He's absolutely right, and people don't understand the level of "skilled work" that will be replaced by computers.
I write clinical decision support tools, and I interview users (doctors). Nowdays, doctors really just want algorithms to follow. They want to know what the fastest/cheapest way to diagnose problems is.
Frankly, they aren't particularly GOOD at diagnosing problems outside of these kinds of algorithms - for example, a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite (see Nick Mann http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8626767/Morgellons-Disease...). Doctors tend to diagnose delusional parasitosis just because it doesn't fit the algorithms.
If doctors are just going to follow a basic set of diagnostic procedures, we can easily automate that using the data that are put into modern electronic health record (EHR) systems. We have your vitals, we know the tests that have been done and the outcomes, and so on. As one (very blunt) doctor expressed to me, doctors just want to follow the diagnosis algorithm, he paid $100k to be a data entry technician, and I think that was pretty much on the money. That's not the only time I've heard that, either.
If doctors are going to be replaced, there's not much that CAN'T. It's just a question of designing a program/robot for the particular task, which is becoming increasingly cheap.
A funny fact. I am working on automation of various finance operations in different organisations , and in workshops often the business users will ask for complete automation; "I want to press the button and like that, reports produced." People fail to realise that the easiest thing to automate is pressing a button.
I am sure myself I am assuming the convenience of the technology that will take my place rather than realising the threat.
I have a hard time believing doctors will be replaced in large numbers. The nature of their jobs may shift away from hypothesis generation but ultimately a human will be making the final diagnosis, choosing from several options that have been vetted algorithmically. Legally & practically a human needs to arbitrate that process, people would feel uncomfortable otherwise.
Why? what people do not understand about automation is that it doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.
Doctors make mistakes all the time, if say you replace doctors diagnostic duties with say IBM Watson MD then as long as he's just as bad as your average doctor it won't matter.
The big open question in automation whether it's in transportation or medicine is liability, but that something that insurance companies can solve easily between them selves :)
Yeah, in a very limited set of circumstances, and still with a pretty significant miss rate.
But the day will come when the machines are near-perfect.
And people already trust computers more than they did in the 70s. Perhaps not if you ask them directly, but the reality is that they do, with many areas of their lives, and without a second thought.
Diagnosis can be automated to an extent, but we're far from being able to automate the clinical observation tasks necessary to gather data to feed the diagnostic algorithm. Automating clinical observations will require huge advances in NLP, image recognition, and robotic manipulators that are many decades away at best.
Do I think that 100% of Morgellons' sufferers have a medically explainable cause? Nope, there's hypochondriacs everywhere.
Do I think that doctors are way too eager to dismiss diagnoses that don't fit their criteria? Yup. I have a sister who has an absolutely zebra diagnosis (astroblastoma tumor, <0.5% of cases, with typical characteristics), given by top doctors. It was a case punctuated with all kinds of medical accusations regarding the diagnosis.
I write Clinical Decision Support tools for a living, for a high-level nonprofit. Our content providers suck ASS. Do I worry that I might be contributing to inappropriate diagnoses/non-diagnoses? Yes, it's a thing I bear in mind every day, every meeting, and I have gone to bat to improve.
I'll take it as a "yes" - you have jumped from a single self-reported case to "a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite".
No - as stated, I have jumped to "there are many cases that aren't covered by generic diagnostic algorithms", and the doctors I'm interviewing who are espousing "I want to be a data entry technician" type philosophies.
Independent of the examples, that's a worrying philosophy. I write the tools for this - in theory, I assume the liability when Shit Doesn't Work - not that we don't do our best to push this off to Other Organizations With Medical Expertise.
Most people may not realize what's coming now but they will soon enough. When they do, expect Universal Basic Income (UBI) to become a very popular topic.
> Gates believes that the tax codes are going to need to change to encourage companies to hire employees, including, perhaps, eliminating income and payroll taxes altogether.
If we want to go down that road, basic income is the future in my opinion.
Ya it's weird to me how Bill Gates nailed the problem so soundly but came to the typical uninsightful solutions that we've had in the US since 1980. Trickle down economics (where benefits are distributed by the private sector rather than government via taxes) is just not going to work in a world where income is decoupled from labor. In other words, as the value of human capital decreases, people without resources will have fewer means to raise themselves out of poverty. Paying no taxes won’t matter in a world where the unemployment rate is 10, 20, 50%. It will just exacerbate the concentration of wealth.
