If I Had a Hammer 732
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tom Friedman begins his latest op-ed in the NYT with an anecdote about Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner who, when asked how he'd prepare for a chess match against a computer, replied: 'I would bring a hammer.' Donner isn't alone in fantasizing that he'd like to smash some recent advances in software and automation like self-driving cars, robotic factories, and artificially intelligent reservationists says Friedman because they are 'not only replacing blue-collar jobs at a faster rate, but now also white-collar skills, even grandmasters!' In the First Machine Age (The Industrial Revolution) each successive invention delivered more and more power but they all required humans to make decisions about them. ... Labor and machines were complementary. Friedman says that we are now entering the 'Second Machine Age' where we are beginning to automate cognitive tasks because in many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans. 'We're having the automation and the job destruction,' says MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson. 'We're not having the creation at the same pace. There's no guarantee that we'll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that.' Put all the recent advances together says Friedman, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. 'But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability.' 'We've got a lot of rethinking to do,' concludes Friedman, 'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace.'"
Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why shouldn't machines eventually take the jobs humans currently do, but could be done better by a computer? Wouldn't that leave everyone with the option to use their minds rather than muscles for those things humans are best at, such as true creativity? I personally think robots at McDonald's would be far superior and everyone's life will be so much richer there won't be the need for the concept of minimum-wage and grunt-work jobs. Except for those who really prefer the grunt part.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why shouldn't machines eventually take the jobs humans currently do, but could be done better by a computer?
They already do 90% of the jobs that were done by humans 150 years ago.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
They already do 90% of the jobs that were done by humans 150 years ago.
There is no limit on the work that could be done. Even if machines did 100% of the work done by humans 150 years ago, we'd still have plenty to do.
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another? Why can't more books be written? More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
Would it be so bad to live in a world where there is 0% NEED to work and everyone just decides whether they want to be a medic, or an astrophysicist, or a script writer, or...
Only amazingly lazy people believe everyone would stop "working" if it was voluntary. Even if the only payment was respect by the society, joy, or simply to fight boredom, most people would do something.
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Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another? Why can't more books be written? More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
Would it be so bad to live in a world where there is 0% NEED to work and everyone just decides whether they want to be a medic, or an astrophysicist, or a script writer, or...
Only amazingly lazy people believe everyone would stop "working" if it was voluntary. Even if the only payment was respect by the society, joy, or simply to fight boredom, most people would do something.
You're ignoring the fact that 99% of the populace are too stupid to do anything other than make-work.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you'll find that 99% of the populace see work as the only way they have to get the stuff they need to live (and the stuff they want to make life enjoyable).
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another? Why can't more books be written? More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
With the exception of helping others, I think the real problem is that the remaining work to be done requires significant training, natural talent, or high intelligence. Most people don't possess these skills and are incapable of obtaining them with any amount of effort or drive. As sad as it sounds I very much believe we are reaching the upper limits on the capabilities of humanity as a whole.
We see it plain as day in the software industry. Probably 8 out of 10 software developers or business analysts are completely incompetent and even with years of education and multiple certifications seem to be unable to not only be productive, but instead be a net drain on productivity and quality of software as a whole. Many of these people are doing this job because the demand for even mediocre software talent is so high and the lack of mindless blue collar work forces people into IT fields that they have no natural talent or ability for. Fifty years ago many of these people would be pushing brooms in a steel mill.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
With the exception of helping others, I think the real problem is that the remaining work to be done requires significant training, natural talent, or high intelligence.
or interest! believe it or not 95% of people don't WANT to devote their lives to exploring the sciences!
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Who pays for it all?
Consider a fast food example, let's assume all fast food restaurants are automated this year - maybe each store has 1-2 technical positions and 2-3 inventory/supply positions, removing 30-50 minimum wage service positions. There are about 4.1 millions food prep/servicing positions in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food).
Does the average fast food worker want to be a fast food worker? Of course not, it's one of those "someone's got to do it" type of positions.
Anyway, they al
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Does the average fast food worker want to be a fast food worker? Of course not, it's one of those "someone's got to do it" type of positions.
more accurately, it's an "I've got to do something" type of position.
Anyway, they all get laid off and now there are 4 million people unemployed.
How do they get by?
It seems we have reached a two-fold intersection where:
1. Society could support/provide basic services to everyone
2. Automation actively reduces the number of jobs available
3. the people who should be working but aren't team up with the people who should be rich but aren't and they stage a revolution.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Interesting)
This definitely *is* the goal, and people who imagine automation destroying lives and healthy job prospects don't understand economics. This is a symptom, not a cause. You don't blame the firemen for the fire, and you don't blame automation for unemployment, despite the obvious correlation between the two.
This should be obvious, since if you take away technology's elimination of jobs from human development, we're all living like cavemen, all working hard, but all working on food, shelter and clothing, and still starving to death and dying from exposure and all the jobs and lives we have now wouldn't be possible. Technology eliminating jobs is as old as technology itself, and it's part of the most important good an economy can bring to our lives. The mistake that's being made here is equating unemployment with job elimination. They're not the same thing, and they have vastly different causes and effects. Job elimination is progress, is good for economies and people, and is caused by technological advancement. Unemployment, is bad for economies and people, and it's causes are economic and political. Technological advancement aids by providing the constant elimination of jobs, but under a properly functioning economy jobs that are eliminated inevitably result in others being created. Technology can no more cause unemployment than bringing water home from the beach and flushing it down the toilet can lower sea level. To think it can is to not understand the whole picture of how things are connected.
Our current problem is that our economy is being operated extractively, allowing people to make money from owning things instead of working. This is breaks economies and destroys jobs, and is bad for people who have to work for a living. Our problem is an economic one, not a technological one, and it's relatively easily fixable, but the fix requires the political will to take wealth and power from the wealthy and powerful, and that's not something that comes about easily.
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OMFG. Who is going to pay those people? Please elaborate. No doubt there's plenty of work to do but how much of that will be paid for and by whom?
Even, assuming that everyone has equal abilities which they obviously don't, under our current capitalist system we compete with each other and some people are STILL GOING TO LOSE. It's unavoidable. Who's going to take care of them?
