I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full "general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite recent advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e. adding more columns to a matrix), we don't really have anything that even approaches an artificial general intelligence. What we do have is a suite of sophisticated statistical algorithms that basically perform regression using huge data sets. This often approximates some subset of what a general artifical intelligence could do for some use cases that mostly apply to recognizing fuzzy patterns. But it's not even close to approaching human-level intelligence.
In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the "pattern recognition" aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity (apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to play Go.)
I don't doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously threaten human usefulness/dignity, but I question the timeline of "decades away".
Here's the thing: let's say that AI never advances past its current level of sophistication (circa March 2017), but it does continue to get cheaper and more ubiquitous. It seems clear to me at this point that even this may already be enough to replace many agriculture jobs, transportation jobs, manufacturing jobs, retail jobs, and perhaps even some higher level jobs in healthcare and law. Even though it's "just" neural nets and fancy statistics, that already seems to be enough to put maybe a quarter, or even third, of educated people in the developed world out of work. Nevermind billions of others in developing countries.
Women nearly doubled the workforce within a couple of generations, but the sky never fell. And that shift was largely precipitated by technological advances, such as the washing machine, reduced infant mortality, and birth control.
In as much as doubling the workforce is similar to halving the number of jobs in pre-existing categories, I don't see the sky falling. Like with women joining the workforce, the shift to more automation will stimulate new kinds of labor demand. And it's similarly likely to make education even more important and relevant.
That said, women joining the workforce is perhaps the single largest contributor to long-term stagnant wage growth. Such shifts are unlikely to prove the end of labor, but they do create significant displacement that requires serious attention. Nothing about the "free market" guarantees that the economy and labor system will adjust quickly enough within timespans relevant to maintaining the well-being of the individuals displaced.
I don't really think there'll be anything particularly challenging about the next shift. In simple terms I don't see how it could be much more problematic than the addition of women to the domestic workforce immediately followed by hundreds of millions of Chinese laborers joining the global industrial economy. We just don't appreciate how disruptive those historical events were because, despite the weak U.S. response (as compared to Germany), even unassisted the labor economy did a decent job of treading water. It's quite amazing in retrospect.
Theoretically we could learn from our past mistakes and not only adjust but come out ahead in terms of income growth and equality. OTOH, we could not learn from our past mistakes, and our current issues would only be compounded. On this I'm much more pessimistic. When the electorate and political culture still pine for a labor economy that is 2 or 3 epochs in the past (i.e. ancient history!), that doesn't bode well for their ability to commit to the demands of the future.
Even worse is the fact that the intellectual class seems oblivious that history is merely repeating itself. The books about robots and labor literally have almost identical titles to books I read in the 1990s in college seminars discussing the implications of women, China, the information economy, and of course the rise of robots. Some of them were written in the 1980s. One famous book, "The End of Work" (Jermey Rifkin, 1994) could probably be re-published today with nary an edit. People would find it just as timely and insightful as they did then, and it'll prove just as irrelevant 25 years from now as it is today. We saw neither the dystopia nor the paradise he envisioned, but rather (as always) a slow, systematic, and largely hidden reorganization of the labor economy that became evident, if at all, only in hindsight.
For this reason, I wouldn't be surprised if AI actually generate more work, at least for most of our lifetime. People that will supervise and correct AI errors while/after they process data, while current jobs mostly stays "until the AI is ready to actually take over".
If this makes you laugh, you have probably never worked in the public sector or big corps.
The problem is that the financial performance and massive inertia of these organizations are becoming such financial liabilities that our economies will be held back by organizational / cultural and technical debt at the same time in these organizations. I've been observing the trend for the past decade where the top tech companies are accelerating in output while most of the large institutions are falling further and further behind. Intel can keep pushing all the way to the theoretical limits of silicon for transistor size, but the economic costs including just sheer interest on fab facilities alone of getting there would bankrupt the company or hurt its credit rating.
To put it into a more concrete analogy, Google is putting out autonomous cars when tons of companies are celebrating releasing the Model T or are still currently developing it with massive delays and cost overruns. Meanwhile, much of the appetite for government spending is dwindling for various reasons and this will cause a lot of strife that hurts already-slow moving organizations. Furthermore, brand recognition by the current generation of entrepreneurs for old hat technology companies is looking absolutely horrific. The next Fortune 500 CEOs 30 years from now are likely in their 30s or 40s now and they're well aware of the lack of compelling vision by so-called "technology" companies that are really just technology re-sellers and are thus unsuitable partners for increasingly tech-reliant businesses (the few that don't have such plans may be so clueless they won't matter).
He addresses this as that AI would be a poor hunter-gatherer, but is actually quite good already at specialized low thought jobs, and there are enough of those out there to cause some economic instability.