An alternative to all of this is to tax all financial transactions: whether to family members, religious organizations, political campaigns or between large institutions or countries. The idea being that in the end there is no real way to distinguish donation from income. Everyone would pay a tax on the difference in their net worth between the beginning and end of the year. The end result would be that people who accumulate large amounts of wealth would pay higher taxes than the majority of the country which is basically living a steady state existence. This also takes care of inheritance tax because children born to wealthy families would pay their income tax the year of their inheritance.
We’ve made a mistake in this country thinking that “the government” is small group of powerful individuals. That’s not how things started. Originally the government was the people, so things like tariffs were paid mostly by businesses as a way to fund public schools and infrastructure for everyone. People voted for tariffs so that they didn’t have to pay for government expenses out of pocket. Starting with the Civil War and then at the turn of the 20th century, that system got replaced by the income tax system we have today, and people have been swindled into paying for government excess (mostly in the form of military spending and tax breaks for industry) out of pocket again.
The gist of this is that framing “taxes” as an expense rather than an income is an effective way to get people to vote against their own self interest. People earning less than roughly $100,000 per year ($16 trillion GDP minus $2 trillion for government, divided by 140 million working Americans) don’t realize that they are short the thousands of dollars that they would receive if people making more than the average paid their fair share.
Consider if the tax rate was a flat 50%, with the excess above $2 trillion for government going to everyone as a basic income. Someone earning $30,000 pays about $5,000 today. But under the new system, there would be $7 trillion going to 300 million people, or about $23,000 per capita. So that person would pay $15,000, receive $23,000, so they would actually receive a credit of $8,000, for a total annual income of $38,000. That $13,000 difference between what we’re paying now and what we could be receiving is a major motivator for the Occupy movement, the Other 98% and similar groups. I find this way of looking at things to be much more inspiring than the usual “you pay us” knee jerk stuff coming from people who have profited from the current income tax system.
> "When people say we should raise the minimum wage. I worry about what that does to job creation ... potentially damping demand in the part of the labor spectrum that I’m most worried about."
Bill Gates has been saying this many times and I really, really don't get it.
Of course when the price of a commodity goes up, demand goes down; but if there's a perfect substitute that's free, demand for the non-free alternative should be zero anyway, so its "price" is irrelevant (as long as it's non-free).
Why would anyone hire a human at any cost to do a repetitive and low-added-value job that a robot can do perfectly, without error, without ever arguing or getting tired, etc. AND AT NO MARGINAL COST??
How does "minimum wage" matter in this scenario?
- - -
Humanity has been wanting to not work since the dawn agriculture, 10 000 years ago at the latest. It's finally happening and we're freaking out about it.
What we need to think about is not how to get people employed, it's how to redistribute wealth so that what you earn is not somehow morally related to the job you're holding.
The solution is universal basic income, not "minimum wage".
"Why would anyone hire a human at any cost to do a repetitive and low-added-value job that a robot can do perfectly, without error, without ever arguing or getting tired, etc. AND AT NO MARGINAL COST??"
Because the robot costs money up front. If energy, maintenance, depreciation, and amortization of the robot exceeds the marginal cost, errors and oversight of the human, then it's rational to keep paying the human.
Raising the cost of the human makes the robot more attractive sooner.
> Raising the cost of the human makes the robot more attractive sooner.
Which is exactly why the minimum wage should rise. Just like the price of coal energy should rise or the cost of unsustainable goods should rise.
People are a limited resource and you can get only so many people over time. It is important that people, who are entities of incredible intelligence should be repurposed to harder and mentally more involved processes.
I really wonder what a society would look like if people didn't have to work to ensure a decent lifestyle (shelter, health, food). I'm thinking that in adult minds there's a psychological need to relate to others that is filled partway by working together and also a need not to have complete freedom about how you spend your existence (paradox of choice). And that when people say they'd love not to work, they mean they'd prefer to balance work ROI differently.
An 'arts, sports, and leisure' society. More people playing video games (the industrialized world is excellent at creating cheap entertainment - we could create WoWs and Candy Crushes forever); playing sports; exercising; socializing; nature walks/hiking/hanging around in parks; learning for learning's sake (with cheap books, MOOCs, etc. you could essentially do self-directed academia for life); amateur science/wilderness exploration; art and music creation; lots of recreational drug use, and eventually, wireheading or its equivalent (top-notch VR would probably get us pretty far down that road, anyway.)