To hear some people on the right talk, it's as if they believe we could all be in the 1% if we weren't so lazy. This is so
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The problem isn't that there is a limit to the amount of work that can be done. The problem is that there is a limit to the amount of work that can be done by the average person. Not everyone in capable of attaining the level of education needed to perform the kind of inventive/creative work that would allow them to work at a level meeting or exceeding advanced AI (this is, of course, assuming that AI doesn't end up massively dwarfing the capabilities of even researchers and artists). Even if you were to
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Interesting)
True, but as AI gets better and better, it is a possibility that machines will be able to do nearly everything, and there just won't be enough jobs. Not everyone can be artists, actors, or musicians.
Artists, actors, musicians, psychologists, physicists, biologists, writers, ...
Not only art gives unlimited jobs, also science, management, services (there will still be cooks, stylists, hairdressers, ...).
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Insightful)
And you think it would be a huge problem for society if half the population didn't work, taking into account that maintaining them would be essentially free? (as no salaries have to be paid to produce food, shelter, etc...
The arguments are similar to saying that the modern world is impossible because the feudal lords wouldn't allow it to exist and the farmer populace wouldn't know how to do anything other than farming.
Sky scrapers are impossible because they wouldn't fit in the cave.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
More than half the population didn't work not too long ago. Between housewives and children less than 50% of people were employed, but a single person could provide for their family on an average wage. Wages have been depressed heavily since then so that a couple with children both need to work.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Interesting)
A sense of stupidity (Score:3)
Or as stupid; you see, it's all about the POV you approach it from. Ask me to go mountain climbing for no purpose other than to get to the top? I'd just laugh at you. Tell me you went mountain climbing? I'd either wander directly on to some other subject, or perhaps investigate (recreationally) why you feel it necessary to risk your family and friends losing you over an "accomplishment" that has no actual value to anyone. The world is not i
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It was done in 2005 by Eurocopter in a AS350 B3.
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What can humans do that robots can't?
What's the difference between a robot who can do everything a human can and a human?
Either humans can still do something robots can't or we're just creating more humans.
And I don't think that the ability to create a new human will be revolutionary. We already had that technology before the wheel and fire.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Interesting)
With services, it depends. I am quite sure that the average joe may get his hair cut and food waited by a robot at some point. But the people that own means of production (i.e. capital) will pride themselves that they are served by real humans. The millionaire may have a self flying jet but 12 gorgeous flight attendants. Unless we have a radical change in the society, I think we will have a situation pre industrial revolution: few with capital that employ hundreds of servants.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Interesting)
But the robots will be owned by someone who does want payments.
Years ago "they" talked about how in the future machines would do the work, and our problem would be figuring out how to handle our leisure time. What appears to have happened is that the machines do the work, the machine owners capture the revenue, and all of that "free time" essentially translates to lack of income.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Insightful)
But the robots will be owned by someone who does want payments.
Years ago "they" talked about how in the future machines would do the work, and our problem would be figuring out how to handle our leisure time. What appears to have happened is that the machines do the work, the machine owners capture the revenue, and all of that "free time" essentially translates to lack of income.
To further clarify, there's a cultural issue - the concept of machines doing, literally, all the work doesn't mesh with the ideology of humanity in it's current iteration. We, as a species, put a certain value not on work itself, but on the mere fact that a person is doing some kind of at least somewhat meaningful job. If machines did all the work, everyone who didn't own machines would, essentially, be on welfare.
Now, consider how the currently working population in general views people on welfare. It's not a flattering image - they're largely considered lazy, shiftless, ambition-less layabouts who would rather sit around a cracked-out government project smoking reefer and playing Call of Duty than bother to make something of themselves, and thus deserve less rights than everyone else. Not that this stereotype is universal, or even represents but a small minority of actual welfare recipients, but that's the common perception. You'll never convince society at large to accept this lifestyle as reasonable without a major sea change in how we view the non-working class, the world over.
And, of course, there's the fact that since this system is born of capitalism, those who own the means of production are not going to give the fruits of their labors away in exchange for nothing. How does a person pay for things when there's no work to be paid for?
Different vision (Score:3)
I am fairly sure we're going to be looking at two very different classes of machine: One, the AI, isn't going to be "owned" by anyone other than itself, just as you aren't owned by anyone. It may, or may not, have some obligations, but ownership of an intelligent being... probably not going to happen again. I hope.
Two, non-intelligent worker robots that have enough compute power to deal with cleaning your house, taking out the trash, mowing the
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So, you have managed to come to a place in your life through a combination of luck and perseverance, that leaves you in a position where you don't have to worry about basic survival needs, and can instead focus on satisfying your recreational desires. You are lucky.
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I'm willing.
Unfortunately, communism requires the government to be effective at distributing resources in a manner that the people consider to be fair, and there must also be an effective mechanism for ensuring that distribution goes according to plan. Those two criteria have been at the heart of communism's repeated failures through the 20th century. Either the government is highly corrupt and distributes unfairly, or the government orders a fair distribution that never happens because local aggressors dis
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Ain't gonna happen. Robots/AI owners have no reason to share their wealth.
Many people said the same thing about cars and computers: that only "the rich" would have them. It didn't turn out that way. If you look at the companies doing "big AI" today, such as Google and IBM, it is clear that their intention is to put the front end on every cell phone. Likewise, the future big bucks in robotics is not the factory floor, but the home. A robot that could cook, clean, babysit, etc., and cost under $10k would sell a billion units.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ain't gonna happen. Robots/AI owners have no reason to share their wealth.
Many people said the same thing about cars and computers: that only "the rich" would have them. It didn't turn out that way.
It was that way at first, you know.
But consider why it didn't stay that way - most people have jobs that provide them income with which they can purchase products like cars and computers.
We're currently discussing the concept of no one having a job because machines do all the work. So how, precisely, are people supposed to own production machines if they have no income?
