[kandu]

Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those related to the humanity of humans. Life could become dedicated to enjoying art in various forms, and this art will be conceived mostly by humans. If people will have no work to do, they could hire entertainers. They could do jobs as a hobby - e.g., manually producing stuff that could as well be made by robots, but that other humans will buy just because it was hand made. They could enjoy experimenting with various lifestyles, effectively creating diverse subcultures, and these cultures will trade items that are uniquely developed within the culture.

Imagine a world where people could enjoy the variety of clothing that existed in the world 300 years ago and that has been now elliminated by the hustle of modern life and by a global trade in clothes. Even if they will be produced by robots, designing these clothes will remain mostly a human job. Virtually anyone could wear designer clothes, and many people could become such designers. The same could be applied to food, music, movies, and so on.

Education and corporal care would also become a large part of the economy that would hire humans and not robots. There will be plenty of niches, and people will have the time to invest in developing specialized skills, rediscovering skills long forgotten.

Eliberated by the stress of modern life, life will simply become more enjoyable.

[127]

Sounds like a society of couch potatoes and drug addicts to me. From my perspective you have a much too optimistic view on the human race. If people are not forced to exceed, they will not. Suffering, that does not cripple, defines us. It makes us stronger, more agile, more determined. I would go so far as to say that when we have dreams and goals and we strive to achieve them, by making work towards step by step, each moment we feel better about ourself. Each success builds us and makes us more confident.

If it were not for women, I'd just sit home playing World of Warcraft, drinking energy drinks and masturbating, to put it bluntly.

Even if our basic material needs are met through automation, we are all still engaged in a very bitter competition for other resources, you do realize. There simply can not exist a state of utopia as long as we reproduce sexually (I have a very Freudian view on this). This is a catch-22 of course. The state we are in defines what we consider an utopia.

You are assuming that if we didn't have to worry about producing material resources, creativity and intellect would be the determining factor in who gets their way. Why not violence? Why not intimidation and sociopathy? As tightly knit social groups (small villages and communities) break down and we live in one global village, nobody really knows each other. Most of the people we meet are complete strangers to us. It's much easier for exploitative and cruel personalities to thrive, because they can stay hidden in plain sight. They can pretend and manipulate to their dark hearts content without the fear of retribution. If they get discovered they can just move to a different location.

As we have more material resources as welfare and a legal arm heavily protective of women and children, women don't need a protector nor a financier. They can just get the sperm they want and raise kids outside of marriage. Old institutions that were the bedrock of civilized society will all but crumble to dust. Widespread soft polygamy will replace it. Those with the most instant charm and good appearances will win, instead of those who build things to last on the long run. Short term strategies will win over the long term ones.

These are all hyperboles I use to describe my views of the modes of societal change and interaction.

It is my theory that the easier it is to meet material needs, the lazier people get and more prone to instant gratification. It's not that difficult to extrapolate from this one simple truth.

Also one of the problems I didn't touch upon, is how our natural instincts that were developed for a very different world will overtake and corrupt us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli. Slow seduction of irrational and unbalanced stimulus can make our behaviour very self destructive on the long run.

[marquis]

> the easier it is to meet material needs, the lazier people get and more prone to instant gratification. It's not that difficult to extrapolate from this one simple truth

And yet all literature (fiction and non-fiction) ever written on this topic concludes that above all humans want to feel connected and valued. I completely disagree with your theory and believe that given the opportunity to not require demeaning work for subsistence, our species will overwhelming choose to seek meaningful activities above becoming a permanent couch potato. Why else would we have such a rich culture of arts and music, if our ancestors preferred to spend their downtime watching the horizon/fireplace instead of creating. Yes, there may be some who choose a less engaging existence but given that of everyone I know, from poor cousins to independently wealthy ex-financiers prefers to do something with their time, I am confident the majority will also prefer meaning over stagnation.

[hackinthebochs]

>If it were not for women, I'd just sit home playing World of Warcraft, drinking energy drinks and masturbating, to put it bluntly.

This is where I think your argument falls apart. It's not because of some drive created through scarcity that encourages you to get up and be productive, its to gain social status (as communicated through wealth) to attract women.

This drive will be ever present in a society where basic needs are free. The only difference is that one will have to be more creative and intelligent to stand out and attract a mate. As society evolves, one's criteria for a mate evolves with it. But that drive to acquire status is ever present.

