Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI Is Going To Decimate Middle Class Jobs (businessinsider.com) 468
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines. Automation will, "in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world," Hawking wrote. "The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive." He frames this economic anxiety as a reason for the rise in right-wing, populist politics in the West: "We are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent." Combined with other issues -- overpopulation, climate change, disease -- we are, Hawking warns ominously, at "the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity." Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges, he says.
Curing Greed. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hawking warns...Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges..."
So, in other words, you must cure humanity of the pure unadulterated, narcissistic greed that has created the chasm between the elitists and the rest of the human race.
Fat fucking chance of that shit happening.
Re:Curing Greed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, created a middle class too. Say what you want about greed but it is a primary motivator of capitalism that has done more for the poor person around the world than any other economic model without an archipelago of gulags. Sure, the disparity between rich and poor is great but the standard of living of the poor today, especially in the west, rivals that of royalty of old. Disparity is not the whole story to understand the standard of living of members of that society nor does it address the mobility those members may have.
Greed, just like any human trait can be used for good or ill. Spewing platitudes does not undermine the good things that has come about directly or indirectly because of some ass holes greed.
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Actually it was the curtailing of greed from the New Deal until just before Reagan was elected that created the middle class. Before and after that the middle class has always been wasting away as inequality was left unchecked to maximize itself, as it naturally does. The greed was curtailed due to political pressure from a credible communist rival. We need to learn to curtail greed once more to restore the middle class.
huh (Score:2, Insightful)
If people don't work, they can't afford to buy things. So who is going to buy the things that get created? Robots?
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If people don't work, they can't afford to buy things. So who is going to buy the things that get created? Robots?
The 0.01% have more money than they can spend in a lifetime. What makes you think they need people to buy their stuff? If a robot provides your food and a robot cleans your house and a robot provides your entertainment and a robot hauls you from place to place why do you need people?
There will likely still be a few hundred thousand craftsmen that create the luxury lifestyle for the 0.01% but the other 98% of the population will be useless.
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All that money they own only has value when society agrees it does - who are they going to spend that with, if the value of whatever currency they hold collapses? The 0.01% are in the same system with the rest of us, whether they like it or not.
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Re:huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Are capitalism (which can basically only be defined by your relationship with an employer) and markets the only way we can think of to distribute goods and services? Are our imaginations so limited?
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if everyone suddenly had a Star Trek replicator, do you think the entire world economy would grind to a sudden halt? No, it wouldn't.
It would not grind to a halt because............?
What jobs do you think can not be automated? And since those currently pay better than the more "mundane" jobs, why isn't everyone already doing them?
It's already happened a few times already... (Score:2)
"Secretary" used to be the most common job according to some interpretations of BLS reports. The Word Processor made that role largely obsolete and now self-service:
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo... [npr.org]
So nowadays it's "Truck Driver"... wait a bit longer until autonomous vehicles make those delivery jobs go away. Wouldn't call those middle-class jobs, though.
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto... [marketwatch.com]
It'll
Re:It's already happened a few times already... (Score:5, Funny)
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
That's cute, you think that the on-line sales/help agent you are chatting with isn't already a chatbot... Be sure to send her programmer a +1...
Re:It's already happened a few times already... (Score:5, Insightful)
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
The problem is that the current trend is replacing good jobs with crap jobs. Even worse, many of the crap jobs exist not because they can't be automated but because it is cheaper to pay $8 per hour to a person than it is to automate the job. This means that automation has put a ceiling on all those jobs so they will never be middle class jobs. Take a job at mcdonalds and figure out how much it would cost to automate it and depreciate that over 20 years and you can easily calculate the point where raising minimum wage would cause that job to disappear. Likewise, you can calculate what the price of the robot needs to drop to before that job vanishes.
"Middle class" (Score:2)
I'll chalk this up as a poor interpretation of what constitutes 'middle class.' Most of the jobs automation would impact might creep into the low end of that range, but not very many.
However, as the wealth disparity widens and more automation in general comes into common use we will eventually have to find a solution. Guaranteed Income and the like may not be the right answer, though it's certainly the common thought right now. We definitely have to look into the issue further.
Re:"Middle class" (Score:4, Interesting)
Guaranteed Income and the like may not be the right answer, though it's certainly the common thought right now. We definitely have to look into the issue further.
I think a better solution that Guaranteed Income would be reduced work hours and mandatory vacation. If people were forced to work less hours then those hours could be given to other people. This works as long as middle class jobs that can't be automated continue to exists. It reduces the supply of labor which should increase the demand for labor and therefore the pay. It doesn't work for jobs that can just be automated away though because if labor cost goes above the automation cost then those jobs just vanish. The only thing that is currently keeping unemployment from spiralling out of control is that it's currently cheaper to pay someone $8 per hour than it is to automate that job away. Increase minimum wage to $15 per hour like many are suggesting and you will likely see any job that can be automated or eliminated like cashier, waitress, stocker, drive thru worker, etc... automated away.
Losing jobs isn't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Not being able to live, is.