>What we need to think about is not how to get people employed, it's how to redistribute wealth so that what you earn is not somehow morally related to the job you're holding.
Tell me again why you deserve to profit from my hard work? Or why I deserve to profit from your hard work? Shouldn't we both just profit from our own work?
This isn't to say I don't think we shouldn't help those less fortunate than ourselves. I try to give a decent amount to charity, but I don't think for a minute that everyone should get paid the same. If you don't provide any benefit to society you shouldn't be as well off as people who provide enormous benefit to society.
> Tell me again why you deserve to profit from my hard work? Or why I deserve to profit from your hard work? Shouldn't we both just profit from our own work?
Take Mark Zuckerberg, and have him do everything he did to build and launch Facebook, working just as hard, but instead of being in the U.S. targeting a product at Ivy-League kids, he's in Bangladesh. Is he worth $33 billion in that scenario? Is he worth $3 billion? Probably not even that.
Every unit of hard work we put in here in the U.S. is multiplied using social and economic infrastructure we did not personally build but rather inherited. Robotic technology is the ultimate expression of that. Whoever owns the robotic technology in the future will not have built that technology from scratch. And when the robots do all the work, why should distribution of the production be based on something like who owns the robots?
I used to feel this way and I understand where you are coming from. You are right in the sense that people providing huge benefit to society should definitely be compensated to a greater extent than a person that contributes nothing.
The problem is that in an ideal situation, two things will happen: 1) human labor will be replaced by technology and 2) human population will increase with technology. Both trends will leave us with a society where there isn't enough work to occupy 40 hours per week for each person.
As we move closer to this 'utopia', I think it makes sense as a society to decide on a basic standard of living and provide that for every person while having additional lifestyle benefits for those that contribute to society.
It will also help if we move towards more employees working for fewer hours, so we all have more free time and more people have employment.
Obviously, the implementation of something like this is extremely hard and will probably create problems, but I think it is the ideal future situation. Additionally, to implement this type of society, it will require some level of 'redistribution'.
> I don't think for a minute that everyone should get paid the same
Conflating your concept of "everyone should get paid the same" and basic income is a logical fallacy (false equivalence?). Nothing about basic income requires that everyone's total income be identical.
Further your "you don't provide any benefit to society you shouldn't be as well off" again has nothing to do with basic income. Nothing about basic income requires everyone to be as "well off" as everyone else.
What will society look like when there are only highly skilled jobs available? How would unskilled parents improve the lot of their children? I find it difficult to imagine that a permanent underclass is likely to lead to a society that is stable over the long term.
"Nothing about basic income requires that everyone's total income be identical."
Basic income will need to come from somewhere. As these costs increase, the people actually earning above and beyond the basic income will be have their income redistributed in the form of high taxes and depending on how high these costs increase over time, will reach a point where the reward != effort. I predict that with a system like this, the costs (and taxes associated) will most definitely reach this point.
Human nature is a bitch. Why would I even bother putting the effort into working when I can get almost the same amount of money back from the government, for free? If enough people think the same way, there won't be enough to fund the system anymore. The government will then need to assign jobs to people to keep the system going.
A Utopia where nobody needs to work sounds great, until you need to figure out how to divide all of the resources.
Most of the great technologies and innovations we see today are a result of a great risk->reward structure. Any system that doesn't foster this doesn't see this sort of innovation.
Your prediction that basic income would eventually mean a total leveling of all incomes and your assumption that everyone would eventually do nothing are also fallacies (fallacy of the single cause? nirvana fallacy?).
Basic income is not about utopia, it is about creating a long term stable society where member's basic needs are meet (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, security, etc).
"Your prediction that basic income would eventually mean a total leveling of all incomes and your assumption that everyone would eventually do nothing are also fallacies (fallacy of the single cause? nirvana fallacy?)."
It's based on history and human nature. My point still stands and it's not a "fallacy"..which it seems you just made up on the spot because you don't agree with my reasoning.
I also didn't say that "everyone would eventually do nothing". I said that we would cross a threshold where the amount of people just getting a basic income would eventually outweigh the people working and putting money into the system, and the system would need to be changed by the government or it would collapse.