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Robots can't build real estate. Fundamentally, there's still a big problem of scarcity, no matter how much automation there is: even if all labor is automatable, there's three things which are scarce: raw materials (perhaps some of them rare, such as lithium, tantalum, etc.), energy, and real estate. The first two can be mitigated: we could build automated mining missions to mine asteroids or the Moon for more raw materials; and we can build better energy-collection systems to gather more energy (such as orbital photovoltaic stations). However, one thing you can never fully mitigate is the cost of real estate. There's only so much land area on the planet, and some of it is much more valuable than other parts. Everyone wants to live in a picturesque coastal location (or mountain location, etc.). No one wants to live in the middle of the Sahara, or in Fargo ND. And as the population expands, the demand for real estate rises and the value goes up. So money can never be obsolete, at least until the environment is wrecked and we all have to resign ourselves to living in pods in the Matrix.
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Thus, Georgism [cgocouncil.org].
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that they have nothing to lose by doing so. All it would take is a single person sharing their robot robot-builder. Money would be obsolete.
And those who control the money and derive their power from it will fight to make sure that doesn't happen. Our situation is not the way it is by accident.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Babies! Or, robot-miners that have already been paid for. Each generation builds on the last after all.
In all seriousness the issue is Demand side for this problem. The price of labor per widget declines as the capitol cost per widget increases. That means that labor can buy fewer widgets per unit of labor even though the price of widgets may be falling. The demand for widgets declines as effiency increases, curtailing demand for more widgets and further depressing the need for Labor. The unit price of Labor declines. The iron law of wages would leave us to belive that the value of labor will move close to zero, and that is only if there is a method of employment. The barriers to entry climb as capitol requirements increase, preventing workers from migrating into job creators. There isn't an equalibrium if the price of Labor is zero and you keep a free market economy.
So we either:
a. Throw progress in reverse. - Insane and futile to attempt.
b. Develop new things that people need to do to get compensated as Labor. - Looking at the trend in STEM wages, I'm guessing that direction isn't working so well.
c. Develop a ways to share the benifits of the increase in return on Capitol. - Widely seen as theft, and amoral by the right.
d. Curb population to decrease the Labor pool - Genocide is looked down on, generally.
e. Accept that 98% of the population (in the US, EU and GB) is going to do worse then the generation before them, and the next will do worse then them. - Sad, but most likely outcome.
f. Revolution! - It doesn't solve anything, but people really like a good revolution.
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We did not try communism.
Some dictators used it as a schem to be a dectator.
Ofc. such schemes "would work", as long as no one actively destroys them and tries to be a dictator or "president" again. But what would be the point to be dictator after such an society was half or fully successful?
Our current "economy" certainly is not what prevents a new dictator, it is common sense.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
We've also tried capitalism - that didn't work out as well as it did on paper either. And we've tried it a lot more often, and it always seems to break down in much the same way, so the evidence suggests that it's a systemic flaw rather than any implementation details (or feature, if you're one of the 0.1% that reaps most of the rewards).
Communism works great on a small scale, and in fact is usually the default economic system for personal households and many tribe-sized social organizations like monasteries, etc. We've only tried a few times on a large scale and the results are heavily mixed - The Soviet Union didn't do so well, China on the other hand has incorporated a few capitalistic principles as well and seems to be doing quite well, though the proof will be what happens once it can't profitably siphon wealth from richer nations.
And we have never, ever, even had the option before of trying Communism supplemented by a massive robotic workforce without desires or needs beyond energy and routine maintenance. We can say pretty certainly though that Capitalism will be an utter failure in such a scenario - a man can't survive in a capitalist society without some kind of capital of his own - take from him even the value of the sweat of his brow and he will starve to death.
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Yes, but growing your own food requires that you have land and water to do so - which you do not have if you're flat broke.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the goal of not having to work because the machines do all the menial stuff, is that pesky concept of Money.
Everyone still needs to find a way to convince someone else that the latter will better off if they give the former some of the money they control.
If too many tasks are automated, a huge number of people will lack the skills required for that age-old civilization arrangement.
Which leaves the others either the choice to subsidize them for nothing, eliminate the concept of money, or eliminate those unable to earn it. Not highly appealing.
While this has always been true, the path of innovation is such that it's no longer the lazy, the sick, or the idiots (in the medical sense) who find themselves unable to rejoin the workforce. Most people cannot fathom how to "recycle" the millions who are about to lose their jobs to ever-smarter machines, because the threshold for valuable work keeps rising, while the basic jobs keep shrinking.
In the end, which is far from tomorrow, you end up with either a police state or a revolution, while those who either control the machines or have not been replaced yet try to hang on to what they have.
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Which leaves the others either the choice to subsidize them for nothing, eliminate the concept of money, or eliminate those unable to earn it.
I'd like to find out what's behind door number two.
Re: Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
We're already there. (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution, up to this point, has been busy work. Based on my experience, 90% of the work being done today is unnecessary. Almost all of the paperwork being done could be replaced by competent automation (though a lot of it has been replaced incompetently and actually lead to more work), most service sector jobs are entirely unnecessary but provide some convenience to those with money. Many engineering jobs are just repeating work that's been done before (but the information was lost, kept secret, or poorly maintained), a lot of the work that is necessary is done very inefficiently. Basically, the only reason most of us even have jobs is the greed or incompetence of some moneyed person or politician or criminal.
Re:We're already there. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an article [strikemag.org] that's relevant to your point.
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But money will not be the same. You can imagine a society where everyone receive enough money every month to be able to live and enjoy it. You can have more money from the 'state'/'governing body' by doing necessary thing that the machines can't (yet) do (Farmer, Teacher, Doctor, Police...). You can have more from your fellow humans by providing some kind of service (Cook, Artist, Performer...). You can also create new things/products that machines can produce and receiving some money for each asked by some
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, money is mot the problem. The problem is the way we distribute money. The current money distribution system is based on the basic premise that humans need to work in order to keep society running. If that premise falls down, the system simply doesn't work any more.
And I also disagree that, as the article states, "labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability". What is needed for that is having an accepted place in society, and having an income you can depend on. In the current system, labour is generally a way to achieve both. But nothing says it must be.
I've one read a very insightful comment: If you look at any depiction of paradise around the world, they have one thing in common: People all were out of work.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Interesting)
> is that pesky concept of Money.
Actually, there are three levels to understanding the definition of Money.