In a perfect world, no one would HAVE to work if there was a minimum support for everyone. There's absolutely nothing wrong with machines doing more and more mundane work. The problem is that the increased profit goes to the wrong people.
Amish of the future. (Score:2)
I'll take "Predicting Trends.... (Score:2)
meh (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, but past innovations displaced specific sets of workers, from specific fields. (pun intended) I think what he is worrying over is the potential to displace many different workers very quickly, from many different industries.
Automation is all awesome, and displacing specific sets of workers in steps is progress.
Displacing MANY different workers from MANY different fields, as automation looks to be about to do, is very painful progress, and will force many tough decisions. At least, that's what I took
Not with new charging models! (Score:2)
I disagree. Companies will do what they need to do to profit.
For example, software companies have moved to monthly fee models where you rent their software instead of buying it. The AI software of the future will likely move in this direction. I expect that the hardware will also evolve in the same way. For example, companies will either be allowed to rent the automation hardware or will be forced to buy "maintenance contracts" that generate the necessary level of income to support the companies that de
Shorter working week; lower retirement age (Score:3, Insightful)
Productivity keeps going up, demand is going up less. Of course we're not going to be able to maintain full employment if there's just not enough work to be done with workers working 40 hours a week.
If people would work, say, 36 or even just 32 hours a week, we could maintain our standard of living, and at the same time get rid of this nightmare where some people are working themselves to death while others are desperate to find jobs.
Share the burdens more fairly, and share the rewards more fairly. It's totally possible, but of course you do have to let go of the business-knows-best, regulation-is-evil, government-is-always-the-problem-never-the-solution kind of orthodoxy.
Trying to Help (Score:3)
I don't profess to have any crystal ball into the future, or even deep understanding of the ever-evolving world of economics, but I do understand that people need jobs. Despite the increasing capabilities of today's machines, we're a long way of from sitting back and letting technology take care of our needs.
I believe in trying to help in little ways. For example, I don't use self-checkout machines at the supermarket, even if it means I have to stand in line. I don't want to help eliminate someone's job. I have similar feelings about self-serve gas pumps, bank machines, and cleaning up my own table when leaving a fast-food restaurant.
Are my efforts misguided and futile? Perhaps. Nevertheless, I believe that just because a thing CAN be done, that doesn't mean it SHOULD be done. I don't want to see wider replacement of human workers unless something else develops to mitigate further impoverishment of the working class.
Decimate? (Score:3)
10% doesn't seem too bad.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Not Just The Middle (Score:4, Insightful)
We've reached a point where AI in medical diagnosis is more accurate then human doctors. Why just wipe out manufacturing when you can also wipe out "higher" and "knowledge" jobs as well? If AI doctors are can out perform human doctors, why not AI lawyers? No human can memorize every single trial case, let alone know about it as it happens thus being able to argue precedence in real time. This seems simple to automation.
Doctors, Lawyers, drivers, manufacturing.... what's left?
AI and Capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't it strange that the very thing invented to enhance human productivity, AI, is going to make a large section of people non-productive. The problem is not AI but that the fruits of productivity is limited to a small section of people. The world will need to evolve to accept concepts like Universal Basic Income to share the fruits of AI with all.
Hawking is wrong: lower class jobs are doomed (Score:5, Insightful)
Hawking is wrong about which class of jobs are threatened, and wrong about the consequences. Lower class jobs are set to be wiped out AND the results of that will be far worse than Hawking estimates, but he is right to be concerned about overpopulation and so forth.
Take an average youth looking for their starter job. Today, they might flip burgers or work a cash register or some other similar entry level job. But in the near future, a lot of fast food jobs are going to be automated. And self-checkout continues to spread.
What will the average youth do for work? There won't be a lot of options. And kids who have no jobs and no hope of getting one often fall into crime and other habits that impact society. We could easily have mobs of kids roaming cities because they have nothing else to do, and if they end up irate or angry, it could result in riots, looting, fires, etc.
It gets worse.
As we automate cars and trucks, we won't need a whole slew of other jobs. Automated cars won't crash as much so we won't need body shops and mechanics, insurance agents and related workers (this goes right into white collar workers too). Police won't write as many tickets which will directly impact many towns that depend on that revenue. Likewise lawyers and courts will suffer reduced case load from car accidents and personal injuries that don't happen, so clinics and doctors geared toward that kind of care will have fewer patients paying them.
Meanwhile, automated cars will make it far less likely for people to make impulse stops such as for fast food or snacks at gas stations. And automated cars might go refuel themselves in the middle of night to take advantage of down time or empty roads. Or they might be plug-in. In all these cases, there will be far less need for people to work at places where drivers make those stops. You won't need gas station clerks. And yes automated refueling is possible. There have been prototype robot gas stations in the works for 20 years. Only the fact that labor was cheap has kept it from becoming an option.
The net result of all these changes are a LOT of lower class people who will have no job options. And nobody is slowing down having babies. Populations are soaring. There won't be jobs for all.
Does society owe anyone a job? Probably not. But we have to realize society will demand something be done about mass unemployment and youths running rampant in the cities and towns. We'll want it fixed. Jobs are one way to try to do that. Of course there needs to be some kind of job to do. I don't see anything on the horizon that promises to employ the number of people we have now much less in 20 years.
