I fail to see in this article where the author backs up this claim:
> automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't.
It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.
At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.
Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have.
The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded.
The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.
"It will be a very long time until computer automation can replace knowledge workers."
It will also be a very long time before computer automation replaces skilled trades. Imagine a robot that drives to your house and fixes a leaky pipe under your sink. Imagine a robot that can upgrade the electrical wiring in an old building. Imagine a robot that could do all the jobs that a landscaping crew does: mow a lawn, trim bushes, prune trees, plant flowers, etc. Imagine a robot that can come to your house and hook up your cable TV connection. Imagine a robot that could make even the simplest repair to your car, like replacing a fan belt. Imagine a robot that could style your hair the way you actually wanted it to look. I just don't see any of that happening in the near future.
You don't need to replace the plumber; if the sink can autonomously diagnose the leak, anyone can be a plumber. You don't need to replace the barber; if a machine can cut hair exactly the same way every time, one person can style a hundred thousand heads at once.
Yeah, we aren't going to see a robot mailman walking around, but mainly because we won't use mail. Fundamental changes are coming.
"If the sink can autonomously diagnose the leak, anyone can be a plumber."
I think you're underestimating the skills required to be a plumber. If the leak was due to a corroded drain pipe, would you be able to replace it? Do you know how to seal a joint between two pipes so that it doesn't leak? What if the fitting at the bottom of the sink was corroded and you had to replace the entire sink? Moving on to more difficult plumbing tasks: What if your gas-fired water heater had to be replaced? What if your toilet was backing up because you had roots in your sewer line? Do you happen to own all the tools and supplies you'd need? And in the unlikely event that you did have all the skills and equipment to do all these things, what percentage of the population do you think would have similar skills? My guess is that plumbers will have job security for a long, long time to come.
One of the fun things about having fully automated production systems (like, say, a tile kiln) and fully automated data processing systems (say, scanning 2,000 stock market releases per day and tracking 1.5 million mining leases every 3 days) is you can take the time to do your own landscaping (80 acres), your own plumbing (two soak wells, three pumps, three gravity tanks, ~5 km piping, three waste separation/settling tanks & leach drain system).
The only external assistance required to doing all that is getting a qualified tradesman in to sign off on the work already completed & to do the final official hookup (for gas & mains power).
Hereabouts (Western Australia), outside a city, the percentage of the population that can do that would be most of the men and a good percentage of the women.
Hell, some of use can even write compilers & OS's & do flash stuff with wavelets and what not.
Sometimes I feel like a country hick, then I read comments like yours and realise how sadly urbanised many people are.
In the past month, I have run wire for a bedroom in my basement, replaced a kitchen faucet, replaced a garbage disposal, replace an exterior mirror on a car (teenagers and garages don't go well together :) and replaced the ice maker in my freezer. In the past, I've replaced almost every piece of my nearly 20 year old dryer and some of the pieces of the matching washing machine.
With all that, I still feel like I haven't go a clue what I'm doing, but it sure feels good when you get something completed.
These things are really not that hard. They just take some tools and some time.
I could learn plumbing, but I choose not to. It's not interesting to me. Not everyone is like you; in fact, I'd guess the majority are more like me in that respect. So regardless of the fact that plumbers may eventually disappear in Western Australia, that's a regional quirk if anything.
Well, if no one has any jobs how can they afford to buy all of that sophisticated junk?
Also, who fixes the junk that is supposed to figure out and fix problems with other junk. Is this future human society supposed to make perfect junk that works all the time; I have yet to see any junk work that well.
We won't use mail? How are we going to get all this junk?
This utopia sounds great but we have large populations that can't even get drinking water, before we jump off an decide we need to deal with these amazing "fundamental changes" that will do all these things like allows to get pizza from a magic vending machine, maybe somewhere along the way we can figure out how to just get basic 1900s style plumbing throughout the world. Just an idea.
>Well, if no one has any jobs how can they afford to buy all of that sophisticated junk?