1. Token of exchange (aka barter)
2. Token of time, knowledge, and/or skill.
3. Token of energy
Each definition "solves" a problem that the previous level is unable to.
Let's go over some examples:
Past: Physical barter; I have 2 cows, you have 10 sheep. We could do a simple 1:1 exchange of 1 cow = 1 sheep. However if say cows are more valuable then sheep, you can't easily trade 2.25 sheep. Since we are trading physical objects sub-dividing the exchange rate is rather difficult. We need a finer granularity.
Current: Let's replace all the physical objects with tokens that symbolize wealth. Since the symbols are mathematical numbers we can sub-divide down to our hearts content. Plus things are a heck of a lot easier to trade for now.
I don't have the skills or knowledge or hours to build a house so I can pay someone to do that for me. Likewise I can trade my time, knowledge, and skills for a common token which I can then in the future exchange for something I want / need.
The old problem of the 20th century was production.
The current problem of the 21st century is distribution.
The next problem of the 22nd century is society adapting to letting go of the false concept of the past thousands of years of "There is never enough" to the new truth: Abundance: Having enough when you need it
Future: Eventually we will get to the point that:
a) We have Free Energy -- as long as we don't pull too much energy at once from the Lattice of the universe we have as much energy as we want, and
b) Einstein showed us that we can convert matter into energy. Once we have mastered the reverse process of Energy -> Matter (aka the Replicator in Star Trek parlance) what will give items their worth if we can simply just crank them out for free? Their unique design. (The Fashion industry is already laying the foundation with this approach.)
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html [ted.com]
> eliminate the concept of money
That is impossible given the definition of what money actually is.
--
I have professionally shipped numerous games on DS, PS1, PS2, PS3, PC, and Wii.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:4, Insightful)
And achieve what? Have people doing boring repetitive work that could easily be automated for $3 an hour because it would cost $3.10 for a machine to do it. Then next year $2.90 because the machines got cheaper? With the state having to top that income up a liveable amount. It's a race to the bottom and it isn't sustainable or desirable.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
It *IS* the goal. The problem is that we are apparently not mature enough as a society to not turn a potential utopian dream into a dystopian nightmare where the world is divided into a few haves and a huge number of have nots.
If we were mature enough, we wouldn't have former middle class people joining the ranks of the long term unemployed while wall street makes record profits and retailers screech about how they must be open on one of the few national holidays we still observe.
Those that think the first time around was easy and trouble free forget that it took the very real threat of global communist revolution to get the capitalists at the top to make the necessary concessions.
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What the poster however many levels up was getting at is that the USSR was communist in name only. It was really a totalitarian regime run by a small ruling class that used the peoples' clamouring for reform and the promise of communism as a means to take power for themselves and then do what they felt like with that power. It was not communism that killed millions of people, it was a sadistic totalitarian regime that did, and people that contiue to conflate communism with the USSR (or North Korea, or whate
I hate to point out the obvious but... (Score:3)
... the majority of humanity is not creative or particularly smart. And if there are few jobs for them to do because machines do all the grunt work what exactly do you expect them to do? I can tell you what they WILL do if the majority of the population is unemployed - riot.
artificial scarcity (Score:3)
I agree with your tirade, AC...there's no rational reason not to advance as humans and take advantage of the automation we can achieve today.
There IS a reason...it's not rational but it is always in play when it comes to any capital resource or essential service: artificial scarcity.
A human engineered economic shortage in some way, a shortage that would not exist in a natural free-market scenario.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we have no economic framework that could accommodate such a situation. It doesn't matter if machines can do all the work is there is no means to ensure access to their produce. Economics as we practice now is entirely centered around the labor market: People work for wages, use the wages to buy things, and producing those things pays wages back to the workers. Money circulates, everyone gets fed and clothed.
Take away the jobs, and what are you left with? A few factory owners swimming in food and products they cannot sell because no-one has any money to buy it, and a load of ex-workers who have no money to buy even the essentials of life.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Add a basic income to this, and you get:
A few factory owners swimming in money, but having to give some of it in the form of taxes to the state.
The state then gives that money to the jobless people.
Those people do not swim in money, but have enough of it to buy the stuff produced in the factories, thus closing the circle.
Still not an ideal society, but a working one.
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Then you have a minority of super-rich people who have ALL the money and pay ALL the taxes, subsidizing the rest. At best this becomes a feudal society where the rich people have more rights - because they can buy them - or more possibly they have rights while the rest (colloquially dubbed "the herd") have not; at worst the rich complain about paying too much in taxes (they always do, no matter the real amount or percentage) and start a policy of population growth control - eugenesia, euthanasia, forced ste
or maybe (Score:2)
'We've got a lot of rethinking to do,' concludes Friedman, 'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace
Or maybe we're just in a recession-induced employment slump.
Seriously, extreme claims require evidence. If you're running around saying, "This time is different!" after we all found jobs that weren't farming or factory work, tell us why you think it's different. Because there are plenty of counter-examples from history saying you are wrong.
Re:or maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
12 people built and ran instagram before it was bought out by facebook. They created $1.2 billion dollars of value. That's $100 million each. To generate $100 million in value in the manufacturing sector requires considerably more resources, long term investments and planning. And employees. And management.
The mail order company I worked for, their online division kept growing and growing the share of sales but they didn't lay off anyone in the mail order division due to loyalty to the employees. But they also didn't hire anyone new. Newcomers to their market don't even have a printed catalog anymore, and mail orders are processed by the IT staff on an ad hoc basis. Newcomer companies just have 2-3 employees where legacy companies have 20 or more along with 10 years of paper records to store and organize.
Yesterday I wrote a script that automates 80% of my coworker's job which was manual data entry for our system, which will allow our department to shed 1-2 jobs over the next 2-3 years.
Heck the financial industry used to be 100% manually processed and employed many many thousands of people across the country, now most trades are processed through four or five "large" firms who employ a couple hundred employees each in just a few cities.
Brick and mortar retail is seeing a decline matched almost dollar for dollar with gains in online retail, especially on holiday sales events.
If you don't see the data, it's because you're actively avoiding looking for it.
