? That's pretty ripe for automation as well.
There is a difference though. Tractors can take away some farm jobs. Robots will become increasingly versatile. They'll eventually be able to take away all retail jobs, all the low skill jobs. Then eventually, higher skill jobs too.
What will be left for humans to do? Art? Sex work? We might be able to build robots to do that as well.
Currently, if a company disposes of all of its workers and replaces them by robots (minus a bit of left human staff for administration), the profits end up entirely in the pockets of the owners instead of getting redistributed to the working population.
Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits or, better, as guaranteed income.
Otherwise funds will accumulate in the hands of a very few and not be put into any productive use - hell, just look at Apple's cash reserves, Apple alone could bail out Greece and even profit from it. Currently, the Apple money is just lying around and doing nothing productive at all.
I don't really get the idea of a robot tax, why make special rules for one particular type of productivity? Should accountants that use better software also pay higher taxes than less efficient accountants that use simple calculators and paper?
>Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax";
Well, we have a lot of "robots" in the house. We can listen to music via Compact Disc robots or mp3 iPod robots instead of employing human musicians to play live music. For example, composer Haydn's job was the "on call" music director for the family estate.
We also run take our C++ or Java code and let our personal desktop robots of file systems submit them to compilers to parse and execute the source code. The acts of "cl helloworld.cpp" or "javac hellowold.java" puts many human punch card operators out of work.
The elevator robots with automatic safety doors and algorithmic braking systems replacing elevator attendants manually closing the gates and guiding the elevator to the right floor. Robot freon compressors replacing ice delivery men. Etc,
I don't think people realize the oppressive nature of all the robot taxes we'd pay unless we listed every "robot" we interact with that replaced human jobs.
So long as you need to work to provide yourself with food and shelter, they are. And since we as a society put so much value on how one contributes to society (i.e. their job), it's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
Probably not the secretary, accountant or dispatcher whom they replace. And for every programmer created to develop for these devices, there will be 10, 100, even 1,000 desk jobs which will vanish.
The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers; the rest will be left to fend for themselves - to find another meaningless job with a tiny wage, so they can live.
This, as something of a tangent, is why I support basic income.
Someone has to program a specific task for a specific robot. Then that can be copied over almost instantly all over the world to thousands or more physical robots.
Making a copy of the software for a robot can be considered as cheap as sending an e-mail. Hardware is hard, but that might change too in the near future.
I'd be interested in how the economics will work, since we already sometimes have silly pricing for software/music/eBooks. Piracy/DRM for robots?
If a lot of people went into programming, then it would become the new working class.
In places like India or Argentina, the median salary for programmers and computer scientists is really low(1/20th of theUS). Its only a stronghold for so long.
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|10 years ago|reply
Romans did collect taxes for using a bridge 2.000 years ago.
There was the alternative of crossing the river yourself or hiring someone to do it(ferrymen).
I have been working in automation for a while. It is true that companies could fire more and more people and replace it with robots because they are less expensive.
It is also true that now people could compete with big guys much cheaper because robots will become dirt cheap. We are starting to see with 3d printers(that are robots themselves).
War has started, big guys are ok with people playing with toys in their basements, but want to make it illegal for small guys to compete with them.
This is what software and business patents are about. Only big guys, most of whom were in the past little guys , creating a legislation in order to make it impossible for newcomers to do with them what they did to others in the past.
[+] [-] massysett|10 years ago|reply
Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment among farm hands. On the other hand, rich countries would not have the same standard of living they have today if half their labor forces were on farms.
[+] [-] chillingeffect|10 years ago|reply
Anyway, consumer's hunger increases with productivity increases. In 20 years, when even more robots than we already have are deployed, we will all want more complex, highly integrated stuff, requiring the same amount of employment to produce.
Anyone who doesn't believe me, think back to the days before interchangeable parts. We could live that way today and have lots of free time, but we apparently don't choose to. We have higher standards, want more diverse food, more complex entertainment, cleaner everything, fancier, more decorated houses, vehicles with more features.
Additional robots - on top of the ones of which we already have lots of - won't take away jobs, they will deliver us finer consumer items and health standards.
[+] [-] SixSigma|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: I'm not some ranting nut job
http://www.freetradedoesntwork.com/
IAN FLETCHER: Libertarians simply don't know their history. Take out a $10 bill and have a look at the portrait on it. Alexander Hamilton, founding father and intellectual architect of American capitalism, was a protectionist, and protectionism was American policy from Independence until after WWII.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/free-trade-does...
[+] [-] miralabs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|10 years ago|reply
Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market.
Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem.
Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.
[+] [-] manigandham|10 years ago|reply
CGP Grey had a decent video explaining some of the points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|10 years ago|reply
At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this.