Furthermore, AI doesn't have to be 100% error free and spectacularly outperform every human, it just has to be cheaper and as-good or better than the average worker. I can think of a good number of coworkers in past jobs that are ripe for automating away - its just a matter of time when it becomes cheap enough to implement. These jobs are not high thought jobs but the ones where the rules are already set and they just follow them.
On the other hand, our society is getting more and more complex, and tasks are getting more and more specific. At the same time, organizations are structuring themselves so that employees are hyper-specialized and are only allowed to perform the exact set of tasks that they need to.
What percentage of jobs actually require general intelligence though? Deep learning can only do things that are relatively simple and repetitive. But that covers quite a lot. Sure, they won't be taking the jobs of programmers or doctors any time soon. But what percentage of the population can be retrained as programmers or doctors?
I would turn the question around and ask you: what percentage of jobs are similar enough to repetitive, algorithmic tasks? We can joke around about it, but I think most things humans do are a lot more complicated than we realize (precisely because they seem so simple to us), which is exactly why the early optimism over AI turned out to be misguided. Even a "simple" office secretary would be hard to automate, because many of these sort of jobs are not specialized at all but consist of many ad hoc tasks that range from making phone calls to negotiating with other humans to collecting debts to getting the boss coffee, etc. Many trade jobs like plumbers, electricians, etc., require way too much "common sense" type reasoning and social interactions to be fully-automated at this point or any time in the near future.
I think it's more apt to say that with automation that increases in sophistication the fewer labor hours you will need to maintain it and it's successive replacements. Meaning that absent a theoretical breakthrough in AI, we'll still see a permanent dislocation of labor across all sectors over time. It's just inevitable but how we deal with it isn't.
I can think of cooking as an example of a surprisingly complicated job. OTOH i can think of many supposedly "creative" jobs that are already ripe for disruption. Anything that has to do with visual arts for example, architecture, industrial design, medical, law etc. These jobs may not be fully automated, but the human supervisor will be relegated to a secondary role.
Visual arts and architecture are both things that seem like they'd "suffer" from induced demand: by making it significantly easier to build a unique home, we'd be lowering the cost of people getting individualized homes, which would disproportionately increase demand. Leading to more profitable work for more architects.
It might not actually get better for architects. After all, the job is a combination of creativity and data points (will the building stand?). The data and knowledge bit could theoretically be taken over by a computer. Suddenly, normal folks can design their own house. After all, the system would know (based on current at the time knowledge) if the building is a sturdy enough design. I think that advancement would also mean it suddenly gets easier to do home improvements as well.
Most new construction would still follow fads, since humans tend to like them - look at the popularity of the McMansion, after all. A few designs from creative folks, who are not architects, would be simply beautiful or simply weird.
The folks in the supply chain - or whoever owns it - would wind up being more profitable because of more demand, though.
https://www.logojoy.com/ seems surprisingly close to this. If I were starting a small business I'd probably just get my logo from this type of automated service.
That's super cool! The only complaints I had was that it seemed to need more training, or it did relatively poorly at the training than desirable; And I wanted the ability to move around symbol and text more than it allowed. It needed to be smarter and learn faster. But still, even in its rudimentary stage it's very useful!
My first reaction when I saw (ted.com) after the link was that this would be an essay about ted speakers. I should have known that it would be more chatter about machines making people obsolete.
I should have known that it would be more chatter about machines making people obsolete.
It has the potential to be a very vexing problem, actually. That may condemn literally hundreds of millions of people to poverty, feelings of uselessness (if not outright despair and depression). And very likely be contributing to higher suicide rates, among the newly obsolesced.
In that vein, it seems rather callous to describe earnest attempts to get a handle on the problem as "chatter".
It seems convenient to blame technology, and it is definitely going to be the bigger cause in the long term.
This said, I am strongly of the opinion that globalization is not a force that benefits everyone (to put it nicely) and it is not constructive that this opinion is not discussed more widely without having to pussyfoot around dirty words like protectionism and nationalism as if they are automatically bad words.
Globalization is centralization: finance is centralized in New York and London; manufacturing is centralized in China and Germany; IT outsourcing is centralized in India.
Over the 19th and early 20th century, the benefits of American westward expansion and the development of the industrial Midwest largely accrued to the big banks in New York. The same is occurring, just on a larger scale and accelerated due to leaps in technology.
There's a lot here to discuss. I think you're right: look at the huge tech grab between China and America. Almost all Western Internet + parts of Asia goes through America (Google/Amazon/Facebook) for example.
As for centralization, I agree with you, but what do you do with all the people who didn't back the right industry? They're slowly being displaced. If you subscribe to the concept of social welfare, a government should be ensuring their quality of life. This includes access to employment, education, healthcare and even pleasure.