Re:or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
... the amount of potential work is limitless.
Is it?
That's no easier to prove than the assertion that jobs are disappearing.
Us humans have considerable appetites, but they are not infinite. We only require so much living space, clothing, food or entertainment. If automation continues to improve productivity there will come a time when the labor of some fraction of the population is capable of fully satisfying every human being alive. The only question is at what point does that happen.
It will happen a lot sooner if you define it as "fully satisfying all basic needs". But if we ever crack real AI, the only constraining factor on what we can provide each individual will be energy, not human labor.
This tipping point may be centuries in the future or it may be a few decades away and we're seeing the start of it. It's impossible to tell until after the fact. But denying that it can ever happen isn't helping. Increased automation will inevitable lead to the redundancy of human labor if automation continues to grow unbounded.
There is, of course, the possibility that automation will stop growing for some, as yet, unknown reason.
TL;DR We can't know how much of an issue automation replacing human labor will be. But blithely ignoring the issue isn't helpful.
Re:or maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, if you look at youth employment it's pretty clear that 'we' don't have jobs. Even the people who do aren't benefiting from the increase in productivity which became detached from wage increases around 30 years ago.
I'm always cynical about any view of doom based on extrapolation. We've seen again and again that we adjust. If there was one slightly different aspect of the current issue it is that the rate of change is vastly increased and the level of expertise is much higher now. When cars led to stablehands losing jobs they probably didn't have to do any training to move into another role. When miners lost their jobs to automation a couple of weeks of training was probably about all they needed to get into another role (actually in the UK we are still feeling the impact of those job losses). When doctors, who spend 5+ years studying and training, get largely replaced by machines then how long will it take them to retrain into a role that a computer still can't do (biochemist perhaps)?
The average level of a job worth employing a human over a machine for is increasing rapidly. The level and quality of education of the population isn't. We aren't preparing the youth of today to all be particle physicists and genetic research post-doctorates so why expect that everyone is going to be able to do something that a machine can't do better and cheaper in just a few years time.
Job limit. (Score:3, Interesting)
Some people need to dedicate a second to imagine a world where one person's work can support a hundred thousand. Centuries ago, the end of the era where 90% of the population had to work in the fields to feed everyone didn't create 80% of unemployment.
There is no limit to the total amount of possible "work" to be done. Just as we went from production to services, we'll go maybe to science, or to entertainment, or to space exploration. Most of the proletariat will also probably reduce their daily working hours, increasing the demand for entertainment and other services.
Re:Job limit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if the wealth is shared.
Re:Job limit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Only if the wealth is shared.
http://jim.roepcke.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/we-grew-apart.jpg [roepcke.com]
http://tcf.org/assets/images/blog_images/20120814-graph-of-the-day-does-productivity-growth-still-benefit-the-american-worker.png [tcf.org]
The wealth doesn't need to be shared.
Instead, the workers need be payed what they are worth.
Re:Job limit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sharing the wealth doesn't mean handing out money to whoever holds out their hands, it means having all people who were involved in creating the wealth benefit from it. If a company only sees its workers as "human resources", then "what they are worth" is the lowest possible price it can hire those resources for. If it sees itself and the workers as participants in a social structure, it can give them a fair share of the income the company generated.
Re: (Score:3)
Many companies are generating huge profits; they don't need to raise prices and risk becoming uncompetitive. Those profits are currently used to for example pay dividends to shareholders and do acquisitions, which benefits a small number of people.
Re:Job limit. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily. The Mondragon Corp. [wikipedia.org] is a worker-directed co-op in the Basque region. Despite being "ethical" it is highly competitive, and with 80,000 employees it's the 7th largest company in Spain. The economist Richard Wolff talks about them a lot in his lectures. [youtube.com] Worth a look...
Re:Job limit. (Score:4, Interesting)
The John Lewis Partnership [wikipedia.org], the most upmarket of any widespread retailer (Waitrose and John Lewis brands) in the UK is employee owned. Their wages are good, they are profitable (with a strongly positive trend) and typically pay out two months salary as a yearly staff bonus.
Re: (Score:3)
Or maybe we'll go back to farming and repairing.
Fossil fuels are the ones doing most of the work, and they won't be here forever.
Re: (Score:2)
Coal also wasn't forever, not wood cut from the outskirts of the village, nor the fire that had started with a lightning and had to be cared for through the night.
And when fossil fuels die we'll have fusion, or antimatter engines, or whatever else.
Re:Job limit. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no limit to the total amount of possible "work" to be done.
This is the crucial point. Remember right now we have people whose entire career is devoted, not to pushing a pointy ball across a line, but cheering for people who push a pointy ball across the line. And they work hard at it. [seahawks.com]
We have people who spend their entire lives painting other people's fingernails.
We have people who make a good living by painting art, not great, but good enough that people are willing to buy it at fairs.
We have people who live by playing live music
There are people who live by teaching chess lessons. And people who make a living playing Starcraft.
Since the computer was invented, and started taking over human jobs, the number of jobs in the US has more than tripled [stlouisfed.org], absorbing a huge number of immigrants and women coming into the workforce. Where did all the jobs come from? If you can't answer that, then you'll have trouble predicting the job market over the next 20 years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As another example, how is it not demanded by society that any paralyzed person has one person close by, ready to do any task?
I don't see anything wrong with the job of simply spending four hours a day watching movies chatting online and playing videogames while staying with a paralyzed person and doing for that person anything they need.
There would have to be almost zero need for productivity in the world for such a job to exist, but it's clearly the current needs that stop all kinds of such "jobs" to exis
Re: (Score:3)
And with cheap and smart automation (IE robots):
We'll have people who "paint" murals and frescos on the walls of your living room for the same price as a single color.
We'll have people who create furniture that no one else on Earth has ever made before, just for you.
We'll have automobiles with custom bodies, paint and mechanicals.
We'll have cell phones and tablets that fit our hands exactly and are completely unique to our needs and desires.
We'll have people who take up woodworking by designing 3D models of
Re: (Score:2)
It seems funding for science is being cut. Most of the service jobs pay less and suck more than the production jobs. There's a lot of 'at liberty' entertainers working for minimum wage already.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the only real barrier, and what in essence is being complained about, is that people now have to reskill if their job does become automatable and automated.
