madviking
north american scum
yea, by (my) definition.
"Humans Need Not to Apply"
- Thread starter Atlantic Pacf.
- Start date
yea, by (my) definition.
I think it's a legit concern.
The issue is that job creation is not guaranteed to keep pace with job destruction. Job destruction would easily be on an exponential trend. And, job creation will take place in a tighter and tighter space.
The easy math to see is that people need 3000 calories per day to survive. Any machine that can work for less than 3000 cals per day can replace that worker. There will always be work, I'll pay someone $1 right now to clean my house. It's a question about whether the work pays a living wage. You also need 3000 cals per day to retrain. In the previous era, retraining didn't take all that long, that's getting less and less true.
I already use the automated checkout machine - I prefer it. And, those things are only going to get more convenient. Cars are next: cabbies, bus drivers, delivery drivers, long-haul truckers, etc. These people will need to retrain at 3000 calories per day, at least.
It's a really serious issue. Where do we get that 3000 calories per day when the 20-something finds out he has no job?
The issue is that job creation is not guaranteed to keep pace with job destruction. Job destruction would easily be on an exponential trend. And, job creation will take place in a tighter and tighter space.
The easy math to see is that people need 3000 calories per day to survive. Any machine that can work for less than 3000 cals per day can replace that worker. There will always be work, I'll pay someone $1 right now to clean my house. It's a question about whether the work pays a living wage. You also need 3000 cals per day to retrain. In the previous era, retraining didn't take all that long, that's getting less and less true.
I already use the automated checkout machine - I prefer it. And, those things are only going to get more convenient. Cars are next: cabbies, bus drivers, delivery drivers, long-haul truckers, etc. These people will need to retrain at 3000 calories per day, at least.
It's a really serious issue. Where do we get that 3000 calories per day when the 20-something finds out he has no job?
Tahuti
Writing Deity
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2005
- Messages
- 9,492
There are several possible endgames:
1) Communism
2) Humans become cheaper than robots again (with the corrallary that living standards have been massively reduced, perhaps for our own good)
3) Legislative limits to automatisation
Starving people are hardly a problem since they, well, starve. Nobody blinks an eye. The trick is that the only people who will ever revolt are people who perceive a reduction of living standards yet are well off enough to survive and thrive to the extent necessary to fight on.
1) Communism
2) Humans become cheaper than robots again (with the corrallary that living standards have been massively reduced, perhaps for our own good)
3) Legislative limits to automatisation
Starving people are hardly a problem since they, well, starve. Nobody blinks an eye. The trick is that the only people who will ever revolt are people who perceive a reduction of living standards yet are well off enough to survive and thrive to the extent necessary to fight on.
Kozmos
Jew Detective
That's what I meant by starving. Poor choice of words. I see more people switching back to food production and moving some of their resources to the country and I can already sort of see that trend amongst my friends.
I've seen protests in countries with 25% unemployment. (or occupation of any kind) They were bad but manageable. The higher that percentage slides it gets a lot uglier. There will be moderate amounts of social upheaval not limited to bombing robots and factories. Imagine China.
Puck Nutty
Prince
This might work for cheap consumables like bread or cereal (even the poor will still have to buy food), but for things like clothes and cars I'm doubtful. Even if you reduce overhead by eliminating your workforce, your marketplace is still going be very small. Since people don't buy cars very often, you would have to raise the cost of every car to make up for the fact that you're only selling a handful every year.
Luxury car sales are booming!
DemonicAppleGuY
King
Automation will drive wages down for many jobs, but they will also drive prices down greatly. Standards of living will only rise I predict.
Atlantic Pacf.
Back from the dead
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- 400
I like Squidward Tentacles' definition of art: "Art is suffering." That is, both a realistic Renaissance painting and a Modernist sculpture, if they involved the artist dedicating entire weeks on end, would be considered art in my opinion. Neither a computer-generated piece of music* nor a "painting" consisting of a singular dot would.
*It might depend on how skillful the program itself was made, and how hard the programmer worked on it. Hmm...a computer program being considered as art...I'm getting too Duchamp here, right?