[127]

>It's not because of some drive created through scarcity that encourages you to get up and be productive, its to gain social status (as communicated through wealth) to attract women.

Isn't this exactly the same thing? The love of women is the scarce resource that drives me to exceed. I don't understand your point here.

>This drive will be ever present in a society where basic needs are free.

It already is. It's called sexual selection. Males protrude themselves and women choose. This is exactly my point.

>The only difference is that one will have to be more creative and intelligent to stand out and attract a mate.

You (and the OP) are making some huge assumptions here. Like that creativity and intelligence has any merit without social skill and boldness. Another assumption is that through creativity and intelligence one gains power instead of just through the skill of manipulating other people. Just look at the current situation. Are the ones with the most money and power currently adept at making great technology and art themselves, or is it instead the most daring and the most merciless? The ones who can exploit other peoples skill to the fullest.

[hackinthebochs]

I'm not sure we're arguing the same thing anymore.

>Isn't this exactly the same thing? The love of women is the scarce resource that drives me to exceed. I don't understand your point here.

It can certainly be viewed this way. What I was referring to when I said scarce resource was food and wealth. The point is that, even if your necessities were taken care of, you wouldn't sit in your basement playing WoW all day. Those drives that push you to go out and create now (in an environment of scarcity) would still be just as present in an environment where wealth was not scarce. What society deems as status-worthy would simply evolve.

The point is that we would NOT become a society of "couch potatoes and drug addicts", as you claimed, as the drives that push us to excel today would be just as present in the supposed robot-utopian future.

[zanny]

The downfall of this is where our current economic system projects us :

Developers make AI and machines capable of replacing farming, mining, power generation, resource refinement completely, except for technicians and mechanics.

It isn't far off from the same machines entering the human service workforce, replacing the cashier and drive through clerk. They replace cars and planes (already have auto pilot, google car in ~10 years).

At this point, we have crisis. Our current system has you buying a good and the company providing it making the money. If the company consists of hundreds of technicians as its only labor force because the entire production process is automated (your big Mac is farmed by robots, overseen by robots, butchered, packed, shipped by robots, cooked by robots, and served by robots) and the ~$5 you pay for it goes entirely to the company coffers.

It would not take long for everyone's wealth to trickle into the hands of the few hundreds of people positioned to rule over the production of 99% of goods. It is kind of like what OWS is doing right now, but much worse. There is no fast food job for the high school grad to do - you must learn engineering, art, or hard science to have any function to society, because any rote task or even service job has been replaced by robots.

And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms. The company becomes a siphon of any money they make straight into the stock holders. And there would be no employees, because everything is automated. You don't even need an engineer to watch the top level of maintenance bots, because you have 10+ of them and they know how to fix themselves.

The end result though is that we have this situation where we pay money for what robots do, not people, and the money just goes to those that funded the robots original creation forever. That kind of situation would not last long, but it would be nice to avoid. It will require a huge reinterpretation of any viable economic system when you can make goods and provide services without any human interaction.

[127]

One thing I hope the technological advancement will bring is synthetic meat. With extremely cheap energy (both environmentally and financially) synthetic product should not be too expensive to compete with slaughtering real live animals. We are predators, yes, but that does not mean we can step up the ladder and satisfy our diet using a higher level of technology without any real animal suffering. This does exclude meat gained through hunting to keep populations in check.

Factory farmed animal meat is just something so morally repugnant to me. If there's no real need for it, why do it?

>And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms.

I don't think this is logically possible. The job of a programmer is to transform human intention and desire into a computer readable input. How would you determine a heuristic for the genetic algorithm? The heuristic would have to be written by a human being on some level. There's only so far you can automate automation itself and I think you are grossly underestimating how difficult it is or will be.

Programming is a trinity between human paradigms, algorithmic mathematics and magic. The closer you bring the math and algorithms to the human paradigms and desires, the more it will resemble magic. It is an asymptotic progression. The magic will be never achieved.

What you are talking about is constructing the perfect programming language. People have been trying to do this since the start of previous century (Lambda calculus). You really think we will experience some tremendous leap in the close future?

In short: you will always have to have a way to describe what you want of the computer, and this is called a programming language.