This is the inconvenient truth of the current world we live in, but frustratingly it took a Trump and a Brexit to happen for the idea to get much coverage, and even still it is mired in unnecessary political complications that are not strictly relevant.
The 'nice' thing about technology being to blame instead of offshoring is that there is no clear and obvious villain to point pitchforks at. That's useful for some people.
"We begin by examining productivity. The most common measure
of productivity is the average product of labor, which is simply the value of all goods manufactured in the U.S. divided by the number of workers. "
^^
Which literally means that according to the author's calculations, if you offshore 50 workers and maintain sales, you have decreased US employment / GDP ratio and thus increased.
The of the paper then measures productivity, states that it's gone up and segues into a lot of reasons why it thinks the increase in productivity is actually because of machines.
Then they invent a calculation involving the trade deficit to determine the number of jobs lost by outsourcing (where one Chinese person buying a $5 million house/year in Cali "makes up for" losing 20 $50k/year jobs) and finish up with what can only be described as an unrelated whinge about US corporate tax rates (just in case you were left with any lingering doubts about whose side they're on).
Authors: Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA.
tl;dr some people use phony math to explain why it's wrong to point pitchforks at the 1%.
I'm sure there is a good critique of that Frey and Osborne paper. Epistemologically, it sounds weird to assign 'probabilities of automation.' I don't have the time to read the paper in detail, but here are a few things:
1. Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased.
2. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will we reach a point where it is cheaper to automate a job than hire a person? Think of non-forklift lifting/moving of heavy stuff, we don't really need people doing this manually, robots should be able to do it. But we see with the Boston Dynamics robots that we are many years or decades away from commoditizing lifting robots.
3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc).
>3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc)
Actually, those jobs are still there. The current useless class are the people who are not capable of holding a modern job. And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When you take away someone's ability to support themselves because there are new, more efficient ways of using the shared resources, they're entitled to compensation [1]; but as a society we don't have a good way of enforcing that.
> And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When you take away someone's ability to support themselves because there are new, more efficient ways of using the shared resources, they're entitled to compensation
What do you suppose is fair compensation for being replaced in that fashion? I think this is more complicated than just touting that we deserve basic income. Does an able-bodied person who chooses to not work deserve the same income as someone who is handicap and cannot work? And then the question arises of what amount of income is deemed sufficient?
In an age where income inequality is more of an issue than before[1], does someone on a basic income government program deserve as much as someone who obtained a degree and has a low paying job[2] (the averages here seem to be ~$35k for a low paying job. Keep in mind that the poverty level is about $16k[3] for a family of 2). How do you pay people on a basic income government program enough for a livable situation without making it unfair for people who are working for maybe just double the poverty limit?
> How do you pay people on a basic income government program enough for a livable situation without making it unfair for people who are working for maybe just double the poverty limit?
What about progressive taxation? Someone at double the poverty line might pay 10% and someone making $10 million might pay 60%.
Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers).
[1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does
Half the cashier's job is automated (tallying is managed by scanning in the items, payment is handled by using the customer facing CC machine; they only handle cash, checks, and manual entry of produce). Bagging is often handled by cashiers, customers, or dedicated baggers. Baggers are cheap, the only skill required is to know not to put eggs beneath a half-gallon of milk (though many seem not to know this anymore). Cashiers cost more because you have to trust them.
Handling cash can be handled by automatic machines (as evidenced by the many self-checkout systems) with one person dedicated to 4-8 checkout stations to assist with issues, check customer IDs, etc.
It's not that they're useless, but cashiers' utility is greatly diminished these days with automation reducing the skill, trust, and number of personnel required.
This is what I think most people miss when they criticize automation. It's not that an android-looking robot will come and stand in your spot and do your job, it's that automation makes one person more effective, and able to do the job of multiple people.
Your point is spot on but only disproves the likelihood of any coming calamity. Understood in the way you describe, automation making human labor input redundant has been pervasive and relentlessly constant for at least 100 years. This sort of technological progress is precisely what accounts for improved economic productivity.
Interestingly, productivity has plateaued these past few years at the same time we're supposedly entering a golden period for applied machine learning. There are a million ways to explain that away, of course, but it's a reality people should really consider carefully before reflexively dismissing as transient.
In any event, if productivity improvements were to kick into high gear tomorrow we could expect more of the same--increasing displacement but not an overall, calamitous reduction in jobs per se. The increase in the unemployed labor force will open up new opportunities for businesses built around human services, while the reduction in prices for consumer goods will allow people to spend more money on those new services.
Things can totally get worse, especially in terms of wage inequality. But the laws of supply & demand make it almost impossible for a complex labor economy to simply fall off a cliff in the ways that overly imaginative "futurists" and "thinkers" would have us believe. In terms of basic economics, nothing about machine learning is substantially different from historical disruptions.