They don't. They are supposed to starve to death, or make some alternative trade economy in vast ghettos.
The rich people, the people who control and own the factories and make the decisions will live in closed patrolled communities, and they won't need those people for anything at all. Maybe as sex workers, but at some point they could just generate genetically-designed people for that.
It would be like feudal kindgoms all over again, with the difference that the people outside the closed walls of the palace/city are not needed at all (whereas in the feudal kingdoms they were the basis for the wealth of the royals, with their agricultural work).
I don't know about that. I think the rich people might find it a touch inconvenient if the peasants rebelled. Not insurmountable, you understand, but ... inconvenient. And distasteful.
Easier to just pay them a small living wage, provide them with cheap entertainment, and dangle the promise of "If you work hard or are lucky, you can become one of the rich too" in front of them.
No, you're being ridiculous. I'm pointing out the reality that this view is unrealistic in multiple ways, it is no proxy. It speaks for itself, really. We have not had any technology as reliable as is claimed so I think it's a little naive of a view, especialy in any time frame remotely related to "changes are coming." As well, the issue of how this is going to get paid for is a real issue for the reality based community. :)
When my dad was my age, a statement like "The entire global economy will soon be managed by a publicly-accessible world-wide computer network" would have seemed similarly ridiculous. Computers are way too slow for that.
The problems we have now will be fixed in ways we haven't yet thought of. We will have new problems, but not the ones we're thinking of. Fundamental changes are always coming.
It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.
That is true but I think it's not an interesting question to ask.
The interesting question is what we are going to do about the rapidly growing unemployment of the unskilled workforce.
Case in point: This will jump to a whole new level when self-driving cars become cost efficient - which seems rather likely to happen within the next 30 years. Automation in other sectors is not standing still either.
"Educate them all" is not a solution. DHL and FedEx just don't need as many knowledge workers as they need truck drivers today.
Also, automation right now is bidding against the humans for their jobs. As the minimum cost for automation falls, it keeps wages from rising, then drives them down, then when they reach the inelastic point, replaces the humans.
So it's not just that this stuff will chuck a great many people out of work with nowhere to go, but that it will drive them to the breadline first.
To fix this, the basic assumption "you work for a living" has to be torn up. The work ethic has to end.
I am pretty skeptical about self-driving cars, for the simple reason that we don't even have self-driving trains yet, outside relatively small systems like the DLR, Heathrow Pod, etc, and it would seem to be that the job of driving a train (no steering, no collision avoidance, predetermined stops, etc) would be 100x easier.
There are actually quite a few driverless trains already[1] and Google's demonstrations of their driverless car are getting increasingly[2] impressive[3].
The question is really only when the transition to driverless cars will happen - we're long past the if.
> It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers. At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient.
I write software that makes knowledge workers redundant all the time -- by making everyone else more efficient.
Middle-tier knowledge job are disappearing all the time because software allows lower-level employees to do things they weren't able (or weren't allowed) to do before and makes higher-level employees so efficient they don't need those people to help them anymore.
> The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them.
From my experience that isn't the case; there's a glut of graduates who have useful skill sets for industries that need them.
...technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.
Making knowledge workers more effective and efficient replaces some of them.
I work at a former tech giant, now a small media company. 10-15 years ago, this company hired people to write a scalable TCL enabled webserver [1], a time series collection system, and all sorts of other basic software systems.
Today, you'd just use apache, graphite, etc. You wouldn't hire someone to build them for you. Technology has replaced developers.
Computer automation doesn't replace knowledge workers, yet, but computer augmentation and computer assisted outsourcing means businesses need fewer and fewer of them, paid less and less.
>There will still be a need for computer programmers, but a lot of programming can already be automated [...]
We could [...] flat-out ban certain types of robots and automated software.
I write software for a living and have no idea what this means. It's either horribly misinformed, or a call to ban compilers.
It seems, according to this article anyways, that the answer to developer unemployment is to rid us of efficient IDEs, compliers and other non-sense, and and get back to good old Assembly!
