I'm very glad this video talks about the most likely first to be removed.
I'm so confused why everyone thinks the least expensive to purchase(low skill labor) will be replaced first when it requires the most expensive version of AI(robots).
Some more insight on this is research into why Wal-Marts did not cause as much employment loss as feared, but instead removed "community leaders" from the area. Because Wal-Mart did all of it's professional services back at corporate headquarters, the area it moved into lost all of those people. The first line of true AI will be very similar to a WalMart moving into town.
He blatantly ignores the issue of energy constraints, more specifically the concept of embodied energy[0], which in the near future will be a very real very limiting factor that right now goes unnoticed because we're burning up energy reserves the earth has built up for hundreds of millions of years.
If we do look at this from an energy spending point of view.. this robot/AI revolution is gonna have a few interesting twists and turns along the way. One has to remember, the evolution of life has been a constant "economic" struggle for limited resources, with energy being the most limiting factor. Right now our economic development is largely based on a temporary liberation from that. However, that won't last, and energy-wise, life is far more energy-efficient than machines for most tasks[1] (I'm not entirely sure how this translates to robotics and computers, but for now I doubt they win). Energy spending also scales sub-linearly for living things[2], and I'm not sure if that holds true for machines.
There is enormous energy "embodied" in uranium, too. If (when?) the time comes that we can no longer sustain our economies on fossil fuels, we will increasingly turn to nuclear power, which should last us for several more generations.
I'm not promoting this; I'm just predicting it. The sustainability of fossil fuels will be reflected in prices. More demand, political restrictions, and fewer new discoveries: prices go up; conservation, carbon sequestration/removal tech, and growing efficiencies supplemented by new sources such as fracked gas: prices relax. At some point (you say "very near", I say no one knows), hydrocarbon prices will go so high that the developed world will either have to voluntarily undevelop (not going to happen politically) or pay what it costs to solve some nuke problems and live with others, and we will continue to grow our use of energy.
Good points - and note that I wasn't saying robotics and AIs were not going to happen, just that it will have some added plot twists - but I would argue that this is not true:
> (you say "very near", I say no one knows)
Given that our energy spending grows exponentially, it's certainly going be sooner than later.
Technology could be used to solve the problems that it's causing. E.g. better utilization of existing resources (self-driving cars), alternative sources of energy, and perhaps even space colonization.
Even if you calculated as embodied energy instead of just looking at the energy spent directly on a task? Because a large part of the "inefficiency" of living creatures is physical maintenance of the body. If that is included for machines as well, I'm not so sure if they're better off. For now, of course - as soon as we realise energy is a real constraint, we'll surely start optimising for it.
The third link I posted references Geoffrey West who has an interesting high-level physics approach to this issue, but it doesn't really do justice to his points. But I figured posting this 40 minute one, which is much more comprehensive, would be a bit much to ask:
(also has a lot more phycisist's arrogance in the form of cursing, which I find entertaining myself)
Actually, given that city energy spending also grows sublinearly, robot and AI networks probably would as well. So that argument likely won't hold against it.
"Obvious reasons" is not a very convincing argument, and and I am quite curious why you are saying that a link that literally states things like:
"A human-controlled punching machine is 25 to 35 times more efficient than a laser cutter when producing a standard part"
"Fibre laser cutters are more efficient than CO2-laser cutters, but their power consumption is still 10 times larger than that of a slower but equally powerful human-controlled nibbling machine"
A human-controlled punching machine is not a living thing, a human-controlled nibbling machine isn't a living thing. Thus none of the sentences support the notion that "life is far more energy-efficient than machines for most tasks".
There might be some manually controlled machines that are more energy efficient than some automatic machines, but that would be a very very different fact, and I don't see any reason to believe that it would hold in general. For example the table you linked to doesn't say how much that is produced per energy unit, which would be the relevant measure, and it doesn't take into account that the operator uses a lot of energy. With your kind of arguing I could show that a hand saw was infinitely more efficient than a chainsaw because the hand saw in itself doesn't use any energy at all and we don't count the operator.
A human in standby (resting) consumes about 80W power, and a human that does any kind of work much more than that. Humans use extremely inefficient fuel that takes many times more energy to produce than it makes available to do any kind of work. For most physical work it is easy to find a machine that does the same work using much less energy. In those areas where computers can replace humans they also do the same work using much less energy but also much faster. And then we haven't even taken into account that the human only works for 40 hours per week, need a house that keep her warm and uses a shitload of energy every day just to get back and forth to their workplace.
They've excluded other industries in forming their basis and it's clearly cherry picking to fit a narrative. I like the idea of a fully-automated utopia as much as the next person, but jobs are simply not going to disappear - they're going to shift industries.
Those graphs aren't in any conflict; of course if the proportion of workers in one industry goes down, the proportion of workers employed in some other industry must go up, mathematically (the BLS graph being percentage of the total workforce, rather than percentage of the total population).
I see your objection that to consider agriculture's decline indicative of the future of labor in general could be considered cherry-picking, but I think the video at least attempts to respond to this charge, explaining why its author does not feel other industries will "pick up the slack" in the same way in the future as happened in the past for jobs lost to automation.
[For what it's worth, while enamored of the dream of leisure-society utopia, I am quite skeptical of the author's assessment of the current state of progress on various forms of automation (and thus, a fortiori, of the projected speed at which such automation will take off as ubiquitous in the near future). But I did want to defend them against the charge of not even considering the idea that jobs will simply shift to other industries.]
I found it surprisingly shallow in that it didn't really delve into post-scarcity economics. With stuff like basic income or negative taxing the loss of jobs will not look as severe societally.