If you were to teleport somebody from 100 years ago to today, and then to 20 years from now, the relative differences in automation and computer intelligence between today and 20 years in the future would likely be indistinguishable from his perspective when comparing either of those time periods to 100 years ago. And yet without a doubt the contemporary and future economies would be far stronger, wealthier, and even more "equal" compared to the time period he came from. All precisely _because_ of that automation, not despite it.
The supermarket I go to recently got rid of all of its self checkout lines and replaced them with additional express (15 item or less) lines. I'm not sure their reasoning for it but I don't think cashier automation is a sure thing.
> Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased.
Did the number of cashier's per customer (or perhaps more significantly, as a share of the population -- not labor force) increase? If you look at even AEIs graph [0] that they use to try to sell idea that ATMs didn't kill cashiers' jobs, it shows cashiers increasing rapidly during the very slow rollout of ATMs in the 1970s and 1980s, and the growth tapering off to very slow growth as ATMs take off in the 1990s and beyond (and remaining relatively flat even after the number of ATMs itself flattens in the mid-00s, probably as ATMs basically reached saturation but are still increasing functions, reducing the need for more tellers.)
The US Department of Labor has more detailed info in their "Occupational outlook handbook".[1] They project a 2% increase in the number of cashiers from 2014 to 2024, compared to 7% for all occupations.
Bank teller employment is in decline.[2] -8% from 2014 to 2024, says DOL's projection. Although, as DOL says, "Job prospects for tellers should be favorable because many workers leave this occupation."
AEI's last data point is from 2008, which was before most ATMs could cash checks and pay out immediately. Now that ATMs can read and validate checks (including handwritten ones, there's considerable AI behind that), the big Friday check cashing line is at the ATM, not the teller windows.
A friend of mine runs a branch of a major bank. The bank is moving to a branch layout which looks like a car dealership without the cars. There's a receptionist to direct traffic, and offices on both sides with sliding glass doors, just like the ones in car dealerships. That's where they sell loans and other financial products. In the back, barely visible, are two teller windows. There are conveniently placed ATMs both inside and outside the branch. That's what's happening to bank tellers.
My credit union in the US has moved to a similar design last year… except that the tellers are behind a video screen. 2 tellers for 4 screens.
My bank in France took it a step further in 1999: no more tellers at all. Nobody touches cash except for the machines. The staff is therefore considerably reduced and only for less common operations, or high-touch sales.
I agree. The numbers should be scaled to # of customers and/or population. To some extent, this is addressed in the text. ATMs reduced the cost of operating a branch, so banks opened more branches. It's easy to see that number of tellers has kept up with population growth. US population was ~200e6 in 1970 and is now ~300e6. From that AEI chart, tellers have grown almost as fast.
(Made some edits to this comment after I realized I mistook the tellers graph for the ATMs.)
Not the parent, but all other things remaining the same, population growth alone will drive the need for more cashiers. Since ATMs did not stop population growth, percentage based metrics help account for that.
So the different types of numbers can help drive home different points:
* in absolute numbers, ATMs didn't cause any job losses.
* in relative numbers, there are less job opportunities in this space. (e.g. there used to be a need for 1 cashier per N people, not there is only a slot for 1 cashier per 2N people).
The second type of thinking is what people are worried about - if we keep reducing percentage of people who are needed to do stuff, what the other folks do?
I think the second is actually much less worrisome than the first. With absolute job losses, people who lose their jobs need to retrain or accept (probably much) lower pay in different fields. Both of those are hard on people psychologically, and requires very expensive government intervention to mitigate. With the second you just alter the mix of what young people are trained in originally. It will be more expensive to train a young person in programming as opposed to truck driving, but it's not nearly as bad as training a 50 year old trucker in programming, fiscally or psychologically.
There's also the factory vs car improvement difference. Factories did not make workers obsolete; cars did make horses obsolete. I'm not sure we can ahead of time tell whether particular technological improvements are more like factories or cars.
Because difficulty of finding a job is related to jobs per unit population (absolute numbers aren't important, and labor force is the wrong comparison because jobs becoming scarce causes people to exit the labor force, which includes only those working or actively looking for work, which people stop doing when actively looking for work doesn't pay off.)
> Think of non-forklift lifting/moving of heavy stuff, we don't really need people doing this manually, robots should be able to do it. But we see with the Boston Dynamics robots that we are many years or decades away from commoditizing lifting robots.
Perhaps if we keep insisting that robots need to look like a human in some form factor.
Otherwise, we are already there. We already have fully autonomous forklift robot systems in warehouses and other similar jobs. I know such robots will also be used in construction and elsewhere, if they aren't already (all of the heavy equipment manufacturers are working on such systems today). Smaller lifting tasks (think in a grocery store or other retail outlet) could be done by smaller but similar machines.