This is the real problem, all too many people still have a jobs for life attitude, a belief that the world owes them a job doing what they want to do rather than asking the question of themselves "What can and am I willing to do that everyone else wants so that they'll pay me?".
It's not a new thing, the whole drama with Thatcher and the miners in th
Re:Job limit. (Score:5, Insightful)
The pace of innovation and automation is only going to speed up, but people's ability to retrain isn't going to speed up much. At some point, maybe not far away, we'll be eliminating classes of jobs faster than people can train for new ones. What happens if, by the time you've learned to do a new job well, it's likely to be obsolete? And then at some point we'll reach the situation where most people simply aren't capable of doing any useful job as well as a machine no matter how much they train.
It's ironic that both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing people believe the fallacy that people are endlessly reprogrammable labour units. Extreme right-wingers believe it because they want to believe people who aren't successful are lazy. Extreme left-wingers believe in a mythical world where every person is a special soul who can achieve anything if they're just given the right assistance.
Re: (Score:3)
In theory the number of work hours could and should drop. In reality they did not. Most jobs are not available as part time jobs, and the laborers get low salaries, so they cannot go for less money per month. Experiments in Europe with 35 and 38 work hours failed and were rolled back to nearly 40 yours or even more. The average work hours is by the way very stable throughout human history. Therefore, I doubt that there will be a reduction at least not capitalism evolves to allow such careers and the people
Re:Job limit. (Score:4, Insightful)
These "experiments" did not really fail except in the sense that bosses and conservatives felt the employees and lower classes where having it too good.
In theory, you cannot be competitive with that number of hours. In practice, a lot could be gained by having employees that are less stressed, less sleep-deprived, and generally happier. But there is a sadistic streak running in those well off that refuses to see it that way.
Re: (Score:3)
The UK has plenty of 37.5 hour jobs, it's probably the closest thing we have to a 'standard' working hours. We also get a minimum of 28 days holiday a year, have a higher minimum wage and get free healthcare. I don't mean to imply the UK is perfect, or the US terrible, but suggesting that Europe has 'experimented' with treating workers remotely well and failed is misleading at best.
Re: (Score:3)
In Germany, France, Greece, and the Nederlands, there were work hour limits down to 35 hours (France), but in recent years, Germany for instance moved back to 40 hours for most jobs (there are exceptions in production). In France the 35 hour limit is not a hard limit, you may work longer, your company has then to pay "extra money". Furthermore 350 over hours per year are legal. With approx 48 work weeks, this is 7.3 hours per week overtime resulting in 42.3 hours. The funny thing is, the EU sets the upper
One word: Tittytainment (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap [wikipedia.org]
Not replacing grandmasters in an economic sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers and automated systems are not replacing any cognitive tasks soon, at least not economically. Sure, if you throw in a team of engineers, several years of research and a couple million euro/dollars, then you can build a computer that can defeat a chess grandmaster. But until engineering companies are actually laying off their engineers and designers and replacing them with computers, I am not worried.
Computers are likely to replace the more simple jobs (as they always have). Driving a lorry or car is not exactly a highly skilled job, and I would be delighted if that is automated.
Re: (Score:3)
A typical brain consumes 20 watts-hour of electricity and is capable to reason and learn almost anything. No software is capable to do a thousandth of what a brain can and what it is doing is at the expense of thousands of wa
Ob (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like hard work. Can't we get a computer to do it?
Obligatory not xkcd (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two basic approaches to handle this:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
Re: (Score:3)
The other results in mandatory behavior-altering spinal implants.
Why couldn't the utopia work without the "referee" feature? It wouldn't be a world devoid of crime but it would still work.
it's the monetary system stupid.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Computers replacing human's is fantastic, it frees us up to do what we want to do.
Well, it would if it wasn't for the fact that the monetary system is designed in such a way that unless we all work like dogs the economy goes to shit and we end up with a vast uneducated, depressed and criminal underclass.
There is a way out of this, but it involves stepping off the money-is-debt forced march that humanity is on at the moment [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Grip-Death-Destructive-Economics/dp/1897766408], otherwise the 1% we will end up having to exterminate the 99% [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm]
Re:it's the monetary system stupid.. (Score:5, Informative)
Let me guess: the way out is an outdated system from the 19th century that was discredited again and again in the 20th, and yet is inexplicably popular among university professors of the 21st.
sure lets go off the deepend here lets imagine a sort of
"neo-communism"
where there's enough automated production to support people doing whatever they want; so it becomes entirely viable that some will pursue art, others will pursue getting high, and others will pursue science, research, and increasing the efficiency of the already automated means of production... not because they need to survive, but because they want to.
Everyone gets a home. Everyone gets food. Everyone gets medicare. Doesn't matter what the fuck they do. Theres enough automated production to meet that demand.
Then you can go earn whatever you want beyond that however you like tax free, if you like... or you can live in a basic home, on a basic food stipend, with your free medicare and get high for the rest of your life... or read bad star trek fan-fic while dressed like a romulan stripper... whatever floats your boat.
Its not "tax and redistribute" because the base means of production for that base layer was realized entirely by automation. They took that production from the "robots". Not from you.
All that has to happen is that there be enough of a national infrastructure to ensure that theres enough publically owned robotic production to meet the basic needs of the population, and the political will to ensure it isn't dismantled.
Utopian fantasy? Hard to say. But if, as you argue, technology brings ever more production per human then at some point its almost inevitable that it would be very achievable. Our basic needs are relatively inflexible in the face of a means of production that is growing without bound. Do the math.
It's politics, not technology (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.
If I had a hammer (Score:2)
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening,
All over this land.
Warning! - Socialism ahead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Historically, technological revolutions have eliminated large categories of jobs. Many manual jobs are now performed by machines, even skilled manual jobs. An economist might say that these former manual workers are now free to retrain, and do other things - (or just grow old and die, and be replaced by youngsters who have never known the old way, and have learnt the right skills to get along in this new world whilst growing up).
