Whenever I see the "positive" prognostications, I wonder if the author is intentionally spinning a tale for their own ultimate benefit, or if I'm just way too cynical. I don't see any way that the advance of automation can do anything but destroy any desirable concept of society. To me, the future inexorably looks like Detroit or Nairobi, not like Tokyo or Singapore.
Education is a red herring. Most people (and I'd include myself in this) are simply not mentally capable enough to be trained to outperform automation in any task automation can perform. More education will not rescue us.
The future I see is, like Asimov's "Solaria". In that world, what purpose does a laborer have? What strength could even rebels have? When the "top" of society controls machines that will produce, fix, and fight, then they are completely insulated and the majority of humanity is disposable.
The "top" of society will eventually have no purpose or strength. That may be sooner than even they expect. Technology commoditizes a lot of expert skills quickly even today. Some with great success are finding their skill sets are no longer valid much like kings and princes did in the past.
Start viewing the future as post-human. This is a future where humans are no longer the agents driving economic forces -- any more than other primates are today. Humans conceivably could live alongside sustainably. Or they may go extinct. James Lovelock's most recent book "A Rough Ride to the Future" presents the option of non-biological life continuing on an earth with a climate that no longer supports human life. He does so in the most optimistic way I have heard described. Optimistic, because he previously considered climate change likely to kill all life on earth.
All of this assumes that we do not have a "Great Filter" looming ahead where machine intelligence is totally incompatible with any form of replicating life.
Because the entities that control the machines and give their products away will be outcompeted by entities that keep the products to fuel their own growth. Over time, the former kind of entities will die out. This is a general argument, the "entities" could be rich people, companies, governments, AIs, etc.
You made an excellent point, thank you. This is big.
We're not fighting with rich men in possession of robots; we're facing the entire machinery of capitalism, and this is still probably only a mask of an underlying process that optimizes for growth and competition. So far our goals and the goals of this process are more-less correlated, but in the future those goals may diverge and the process will continue unhindered in a fully automated world while we die a slow, painful death.
I've been thinking about it for some time. I'm afraid that, of all the things we fear, we might end up getting fucked by game theory. Anyway, I recently found a nice writeup on the topic by someone much smarter than me, which elaborates on this problem [0]. (warning: it's long, but worth reading)
Some of those general "entities" you speak of are composed of smaller entities. Trade (e.g. of labor) will occur between those smaller entities.
Where there exists scarcity and a differential in value, trade will occur. Now, of course, that says nothing about the people that have nothing of value to trade with. But I'd argue that everyone has something to trade, it just might be of very low relative value. Even in such a scenario they'll trade with their peers.
No matter what scenario of this dystopian future I play out in my head, I always find equilibrium. The key is not to attempt to fix it, but to have base rules that apply to all and will mean basic safety for all. You can't guarantee a peachy life for everyone. Most people just want to play meddling Deity with government money and violence, to suit their own personal ideals and prejudices. That is why I'm an anarcho-capitalist; because it makes everyone absolutely equal and everyone absolutely free to make their own way in life without intervention.
Where there exists scarcity and a differential in value, trade will occur. Now, of course, that says nothing about the people that have nothing of value to trade with.
You can have something of value, but still be unable to find a trading partner, if that thing can be had for a cheaper price somewhere else. For example, if machines make labor cost less than a living wage, then you can't survive by selling labor.
Their labor has value to themselves. So they can always go farm/forage for food.
But to actually rebut your comment:
"if machines make labor cost less than a living wage, then you can't survive by selling labor."
If machines reduce labor cost, then the cost of goods reduces as well, making goods more affordable for poorer individuals. And consequently, reducing the amount of money required to be able to survive. You have to understand that none of these things function in isolation, but as a balanced equilibrium.
> Most people (and I'd include myself in this) are simply not mentally capable enough to be trained to outperform automation in any task automation can perform.
Well, they shouldn't. I see automation as a way to end slavery, on which our society is based. People in the first world don't see this because their chains and whips are made of gold, but if you think about it, it's slavery nonetheless. We are all slaves to the system that requires us to work long hours on increasingly pointless things in order not to starve. I strongly hope we'll liberate ourselves from this situation with automation and technological progress (though I don't feel confident we will).
IMO it depends a lot on the timescale. Give it 100-200 years and all the positive scenario are the likely outcome.