I rarely consume art. Most things that might be called art are ... something else. And Shrek 3 definitely had been graphics than Shrek 1
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
its gonna be asap. Everyone is so stoked about Ubering someone else's automated car. As long as I know the statistics are better than human drivers, hell even close enough, I'm game.
Atlantic Pacf.
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The thing is, unlike you, most people are not rational creatures who base their decisions on statistics. Even if the "autos" are objectively much much better than human drivers, it's going to just take one highly-publicized incident to drive many people away from the concept.
With businesses like trucking, though, I think that adoption would go more smoothly; I would believe that the average business is more likely to make decisions based on statistics. Besides, unlike autos replacing regular drivers, autos making inroads into businesses would produce unemployment. After all, transportation is a large, if not the biggest*, employment category in the US.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 1.58 million people work as "Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers." (here) Around 9 million people work in "Transportation and Material Moving Occupations." (here)
What if you can get a VR sim that you can't distinguish from the real thing that you can put on while your AI cabbie drives you around?
Atlantic Pacf.
Back from the dead
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Some people, like you, enjoy driving for the sake of it.
Some people enjoy riding horses for the sake of it.
DemonicAppleGuY
King
This is true. Presumably people will long be allowed to drive unaided (or only lightly aided) by computers.
Although most transportation jobs will likely be replaced with automated systems. Bus drivers, taxis, and truck drivers will all in a not so distant future.
hobbsyoyo
Deity
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Sure, but what happens when we approach the precipice wherein all jobs go away as the robots do them better than all of us?
____________________
To be honest though, I don't see robots replacing everyone unless and until they are fully sentient, i.e. true artificial intelligences. At this point though, we have to ask ourselves are we going to enslave them to do the work for us? Because you can't guarantee that they will just do all the work of their own volition - being intelligent means you have your own priorities, wants and needs.
So making robots only to do labor does amount to slavery, with the caveat that they were *created* to do the work. But then I can imagine some genteel southern plantation owner claiming he *created* his workforce through clever forced-breeding back in the 1850's. So I'm not sure the whole 'created workforce' argument has any merit.
Perhaps I'm wrong...
kochman
Deity
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Well, I don't have a crystal ball, nor do I think that's ever going to completely happen...
But, to make a wild guess.
We'll drink more and engage in life rather than office work.
I think the transition will be important. Once we're all in networked holodecks and given food replicators, things will be fine(ish). Social currency is really a great motivator, the urge to entertain (and be liked) is always present. Anyone on rpg.net who puts the least bit of thought into making their post entertaining understands, whether it's thoughtful or funny, it's crafted in order to generate some type of social currency.
I think the transition is the hardest part. Socially, we do value work. I have to currently tell people I am unemployed, and it's not easy, seeing their noses wrinkle. I've been thinking about this hard, nearly posted to rpg.net many times. I don't see a solution other than deliberately inefficient workfare. And that needs to be funded using progressive taxation. The workfare should either generate some social good, or better, correct some market inefficiency. The hardest part will be the deliberate inefficiency. We like to get a bang for our buck. The free market rewards that type of innovation, and we encourage the public sector to do so too. If we can get a team of pothole fixers to fix more quickly, we'd like them to, please.
Inefficiences can disappear as we invent/discover new forms of morally valuable workfare. Morale-wise, not moral-wise. Plus, it would be awesome if they created public goods.
The demand-side benefit of workfare will disappear. Eventually you're using more and more of your paycheque to rent time from some network of robots so that the uber-rich and collect that income. The uber-rich will continue to modify their products and services to compete for the consumer dollar of Joe Potholefixer. But Joe's purchases will cause increasingly less employment.
Straight out welfare would be nearly as good. Two downsides: (a) less ability to correct market failures and (b) the shitstorm of offense when people think that other people are getting something for free. The uberrich would still continue to compete for our consumer dollars that was given to us through progressive taxation, but I personally think that avoiding the shitstorm is valuable. It's there, sitting as an obstacle. No amount of angry blogging can eliminate it. Certainly not quickly enough.