"it is about creating a long term stable society where member's basic needs are meet (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, security, etc)."
The best way to help someone is to teach them to go out and help themselves...not just pay for all of their needs and tech them to depend on the government.
The idea that people's living must be tied to their job is not some fundamental axiom, rather it's a practical rule to build a society that works (examples where that rule did not apply could be slavery or communism). We are reaching (arguably have reached already) the point where there is more people than need for work to be done by people, and that rule is not valid anymore.
What happens when there is no work left for you to do? Eventually robots are going to take all but the most specialized of jobs. Longer term, we're all probably going to be made obsolete by AI. I understand the sentiment of living on your own dime, but we have to think about the fact that technology is very quickly making human labor obsolete.
Edit: After rereading you comment I realized you were talking about something else completely. My bad. This is still a discussion I'd like to have with somebody, if not you.
OP means to say that all work should be valued equally. Because all work is precious.
But then again, I have found that earnings usually commensurates intelligence and efficiency. A highly intelligent individual gets disproportionately more money than his counterparts because he is smarter than the median intelligence in the industry.
while i'm not sure i agree that all work should be valued equally, that would be more reasonable than what a basic income implies. a basic income means you get it whether you work or not, and that is the part that I find undesirable.
that being said the problem with valuing all work the same is that people's definitions of what work has any value at all will be different. it's much easier if the work actually has to have value, i.e. someone willing to pay for it.
Wow.. This was cut off and not editable... What mobile client for iOS is good as there was a whole story here in the client i'm using and it just posted this :(
How about that: Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.
If by "improve" he means creating a mediocre clone of an existing and successful product, leveraging a monopolistic position to wreck the original, and then go through a long process of incremental improvement on the clone until it is objectively better that what was available 20 years ago (and selling every milestone along the way)... then I guess he's more or less right.
I wonder when being a sysadmin will be automated away. My job is, pretty much, to replace every single thing I do with a script. For some reason there continues to be work to do. I strongly suspect I could work until I'm 100 if I want to. Because EVEN IN THE FUTURE, NOTHING WORKS.
I've been toying with the idea of creating a non-profit "social-responsibility" fund. A startup at inception would donate some fixed percentage of their stock to the fund, and the fund will later use dividends or sales proceeds to pay for retraining or retirement of those displaced by the startup.
The trouble is, the idea being so novel, I don't think I could convince any investors to get on board with it. It requires broad awareness and years of propaganda to make it a commonly accepted practice.
Alternatively, I imagine the disrupted themselves should have a pension fund or a trade union seeking out disruptive innovations and investing in them ahead of time. But in practice they don't, so that where it ends.
How would you certify the eligibility of someone being displaced? Having no direct application of my superb oats carrying and stable attendance skills, can I be compensated by the horseless carriage companies that put horse stations out of business?
A bunch of the skills displaced are so trivial (sales clerk? taxi dispatcher? a person to look up airline tickets and report back what the prices are?) that anybody can (and will) claim complete mastery of those skills and excruciating unemployment caused by your startup.
Seems like the focus should be on lowering the cost and increasing accessibility of retraining programs. When it's nearly free and available to anybody in need, motivated individuals will take care of themselves, and you just need to take care of smaller remnant group and address their specific issues.
Disruption typically happens where it's not only more efficient but cheaper too. The number of people you displace is going to be a fraction of what you make.
If you do end up making as much as the original industry it's because you are doing MORE than the original industry in which case you now have to question if the original industry didn't deserve to be destroyed.
Everything that can be software, will be software, what needs to happen is that the number of things that are software needs to outnumber the things that exist now. Software will create work for people to do as long as it keeps pushing what we can do as people. People need to adapt to a world with software at the heart, everything else is very dangerous.
Retraining is one-time event, it doesn't require equal cash flow, just that there is some cash set aside for it. I don't advocate permanent welfare, except maybe for those who are past retirement age.
It would have to work like insurance. Lots of companies with a chance of large scale disruption pitch in funds, applied in the rare cases where large scale disruption happens.
I think the big one that no one mentions is management. A company with 100,000 employees, and a reporting span of 10 people then you have 11,111 managers - and as they tend to get paid more upwards of 25-30% of the salary.