Yes, actually: if we wanted to ensure developers stay employed, we should make writing code less efficient. Yes, you're being sarcastic, but that doesn't mean your point isn't spot on: this is in fact what unions have been doing all along, and states like New Jersey don't allow you to pump your own gas, specifically to create inefficiencies in the market that promote employment. If the option is between requiring people to work meaningless jobs, or paying everyone a living wage, which really makes more sense?
Well... The very basis of my understanding of self causes me to say that there has to be a 3rd option... That said, a living wage would be less wasteful.
As for unions, I believe this is pretty much what killed the Twinkie manufacturer - they were not able to even optimize routes.
It seems that similar concerns have been voiced with every advance in technology that replaced works with machines. The argument generally assumes that the amount of "work" needed will remain relatively the same. So, if society today requires 100 works to make one widget, and we can make the same widget with 1 worker and assorted machines, then 99 works will be left unemployed.
In reality, what seems to happen is that because the products of that work become cheaper, society starts to consume a lot more. In the end, something like 80 works end up supervising the machines, while 9 works maintain them and the other work is designing the machines.
I can't foresee what will happen if all basic service jobs are automated, but then again it will not happen overnight. The biggest question in my mind, is how well will the society repare the future generations with the skills they will need to remain relevant. Education is everything... and it will remain everything. (Not formal education mind you, but more so knowledge/training.)
The thing is, we've only really been seeing this boom since the 18th century. And for most of the world, not really until the 20th century. The solution, as you said, for most of this period was to have people consume more products. But with the rise of electronics, that trend doesn't appear to be continuing. We already live in a world where not everyone needs to work: in fact, we specifically push people out of working once they reach retirement age. That was one of the points of Social Security and pensions: to stop older workers from preventing new workers from taking their place.
Also note, our real unemployment isn't 7.9%. In fact, if we look at the number of non-farm jobs from the last census in 2010, we had 112 million jobs. If we assume about 3% of employment is farm jobs, then we have ~115 million total jobs. According to the census, there are 313 million people in the US, and 76.3% of them are adults. Therefore, we have 238 million adults, and only ~115 million jobs. This means our real unemployment rate is about 52% (given the roughness of my figures, I'd stick it at a range between 45 and 60 percent). Which means, not counting children, our country is already fully capable of supporting half the population not working. This wasn't the case in 19th century America (where yes, even women usually worked in some capacity), meaning we probably already are in a society where most people don't have to work, we just don't notice it because most of those who don't work are not labeled "unemployed."
Edit: Basically, I'm questioning your premise that employment rates have, in fact, remained relatively constant throughout the last few centuries.
You are questioning whether the current Labor Force Participation rate and whether it has gone down over the years. The peak in recent history appears to have been around 2000 at 67.3%. Currently, it's at 63.6%.
The furthest back I could find is 1948 for 58.6 at the start of that year. Last time we were in the 63% range was in 1980s. Guessing from 19th century, it has gone up.
The key here is to understand what influences this rate. Many factors go into what percentage of population chooses to seek employment. For example, if my wife and I are rich enough, when we have kids, we may want to have one or even both of us take a few years off to raise them. This is a profound luxury in the current US society. Some countries have extended maternity leave that lasts for 3 years and includes some form of pay or other welfare payment. Such structures would easily drive the participation rate down.
Conversely, public daycares and other child-friendly services promote higher participation rates by freeing both adults to work.
These examples are meant to show that the "machines are taking our jobs" discussion to be a gross oversimplification of a much more complex system. So far, history tells us that we will adapt. That still leaves a possibility of a black swan event... In either case, I have faith in humanity :-)
True. In addition to assuming the amount of work is constant, it assumes the amount each individual should work is constant. If their fears come true and we somehow do progress to the point where we have half the amount of work to be done, why have half the people unemployed while the other half do the share of two people?
During the Industrial Revolution we transitioned to a 40 hour 5-day week as being the standard. Why couldn't we transition to something else in response to this or a future technological revolution, perhaps at first a 32 or 36 hour 4-day week? This would make a 3-day weekend possible and also save on gasoline.