In 200 years, people will only have hobby because that will be all they have to do and most of their needs have been automated.
The problem is the transition to there and that's the annoying thing in all those discussions, nobody ever talk about it.
For example, Industrial Revolution and the 2 World Wars were the fantastic drivers that pushed EU and US in an unprecedented golden age. I'm sure the majority of people would have been happy to get the golden a few years later rather than going through the mass loss of lives or the misery of those years.
> This is not a technological consequence; rather, it’s a political choice.
Not quite sure how it is reassuring. Except China, there seem to be no move to even acknowledge that we may have something to do other than "the invisible hand of the market will solve everything"
> In 200 years, people will only have hobby because that will be all they have to do and most of their needs have been automated.
This has not been the trend. Interconnectivity and ease of travel were supposed to relax the amount of work we do, but instead people put in more hours than ever. The efficiency gains have created winners and losers, but both are working at least as hard as before.
Depends on the country. In the Netherlands we are definitely working less :)
"In the mid-2000s, the Netherlands was the first country in the industrialized world where the overall average working week dropped to less than 30 hours."
People may not work less (I don't think people are working more), but both working condition and nature of work greatly improved. That is, work is more enjoyable now than in the past.
According to some economists, this is the primary reason why work hours has not declined as expected.
Are you serious? People work currently, because that's the way _society_ works, currently. We have convinced ourselves that everyone either works or reaps the benefits of having worked (which is why he "justly" owns the means of production).
However, your question is meaningless _if_ everything is produced by robots. Nobody will be able to charge for anything, because the justification for the current way wealth is distributed will be gone: Nobody works, or will have worked or can pretend to have worked: Charging for products will be difficult to justify. Therefore, things will be free and there is no need to "earn a living".
If the powers to be would have it otherwise, there _will_ be a revolution. Or people will move to a country where the robot dividend is fairly distributed.
Until now revolution have pitched humans against other humans. And in most successful revolution, at one point, the police/army refuses to shoot on the protestors anymore. (or oust themselves the current head of state)
I don't necessary have a really bleak view of the future, but I wonder what would a revolution would looked like with a robotized police. You could hope that at one point someone on the loyalist side would press the robot kill switch.
But taking today's world as an example, I wonder what would Assad or Gaddafi would have done with an army of robots.
My point was not really that the revolution actually has to happen. Political pressure will build up long before and things will get sorted out peacefully.
...or some other rationing of goods will occur. When things are free, people waste them. When they cost even a nickel, they don't. So some credit system (basic income?) and some cost function will be necessary, because people are people.
Well that's the transition period still. Either you own your share of means of production that sustains you or you don't and you starve to death because there is literally nothing you can do.
I enjoy a good distopian novel as the next man, but it would take a really unlikely set of circumstances so that technology has improved enough to enslave the population durably, yet not enough so that this enslaved population still has some use and, added to that, a ruling class or at least a culture motivated enough to maintain that kind of status quo.
>> This is not a technological consequence; rather, it’s a political choice.
> Not quite sure how it is reassuring.
I don't find it reassuring and I also think it's wrong. Politicians won't even see it coming. Political decisions tend to be consequences of technology, not the other way around.
Nah, it's not as bad as the article says. It's much worse.
1) If you don't lose your job to a robot, you'll lose it to an emulated human. An em requires only a tiny chip and a little electricity, and is every bit as capable of doing empathy and creativity as you are.
2) If you don't lose your job to an em, you'll lose it (and your life) to unfriendly self-improving AI that has a use for your atoms. If you think there's a law of nature against such awful things happening, think again.
3) Even if you learn about that bleak future with 99% certainty, you'll keep living life as usual and hoping for the 1%, instead of trying to change things.
4) And even if everyone on Earth sees that the bleak future is coming, we won't coordinate with each other to stop it! Look at poor people today, they are already suffering but don't coordinate to improve their lot.
I don't buy it at all. Where is your evidence that convincing emulation of human emotion and empathy will exist any time in the next 100 years. Based on current technology and the pace of technological advancement that proposition just seems ridiculous.
The median result of polling AI researchers is we will have human level AI by is the 2040's.
The last century we went from no computers at all, to people carrying around supercomputers in their pocket. We went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon in 66 years. AI in a century is by no means impossible or unlikely.