So, my recommendation: workfare. And increasing number of workfare projects, with intentional inefficiencies that can be eliminated as more workfare projects are discovered. The department of lolcat production (with its quota of 20 funny lolcats per day) can get photoshop (and layoffs) once the department of playing with kids gets moving into full swing. The goal here is employment and a nod to creating a societally useful product.
The feeling of performing valuable work is an important one. We can use a lot of feedback from people we like ("lol!"). We can use our own internal morals (satisfaction in a job well done). We can even (though few people do this) just use the Free Market as validation; if someone is paying you to do something, then there are really strong odds they find important at least to them.
It's nice when all three align. I greatly enjoy being a rich attorney who's respected for suing large corporations when they trounce welfare mom's rights. Or a pediatric cardiac surgeon who can afford yearly Caribbean cruises. I'm not one, obviously, so rarely do all three of those (above) align. You might wonder why you should be proud you can align and collate Excel spreadsheets, for example.
It's why I think the intentional workfare needs to have some obvious social benefit. Digging and filling ditches isn't as emotionally satisfying as keeping your boots polished feeling like you're contributing to your nations defense. Or even hand-filling potholes a few times a day.
I think the transition is the hardest part. Socially, we do value work. I have to currently tell people I am unemployed, and it's not easy, seeing their noses wrinkle. I've been thinking about this hard, nearly posted to rpg.net many times. I don't see a solution other than deliberately inefficient workfare. And that needs to be funded using progressive taxation. The workfare should either generate some social good, or better, correct some market inefficiency. The hardest part will be the deliberate inefficiency. We like to get a bang for our buck. The free market rewards that type of innovation, and we encourage the public sector to do so too. If we can get a team of pothole fixers to fix more quickly, we'd like them to, please.
Inefficiences can disappear as we invent/discover new forms of morally valuable workfare. Morale-wise, not moral-wise. Plus, it would be awesome if they created public goods.
The demand-side benefit of workfare will disappear. Eventually you're using more and more of your paycheque to rent time from some network of robots so that the uber-rich and collect that income. The uber-rich will continue to modify their products and services to compete for the consumer dollar of Joe Potholefixer. But Joe's purchases will cause increasingly less employment.
Straight out welfare would be nearly as good. Two downsides: (a) less ability to correct market failures and (b) the shitstorm of offense when people think that other people are getting something for free. The uberrich would still continue to compete for our consumer dollars that was given to us through progressive taxation, but I personally think that avoiding the shitstorm is valuable. It's there, sitting as an obstacle. No amount of angry blogging can eliminate it. Certainly not quickly enough.
So, my recommendation: workfare. And increasing number of workfare projects, with intentional inefficiencies that can be eliminated as more workfare projects are discovered. The department of lolcat production (with its quota of 20 funny lolcats per day) can get photoshop (and layoffs) once the department of playing with kids gets moving into full swing. The goal here is employment and a nod to creating a societally useful product.
The feeling of performing valuable work is an important one. We can use a lot of feedback from people we like ("lol!"). We can use our own internal morals (satisfaction in a job well done). We can even (though few people do this) just use the Free Market as validation; if someone is paying you to do something, then there are really strong odds they find important at least to them.
It's nice when all three align. I greatly enjoy being a rich attorney who's respected for suing large corporations when they trounce welfare mom's rights. Or a pediatric cardiac surgeon who can afford yearly Caribbean cruises. I'm not one, obviously, so rarely do all three of those (above) align. You might wonder why you should be proud you can align and collate Excel spreadsheets, for example.
It's why I think the intentional workfare needs to have some obvious social benefit. Digging and filling ditches isn't as emotionally satisfying as keeping your boots polished feeling like you're contributing to your nations defense. Or even hand-filling potholes a few times a day.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Sure it can, and has. You don't have to call it art, but that doesn't really matter. Plenty of stuff that I wouldn't consider art that's made by humans is considered to be art, no matter what I might think.
There is always going to be *some* human input anyway, whether it's with the actual creation of the AI or its maintenance.