Machines as a class have been becoming more and more general in their capabilities. Meaning that there are more and more things machines do better than humans. Humans can't keep racing ahead of that curve forever, at some point the machines catch up and can do anything humans can do. At that point, there is no next level for human work to move up the value chain. The value chain will be entirely subsumed by machines.
That endpoint is some time off in the future, but that doesn't mean that the inflection point of the curve is. We might be a lot closer to the inflection point than we think.
I don't think this is a bad thing, but it's something we're going to need to address as a society.
The fact that machines have been gaining a lot of capabilities doesn't mean they'll catch up to us, much less any time soon. While I hope for the "singularity" much more than I fear it, we might remain in an intermediate state for a long time.
I disagree that machines have become more general (at least as I am interpreting it). I would argue there are just a wider variety of specific tasks they have been programmed to do. "General" implies abstraction, and I suspect machines won't be capable of meaningful abstraction ("this situation is like that situation") without AI.
97% percent of us used to be farmers. Did the machines and processes that replaced us render us irrelevant and without other pursuits? No, it unlocked massive amounts of intelectual capacity that led to unprecedented scientific and economic growth.
I don't understand why people don't understand this basic economic principle. When you free up peoples time from monotonous tasks, we all benefit. These calls for a universal minimum wages are odd.
I endorse this work of fiction and encourage everyone to read it. At the very least it is an approachable, engaging and thought-provoking "what-if" scenario.
His Robotic Nation articles provide a good source of information on his thoughts as well. Then, you can take that right to his Concentration of Wealth blog and make a big picture.
I mostly worry about this scenario of not enough work for everyone because too many people in my country (USA) will probably be unwilling to support a universal living wage.
A social safety net improves the lives of everyone because of lower crime and a generally more civil society.
The trick will be to provide life long educational and vocational resources. Hopefully almost everyone would want to produce extra value for society and improve their own material life style. There would still be room for very capable people to be "rich" and generally rewarded for skills and hard work.
So, a pure meritocracy with rewards layered on top of a minimal universal ling wage sounds good to me.
I agree that the universal living wage is problematic because it sends out a signal of "You don't have to work" in a world where clearly work still needs to be done.
There are alternatives, though, such as the Employer of Last Resort or Job Guarantee style concepts. They recognize that what we are actually seeing is that there is a lot of useful work that could/should be done outside of the purely economic sphere, but this work isn't being done because the people who would benefit the most from it cannot afford it. Hence the idea to just offer everybody a job at a fixed wage (this wage would be similar to a minimum wage), paid for by government and organized by local communities, non-profits, etc.
Obviously, the devil's in the details, but the idea deserves similar visibility as the universal living wage because it essentially solves the same problem, but possibly in a better way and without destroying the social contract surrounding work.
The economists that advocate such a program typically say yes.
After all, the basic idea is that it would be an offer to those who are both able and willing to work. If you don't show up to work, then clearly that's pretty good evidence that you're not actually willing, hence you can be fired.
(If you are unable to work, then some other social safety net should catch you. If you are able but unwilling to work, well, opinions differ on how much society owes you in that case, and clearly this is one of the uncomfortable but important distinctions between ULW and ELR/JG...)
I don't know, it sounds too communistic-utopian. While communism is not a bad thing, and utopias are theoretically a great idea, humans thrive on opportunity and individualism. The world isn't a fair place by nature. Attempting to equalize everyone's talents and source of income, and not allowing them to be rewarded for whatever they pursue seems to cause less incentive for education.
Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000 every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress intellectually, and be an accomplished man.
"golf, and do many things that require little mental facility"
Does golf really require that little mental facility? Would Tiger Woods agree with you?
People are extremely unpredictable in what they do with their leisure time. Over 10 years of working to encourage and develop amateur creators in the film world has left me with the conviction that we simply don't know what would happen if 100% of a Western country's people didn't need to work to survive any more.