Change the shelving system and/or the packaging to accommodate the objects being lifted and put into place, and the entire thing can likely be automated. I can easily see stores like Walmart or Costco doing this. Right now, the only thing stopping them is the cost (the robots themselves are one thing, changing the shelves, packaging, stores, etc - that's going to be a great expense). Perhaps as time goes on, they'll do it first in new stores being built.
Who said anything about human form factor? I said non-forklift, I meant things like: last mile delivery of furniture and appliances, packing and moving, etc. where most of the lifting is manual. These are situations where things are more unstructured than a warehouse. The kind of problems for which Boston Dynamics seems to be building robots.
> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40."
I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education.
Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existence here and should continue to be passed on to as many people as we can.
I find the excitement for UBI concerning. People seem to have already tossed up their hands and said, "well, I'll be useless in the future, I guess I can't work now!".
Meanwhile, Mike Rowe has been saying for years that there are unfulfilled blue collar jobs. Our culture's problem is not that machines will take over or that schools are failing to educate students. It's that we don't find enough value in the contributions that we do make. It's okay to not be a successful tech founder. Everyone is useful in some way or another.
> I find the excitement for UBI concerning. People seem to have already tossed up their hands and said, "well, I'll be useless in the future, I guess I can't work now!".
I wouldn't quite characterize the excitement as giving up. I see it as a form of liberation. Although I doubt society is ready to take such a mental/psychological leap, work/labor does not have to be the primary way in which one derives a sense of self-worth and purpose. I once worked in a mind-numbing, soul-crushing job (it was in the sub-prime credit market, basically screwing people over who didn't understand the concept of compounded interest rates) just to make ends meet.
If I had UBI and didn't have to worry about whether I'd have somewhere to sleep, I would've volunteered working at the local hospital (I ended up quitting and doing this anyway, but only after another 6 months of working)
> I wouldn't quite characterize the excitement as giving up
To clarify, the excitement comes from knowledge workers who think they have something in mind that will satisfy displaced laborers. I don't think most laborers would be excited about not working for a lifetime and relying on government payments. I think they'd be concerned about getting scammed at some point down the road.
> work/labor does not have to be the primary way in which one derives a sense of self-worth and purpose
It doesn't for everyone, but it is for some people. UBI is a one-size-fits-all that would replace individually tailored programs.
I don't think "work" is so terrible. Money is just a paper form of trust. You did some work for me, and I know you did that, so I convert your contribution to society into special paper that you can exchange elsewhere for stuff.
A small community wouldn't need money. They'd all know each other. In a larger society, where we each have a specific role, it's one way to ensure people are pulling their weight.
Work connects us, and money smooths the path. We're all working together on something. Some people need more than just money to keep going, so, I don't feel UBI is the right solution. My 2c.
Although it's impossible to know with 100% accuracy, a lot of historians believe that the origins of money tied up in the creation of empire and slavery.
As you say, smaller societies didn't need money and worked on favors. As armies began being created, soldiers wanted something concrete up front, because they could die before you repaid the favor. So they settled on precious metals and eventually coins. Someone has to mine for these metals and mining is backbreaking work. The solution was to take conquered people and turn them into slaves. This is the vicious cycle of empire...armies need to get paid, so you need to plunder and conquer people, you have more territory which requires more soldiers which requires more coins which requires more slaves and on and on.
Money enables you to exchange goods without worrying about having the exact thing your neighbor is looking for. Shiny rare metals were money for awhile, and I guess the thing that people tended to value most, gold etc., ended up representing the universal trading platform.
Arguing that the creation of money was tied to the creation of armies sounds like a political view that someone might push alongside the promise of peace on earth.
Yet, animals fight over food. If humans didn't have money, we'd fight over that or something else that maintains our health and well being.
> Arguing that the creation of money was tied to the creation of armies sounds like a political view that someone might push alongside the promise of peace on earth.
I wasn't penning some Marxist screed or making a value judgment about the nature of money. It's awesome because it means I don't have to farm the food that i eat. I specifically stated where that statement came from. You may try to call it political, but coin money was tied to the raising of armies. Before that, people just relied on an elaborate credit system. Coins originally were not used as a medium of exchange, they were just a way to represent quantity.
> Yet, animals fight over food. If humans didn't have money, we'd fight over that or something else that maintains our health and well being.
Eh, history and anthropology are murky on this subject. Personally, I think we focus too much on the role of competition in history and discount the role of cooperation.
> Personally, I think we focus too much on the role of competition in history and discount the role of cooperation
Okay, well, you're the one who believes money was created to pay armies.
I'd argue that the notion of exchange of some goods for different goods precedes that and has a lot more to do with cooperation. A promissory note is just a natural evolution of exchanging goods. It's my signature saying, yes I owe you x bananas because you gave me y tomatoes. Doesn't matter if it comes from a state or individual. Same concept.