The point of the video is that robots will soon exceed humans as workers in every conceivable way. "Post-scarcity economy" is obviously incompatible with free market capitalism. I can see how one might believe that prices could decrease towards zero as the efficiency of technology increases, however there still needs to be an incentive for production. At the moment, the incentive is profit. But if nobody can afford a loaf of bread, then what is the incentive to produce loaves of bread? Good will? Government mandate? What happens when companies possess more power than the government? Google for one appears to be positioning itself as a contender. Interesting times ahead.
It's definitely going to be interesting how things play out, and honestly I think China will adapt to the change far easier than the US will.
The US has major political dogma against communism and socialism. The only way out of this is going to be with major socialist programs. The only way to avoid civil unrest over unemployment rates will be literally paying people off. Basic income is inevitable.
The issue is, how long will companies be allowed to hold on to control. What happens when we start automating out jobs with AI. What happens when even the CEO is replaced, and investors are just AIs representing a portfolio. I find it highly doubtful the public will allow billions of dollars and control of corporations to sit in the hands of AIs with the intent of profiteering.
So how long until companies are taken over by the government. You said what happens when companies possess more power than the government, but I don't know any corporations with 10 aircraft carriers in operation. Eminent Domain seizures will be the way the government retains control.
How long after basic income would it take to see grocery stores become seen as a public utility? Or housing construction? When everyone can afford a house, we can't afford not giving people houses.
It's going to be interesting to see how much of our traditional practice's remain.
Human consumption hinges on the fact that the humans have income to buy stuff to consume. Are you saying we shall tax the company profits in order to pay people basic income to provide means needed to consume stuff to create these required profits. And that the profits are staying in the tax jurisdiction as well as not getting tax breaks the owners lobbied for using previous profits.
Corporations can move out of the jurisdiction with corp tax much easier than humans. And judging by Apple etc, they are pretty good at getting tax brakes, buy legislation.
More plausible since it directly connects to the problem at hand. But when you replace humans with algorithms how do you determine what to tax and how much?
I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy.
I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the decisions that need to be made.
I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils.
I have concerns about this myself, but I don't find that video remotely convincing.
CGP Grey went through the analogy of horses and the history of technology to emphasize the line of thinking that the invention of new technology will lead to the creation of new jobs is a fallacy and false.
In the past, new technological changes lead to the demise of horses. There were no "new" jobs that horses could fulfill. So it will be with humans.
Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Horses have never created their own jobs using their own ingenuity. We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses. Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services. Or social structure does not depend on horses feeling a sense of meaning in their lives.
We didn't react to horse unemployment by finding new things for horses to do because, aside from the horse owners, we did not value the employment of horses and the horses did not create new jobs for themselves because... they are horses.
Without necessarily disagreeing with the conclusion, the analogy comes off as extremely silly.
I do in fact agree that we need to think about what society we are building as we approach machines that rival humans on all levels, so it's frustrating to see a video that pretends that the employment of horses is at all similar to the employment of humans.
> Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world.
Dark as it may seem, many people would say the same about most human consumers in this country. Looking at the most successful creations in the past century, most are made by corporations. While people have been spearheading those efforts so far, the whole novel creation process would be automated if and when it can be. (The "if" in this case is weather or not you believe in "the singularity")
> We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses.
.. but a society of horses sure would. We, as a society of humans, are worried about the future of human jobs. Our human society and social structure is in for one hell of a shock, but the world will move on.
> Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services.
And our economy barely relies on humans anymore. As long as there is something with money to spend, the economy doesn't really care. Look at the banking industry. Look at all these B2B partnerships.. who cares about humans in those relationships? Robots are getting better and better at deciding how to spend money.
Is the analogy really that silly? I love it because it helps wake people up to the reality we live in: we are the horses in this new age, growing ever more irrelevant. The world economy couldn't care less about humans.
This is getting depressing. I'm gonna go listen to "Dog Days are Over" by Florence and the Machine...
Uh, it's only depressing if you agree with the nutjob elitists that think everyone else is a horse that needs their constant guidance to do something with their life.
Do you have any idea how the banking industry and B2B operations work? People. Lots and lots of people. Way less automation than low-margin retail junk, which itself is way less automated than most people think it is.
You have it exactly backwards: It's not that the economy is run by robots that are not interested in you. Robots are not interested in the economy, but the economy is very interested in you -- money is just a way of keeping score.
Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your complaints are mostly irrelevant.
The analogy is itself a fallacy. The jobs that were displaced were not those of horses, but of horse breeders, trainers, keepers and drivers. The horses in this story were not the laborers but the tools. Those people, unlike horses, could retrain to do a different kind of job which was in-demand. Horse traders could become car salesmen. Horse drivers could become car drivers. The replacement of horses by cars led to an increase in jobs, not a decrease.
he actually directly addresses this by stating the standard argument that low skill/resolution jobs are replaced by higher skill/resolution jobs.
The issue is not that there will not be new jobs, the issue is that the automation of these new jobs is accelerating - so people cannot adapt fast enough to be able to competently take these new jobs as their old jobs become obsolete.
He starts the video exactly the opposite -- he pointed out that all humans used to be involved in food production and now almost none are and briefly summarized thousands of years of history of humans creating new things to do when the old things became unnecessary. That's a long timescale of course... on a shorter timescale I can't think of many jobs that existed 100 years ago that still exist today, at least not as a significant percentage of the current job force. Of course then he says "but this time it's different" before he starts on all the poor, and I think dishonest, logic.
So then, yes, he listed a lot of jobs that will go away, insinuated it's basically all of them (with which I agree, but no argument was made), and then took the strawman "well maybe you think creative jobs won't go away" and then defeated that strawman by incorrectly assuming creativity is limited to artists, poets, directors, and actors and said "there can't be such a thing as a poem and painting based economy", which I think is what you are referring to. That's just as dishonest as the horse analogy. It assumes without argument that creative people won't look at the new robotic world around them and find new things to create, or at the humans around them eager to work and find new ways to utilize them, all with the assistance of AIs and robots.