And what do they do? Administration and process? Easily automatable. Hiring and firing (teams do this better), "magically know what to do in uncertain times" (guess my views). A lot of this can be replaced with high trust, open environments and "team empowerment"
There's a popular notion that we will experience mass unemployment resulting from people whose jobs are replaced with software.
This is false. With any revolutionary change in technology, jobs lost in one field will be jobs gained in another.
The agricultural revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when farmers were replaced. The industrial revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when small merchants were replaced. The software revolution won't either.
There has been a steady decline in the % of 30-40 year old males working in the US which suggests your probably wrong.
It's not that there is to little work out there, the issue is are economy keeps changing so rapidly that people are unprepared for new occupations. Worse while low skilled jobs that are often easiest to automate, productivity increases also kill off some high skilled jobs. And people are both reluctant to higher workers for less than they where making especially if they have been out of work for a while.
>The agricultural revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when farmers were replaced.
Actually, it did. The labor oversupply crisis fueled the World War 1, which killed the bulk of the displaced agriculture workers. Had everyone been productively employed, there would be no one left to fight the war.
I disagree; I think the speed of automation this time, and the ever-rising qualifications needed to compete with that automation, make this one different. There was a comment over on Reddit a while back that put it better than I can:
Every revolution increased the tendency of wealth-gap creation by diminishing the number of "essential" workers (e.g. farmers, miners, industry workers). The additional resources made available by allocation allow other jobs to be created, but a fraction of those resources are going to stay with the large enterprises.
To put it shorly, sure, living wages will probably be forever affordable to a large hypothetical company in a future where software/hardware is extremely advanced: tasks like art asset creation, customer support, advertisement, get increasingly cheaper, relatively. But it won't necessarily make sense to pay a large wage to workers on non-core activities (a few developers/designers/engineers/managers): income inequality and maybe unemployment should tend to rise.
I believe the US will soon be forced to adopt increasingly European-like well-being policies to amend this trend. Possible measures that come to mind are rising minimum wage , providing incentives to hiring, increasing taxes at the high income end, providing universal services (the health care reform comes to mind).
There's a difference between a new cotton gin technology which does one thing well and a general purpose robot which can be trained to do lots of things well.
We're moving from machines which are better than humans at specific tasks to machines which are better than humans at general categories of tasks.
This is a fundamentally different situation. The new jobs that are created will also be filled by robots/software.
For as long as the occupation or the work can be divided into routine tasks that does not require intelligence, that work can be replaced.
Take for example my scenario at work: I want to move mountains and can get times more work done than I am able to do now. How do we do it? Extract the routine tasks and assign it to a computer, or to someone who can follow directions. That would free me to do more inordinate things. Maybe then I can move mountains. Also, become more managerial in my tasks with my computer serving as my subordinate. That is another way of growing. Lastly, diversify my newly found time to more ambitious projects where roads and directions have yet to be paved.
The problem is this revolution involves creating artificial minds that don't have any of the biological constraints that our minds are subject to. An intelligent machine doesn't have to sleep and can be taught to do pretty much anything a human can more quickly and more efficiently. What happens when the jobs that the new technology creates can be filled by that same technology? Thats the problem we're facing this time.
I cannot upvote you enough. Humanity needs more things and more people to produce those things. If humans are constantly wound to mundane tasks, when will I get things that involve more intense labor? But the only problem is there is no easy transition from innovation, so much so that it is called disruption.
I write clinical decision support tools, and I interview users (doctors). Nowdays, doctors really just want algorithms to follow. They want to know what the fastest/cheapest way to diagnose problems is.
Frankly, they aren't particularly GOOD at diagnosing problems outside of these kinds of algorithms - for example, a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite (see Nick Mann http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8626767/Morgellons-Disease...). Doctors tend to diagnose delusional parasitosis just because it doesn't fit the algorithms.
If doctors are just going to follow a basic set of diagnostic procedures, we can easily automate that using the data that are put into modern electronic health record (EHR) systems. We have your vitals, we know the tests that have been done and the outcomes, and so on. As one (very blunt) doctor expressed to me, doctors just want to follow the diagnosis algorithm, he paid $100k to be a data entry technician, and I think that was pretty much on the money. That's not the only time I've heard that, either.
If doctors are going to be replaced, there's not much that CAN'T. It's just a question of designing a program/robot for the particular task, which is becoming increasingly cheap.