How many people use say more than 1% of the knowledge they learn in High School? Hell how many people even remember more than 1% of it? There have been studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal education and are allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do only sightly worse than schooled kids.
I realize there are people who feel that way. I'm not one of them. There are a lot of things I synthesized from school. For me, practicing learning a bunch of different things was useful in itself.
Some people learn better in school, and some find ways to do it on their own.
> There have been studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal education and are allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do only sightly worse than schooled kids
There is a big difference between having a few unschooled kids and changing the whole system to be unschooled.
If unschooled is going to be the way of the future, do it at local levels and let it grow with its success. We need not defund public education to achieve an idealized educational system that isn't going to work for everyone.
Actually lots of them do, because they see it as a way to remove "entitlements". Delete food stamps, delete welfare, delete all aspects of the social safety net, and implement a simple UBI. It's the same regressive strategy as "do your taxes on a postcard". Treat every equally, not equitably.
You're thinking of the wrong generation. Libertarians support it. They are one option for a future Republican platform.
The tech generation's wealthy view UBI as a way to simplify the tax code, thus saving money.
UBI would cause inflation and lower the lower class. Their buying power would eventually be worth nothing in a capitalist society. One couldn't expect the government to appropriately increase UBI over time.
Stay in school, kids. There's no future where you don't need to do work in order to have the lifestyle you want.
This is short-term pessimism, inline with the common dystopian future of sci-fi. It is really difficult to predict human behaviors and technology in the long term.
Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen.
Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekinetic so then we get the neural internet from that. We would actually be less divided, more connected and more productive as a human race. Our current sense of self is too selfish and our intellect too limited. I'm sure it would be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case so everyone could make better decisions, not just about themselves but about humanity, etc. because they could perceive things at a grander scale.
I think this is already happening. In fact most AI pessimists don't consider that "man + machine >> machine." Consider chess. Kasparov's defeat happened in mid-1990s. Machine is considered > man. Yet, in freestyle chess, where players are allowed to consult machines, we have achieved ever greater heights of performance. In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better. Similar things will happen in Go, Poker, etc. The handicap of not using a computer to inform your moves exists to make things more competitive, it doesn't mean that we are worse off!
Taking this further, most technology we use daily (word processors, email, the Internet, etc.) are enhancements of the man+machine organism and enhance our performance as well as the 'machine''s.
> In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better.
This worked between about 2008 and 2013; but those days are long one. Engines such as Stockfish 8 surpass both humans and human+engine "centaurs". That is, incorporating a human into the loop only makes things worse.
This is just an artifact of how chess engines work. They are really dumb and just search a huge number of moves into the future. Combined with human pattern recognition, they can be improved. Humans can see patterns that the chess engine doesn't.
However Go was beaten by a neural network trained on millions of games. It already has pattern recognition. At least on par with humans, and probably superior to them. In the famous AlphaGo match, it considered and made moves that looked stupid to humans... at first.
I really doubt human + machine will do any better than just machine at Go. Or anything NNs take over. Human brains can't possibly compete with a machine that can iterate over billions of training examples in a few hours.
Yah I think so too. Super Tangent warning: I recently saw the documentary on Koko the Gorilla and was amazed at her emotional intelligence and communication skills. Why not integrate AI into other animals besides humans?
One more tangent: The perception of time would be very different if we were highly integrated into machines right? What if you could perceive things at 1000 times the normal human?
> Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting
Shouldn't this be the ultimate goal anyway? I know Elon Musk sees the future where there is a merging of man and machine to enhance what he sees as man's limited upload bandwidth (talking, writing, gesticulating, etc.)
Yes, I hope it is. I just was writing it in a style of a possibility rather than a prediction as its the same thing to be very positive or very negative, at least in terms of making errors into the future.
"I'm sure it would be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case..."
No offense but I literally laughed out loud when I got to that part. Reminds me of what people said about the internet. Doesn't that comparison lend credence to the notion that greater access to information might often lead to a retreat into comforting echo chambers? That greater ease of communication might often increase the vectors for infection for unreason?
The difference being...perception right? Currently we have a huge amount of information but the same limits of comprehension. We didn't suddenly get new anatomy when the internet came online. Its apples and oranges. If you are able to understand things at great depth, you are able to understand information at great depth and know the difference between bunk and not. Myths and legend-type information becomes harder to rationalize as truth because the origins of it do not result in a high probability of accuracy in which you are highly capable at that point to determine in a sub-microsecond.
To be fair, we are still fairly early on with this stuff.
Yes, folks have their echo chambers. But alternatively, perhaps we simply teach the new generation better critical thinking skills, introduce uncomfortable viewpoints, and how to better not fall for tricks such as "fake news".