Wouldn't it be nice if all the things that threaten us turned out to be physically impossible?
"At the same time, the parts we do understand, such as that human intelligence is almost certainly running on top of neurons firing, suggest very strongly that human intelligence is not the limit of the possible. Neurons fire at, say, 200 hertz top speed; transmit signals at 150 meters/second top speed; and even in the realm of heat dissipation (where neurons still have transistors beat cold) a synaptic firing still dissipates around a million times as much heat as the thermodynamic limit for a one-bit irreversible operation at 300 Kelvin. So without shrinking the brain, cooling the brain, or invoking things like reversible computing, it ought to be physically possible to build a mind that works at least a million times faster than a human one, at which rate a subjective year would pass for every 31 sidereal seconds, and all the time from Ancient Greece up until now would pass in less than a day. This is talking about hardware because the hardware of the brain is a lot easier to understand, but software is probably a lot more important; and in the area of software, we have no reason to believe that evolution came up with the optimal design for a general intelligence, starting from incremental modification of chimpanzees, on its first try."
Thinking human brains are the pinnacle of intelligence is ridiculous. We are just the very first intelligent thing to evolve. On top of which, biology is severely constrained in many ways and stuck in local optimas.
Often, the artist or novelist is a better judge of history than the professor or engineer, as they have the distance to see.
Neil Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' is a masterpiece of scene and action. His 'dystopian' novel set a bar to which we judge ourselves to this day. I use 'dystopian' in quotes as Stephenson himself describes his novel as an optimistic view of the future when he wrote it. Why? Because humanity survives the Cold War.
In 1980, that was not necessarily true. I would like to remind any readers that the facts have not changed in this manner. War has always been with us, and the robots, though shiny, will be tools of war just as every keyboard, scythe, and lump of granite has been. If there is one thing we can count on, it is war.
You may argue that the robot will eliminate the scarcity of resources that causes conflict. I hope so. However, history shows us again and again that war is a part of man. If you eliminate it, you rid us all of a part of humanity. I hope dearly for this.
But the consequences of that are not simple, there will be blowback to having the robot take our darker sides away. It is a bargain I hope we strike with the robot. But I have no doubt that my grandchildren will not be the same humans we are if that deal is signed.
I see a darker future ahead:
From a totally cynical but rational and economic perspective I think human labour is cheaper than any machine workforce for many tasks. We reproduce and maintain ourselves, we just need some water and food. We are very flexible and can adapt to any task very quickly. No need to order spare parts made from expensive raw materials. Human labour is only expensive because we have civil rights and we tend to riot if we are treated badly. Take away these two factors and you have a cheap labour army that's getting bigger by itself.
We are also limited by the capacity and architecture of our brains. A.I can rely on Moore's law, or quantum computers to benefit steadily from better hardware. Therefore I conclude that the most successful agents in our economy will be of A.I. The enterprises behind them might still have a human executer, smiling all charmingly, but A.I. will be in control.
I agree that under the current system, AI will be in control, and that would be bad for humanity. It seems to me the obvious conclusion is that we should change the system. AI is not yet in control, we are. Therefore, while we are still in control, we should steer the future in a way that is beneficial to us.
You seem to think that we would fail to coordinate to do so until it is too late. That is possible, but I don't think that is certain yet.
Sadly, you have a great point. Find a way to shut down the "riot if treated badly" part in our brains, or even most of the higher cognitive functions, and you've made yourself a cheap but extremely efficient robot frame that's self-replicating thanks to being made from complicated nanorobots.
But robots adapt (or their manufacturers do). Need a drill attachment for construction? Just snap it on. NO need to use a human who needs a portable drill with internal motor and cord.
You can adapt humans as well. Bolt in the drill and a battery pack to the human "frame" and you're good to go. We're not Borg already only because "we have civil rights and we tend to riot if we are treated badly".
But much more expensive to adapt to a biological unit. The robot's drill can share the robot's power unit. Mine has to be plugged in; has to have its own motor; has to be shielded and safe.
Once again sethf hits the nail on the head. The response is entirely up to us.
I'm not personally optimistic: this country has a deeply held Puritanical work ethic, and even if we get past that we have a real nasty habit of not liking to give any government benefits to "those people".