He addressed this by talking about how there really aren't being created many new kinds of jobs, and that the large bulk of employment these days are in professions that have had a long history already.
In the video, the analogy between horses loosing out to cars and humans loosing out to AI is false. Humans are the ones building the AI. Horses however did not build the cars. Its a very important distinction we are not at a liberty to dismiss.
You're missing something. Horse-like animals actually did develop cars. They only had to evolve into humans and build up a technological base before they could do it.
Over a very long period of time, animals developed cars. Now that same development process is remarkably faster, and robots are being developed. The horse analogy is perfectly valid.
Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your nitpick is therefore irrelevant.
I did not say the analogy is not representative. I said its wrong. Now if horses were building cars and being worried about their future, I'd say fine. But its not the case. Here horses are not in the same position at all as humans. So its not helping to "compare and contrast", its building up a wrong mindset, wrong premise.
It is never made explicit in the video but imagine that corporations are the current dominant super-organism on which the economy depends. Humans are only designing and building cars because corporations have no better way of getting that job done. Thus, humans are used by corporations just as horses were used by humans before the corporation became the dominant economic species on the planet. Corporations may not always need humans to survive.
Just as cars replaced horses for the benefit of human masters, robots may replace humans for the benefit of corporate masters.
You may still disagree with the analogy but I think this is at least the proper analogy to be arguing about.
I really hope we dont let the bottom half of our economy fall before we strive for the restructuring we will need. Because when we let stuff fail, billions or trillions in value will vanish with it.
As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 minutes to read the following counterpoint.
Self-service checkout – “What used to be 30 humans is now 1 human overseeing 30 self-service check outs” – At all the grocery stores I’ve been to in my area, there are still ~30 human-staffed checkout lanes and 4 – 6 self-service machines, which replaced maybe two rows of check outs and still employs a human for oversight. However, these self-service checkouts allow the stores to operate 24/7, because after 10:00 they are the only lanes open. Now the store is open longer so it can make more money, whereas before they closed at 10:00. More money for the store means perhaps a whole new store opening, employing more people than would have otherwise been employed without self-service lanes.
Self-driving cars – “They are not the future, they are here and they work” – For narrow definitions of "here" and "work". There's a big difference between being developed in a lab and driving up and down the coast in sunny Cali, and being deployed to millions of consumers around the globe in multitudinous climates. He lists some things self-driving cars do better than humans, but fails to mention that self-driving cars lack the complex decision making, cognition, and communication abilities that are required in every-day driving. Self-driving cars are low hanging fruit for roboticists because we have a set of rules governing transportation, and that’s prime material for automation. Take the rules, code them up, done. Problem is, the rules are broken constantly, and in a way that driving a million miles up and down the west coast won’t solve (How many miles exactly has the Google car driven in snow?). Self-driving cars will come, but as long as there are still human drivers and weather, they will not live up to the hype they are currently generating. Take it from someone who actually engineers these types of robots.
Law Bots – He claims that bots will replace the bulk of lawyering because they can sift through a million e-mails quickly. And what happens when the bot is done? The lawyer gets back to work. It sounds to me like the bot is making the lawyer more efficient. Instead of spending weeks going through e-mails, he can use a computer to help him, and do his job more efficiently. So maybe we need fewer lawyers? The only reason we needed more in the first place was because of the amount of e-mail and electronic documents created by computers. To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous.
Doctor bots – He says that knowing the reaction of every drug between every other drug is beyond the scope of human capability… sounds like a great job for robots then! Again, this is an instance of a robot augmenting the capabilities of a human, not replacing one. He goes on to say that the doctor bots will be able to read the latest research, understand it, and then go on to implement the knowledge. First, one has to wonder how the research is being generated if human doctors are being replaced by robots. Second, as long as we’re assuming an AI advanced enough to read a research paper, generate inferences and implications based on that research, and act on that new knowledge, we might as well assume that all disease has also been cured, eliminating the need for doctor bots in the first place.
Creative bots – Finally, and most egregiously. Creativity is right up there next to sentience in the totem pole of AI capabilities, and is well into the realm of science fiction. The (only) example he gives, Emily Howell as a source of machine creative music is a complete joke. Here’s what the inventor of the bot has to say about it:
> Professor Cope argues that Emily Howell’s music is still predominantly created by humans. “Computers are not separate things,” he said. “The computer is human-made. The program itself is human-made. The music in the database is human as well. There’s so much about this that is human. There’s just a lot more humans involved in making this than usual.”
Emily Howell is a program designed by a human to output a specific kind of music. It may be music that has not been written before by any human, but it is not creative. In the end, the music is the result of an algorithm, designed by a human. In my view, a creative machine is one that performs a task, on purpose, it was not programmed to perform.
So those are the big problems I have with what he showed. What is even more aggravating is what he left out. What about robots that do things humans can't do. What about a robot that can fit into a 1/2" pipe, or one that can fly (we call them drones), or one that can go into a nuclear reactor or the bottom of the sea. Those robots are taking away 0 jobs, and create hundreds (if not thousands) of jobs for those that design, engineer, manufacture, repair, sell, program, manage, and use those robots.
Finally, robots are great at replacing some tasks that can be automated, but not so great at others. We've had robot receptionists for a while now. They are so terrible, that having a human receptionist is now a competitive advantage for some businesses. I think the general point that this video misses, is that robots are terrible at interfacing with people. Any human-facing occupation, even if it has aspects that can be automated, will probably still exist no matter how pervasive robots become in our lives. When robots can interact with humans well, we're probably talking about a future that is too far out for us to accurately predict.
> To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous.
I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of the video. The video doesn't say, "hey, we need to turn off these computers because they'll make us obsolete."
He's arguing that we'll inevitably use computers to solve a problem created by computers, and that a lot of people will be unemployable as a result, and that's something we need to think about as a society.