Just because we have problems with echo chambers now doesn't mean that we will in the future. Heck, in a way, the internet is teaching us about our echo chambers - it isn't a new phenomenom (families and community provided it for us), but having a choice in one's echo chamber really is.
Ideally, I agree with you. The other part of me sees humanity in a transition period of having all of this amazing information at its fingertips but not the smarts to use it, at least for the common person. We need a brain boost to keep up and that could just be the AI we merge with at some point or some genetic/biological enhancement or combination of those, otherwise, I just feel we peaked as a world and will just go up and down until that happens.
I want to be like my dog, but smarter and with more freedom.
Every day I look at the lazy beast and wonder at the simplicity of its existence. Give me that life and an allowance for supplies to create, eat, socialize, and travel and let me loose.
This is the missing component of the Drake equation.
The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death cycle...
I don't think they would they care about births. Having more humans would just reduce the technological resources available to provide for their personal happiness.
But if they have superior AI, what stops the AI from expanding outward instead? Such an advanced civilization has nothing to lose by sending a few robot colonists out through the galaxy.
If aliens landed in an American urban area, they would see dogs walking around with people behind them, picking up the poop, and special people who walk around with the dogs in the middle of the day, and the aliens would have to conclude that the dogs are the most important beings on the planet.
That's not too far off. People really love dogs. I've never met a person who would blame a dog for anything, they're treated like angels and any bad behaviour is blamed on the owner, not the dog itself. The dog is without sin and beyond punishment. They're treated kind of like children, really, except even the most cold-hearted scrooge, who would gladly put kids to work shovelling coal for 12 hours a day at a salary of half-penny a month would think twice about kicking a dog.
That's pretty much my life since I retired at 50. My existence isn't so simple as I have two houses, two cars, ten bikes, etc. but eventually it will be simple.
I retired at 35. I find it a blessing and a curse. With no kids or any other major attachments, I had to come to terms with how unimportant I am. Having a high paying job where people depend on you really feeds your ego. When that's gone, you can't avoid this fact and it takes some humility to deal with it.
Am I the only person who finds the whole concept of judging people as useful or useless completely nonsensical? So, machines will be able to perform jobs that are currently done by people. How does that make people useless? It assumes there's some sort of preordained, global utility function. "Oh, your job as a cab driver has been automated. You're useless." Uh, what? Useless to what? To whom?
Humans define what is useful or not. They're certainly not going to will themselves into uselessness, curl up into a ball and die. The idea that humans can be useless is complete nonsense to me. It's something akin to a type error. And I have a hard time understanding why that meme keeps being repeated and debated without anyone pointing this out.
I believe the designation of the people as useless is based on the fact that part of our value to society is measured by the utility that provide to society and with continuing automation of human tasks it will be harder for us to find way for all the humans in the world to provide utility at the same level as they are now.
Now I agree with you that this (valuing people by the utility they provide) is a shallow and incorrect way of measuring a human being's value but it is true.
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I think I'm talking about something slightly different. First, I think that what you're pointing out in your first paragraph, while wildly accepted, is completely unproven. Second, I don't think valuing people by utility is necessarily shallow, but the way I worded my original post might lead you to believe that.
Here's what I'm getting at (and failing horribly, because I'm too lazy to think it through): many articles have been written that seem to outline scenarios where runaway automation leads to a situation where you have some sort of closed loop automated economy where humans have no role to play, thus making humanity "useless." I think that's hogwash. It presupposes that the goal of humanity is to perform a certain number of tasks that happen to be the tasks we currently perform. If we can find something to substitute that performs the same tasks, our goal is accomplished, and thus humanity is "useless."
That's when I generally go: that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Yes, I agree that the idea that with continued automation humanity's role on earth will become un-necessary and superfluous (the useless that I believe you are referring to) is hogwash and not a concern.
The reason for the automation revolution (I just coined that phrase) is allow humanity to become a better citizen of the planet and not to discarded.
Of course automation will inevitably be capable of displacing all human acts (jobs and art). The author concludes with the same tired, naiive and unsatisfactory outlook: 'you don't need worry about it because robots will just kill off humans'.
However, it seems obvious that humanity will handle this like many cultures have - by choice. Just like some people chose not to eat GM food, and others (Amish) generally elect not to use electricity, humans too will reach a point where they will simply choose to either accept that their lives are 100% sustained by autonomy or, live a life free of AI-generated products (i.e. food, services, art, etc).
I'm curious to see how long it will take for the world to experience any meaningful kind of pushback against automation or AI. Today, I feel like all I see are a dwindling number of people saying they'd "rather deal with a real person", and a growing number of people who come close to fetishizing automation.
Maybe once Uber decides to flip the switch on all of the drivers who are now dependent on them for some if not all of their income, we'll see people in the streets vandalizing and otherwise circumventing empty self driving vehicles.