[loup-vaillant]

You are saying that strong AI (with at least human-level intelligence) is impossible. We don't run on magic, though. Many tasks we do, we made machines that do them better. I see no reason why that couldn't apply to programming itself. (In principle, at least. I could understand that we're not smart enough to achieve this in practice.)

[kkihara]

Funny that you should bring up the whole synthetic meat thing. Techdirt just recently had a post with a link to it :

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110909/04255515875/dailyd...

[Selvik]

You could feed the us population with income from capital gains and corporate taxes alone. Also, in western countries large percentages of workers are employed by the government, their organizations are competing in a political (as opposed to an economic) market. They are pretty good at it, I would not bet against them.

[Tsagadai]

The modern capitalist society is extremely unlikely to end up in this state. Companies grow larger, that is their modus operandi. Once capital can be used to buy capital that produces capital you have eliminated humans from the equation. There is a level which we are approaching where some industries will become almost entirely automated. What happens in that situation is a few people make all the money and the rest don't. We are seeing an ever increasing disparity between wealth gained through capital investment and wealth gained directly through labour. Even high-end labour produces far less money than investment does. Most high-end labour tasks are tightly coupled to capital investment.

Do you really think that the history of wealth production is somehow going to change radically to a sudden redistribution of wealth to everyone so they can relax and take it easy while living off the fruits of others investments?

[nazgulnarsil]

yeah, standards of living will remain stagnant as the evil rich overlords accrue ever increasing wealth!

Oh wait 200-2010 was the single greatest decade in all of human history for the amount of people raised out of subsistence living to a reasonable standard of living and 2010-2020 promises to be even better.

Darn reality messing up my morality plays. Real life is not a status game.

[Tsagadai]

I agree with you in part, capitalism has brought billions out of poverty and backbreaking labour. When you compare serfdom to pretty much any alternative is better. You will also notice if you read the data correctly that individual wealth has risen across the board. Everyone has more than they would have otherwise had in the 1950s. That's great but it doesn't mean that economic discussion is now over because all arguments have been won and lost.

What I was wondering about in my post was what happens when capital no longer requires much labour. This is happening now, hedgefunds are a great examples of this. They are amazingly efficient and produce very large sums of capital for the amount of labour required (revenue per employee). I'm not saying all labour is equal, I am saying capital is producing more in industries with less labour. Potentially, a financial model could get so good (or so stable) that it requires only minor updates to the system in order continue deriving a profit. You then have a situation where capital creates capital with only a statistically insignificant amount of labour. Efficiency pushes the system forward and delivers much to people while people have a valuable product to sell, their labour. When their labour is not valuable, they are unemployed. If their labour cannot generate enough value, why would they ever be employed in an ultimately efficient system?

My argument still stands, if you would like to respond to it. Why would capitalism suddenly change to give accumulated wealth back? Will the masses just rely on philanthropic whims?

[nazgulnarsil]

productivity outpaces population, so supporting the masses takes a smaller percent of gdp as time goes on. Of course this will not happen in a democracy as the populace will vote themselves largesse until the system collapses as noted by the greeks.

[suivix]

The masses will end up relying on some sort of a welfare system, and would riot otherwise.

Food and wellbeing are the main things keeping civilization together. Wealthy regions are also stable regions, so it is necessary for the poor to be supported.

[peteretep]

> What happens in that situation is a few people make all the money and the rest don't.

Or alternatively the economic force of competition kicks in and these goods become virtually free above the cost of the machinery and raw goods.

[ars]

Sounds like a horrible world to me.

"Life could become dedicated to enjoying art"?? Ugh!!!!

"...could enjoy the variety of clothing..." are you kidding? That sounds horrible.

There is a basic human need to be needed. People who have everything but are not needed are miserable. People who are needed, but have little are happy.

[Joeri]

Being needed and being appreciated aren't the same thing. What we want is appreciation, even if what we do is sort of pointless.

That opens up all kinds of possibilities to how to spend our time. For example, if you didn't need to work to meet your basic needs, you could decide to devote your time to beating videogame records. It would be completely useless, but still lead to lots of appreciation for your skill. Doing a hobby all day long could become the norm.

I have to second the culture series as good reading on this topic. It paints a believable picture of an Ai-driven post-material society where people still feel that they live full lives.

[mietek]

The "Culture" series of novels by Iain M. Banks explores these issues in some detail.