The video doesn't suggest any concrete solutions at all. (Basic income/negative taxation seem like obvious candidates; walking back technology itself is probably not a good candidate, though some people will certainly try.)
Regarding the doctor bot portion, I found the claim that knowing the reactions of a cascade of drugs is beyond the scope of human capability to be an absolutely ludicrous position to take. That right there is a huge portion of internal medicine. Pharmacists, nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists, etc. all spend years learning these matrices before even entering practice. Maybe knowing the totality of all drug combinations is difficult, but it ignores the fact that most—if not all—drugs are prescribed under known, common patterns, often now with the assistance of programs to make sure they don't accidentally prescribe something that will interact poorly with other meds. Medical professionals end up specializing and work with only subsets of the matrix anyway, but I really doubt a robot will ever be able to replace a doctor in this area, let alone all of medicine. If recent history is a decent guide, robots and software will only augment a doctor's capability to work accurately and efficiently.
With the creativity bot, I also wondered about this. With creativity, a bot creating sound based on rules isn't a musical genius, let alone "creative." They're a performer. They'll have difficulty 1) creating new genres of music and 2) creating music that is popular or meaningful to people. Technical performance and creativity are two very, very different things. We tend to think of the rule breakers as the geniuses of creativity. Hard to do that when the act of telling a machine to break the rules is itself a rule. How boring.
Lastly, we've found that a robot that plays Jeopardy! against humans to be an interesting gimmick, but nobody would suggest a game show where robots continually compete against other robots. Who would find it entertaining?
He's not saying that robots are going to take literally every job ever. Only the majority of them.
I believe I read that stores don't encourage self-checkouts very much because having humans around significantly decreases shoplifting. This may be less necessary if we get better AIs for monitoring security cameras.
I've never read anything about self-driving cars being impossible in bad weather, only that no has done it yet. Machine vision systems are not as vulnerable to this btw and that has been improving in leaps and bounds over just the last 10 years.
Lawyers still searched through documents tediously before computers. It was probably even harder then, not easier.
It's at least theoretically possible create a robot that can diagnose and prescribe treatments for a patient just like a doctor. All the video claimed is that they can do statistics and search the relevant research a lot better. Which is definitely true, and see IBM's Watson.
Arguments about what "creativity" means are never useful or productive. But AI that generates music well already exists and is going to continuously get better.
I don't consider a self-checkout lane to be a "robot" in any sense. It's a customer doing the job of a once trained employee. If you've ever been behind someone new to one of these things, they're slow and annoying experiences.
The main reason for them is reducing workers necessary during slow sales periods (like overnights, or weekday mornings).
And anyway, the job wasn't replaced by a robot in this case. The job was replaced by a customer.
No they aren't robots but tech that as a consequence reduce the number of employees.
In Sweden there has been quite a big reduction in number of people working at the checkouts. And even if they are freed up to do other things in the stores, there has been a net reduction in number of employees.
Yes, "robot" isn't the point. "Non-human" is the point. Non-humans replacing humans probably began with animal domestication technology and has accelerated dramatically since then. Once a non-human replaces a human, the switch tends to be permanent, so all human jobs will eventually be replaced unless technology stops progressing (only if there's a global holocaust) or if humans can forever invent new jobs (that humans do better than non-humans) at a rate that matches the takeover of old jobs by non-humans.
Since the takeover is apparently accelerating, humans aren't significantly improving, and non-humans are, it's going to be a difficult race.
One thing that strikes me as peculiar about the self-service checkout argument creating more wealth is that it assumes that the store would not have received the revenue if they weren't open at the time. Perhaps this might work in certain urban areas, but even still some places culturally abhor the idea of shopping for anything 24/7. I've heard that Germany doesn't have that many stores open very late because the purchase can probably wait until the next day and people would both plan their days better and allow for more leisure time away from chores and work accordingly. Assumptions about consumer behavior should be researched and tested first especially when entering new markets.
Also, let's not forget that we now have a human needing to supervise these 24/7 bots. Graveyard shift work in any industry regardless of pay is not a pretty thing to witness with really high turnover rates and the health ramifications for encouraging it are probably not positive in the aggregate. Of course, we could employ remote workers to oversee machines in their regular time, but this usually results in the loss of the on-site job and the creation of lower-value jobs in developing markets due to geographic limitations for one of the obvious end results.
But good criticisms overall about the robot revolution alarmists on many common arguments. I can't help but agree given I'm a strong AI skeptic given what I've learned about AI through research and the tendency of the AI community to overestimate itself on achieving human-like behaviors grossly for decades with no exception while so much progress (and more importantly for continued investments in modern economies, immediate value) has been achieved with weak AI. The comparison that's most accurate is that we achieved human flight, but nobody would say that an airplane is "superior" to a bird's capabilities. A Jetsons like future has been dreamed of in various capacities since human being realized they could make machines to do work, but the nature of work just adapts with all of these inventions.
> I've heard that Germany doesn't have that many stores open very late because the purchase can probably wait until the next day and people would both plan their days better and allow for more leisure time away from chores and work accordingly.
Its about if even one store is open late, then every store has to be. Because people go where the store is open. The closed store will absolutely lose those sales.
Some people go where the store is open. I have a Safeway near me that's open until midnight, but it would have to be something of unusual urgency to make me go there late in the evening. Generally I just wait and go to my preferred supermarket a day later.
In the UK we do have shops with only self service checkouts (convenience stores, not the larger supermarkets, so far).
Receptionists are an odd case, as telephone access to people has either been removed (use a web interface), or goes direct to where you want. Redesigning the interface.
Law bots will only change if the law changes to be more computer friendly.
I don't think you and Grey are in disagreement. The content of the video is generally correct and points to where things are going, not specifics of implementation.
The presenter isn't attacking robotics, but outlining the increases in capabilities.