We'd almost certainly hit a sudden epidemic of depression, to start with. Tim Ferriss' book "The Four Hour Work Week" has a fascinating section on surviving the transition to not having to work any more - it's harder than you'd think.
But subsequently? A surprising amount of popular activities in leisure time right now are actually very mentally engaging. Both watching and playing sports are actually reasonably mentally engaged activities for a lot of people - try memorising half the statistics that the average baseball fan has at his fingertips and see how far you get. The most popular drama television is getting more complex and sophisticated, not less. And of course games are actively mentally engaging, and increasingly creative - Minecraft's the biggest gaming sensation since World of Warcraft.
The fact that the two biggest gaming sensations of the last decade are ones in which the primary activities are a) working with groups of up to 40 other people to complete complex, challenging, multifaceted choreographed tasks and b) building massive structures up to and including 1-1 replicas of goddamn cathedrals does not lead me to believe that most of the population doesn't like to use their brain.
Add to that the fact that there's actually a startlingly large number of amateur musicians, painters, writers, bloggers, artisans, chefs and similar pursuits out there. Here's a link - http://www.amateurorchestras.org.uk/ - to a list of the 1,121 amateur ORCHESTRAS in the UK, for example.
You might see a very interesting world develop after about 10 years.
This is completely irrelevant to whether or not the structure of our society is or should be fair.
> Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000 every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress intellectually, and be an accomplished man.
Ought we to strictly forbid inheritance, then? And if so... what do we instead do with all the money?
First, I don't think people advocating a guaranteed minimum income are talking about setting it anywhere near $70,000. The choice would be more like--here's $25k a year to cover the basics. Now you're free to work part time, or start your own business to earn extra, and if you want to make $70k you're probably going to need to work full time.
Second, we already try to ensure a guaranteed minimum income, but in an indirect way. Instead of giving people money directly, we force employers to do it through minimum wage laws, and other regulations.
- Without the need to be forced through employment-preparation school, rather than study what takes their fancy and learn at a natural speed,
- without the need to pick a higher education on the basis of practicalities like earning potential,
- without the burden of a day job and the constant distraction of making ends meet,
... this would not be a society of couch potatoes. It would be a society of vocations and learning. In school did you really want to be a concert pianist, but had to settle for grinding out C# in a bank? In this society you'd get to be a concert pianist.
A couch potato is what you get if you sap someone's energy and available time with a 9-to-5 and then offer them broadcast entertainment produced by a small class of specialists.
Idea is that you don't loose your universal wage for any reason. So in you scenario you can get 70k if you do nothing or 70k plus what you are worth on the job market of companies that sell to consumers that all have at least 70k at their disposal.
If humans only need enough productive labor to engage 10% of the population, who cares if only the 10% (to use your number) that are engaged by "being productive" are productive?
I am basing my startup mostly on this discussion / meme - so I am happy to see it on HN. However the stage I think has been missed by the article (in the rush to say 2120!) is a transition away from commuting and into massive remote working, probably in the next ten years. The costs of commuting and office space is enormous compared to it's benefits for most jobs so we shall see a sea change in how jobs are measured and managed, leading to the path to remote working being freed up.
Oddly in software continuous integration / delivery is that sea change. In marketing? It's AB testing. In everything else? We shall see.
Brief idea: Continuous Integration is a step function in how software teams can function. By enabling CI or CD one can remove the major impediment to remote working - managers cannot see what you have done in a day.
If folks remote work in the software department, pretty soon others want to. The company needs to have the same confidence that people are working and things progressing daily. So let's say marketing moves to the technicalmarketing beloved of patio11 - you can have Market department run tests on it's changes, measure customer behaviour etc. And they don't need to do it in the office.
Apply the same to every business process. Business people need to interact so we are not going to abandon cities - but the most valuable interactions are inter-company not intra-company.
So from little acorns of CI we can see the world of the Race against the Machine coming to pass - White collar workers automated or their jobs changed out of recognition.