The question is, what happens when literally everything of economic value that a person is capable of doing, can be accomplish more efficiently by a machine? More and more resources come under the complete control of fewer and fewer people, and for the rest of the population, what is left?
I believe that once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies, a form of democratic socialism will become the preferred way to run society. Resources owned collectively, with broad decisions made democratically, but organisational details left to machines to optimise and execute. People would be provided for, because it is easy to produce enough to do it.
Re:Warning! - Socialism ahead. (Score:5, Insightful)
"The only universal medicine (Marxists) have for social evils - State ownership of the means of production - is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the capitalist world: with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, economic waste, national hatred and national oppression, but it adds to them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and above all the unrestricted rule of the omnipresent bureaucracy, a concentration of power never before known in human history". -- Leszek Kolakowski
The current alternative to socialism: global hyper-capitalism - is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the socialist world: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and above all the unrestricted control of supposedly democratic governments by unaccountable multinational corporations , a concentration of power never before known in human history, but it lacks any of the redeeming qualities of either socialism or capitalism as they were in the time of Marx. Even the "omnipresent bureaucracy" helps protect large business from any true competition by building a regulatory thicket to discourage enterprising newcomers.
Worse, we have a world where even capitalist governments such as the US recognise the need for some sort of social welfare and infrastructure program, but with the multinational corporations paying the absolute minimum in tax this has to be funded primarily by punitive taxation of middle-income earners. Moreover, most of this money is actually spend protecting the interests of those same corporations, either overtly (like the state underwriting the casino bankers when their pyramid schemes collapse) or indirectly (in welfare payments that allow businesses to employ workers without paying them enough to live).
Meanwhile, the managerial elite enjoy more "feather-bedding" than the inhabitants of the most unrealistic workers' paradise, with annual salary and bonus packages any one of which would secure a typical person for life, seeming total immunity from the consequences of their actions, any failure rewarded by windfall severance and pension packages, and all sins forgiven after a "decent interval". Yet, with a few exceptions, these are largely managers and administrators, not entrepreneurs who have created wealth by building new businesses.
As for TFA - its hard to say how much of any reduction in jobs in Western countries is connected to automation rather than the offshoring of work to developing countries still experiencing their first industrial revolution fuelled by former agriculture workers/subsistence farmers.
If you look at science fiction - particularly Iain Banks and the like - what you see is a post-scarcity form of anarcho-socialism where the means of production not only automated and virtually cost-free but distributed and democratised. That the sort of thing we need - but whether it is attainable without the fantasy plot devices available in a SF story (e.g. humanity effectively ruled by hyper-intelligent and benevolent AIs who might as well be called gods - who usually go bad in order to drive the story).
Re:Warning! - Socialism ahead. (Score:5, Interesting)
People often say "communism doesn't work", and out of curiosity I looked into it. Dictatorships are bad news for sure, but democracy is a form of government and communism is an economic system - they are not incompatible. Several states in India have had governments with significant democratic communist components - Kerala and West Bengal [wikipedia.org] being the most notable. West Bengal recently had their communist government voted out after 34 years, and that was apparently only because of a percieved betrayal of their socialist principles(!). South America has had several democratic socialist/communist governments... usually overthrown in short order by the USA, as is the case in the Middle East (eg. Iran)... so it's difficult to draw any conclusions there. I did find an interesting communist community in Spain with economic refugees coming into it from the rest of the country. Apparently the mayor [wikipedia.org] changed the economic system to escape the crushing poverty commonly experienced in that part of the country.
I'm happy with my Australian free market with social/democratic trimmings, so I'm certainly no radical, but I was surprised and fascinated by my research.
It's a Good Thing (Score:2)
Services (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, jobs in manufacturing have been greatly reduced over the past century and the individual productivity sky-rocketed. The consequence was consumer goods became dirt cheap and few people work at producing them - at least in the western world.
Now things start the same with knowledge jobs and some services. With a diagnostic tricorder, automatic blood analyser and self-service MRI, the doctors and many specialists at the labs will have a good part of their work disappear or be replaced by a friendly unskilled worker telling you where to place your hand and hand you the print-out. Another set of jobs on the way out are train-drivers, truckers, taxi-drivers and pilots, they have a big chance of being replaced by computers in the near future.
What will be the consequence? Will the world end? Will the mschines rise and Skynet take over?
One of the first consequences will be, that the value of the service rendered will be greatly devaluated. In the end, we humans pay manly for three things: The value of the raw materials, the necessary investments for the production site and the time spent by a human to create the product. If the latter two drop significantly, the second because the productivity of the machines go up and the third because of automation, then simple we won't be willing to pay as much for the product and spend out money elsewhere. This elsewhere is where the jobs for humans will be.
For one, personal comfort services are very often hard to automate. Hairdressers and make-up stylists will be be hard to replace by computers. As another consequence, the organisations will fill with pointless jobs which keep each other busy. We see that today with all the consultants, controllers, marketing departments, safety and security people, quality assurance, project managers, application owners and so on. Those are nearly totally unproductive or, the few that are good at their job, cost only a little less than what their work saves. This is the negative aspect, but the same also exists in positive. Skilled people are able to spend more time doing things not possible before. Today, many illnesses have been identified that before didn't have a name because people died of other things first. And for many of those illnesses, cures have been developed.
In the end, humans will go on pushing the envelope, being that with discovering new cures to make life longer and better or be that by spending more effort on hairdos and the next fashion in legging-design. Automated tasks will just become a commodity, no matter how complicated it is. If you don't believe me, just look at that mobile phone of yours and look around how many designer cases are floating around. People are willing to spend 25% of the value of the phone on a piece of printed plastic with some designer-scribbles on it.
A slave's automation opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
The sincerity in this argument is an admission that, in reality, the 1% that make up the wealthiest of human beings consider the rest to be slaves, be it to labour, or interest rates or just putting food on the table.
Consequently, the externality from their pursuit of automation is making more and more people slaves so that we are always competing with one another for a dollar instead of the market competing for our labour, which drives labour prices up. As long as there is a steady rate of unemployment around 10%, every person will fear for their job and be a subservient slave, too afraid to attend to matters of democracy or society. That's what that 1% want from their win-win situation.