That video was actually briefly on the HN front page. I’m still wondering why some people apparently flagged so that it was quickly relegated to page 3 or so.
Ah, thanks for clearing it up. I was just surprised seeing it with 13 points off the front page the second time I checked it. Looks like I have to eat my words.
If a panel of experts are evenly split on their opinions about the future of jobs, it seems to me that nobody really knows what is going to happen. It's one thing to point to how historically new technology created new jobs to replace those it displaced, but I get the feeling that this time it might be very different. All the rules go out the window when technological acceleration reaches a certain point. I'm not saying that we'll hit the Singularity and upload our brains into computers, but we might hit a sort of "economic singularity" where it no longer becomes economically viable to create new jobs. What happens then is very much up to our society to decide.
Economist Louis Kelso (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kelso) was talking about many of these issues in the 1950's. He proposed the concepts behind Binary Economic Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_economics) which helped usher into law the Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP). Whether or not you agree with it, it is certainly interesting to learn about. It isn't something that is widely taught.
"Kelso claimed that in a truly free market wages would tend to fall over time, with all the benefits of technological progress accruing to capital owners"
I've worked for three ESOPs and was curious about their history. Learning about Binary Economics has led me into an interest in alternative economic theories. There are sites and books dedicated to the subject, the following excerpt from the previously linked wikipedia page was the connection I had made, but really he was trying to solve problems related to measuring production with regards to automation. With the advent of the computer age, it was viewed as inevitable.
`Binary productiveness is distinctly different from the conventional economic concept of productivity. Binary productiveness attempts to quantify the proportion of output contributed by total labor input and total capital input respectively, Adding capital inputs to a production process increases labor productivity, but binary economic theory argues that it decreases labor productiveness (i.e. the proportion of the total output with the support of both labor and capital that the labor inputs could have produced alone). For example, if the invention of a shovel allows a laborer to dig a hole in quarter of the time it would take him without the spade, binary economists would consider 75% of the "productiveness" to come from the shovel and only 25% from the laborer.`
`Kelso used the concept of productiveness to support his theory of distributive justice, arguing that as capital increasingly substitutes for labor..."workers can legitimately claim from their aggregate labor only a decreasing percentage of total output", implying they would need to acquire capital holdings to maintain their level of income.`
and
`...Kelso had uncovered over years of intensive reading, research and thought, drastically modifies the classical paradigm which has dominated formal economics since Adam Smith. It concerns the effect of technological change on the distributive dynamics of a private property, free market economy. Technological change, Kelso concluded, makes tools, machines, structures and processes ever more productive while leaving human productivity largely unchanged. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy (whose distributive principle is "to each according to his production") delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contributions through labor.`
That's hardly a point of comfort if the new jobs all tend to be subject to the laws of "extremistan" (which seems to be the case for most artistic/creative/high-level ventures):
If today you replaced half of the blue-collar jobs in our economy with jobs that had a 10% chance of paying 100x as much but a 90% chance of paying effectively nothing (10x the average productivity, woohoo) you would still have widespread starvation, revolution, and violence tomorrow.
But under our current economic system, what you can afford is tied to the value of the goods/services you produce. If we find ourselves in a future where 90% of the population produces nothing, then 90% of the population can afford nothing, no matter how cheap.
Obviously there is a utopian solution, where most goods and services are so cheap to produce, that most people have essentially free access to them.
What is worrying is the dystopian alternative (and probably inevitable adjustment period), where only a tiny fraction of the population is "valuable", and therefore has access to all the benefits of cheap automation, while the other 90% have no value (economically speaking).
We also tend to forget that we live in a sort of intellectual bubble. Just by being able to hold a highly technical job, you are probably already in the upper 90% percent of the intelligence spectrum. 80% of the world's population has an IQ of under 115; and half the world's population is under 100 and can barely grasp any form of abstract logical thinking.
If the vast majority of jobs in the future require high technical or intellectual aptitude, then the vast majority of the earth's population will be left with nothing to do.
I was pointing out what I think is often ignored in these conversations: that robots taking all the jobs means we have reached post scarcity. Between that potential future and where we are now there could be some serious problems as you suggest. I agree that the economy is shifting away from low skilled jobs towards high skill jobs and that does seem like a big problem for low skill people. I am slightly more optimistic than you because I think that the primary difference between low skilled people and high skilled people is not innate intelligence, but education and training.
"Incredibly cheap" is not a relevant metric. The relevant quantity is price/income. If income drops by 50% and price drops by 10%, the good has still effectively become almost twice as expensive.
Workers capacity to fill those desires for people with capital is limited though. At what point does the majority of un-capitaled humanity become irrelevant?
Is there any convincing data on this point? I know that it was an economist that uttered this theory, so I'll assume good faith when it comes to research effort or at least diligent argumentation on the behalf of this statement. But without anything to back it up, it just comes off as something it's proponents take for granted as a truism.
"Consumerism" (which goes beyond "stuff" and materialism, at least here) has been criticized by many in the western world. Even just leaving aside the argument that involves a finite planet sustaining ever-more needs and desires, I'm not convinced that the average human's needs and desires are infinite in any practical sense. It might be that "more is more", but I also suspect a sharp decline due to diminishing returns as one gets ever more needs fulfilled. How much better does spending 1,000 million on yourself feel than spending 100 million on yourself? Significantly better? I guess we could theoretically get to the point where everyone takes what is in today's currency billion-dollars worth of vacations by going on trips 'round the Solar System. But at some point, maybe before we're at the point of the Solar System joyrides, it just might not seem so exciting any more (travelling to the red wasteland of Mars might not be so exotic and exciting as it is today when a lot of people can and have already done it).
There was only two economists discussing the future of jobs :(
Robotics and automation are changing business from labor intensive to capital intensive. Wage share (share of wages from the GDP) has been going down since early 70's in all OECD countries. Automation will continue to increase that trend together with more competition from third world.