I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.
[+] [-] Qantourisc|10 years ago|reply
But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D
Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.
[+] [-] DannoHung|10 years ago|reply
Compulsory sterilization for those unable to fulfill the needs of their children is a thing even today.
Well, that or we could destroy capitalism as we know it. But only dirty socialists want that to happen here on Hacker News.
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|10 years ago|reply
Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave.
No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates.
Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners.
We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.
[+] [-] Roritharr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glaberficken|10 years ago|reply
Sorry, i get these random thoughts in my head sometimes! :P
[1] http://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictu...
[+] [-] salmonellaeater|10 years ago|reply
What happens when programming becomes routine? I expect there will be a very scary moment when we all realize that someone with the right resources has discovered the right learning algorithm, before all of us plebes die.
[+] [-] logicallee|10 years ago|reply
In programming languages, there has never been a push toward easy programming. Everyone thinks it's great to make people do useless work to become an expert before being able to achieve anything. Elegant, simple, obvious syntax like Python that is suitable for beginners makes programmers scowl: to the point that they would like to require users to learn a new non-obvious meaning for a semicolon, and put it at the end of each and every instruction they write. (Just one of many, many examples, other examples being library and package management, nature of error messages, interfaces, API's, etc etc etc. Everything is about making things harder, to the point that you would be mistaken for thinking that "require user to spend more than 15 seconds interacting with documentation before achieving what is obvious and easy using our solution" is a design requirement.)
I would say that a lot of programmers could program their job out of existence if they wanted to.
[+] [-] Qantourisc|10 years ago|reply
At this point it's basically "We welcome our computer overlords." and not only programming will be at risk.
[+] [-] danso|10 years ago|reply
In other words, as some programming tasks becomes routine, many more non-routine tasks become available to us.
[+] [-] uuilly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|10 years ago|reply
> They all float the idea of basic guaranteed incomes for everyone, or tax credits to supplement low-wage workers.
Yeah, just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach. It's so disappointing to see otherwise smart people ending up with these kind of conclusions.
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
Early retirement wasn't an option for those farmers - they had to find a way to support themselves or their families. As a result they took up desk jobs (many of which are, in the broader view of things unnecessary) in the city. When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? Into manual labor? That's pretty ripe for automation as well.
[+] [-] tachyonbeam|10 years ago|reply
What will be left for humans to do? Art? Sex work? We might be able to build robots to do that as well.
[+] [-] suttree|10 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/@somewhere/how-i-learned-to-relax-and-sto...
[+] [-] mschuster91|10 years ago|reply
Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits or, better, as guaranteed income.
Otherwise funds will accumulate in the hands of a very few and not be put into any productive use - hell, just look at Apple's cash reserves, Apple alone could bail out Greece and even profit from it. Currently, the Apple money is just lying around and doing nothing productive at all.
[+] [-] maxerickson|10 years ago|reply
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1246081-apple-does-not-have-...
I don't really get the idea of a robot tax, why make special rules for one particular type of productivity? Should accountants that use better software also pay higher taxes than less efficient accountants that use simple calculators and paper?
[+] [-] jasode|10 years ago|reply
Well, we have a lot of "robots" in the house. We can listen to music via Compact Disc robots or mp3 iPod robots instead of employing human musicians to play live music. For example, composer Haydn's job was the "on call" music director for the family estate.
We also run take our C++ or Java code and let our personal desktop robots of file systems submit them to compilers to parse and execute the source code. The acts of "cl helloworld.cpp" or "javac hellowold.java" puts many human punch card operators out of work.
The elevator robots with automatic safety doors and algorithmic braking systems replacing elevator attendants manually closing the gates and guiding the elevator to the right floor. Robot freon compressors replacing ice delivery men. Etc,
I don't think people realize the oppressive nature of all the robot taxes we'd pay unless we listed every "robot" we interact with that replaced human jobs.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gress|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] branchless|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shit_parade2|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] callum85|10 years ago|reply
These aren't mutually exclusive.
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers; the rest will be left to fend for themselves - to find another meaningless job with a tiny wage, so they can live.
This, as something of a tangent, is why I support basic income.
[+] [-] deathy|10 years ago|reply
Making a copy of the software for a robot can be considered as cheap as sending an e-mail. Hardware is hard, but that might change too in the near future.
I'd be interested in how the economics will work, since we already sometimes have silly pricing for software/music/eBooks. Piracy/DRM for robots?
[+] [-] conanbatt|10 years ago|reply
In places like India or Argentina, the median salary for programmers and computer scientists is really low(1/20th of theUS). Its only a stronghold for so long.