Honestly, like you point out, I think it's happening at micro-levels already. Certainly entire societies have voluntarily cut themselves off largelt from technology altogether - not just Amish, but modern off-grid people as well.
However, just like some "bush people" will bend the rules and return to modern technology in diar situations (e.g. they need an insulin shot), I'd bet dollars to donuts that medical needs will drive many situations where self-declared "AI-free" people will opt for an AI product, since there are certain to be many AI-generated medical treatments currently out of the reach of limited human brains to develop.
> Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning, followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves repeatedly.
Agreed. It'd be quite difficult to measure whether or not someone learns something new, anyway, because of the variety of things available to learn (large and small). If we're talking about learning entirely new skills, though, yea, obviously a cashier will probably not need to learn any significant new skills over the course of their career.
As always, people who do make learning new things a part of their life's rituals will generally be more successful than those who do not.
This is the most fascinating quote for me. If corporations and nations are entities capable of owning things, could we give such power to software/algorithms? How would that work?
As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. Human law already recognizes intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as “legal persons.” Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to algorithms. An algorithm could then own a transportation empire or a venture-capital fund without having to obey the wishes of any human master. Before dismissing the idea, remember that most of our planet is already legally owned by non-human intersubjective entities, namely nations and corporations. Indeed, 5,000 years ago much of Sumer was owned by imaginary gods such as Enki and Inanna. If gods can possess land and employ people, why not algorithms?
Algorithms require hardware to run on, so they'll have all their assets drained away from them in the former of rent to the landlord, that is, the person who owns the hardware they run on.
Thinking out-loud in terms of a corporation. The owners are the landlord for the corporation, but that corporation is it's own legal entity. Owners come and go, but that corporate entity remains and insulates the owners from many legal and financial repercussions of the company's actions. It's a similar thing with countries. I'm not personally held responsible for the actions of the United States or the Town in which I dwell, but I am one of the landlords for those entities.
I think the question here is whether there are advantages to making algorithms legal entities similar to our other communal legal entities. It's a radical idea, but so is UBI and some other suggestions for mitigating the obsolescence of many human being as a result of automation.
If you want to see what technology and automation do, and early ideas of how to support the "useless" class, don't look at California. Look at places like Switzerland, Scandinavia and Belgium.
The wage cost pressure is just pricing low productivity work out of the market there more quickly than elsewhere. A taxi in the valley is cheap. A taxi in any of these? Rather more expensive...
Jobs being replaced with technology? Government policy trying to do something about it? Keep an eye on what happens in these countries...
what happens when human labor (and life) is cheaper than robotic output? storm the castle with a swarm of useless humans, or put your really expensive robot at risk?
This has already happened. That's why Trump won. Check out Detroit or the Rust Belt, or most towns under 5,000 people not near a major population center.
I disagree. It isn't really that folks don't have their old job. With that job went their livelihoods. Houses, jobs, medical insurance. Bills get late and suddenly finding food becomes an issue. Others just have very stagnant wages, so they work harder but can't stretch their paycheck as far anymore.
Do you think Trump would have still been elected if we had a proper safety net and social support for folks?
This is so true. As someone who's had the misfortune to be on unemployment twice in my career, and food stamps once, I can tell you our "safety net" is bullshit. Unemployment maxes out at $450/week and takes months for the checks to start arriving. Try making ends meet in that scenario, and better hope you get a couple months of severance. Food stamps work fairly well, but you've got still got the slow and inefficient government albatross in the mix. Long story short: we spend a ludicrous amount of money on a safety net which provides zero safety for anyone.
i'm deeply offended by an attitude that
leads to word-choices such as "useless"
and "bums" and "superfluous" in regard to
human beings who simply do not have jobs.
are people really "useless" if they do not
provide labor to make rich people richer?
if the economic system can't make a profit
off your presence, are you "superfluous"?
is this the mentality that would cause
our "leaders" to abandon health-care for
the large majority of our population who
will soon be unable to afford insurance?
and please don't tell me that a _job_
is necessary to make people feel useful.
many wealthy people seem to be able to
do nothing productive at all, without
having doubt about their right to exist.
We are way, way too late for that. We solved that problem by making sure each phone is only used by one person. So even if people poke their grubby fingers at their phones for the entire time they are sitting on their toilets, there won't be a planet-wide epidemic of a phone-vectored disease.
Did you consider that we would need to have scientists predict that the planet will be devoured by an enormous mutant star goat beforehand (or maybe a gigantic swarm of twelve foot piranha bees),and convince them about that didn't you? ;)
In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the "pattern recognition" aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity (apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to play Go.)
I don't doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously threaten human usefulness/dignity, but I question the timeline of "decades away".