The job loss should be considered as one issue in downward pressure for wages caused by automation. Workers can compete with with automation by earning less. People from developing world will be able to compete against automation longer.
Removing cashiers and logistic workers with automation and more sophisticated vending machines might generate bigger dent to the jobs than self driving cars (They have vending machine in Italy that makes fresh pizza starting from the flour).
My local grocery store has a fresh food department, that basically sells the cooked version of the stores prepared foods (so the pizza they sell is their pizza dough, their marinara sauce, their carton of cheese and their packs of pepperoni, all of which you can grab and make the same pizza right at home) and the store brand foods.
The thing I find amazing is that they have a couple of kids working barely above minimum wage essentially doing the task of a vending machine. Their most labour intensive task is rolling out the ball of pizza dough.
I won't be surprised to see grocery stores rapidly change to near full automation. We already have automated shipping warehouses, stocking store shelves is essentially the reverse process and with proper inventory monitoring a shelf would never be empty. Checkouts are already becoming self-serve in many places as it allows more "cashiers" to be open thus reducing lines.
Every job in a grocery store is shockingly automatable, from assembling the loads at the distribution warehouses, we're already talking automated tractor trailers for freight, automated fork lifts to load and unload, automated shelf stackers and self-serve cashes. Whose going to be working? Security, at least until we automate that.
I work construction, and its honestly a matter of time before I'm automated out of a job. I'm blessed by the fact that rough terrain is the main limiting factor, that I might actually stay employed longer than most.
The reason I see automation taking over is because we're approaching onsite manufacture of a lot of materials. It used to be just eavestrough, but now every form of steel roofing can be made on site. It's only a matter of time before someone starts mounting them on boom lifts and running them out in place for workers to just screw down. From there its only going to be a short time until the machine makes and screws the piece.
We're starting to see vinyl products that can be bent to make fascia, which means a machine can easily produce vinyl siding and accessories on site. So how long until they get mounted on a scissor lift and parked at one end of the wall and you can have a 50ft wall of seamless siding.
As a society, we need to ask ourselves two questions: (1) what is the purpose of work? and (2) what do people find valuable?
The premise of question 1 is that we should not work just for the sake of saying that we are working. Rather we should work because we are creating something of value for others and ourselves. I think that automation will have a profound impact on the economy by making certain types of work economically infeasible. But this is not necessarily a problem as long as people realize it and move on to work on more highly value areas. I believe that as individuals our desires are limitless and there will always be a demand for something. We just need to figure out what that demand is and work in that domain.
Overall automation will free us from many manual labor jobs and allow us to produce more art, poetry, mathematics, and science.
I think we also have to consider conservatives who believe that there is inherent value in certain lifestyles that is independent of the products of those lifestyles. Automated labor will also free us to compete in whatever inefficient way we want. Just as garment technology has not stopped people from knitting, automated labor will still allow people to choose to be Amish.
Personally, I think we can find better things to do than work most jobs that exist today. We need to be open to the idea of perpetual changes in what we can and should do with our time.
One of intended or unintended consequence of the work is distribution of wealth. And the effects of the growing robotics and automation will be breaking this distribution. Per se, this should not negative, unless we are prepared for this.
From the point of view of classical economics, AI increases the productiveness of capital, and certain specialized kinds of labor (e.g. creating and improving AI).
While this increases the total output of society, it also increases inequality.
We already have in place mechanisms to deal with inequality, namely income tax and welfare. As the total output of society grows, we will be able to afford more generous kinds of welfare, until eventually we probably settle on a negative income tax scheme.
Note that a correctly designed welfare system wouldn't result in lots of people living on welfare, but rather everyone working fewer hours.
So I imagine that the future could be quite good, as long as our methods for redistributing wealth are able to keep pace with technological change (and there are some great examples to follow in the Western world, e.g. Scandinavia, Australia and NZ)
Why do you say that AI will automatically increase inequality? Not necessarily disagreeing but interested to hear your thoughts. I'm also wary of the impact that AI and robotics may have but am cautiously optimistic. While I do think that many jobs will be displaced by automation, I wonder if we'll also see a labor revolution or rather emergence of a new sector/type of jobs. E.F. Schumacher talked a lot about the dehumanizing nature of many jobs, and I think in a perfect world automation and robotics could take over the repetitive or dangerous jobs, freeing those workers to take on more fulfilling and important jobs.
I hope as you do but.... Small scale tools for small groups and individuals might be more flexible but will absoltuely be less prodigious/efficient than large scale factories and therefore margins and pricing will always put the little guys on the edges of the economy, thereby exacerbating inequality.
Automation increases the benefits of owning capital over providing labor, in ever growing proportions. The less people are needed to provide labor, and have any resources distributed to them at all, the more fruits accrue solely to capital-holders.
"Race against the Machine" is actually a good book about the topic: "In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating.
"...digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie."
Of course, there will be less and less "jobs" in the future. But that's OK. The population growth is already stopping. Productivity will rise to the new heights. Society will adapt — first, by introducing, say, 4-hour work days, then by totally eliminating the concept of a "job" — everyone will be either a temp staffer, or a business founder (or an artisan — arts and crafts will be more valuable than ever).
We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright. No more office jobs, though.
"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by other affluent individuals working in a similar field, all in jobs with increasingly flexible work hours, better benefits and nearly unlimited job prospects.
The world only looks like it's moving towards post-scarcity because the resources consumed and waste produced have been nearly completely outsourced away, and the pangs of the labor issues created by automation are happening somewhere else.
Post-scarcity is not an issue of 'productivity' but of resource use. As Jevons paradox [0] points out the more efficiently we use resources the more of them we tend to use. Looking merely at productivity and efficiency without looking at resource use and waste production gives a wildly incomplete picture of "post-scarcity". What I see is that the world is increasingly separating into a small sub-population that is presented the illusion of post-scarcity and a another, growing, subset that is feeling the effects of scarcity required to maintain that illusion.