> Once again sethf hits the nail on the head. The response is entirely up to us.
I disagree. Short of halting the progress of robotics and software, there seems to be no way to avoid the continued automation of things, and economy, politicians and social habits will have to follow and adapt, like they always did. More and more I'm buying into the view that it's the technological progress that drives cultural change, not the other way around.
I recently found an interesting article touching this topic:
Well I understood that Seth was saying that politicians can decide to stop job automation or let it happen. I believe that they can't; they have far too little influence to stop a force this strong.
That's not how I understood it, and not at all how I think he intended it to be read.
His statement is that a question that sets "automation means less jobs which is bad!" against "automation means more and better jobs which is good!" is improper. Automation will change the job landscape - that's an objective statement, and we've been living it so far.
Whether we make it a positive change and end up with Russell's "idle utopia" or a negative change and end up in some horrific dystopia is entirely up to our response.
We're not going to get past that because not everyone agrees with you.
At least, not until you realize that forcing people to do what you believe is right is fundamentally immoral. No matter how noble your ideals, and how rainbow-colored your utopian future is "if we can get past that".
It's sad that you can both simultaneously hold noble ideals of taking care of the needy, while thinking that the only way to do it is by violently and immorally forcing others to help you do it, whether they want to or not.
> At least, not until you realize that forcing people to do what you believe is right is fundamentally immoral.
That's the funny thing about "moral foundations" - what's fundamentally immoral in yours may be a cornerstone of mine, what I find barbaric is a cost of doing business in someone else's...
Question: What do you think "government benefits" are? As in, in what do they consist? What is their form? Of what stuff are they? Are they corporeal or spiritual? If corporeal, whence did they come? Who created them? Are they extracted from a mine? Built by a machine? Contributed by working men?
Broadly speaking, the transfer of some good from the government to its citizens. Today we talk about it in terms of essentials (food, shelter, etc.) But in a world where most (if not all) tasks are handled by automatons, perhaps that's too reductive.
> Who created them? Are they extracted from a mine? Built by a machine? Contributed by working men?
As advances in agricultural automation removed laborer jobs in the 1900s, workers switched to different, more-specialized industries.
In short, we will probably see jobs disappearing because of automation in the 2000s, but it won't necessarily be bad. Most likely we will also be seeing many new types of jobs appearing as well - some which may have never been conceived yet.
This debate has been going on since the 1960s when jobs started becoming computerized. Yes, lots of bue collar manufacturing jobs were lost then. And workers were afraid of automation. In the 1990s workstations and the internet replace white collar clerical jobs. There are far fewer travel agents and bank clerks now. The newer robots may replace the more sophisticated manufacturing, delivery and service jobs.
If we were having economic growth, it wouldn't matter. Robots would replace mundane labor, allowing people to be allocated to more economically beneficial occupations.
The problem is that there is no economic growth to speak of outside a few sectors.
IMHO the concern over automation and tech in general is shifting the blame from where it actually belongs: conservative fiscal policy.
I think the safest thing to say is that integration of any technology takes time. Even if a technology exists, it won't be ubiquitous immediately.
If we accept that one day computers/robots will be able to outperform a plurality of the population, three questions arise. When will that be? Will enough of us see it coming? How should we respond?
And then, in the next 100 or 200 years, a geomagnetic storm destroys all electrical systems and no one will know how to perform basic jobs because we delegated them to robots.. I know, a dystopian vision, but still possible :)
Not just possible. Likely. The Brunhes–Matuyama reversal was 780k years ago and the average gap is only 450k years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal. Such reversal events can cause thousands of years of fluctuating protection from solar radiation.
I'd be fascinated to see a study of how we might protect ourselves during such an event.
Sadly I imagine nobody wants to be the guy that spent billions on EM shielding 50,000 years before anyone needed it.
Well, they could always start trading with each other - cutting us slow, dim-witted, lumps of meat of the system entirely - Charlie Stross gave a view of that with the Vile Offspring from Accelerando:
Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo.
Personally, I'm hoping that in the long term we end up with something like a technologically plausible version of something like the Culture (i.e. the Culture's combination of AI and biologicals existing in harmony), or at least the ending of Elysium.
I'm not sure a capitalist system makes sense in a techno-utopia. If the robots make themselves, mine the minerals, smelt the ores, assemble the smartphones, and deliver them to me, there is not a labor cost associated with assembling the smartphone, so why should there be a price?