So my startup, yeah that. I see my one person consultancy not as a lifestyle business but as a forever company - where I and I hope others will work, but more importantly experience many new modes of future work - and teach others and produce products that fill niches we ourselves need or are very well placed to understand.
To be brutal, I want to turn a one person consultancy into a dispersed products company, solving the big work ideas of the next twenty years.
First three are the CI consultancy, a data warehouse scm driver and videos of bug fixes.
Please don't judge the book by the website - www.mikadosoftware.com. Ps - I think the auto farm is fantastic - keep it up
I have never met any of my coworkers - they are in various parts of the States and I in Kent. The world has changed, it's just not evenly distributed - I want to be part of that change - the view is best right out on the edge.
Robert Heinleins For Us, The Living describes this kind of society. Everyone gets a "dividend" which is enough to live on and people do what would be a low wage/non-job such as being an artist for part time fun and high wages.
One interesting anecdata point on the "everyone would just sit around and watch TV" front - my girlfriend and I just went through all of our reasonably close friends, and could only think of one person who might, possibly, not start or continue doing something challenging and interesting, given a "living wage" situation - and to be fair, we don't know that person very well.
The "everyone would just sit around" theory seems to be predicated on the belief that there are millions of people out there whom we don't personally know, but we somehow know well enough to believe they have no other interests that might blossom.
While I'm sure the universal living wage will become reality in a few countries, I'd expect a shorter work week and more vacation time to be more politically solvent solutions to systemic unemployment in the US.
The answer is quite simply, we are going to have to STOP having an economy that contains employment or money, at all. As I've put it before, either we all retire, or we're all sacked.
The economy, what little of it still requires humans, is going to have to run on vocations. And the part that does not, is going to have to run on allocation.
You still need some sort of unit to track resource consumption, maybe that's the Joule instead of the Dollar, but as long as there needs to be decisions made of the form, which is better/should we do, X or Y, then you need a quantitative way to think about it. Von Mises called this "economic calculation".
I'd consider the primary problems of early-Soviet style allocation economics to be (1) informational (2) computational. Money provides a quantitative (if not nice) solution to these because private economic decisions are intrinsically local, infinitely parallel and they self-aggregate.
Happily, look what happened in the intervening decades: mass connectivity and big data, plus the normalization of data mining over petabytes of raw information.
I think, in other words, that we have reached the point where we can batter down the economic calculation problem with brute force.
Even if you are correct, all that computation still needs to be done in some sort of unit. Money is good because it is abstracted from actual stuff. Joules are actually a bad unit, because how do you value an information product in terms of the energy of the computation it does? Hmm.
You use the natural units of the activity. Tonnes of ore or raw material. Hours of factory time. Joules of energy consumption. Production line machinery MTBF. So on and so forth. It's a lot of data, but nowadays we have tools to work with a lot of data.
No, that won't work. You can say, right now, and people do, "If we spend X building this thing, we estimate Y boost to the economy". You can't say "if we use X tonnes of concrete, we expect Y tonnes of Z to be produced" without the X/Y ratio being money. All money is is a way to abstract the worth of something from what it actually is.
Oh, and you can't pay your workers in concrete either. Or do you propose not paying them at all and just giving out rations to people living in barracks...?
Money abstracts demand-pull from production and supply. But abstraction is a complexity management tool you don't need if you can crunch the raw complexity.
What I'm proposing is a "you want it, you got it" economy, basically, that starts from a premise of equal allocation of resource control (not resource use) and allows unused allocations to be reflowed to the use of those with more ambitious projects, with direct-democratic oversight.
For example, if a hypothetical Elon Musk wants to build rockets (a resource hog activity) then he'd probably end up having to make a public case he was capable of it to avoid being vetoed, but case made, the resource allocations of people who prefer to paint at home or study Tudor history other low-expenditure vocations would be diverted to the rocket project.
No, this would not fall prey to hoarding. Hoarding is stupid and gains you nothing in a post-scarcity economy. You end up with a huge heap of copper or whatever that you aren't using, looking like a selfish idiot and with a trashed reputation that follows you around and makes people not willing to work with you.