However I think it's 50's thinking that drives it and the fear. Technology is a gift that will either enslave or free the human race and most people can't comprehend what it means to them. So too many of the people who devise the technology. To me automation means I kick back a work for an hour or two while my automation does the work for me. That's because I control the technology I deliver and the reason I control it is because I have educated myself to do so. So the automation allows me to educate myself more - improving my life.
We have to ask ourselves what happens when the Western worlds labour becomes obsolete in a world that is competing for resources and corruption is inherent in every political system in the world. Personally, I want technology do better for people not profits, however it was my own naivety that blinded me to the fact that those who control the deployment of technology en-mass, aren't even people any more - they're company boards legally obliged to make a profit.
Our role as technologist's is also changing with the automation. You can bet that people will begin to cast blame on those who devise technology so unless we are prepared to push back and be cognisant enough to take a lead role in society and educate them about the choices they make the consequences of that fear will be played out on us hapless geeks.
If the cost of education goes down as the price of energy goes up we stand a chance to find a way to reduce our slavery and perhaps live better. My old mentor used to tell me 'You bleed on the cutting edge of technology' and, like a knife it will be used like a tool and a weapon to sculpt or subjugate our entire society.
This is ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
How come you're not being paid 2x as much? (Score:5, Informative)
Dear PhD AI worker,
How come you're not being paid 2x what you are now? Yes, 2x. Productivity of the worker has gone up 2x in real terms since 1973. Yet your pay is less than that, even YOURS, Dr. AI worker.
Suppose most jobs are automated, and the few remaining jobs have many highly qualified people who need that job. What happens to the price of labor? Market forces push wages down--people underbid you just to work. THAT is why your pay doesn't match your productivity. And the trend is accentuating.
Those high paid high level creative jobs you like to imagine? They ONLY exist if there is market for them, i.e., if the 1% (or whoever controls the resources) decides to allocate resources for them.
And they're not, hence the depressed wages ACROSS THE BOARD. I've got a PhD too, doing creative non-automatable work, and I SURE WOULD like to be getting paid 2x as much. But I'm not, and it's flatly because the rest of the labor market is depressed.
I'd sure love to keep doing creative non-automatable work, but I can only do that if it pays, which in turn depends on how many creative non-automatable jobs the 1% wants to devote resources for. And guess what: the 1% is apparently deciding that research and technology investment needs to drop because it is a "cost". Government investment is declining too. So capital (the 1%) thrives on productivity increases and everyone who must labor, is, frankly, slowly starving to death.
At least in the USA.
--PM
Blue/white collar jobs my foot! (Score:3)
The question now is what we will do when everyone is out of a job. There's no clear answer but we can assume a few things. One is that society fares better when people are employed. The second is that values shift and that we pay more for property and services that are scarce or that are a nuisance. So how will employed society look like in 30 years? War and other instabilities hurt business and therefore new activities will appear in order to prevent these. So which ones will come? I don't know but I'm sure there will be. Perhaps working on a way to extract desert heat and to bring water to it in order to allow crops to grow and humans to live. To me such ideas seem easier to entertain than say smart phones 100 years ago.
He's gonna have to get a .... (Score:3)
... a bigger hammer.
On the serious side, since all this technology is supposed to make our life experience more enjoyable, otherwise why are we doing this (greed of the few or competition mindset???) I want to know why our paid vacations are not getting longer.
Oh wait, there is a growing number of Americans on long vacations, sort of..... its called unemployment.
Maybe we really do need a bigger hammer.
Other people saw this coming a long time ago (Score:4, Interesting)
James Albus [james-albus.org] wrote a book in 1976 called Peoples' Capitalism [peoplescapitalism.org]. He proposed that the government create a mutual fund that invests in automated industries and pays dividends to every US citizen.
Eventually the fund's dividends would be enough to live on, so nobody would be required to work, and everyone would get a minimal share of the proceeds of automating everything.
Imagine that we had started doing this in, say, 1980.
Big red finger savings at Coles (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:i agree except for one thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
A person requires two separate lives. Work life is but one and no matter how passionate about the subject I might be, it is primarily to earn money. You ensure you earn money and continue to do so in the future by doing a good, professional job of things, don't get me wrong. And you might well be passionate about your work. But it should not take over your life.
Fact is, if you told the average person that they'd never have to go to work again, they would NOT do the things that they do as part of their working life. You are not going to see these people walking into their work at an insurance brokers and trying to arrange policies. You might, just might, find a scientist or maybe a passionate person offer their services after such an event but, in general, across the various workforces those people don't have to worry about their identity or robots coming in to do their jobs for them.
There's a couple of countries that don't understand work-life separation and they are usually the ones where you can convince people with the "cheerlead" method of inspiration ("Woohoo! Let's go do this!") and not much else. But I'm not convinced that, even under the facade, this is a healthy option, or that over-dedication is rewarded.
My previous boss basically worked himself into hospital, such was his dedication to the workplace, but it was never adequately recognised and he calmed himself down and moved on.
Every employer I go to seems to want me, at some point, to prove I have a life outside work. Literally, they have application forms that ask about my non-work-related interests and specifically say things about it not drawing on your working skillset. They don't want mindless drones with a single interest. They want humans who are happy and have a life. And I work in IT!
I don't want to work with, nor do I want to be, a corporate drone. I work as a payment to do the things I enjoy doing. Fortunately, I enjoy the majority of my work too. But even among my friends and family, my work life is a separate, mysterious thing that they don't see (unless they come work with me, like my brother did just recently).
Work is not part of my identity - it's another identity that I assume in order to live my life comfortably. If it were not necessary, that persona would not exist. And if I ever find my work identity being all I have in life, I think I'd have to seriously consider what I'm doing with it.
Re: (Score:3)
I remember that story, it's not that bad at first but it soon devolves into Utopian wishful thinking. I like to think that the dude overdosed on something while in the concrete block and the flight into the paradise-Australia that looks and sound communist but is totally not communist and people surrender their very brains to computers that are totally never going to go rampant or be subverted and where he marries the totally-hot chick who he just met and is the first female he ever talked to in the story i