When I see data to support the argument that resource use and waste production are plummeting, then I'll believe in narratives about post-scarcity.
If labor is effectively free (because robots don't get paid) then I don't think that the products of that labor would be particularly scarce. Even material costs are primarily the labor cost to extract or recycle a material.
1) Lots of people want to live in the same relatively small area.
2) Houses take a lot of labor to make.
3) The material houses are made from take a lot of labor to extract.
If labor were cheap 2 and 3 would be cheap as well and if people did not need to live near job centers I think 1 would not be as big of a deal either.
This discussion of the problems we will have once robots take our jobs by making labor free ignores the benefits of free labor. I am skeptical of the ability of robots to take our jobs by providing free labor, but we only have to worry about the downsides of free robot labor, if we actually have free robot labor.
There's a lot of delusion about the developing energy picture. The arithmetic shows we will not be running millions of robot slaves and self driving electric cars on solar and wind power. We will be walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines. We are running out of fossil fuel energy and still no viable replacements have been identified.
I like how you identify "walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines" as signs of the collapse of civilisation. To most people, those are normal things.
I doubt we're going post-scarcity any time soon though. We don't have any of the technologies that form the foundation of a post-scarcity society: abundant renewable energy, fully automated just-in-time production of nearly all goods and materials, extremely low cost delivery of goods to the home and/or business, and the intelligent software that ties it all together. Some of those things are close, others, not so much. Aside from a "magic" solution, like the singularity, I do not expect in my life-time to see a post-scarcity society arise.
I do agree that the automation of jobs is not a serious cause of concern, though obviously for those whose jobs are displaced it will be. People can't stand to sit around and do nothing for any great stretch of time (although everyone claims otherwise). They will find ways to be busy, and if you automate away one part of activity, other forms will take up its place. Someone will figure out how to monetize it and presto, a new job category. Selling software was once a crazy idea. Selling virtual characters was crazy just a few years ago, and is becoming normal. We will gradually become ever more refined in the sort of virtual goods and services we create through human labor that can be sold online.
We have enough uranium and thorium for millions of years with breeder cycle. Even if not renewable, who cares? And it's quite ecological, compared to burning oil products.
Molten Salt Reactors are cheaper. They do not need a pressure vessel or a huge containment structure. They can fit in a shipping container. BTW red herring is delicious!
Renewables are basically already viable, despite what its opponents have been trying to say. It's already more competitive than natural gas in some places, and the next 5 years will be crossing many other such thresholds.
Renewables are not already viable, they are never going to be viable but for a small portion of our energy needs. Because Physics. They just don't have enough concentrated energy. Take solar for example, take a look at http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml, In the UK solar basically works out to 100 watts per square meter on average. Somewhere really nice in the American Sotuhwest is maybe like 400 watts per square meter. At 25% efficiency, to equal the baseline load of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, you need something like 7.7 square miles of panel area when you factor in the need to capture enough sun during the day and store it for the night. You need to also have a high voltage DC grid to ship the electricity from the Desert to where we need it, and much better storage systems to hold the load for the night. Basically Solar is never going to work for baseline load, and to top it all off photovoltaics are dirty as hell to make. Wind is even more bad (There was a study that said you needed 270 square miles of land to generate 1 GW reliably), and hydroelectric is limited in where we can deploy it. Nuclear is exactly what we need, renewables just can't be anything but a small part of the solution considering our power usage is increasing not decreasing.
Ah. That's why Germany manages to generate >30% of their energy via renewables. They are this immensely huge country with wide open spaces, flooded with sunlight.
Wait. They're not.
Turns out that you don't need a high-voltage DC grid, you need decentralized power. And you don't need huge contiguous chunks of land, either - you need everybody to be involved.
That doesn't rule out that we might need other energy sources, too - there are the issues of base load, and industrial consumption - but claiming that renewables are "not viable" is a tiny bit of an exaggeration, don't you think?
There's no doubt that the US can learn from the shear audacity and willingness to invest in our country's long term energy plan like Germany has done with the Energiewende. However, we can't pretend that Germany, in terms of its size, existing infrastructure, and structure of the electricity industry, is at all comparable to the US.
While I agree with you that decentralized power will be the way of the future, there's no way the US, where California alone is larger than Germany, can make such a drastic and impressive transition in even a tenth of the time it takes Germany. The power grid in the US is one of the (if not the) most complex networks/systems the world has ever seen. Heck, it's not even a "singular" entity, with three interconnects spanning parts of Mexico and Canada comprising it. We're not going to easily transition away from this--not that I'm saying we shouldn't try. Our current infrastructure is not capable of handling mass amounts of renewable (read intermittent) sources of energy--the energy storage technology, bi-directional communication, and security measures among other necessities just don't exist yet. And while at a certain point our country needs to make the leap and take the risk, we should also be cautious about trying to brute force a solution--look how Spain's renewable energy investments are paying off.
Absolutely, there are issues. I was mostly commenting on the GPs "they are never going to be viable but for a small portion of our energy needs". They are viable already, for substantial parts of our load.
And you put your finger straight on one of the largest sources of trouble for the US - the existing grid. That's why I believe the way forward is decentralized power. Cut out the grid. Generate and consume very locally.
There are still many issues that need to be solved there, storage being probably the large one. But I'm more hopeful about that than reforming the US grid with its entrenched players.
California is perfectly positioned for going into renewables if it actually tried. I live near Los Angeles and there are only a few days during the year when we don't have sun. There huge open desert areas tat could be covered with solar collectors. If any area in the world can make the transition it's California.