What do you think Wall Street is, if not an attempt at "crunching the raw complexity"? It doesn't work and can't work.
would be diverted to the rocket project
Diverted by whom? The "owners" of those resources, or your central planning bureau?
Post scarcity relies on the assumption that if we have more than enough raw materials (and we don't, but let's assume asteroid mining or something), and more than enough energy (fusion maybe) and instantaneous transport of matter (otherwise scarcity exists by the stuff you want being somewhere else) then we still won't be post-scarcity really, because people/civilizations will just take on bigger and bigger projects. There will never be a time when there is no need to make a decision on how to allocate some finite resource to create some outcome by a quantitative means.
Even in Star Trek, someone needs to be thinking, how many planets do we colonize this year? How many starships do we build?
How much jobs we are loosing is not readily apparent. For example you should add almost all inmates and jailors and possibly half of the laweyrs and some of the goverment clerks (especialy the ones hired in branches created over last 20 years) to the unemployed to get the real numbers.
Our societies have a lot of pathological mechanisms for coping with inflow of people of diverse levels of education that have nothing to do.
I sincerely hope that people will be humane enough to create universal wage sooner than later.
I'm reading this like 'the singularity is upon us'. We aren't there yet, but articles like this are very good (even if they are slightly non-realistic at the moment) to throw a dart at where we, as a civilization, could end up. We have lost the ability to question where we'll go, because we move faster than our feet can take us. We are sliding down a snowy hill, holding on for dear life, hoping there's a nice landing at the bottom that won't end with us crashing. We've lost control of the sled, but it still moves forward because there's nothing to stop it.
I have an anecdote from Germany, and one from Uganda that kind of flow with the idea of 'if you want to, you can, but why?'. We are talented creators, we can make awesome things. Almost anything you think of now a days can be created (and likely has). Some of these things shouldn't have been created, and if every time we want something we ask "but why?", I think it help us to realize where we're going. These are anecdotes from friends, I have no idea of their truth, but they're interesting nonetheless (if it's wrong, consider it fiction).
In Germany, the buses run on time. When the buses are just a couple minutes late, people start getting mad. Ultra efficiency, where everything is perfectly meshed together like the gears on a Swiss watch. The timing is perfect, and it lets life progress with a minimum of fuss and extraneous endeavors. Get in, get out, get on your way.
In Uganda, when you invite someone over to your place to get together, you can set up a time. They'll get there, but they might be eight hours late from the time you set up. They might start walking, and talk to everyone they see along the way. They'll get the scoop on everyone's life, and share the human experiences that are happening around them. This lateness would sound like insanity to most people, but once you realize that everyone's clock is adjusted to the lag time of getting somewhere, it's not a big deal.
Now we, as humans, can create the most efficient complex world that we want to. But why? I think we have collectively lost a lot of modesty as our world has been progressing. We love to play games, we always need a challenge to solve. There's challenges all around us, and the money from solving the challenges is ripe for the taking. It doesn't matter what you do to get there - if you get the money, you get the prize and you won. The ripple effects are what does us in, and the ripples are the unexpected or unintentional differences that were created in our society after adopting the solution to the challenge. Some examples of technology with ripple effects are things like lead paint, leaded gasoline, clear cutting forests, asbestos insulation, etc. We might have been able to predict these things would be bad before we started if we thought a little longer. I'm sure a lot of people knew it would be bad, but it was the easier one that solved a 'problem' that we had. We're young as a civilization, and we are going to make mistakes. The mistakes we should not make though are ones that could have been prevented with a little bit of thought before jumping in head over heels (drunk driving for instance, if you don't do it, you will likely live a bit longer). It takes self restraint (from a person) and conditioning/education (from society) to reduce the number of drunk drivers. The trouble is that we have no restraint with advancing technology, and our society hasn't had the change to find the differences that are created when we advance it.