Maybe the "cost" comes from the loss of the mineral in the ground, but if we're going full on techno-utopia the robots would reclaim the mineral through recycling, so does it become negligible?
Marx touched on the paradoxical nature of automation and advanced technology: "Though machinery be the most potent means for increasing the productivity of labour, that is to say for reducing the amount of labour time necessary for the production of a commodity, in the hands of capital it becomes the most powerful means... for lengthening the working day far beyond the bounds imposed by nature"
Companies don't automate to reduce potential profits, though, but to reduce the cost and inefficiency of human labor. Presumably, even with a fully automated infrastructure, there would still be a human-run corporation at the top, otherwise why would they bother creating the system at all?
But then I may simply not have gone far enough down the rabbithole in my conception of 'techno-utopia.' If the automation is truly self-sustaining and self-contained, in essence, a complete AI economy in and of itself, then perhaps the "cost" comes in the burden of including humans at all?
> Presumably, even with a fully automated infrastructure, there would still be a human-run corporation at the top, otherwise why would they bother creating the system at all?
IMO you're looking at the system before it reaches an endgame.
Investing in automation is a rational decision to reduce costs & increase profits, so companies are going to make that choice. As automations continue to improve more and more jobs will be eliminated in order to continue increasing profits.
But as jobs are eliminated the people that used to do the jobs are still there - still wanting to earn money to feed and clothe their families. And as they don't have jobs, they don't have money, so corporate profits begin to suffer.
The system will eventually reach a tipping point. I just hope we end on the side of "we run the machines and distribute their output for the good of the people" rather than "we run the machines, keep their output, and give the people worthless scrip".
>If the automation is truly self-sustaining and self-contained, in essence, a complete AI economy in and of itself, then perhaps the "cost" comes in the burden of including humans at all?
Hopefully our robot overlords would see it as an opportunity, rather than a cost.
I think that art would remain the thing that humans alone can produce - good tasting food (the production can be automated, but not generating a recipe) - music - entertainment...
In my theoretical future, capitalism will still exist, and we'll still trade and buy things from one another, we just won't need to do so for our basic needs, only for our entertainment desires...
I'm pretty sure Zakalwe asks Sma in Use of Weapons what the humans in the Culture are for - given that the machines are so much better than humans at pretty much everything - the answer is essentially "for having fun".
Table 1
U.S. Equine Population During
Mechanization of Agriculture and Transportation
Year Number of Horses and Mules
1900 21,531,635
1905 22,077,000
1910 24,042,882
1915 26,493,000
1920 25,199,552
1925 22,081,520
1930 18,885,856
1935 16,676,000
1940 13,931,531
1945 11,629,000
1950 7,604,000
1955 4,309,000
1960 3,089,000
If we ever end up really asking ourselves this question it means that capitalism has been running for too long; that it grew into an entity that serves its own goals rather than ours. By that time it might be too hard to slay that particular beast though.
He didn't say so explicitly, but the horse-count is typically used in relation to this point:
What happens when the value of your work falls below the cost of subsistence? In the case of the horses, once feeding them was no longer worthwhile, the answer was simple: They didn't.
Hopefully we won't do anything similar for humans. It would be the most horrendous eugenics program of all time.
This is the pretty much the stated goal of "austerity" benefits cuts. It's already starting to have the effect in the UK of disabled people starving or freezing to death due to not being able to afford to carry on living. So far in small numbers ...
I am not sure this is an helpful response but you have plenty of countries where a small oligarchy controls an enormous share of the GDP and most of the population is dirt poor. I can't remember the reference offhand but there was an African country where the personal budget of the head of state was something like 20 or 30% of the total state expenditure.
people often hand-wave that "new technology creates new jobs". but it seems to me there's a simple economic proof that it's true, based on demand and supply. Is there one?
Education is a red herring. Most people (and I'd include myself in this) are simply not mentally capable enough to be trained to outperform automation in any task automation can perform. More education will not rescue us.
The future I see is, like Asimov's "Solaria". In that world, what purpose does a laborer have? What strength could even rebels have? When the "top" of society controls machines that will produce, fix, and fight, then they are completely insulated and the majority of humanity is disposable.