It doesn't matter, I don't have to convince you. Renewable prices are already dropping so much such that they are coming regardless (can't say that about nuclear can you? unless you lie about the budget of course); only Koch-like attempts to oppose it like punitive fees for solar panels can do any damage.
I have seen credible estimates that there may only be about 80 years of uranium supply left for current usage, let alone massively expanded generation. Breeder reactors are a red herring. France is shutting theirs down because they are uneconomical.
Robert Owen thought the same thing at the beginning of the industrial revolution some 200 years ago. Skyrocketing productivity was supposed to lead to a new age where a society could produce all it needed with little effort, and much time would be left over for leisure and pursuit of the arts. Instead, there were mass populations of over-urbanized, overworked, impoverished people. Turns out that when the means of production are owned by the few elite, innovations in productivity are more likely to marginalize the rest.
I'd like to believe this, but I don't see the corresponding changes in societal structure. If we really are post-scarcity, it would be nice if some sort of average person could have a family if they choose, or at least have access to health care, housing and things to make a reasonable life. Truly part time work with a decent wage almost does not exist in most fields. The people I know trying to make a living doing artisan things would certainly not agree that arts and crafts are more (monetarily) valuable than ever.
Rising productivity has just put more money in precious few pockets. While I truly believe that this vision of the future is technically possible, I have little faith that it will be the future we end up with.
When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? The only things that have ever had a clear, direct affect in quality of life of the masses (both positive and negative) are political.
The average worker today has a 5 day working week rather than a 6 day working week: a change that was brought about by political means (unions) rather than technological means.
The average worker today has an 8 hour working day rather than a 12 hour working day: a change that was brought about by political means (unions) rather than technological means.
The average worker today has a minimum wage and minimum safe working conditions: a change that was brought about by political means (unions) rather than technological means.
Technology has certainly improved our lives, but you're not making the best case for it.
A chicken sees man coming to feed it, so it jumps out in front of him awaiting food. Then one day, man comes with an axe, and chicken still jumps in front of him expecting food. The end.
I.e. Correlation doesn't imply causation etc.
Imagine having at your disposal perfectly amoral and lethal robotics force. One that only exists to protect you and exterminate any threat to you. What stops the future rich man from treating a fellow man like a dog? Right now, the police might rebel against you if you go too far.
I'd be interested to look at average worker today and future where inequality is super rampant. In that society, I think a worker from 100 years ago would compare similarly to a worker from 100 years in such future.
Alright, I'd like to. Do you know where I can find statistics on wages and working hours over history (in particular, I'm curious not just about 100 years ago, but also 200, 300, and 400 years ago, to get a fuller sense of the impact of the Industrial Revolution).
world wide or just US. since alot of the work from 100 years ago got outsourced with the polution to parts of the world that don't regulated it as much.
I've thought in the past that our pursuits might be more oriented towards art, but watching the video above reminded me that machines are getting more and more capable of creating art.
Maybe it will depend on whether we're using art to drive an economy, in which case creative robots will win, or we're using art to create meaning in our lives. In the second case, we'll still have to compete with entertainment (created by AIs) fully capable of filling our waking hours.
"We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright."
If you are the king, why do you need to keep those billions of loud, dirty, polluting, dangerous, depleting the natural resources, and now UNNEEDED serfs around? When you could gain by exploiting them, great. Someone had to do the hard work. But now / soon, they have nothing to offer, besides problems. Problems, are to be ..exterminated.
Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic.
(PS: Yes, I totally understand that the above stands on the pov that there are some "kings", and we are the "serfs". It's a pov that's easy to dismiss. Personally, I don't.)
> Problems, are to be ..exterminated.
> Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic.
I doubt it is either of those. People can't go against billions, not without significant casualties, and not any time soon. I fear what the solution might be... If you are rich you might be more interested in culling number of those unneeded serfs by simply neutering them and providing them enough distractions unhealthy food and poor medicine that they just slowly keel over.
Otoh, intelligence isn't hereditary, so killing off those 'serfs' might also reduce the numbers of intelligent people.
There will be a bright future for our capital owning population.
There is a weak correlation between old people and capital ownership and easy to mistake the two if inferring from the age axis, e.g. person X owns more capital at 50 than at 25. However, this doesn't generalize well when doing a cross section at a given age, see for example the average savings for a 50 year old, which is a meager $43,797 http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics.
Ah, but that's the hard part. Capitalism does provide some benefits. For example it is magnificent for encouraging economic growth, which for most of the world is essential. There are still large swaths of the global population living in poverty in first world and third world situations.
What I believe will happen is most of the world will look like china. If you were to look at them maybe 10 years ago, what you would see is economic growth fueled by cheap exports. Today, they are starting to see a middle class stable enough to support their own economy. Global trade is still essential, but it is now only a part of the pie, rather than the whole pie. At the same time you'll seeing a middle class grow in china, we're starting to see manufacturing move out of the country searching for cheaper pastures.
I think its a model that will repeat itself across the world. First comes a improved political environment, than a hearty shipping infrastructure is created, and then business and global trade starts. Repeat.
I believe capitalism won't be replaced, it'll fade away.
This part in that future is actually made of shares in the stock market. If you want some, you have to buy it. Fortunately anyone can : it's a free market and you can enter with as little as a few hundreds bucks.
> This future of no capitalism people want scares the heck out of me, almost makes everything I've worked for pointless.
The future of continued capitalism scares the heck out of me, because it's the future of more and more people living on subsistence level, slaving away all their lives for increasingly smaller group of wealthy people, until the whole thing either collapses or the economic machine optimizes all humanity away for more profit and the Earth will be left with no people.
Well, the good news is that this won't be possible since they will soon be made useless by automation. You can't enslave someone who has no use for you.
Well, if even quality sex services get automated away in the end, then I guess we'll have no other choice than to say "so long and thanks to all the fish", followed by starving and dying.