We're like dogs trying to resist the urge to pounce on a piece of meat. We simply can not let something pass us by. If there's a forest to ravage, or an ocean to destroy, we will do it, and we'll do it well. Try this - the next time you think of something cool to make, DON'T MAKE IT. Think about it, see it in your head, but resist the urge to make it. It's very, very challenging.
It's easy to know what you've lost after you've lost something, it's hard to predict what you're going to lose. When we do something, we have to change society, and we lose parts of society that we had before. Sometimes the changes are good, sometimes they're bad, but before changing it we should think about what we're doing.
Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany.
You can say technology has its drawbacks, but people overwhelmingly choose more technology and greater riches over any alternative. And more importantly, if you don't choose technology and someone else does, they can easily conquer you (militarily or economically) and destroy your livelihood.
>Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany
I'd pick Uganda. And when a had a similar choice to make in real life, I picked the poorer country.
Screw efficiency and screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend alcoholic binges, while f*ing poorer countries over to maintain their wealth and superiority (sometimes literally: from colonialism and interventions to Nazi Germany and the extermination of the "undesirables").
"screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend alcoholic binges"
I agree. Not sure what relevance that statement has to Germany, though. I've spent quite a lot of time in Germany and traveled to a lot of the country, and I'm certainly not seeing the resemblance.
Well, our experience differs in this case I guess. There are some vibrant parts of youth culture in Germany (in Berlin, etc), but for the most part it is work + weekend binges. There is a coldness one cannot really explain, except if you have leaved in "warmer" societies.
I've heard from people living there that Sweden/Denmark etc are even worse in this aspect.
My experience of Denmark has been that it's a vibrant, diverse, interesting society with some tremendously smart government policies, a lot of tolerance, and some really cool stuff going on, from great filmmaking to a massive Live-Action Roleplaying scene.
Doesn't every young person find the idea of work to be cold? I have lived in Germany and found the people and the society vibrant, friendly, and very warm. They are aggressively pursuing new areas of technological expansion, for me the most exciting being solar and wind power, and they have a very important role as the economic center of the EU. The fact that people there are thoughtful and careful and seek to match their life to their plans and stated goals does not make them cold.
So here's the thing: the idea that we should "think more" doesn't do much for me.
You won't find many people that disagree with the idea that we should "think harder", because the opposite stance ("we should think less!") is absurd, but, just because something sounds reasonable doesn't mean it's useful. "Think more" sounds a lot like "raise awareness" to me, which might as well be rephrased as "feel good about ourselves for recognizing reality without actually having to do anything"
The thing about society-changing events like this is that the result of "think more" generally ends up being "well, it's inevitable, but it's going to suck for a lot of people". Kudos for your awareness, but that extra "think about it" step doesn't do a lot, does it?
Well put, though personally I would have extracted a sliver of troublemaking glee changing 'leaded gasoline' out for 'the automobile culture' in general.
I'm sure that it goes by many other names in other philosophies, though you would probably be hard-pushed to find one that analyzed its nature as early and to such an extent as the Buddhists did.
For those interested in thinking about issues of a future society where most humans do not work, I'd highly recommend reading "Limes Inferior" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior), a thought-provoking book where many of these issues are raised.
The idea of paying people a basic wage even if they do not perform any useful work is not a new one.
That's basically what Zajdel describes in his dystopian vision: the basic "red" points that you get allow for a basic existence (e.g. food and shelter) without performing any work at all. So one might say it isn't really a wage.
I mean, reduce the basic living cost. For example, a homestead that ran on its own power (solar, wind, etc.), can manufacture many basic needs products through microfabs, and grow enough food.
Reducing costs doesn't do away with capital expenditure. But once acquired, the ongoing cost of living approaches zero.
If you give everyone a universal income, you are still making people beholden to the grid of some sort. The red points are still a wage, because ultimately, you have to rely on someone outside your family group to redeem your needs.
Reduce the cost and make that available en mass, and each household would be reasonably resource independent. Luxuries, of course, won't go away. Wants are endless.
> automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't.
It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.
At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.
Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have.
The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded.
The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.