Hawking is absolutely right that this is the biggest threat humanity has faced. It is itself a huge, dangerous issue. And one way societies have solved over population and unemployment problems is by having wars. Which is not going to be fun for anyone.
Overpopulation will solve itself (Score:3)
That''s all solvable too, but I'm not sure we can keep a lid on the Christians and their Anti-Birth Control crusades. We just put a certifiable nutter into the VP slot. Basically, what happens next is entirely dependent on whether we can keep our religious minority from throwing human civilization under a bus like they did for a thousand ye
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:5, Funny)
Well, the guy is the first victim of automation : a machine is speaking for him...
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And walking... err rolling.
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:5, Insightful)
We get it Stephen, you've got an opinion on everything. Why exactly do we keep treating yours as definitive when it's clear you're way out of your expertise?
Since when is common fucking sense way out of his expertise?
It hardly takes a genius to figure out that greed created the financial chasm driving cost-reducing solutions such as automation and AI, and a 12-year old can grasp the fact that greed isn't an element in society that is easily controlled by any means. Not law. Not policy. Not taxation. Not anything.
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:5, Insightful)
You make the argument.
Stephen Hawking is not an expert on many of the issues not in his wheelhouse any more than any other celebrity.
It doesn't take a genius, expert, or celebrity to understand these predictions or the likelihood of them, or understand how hard it would be to utterly remove the greed that is driving all of this, and will ultimately change the face of human employment forever. This concept isn't new, wasn't first predicted by Stephen, and his predictions aren't weirdly obscure as compared to others who have analyzed this.
We should also remember that when George Orwell's 1984 was first published, most humans likely thought it was utter bullshit that would never come true. Perhaps we should be careful to criticize, since automation nor the greed driving it is hardly a work of fiction.
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not that it isn't common sense, but that additional weight is given to the premise when it is expressed as the opinion of a certified official Smart Person (tm). If Stephen Hawking happened to mention that the sky is blue, a certain sort of people would hold it up as divine wisdom simply because he said it.
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Now imagine two workers, Abby the Apple Pie Maker, and Betty the Basket Maker. Before the robots came along, Abby made a pie everyday, and Betty made a basket everyday, and then they traded a pie for a basket.
What if both Abby and Betty sold their products to other people and then bought food, paid their bills with the money and only sometimes exchanged their products with each other? Now that both their products are worth 10% of the original price, both of them will starve and be kicked out of their flats for not paying the bills.
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Some people certainly were worse off when automatic looms were invented. However, those people could either work with the automatic looms at the factory (for lower pay of course) or work at some other factory doing some other simple job (maybe instead of weaving they now work at a spinning factory).
While the early factories obsoleted some jobs, they required new simple jobs, for example, somebody had to shovel coal into the furnace so the boiler can make steam for the factory.
If automation obsoletes most of
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:5, Insightful)
But WAIT A SECOND, while the pies and baskets have each fallen in value by a factor of ten, a pie is still worth ONE basket. So Abby and Betty can just continue life as before. The robots changed nothing.
The just-so story is pretty, but it's hard to take it seriously as a prediction of the future when it doesn't even predict the past accurately.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before ("the foreign workers changed nothing"), because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc). But that isn't what happened, is it? Instead, many people lost their jobs and ended up either unemployed or working at less-desirable unskilled service jobs afterwards, because they were unable to compete with the cheaper/more efficient new foreign producers who didn't need to hire them.
Abby can just switch to making baskets
Can she "just switch"? Does Abby somehow already have the skills to make baskets, or the time and resources to learn those skills to the point where she can perform them at a commercially viable level? Switching to a completely different skill set is not without cost; not everyone can afford to spend months or years without any income while they retrain themselves. That's why so many previously-high-earning people end up "switching down" to something like Walmart cashier after the industry they trained for becomes non-viable.
So the most likely scenario is to put [the "losers"] on some sort of welfare until we can get riot control robots perfected
And here is exactly where the core of the problem lies. As the skill level of available automation rises, the pool of "losers" (i.e. people who aren't sufficiently skilled or adaptable to economically compete with cheap automation) gets larger every year, and eventually includes most (if not all) of the human population.
Dismissing that issue as a negligible corner case is ignoring the problem entirely. The fact that you think "riot control robots" are the endgame suggests that you do also see the problem; you just refuse to label it as a problem because you lack sympathy for "those people".
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If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
Sure. Low-end manufacturing is not something where America has a competitive advantage.
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before
No. That is not at all what "my theory" is. That would only happen if the relative value of products was exactly the same. But that is not true at all.
because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc).
That is not true at all. The value of steel has gone way down. The value of cars has gone up.
probably not sympathy (Score:4, Insightful)
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"No externalities". Typical of the unbridled-capitalism/free-trade mindset. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, 'tis said...
Thanks for the link.
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but unskilled workers in rich countries are a large and influential voting bloc, as a certain US political party recently discovered a little too late.
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The problem is that wealth creation is becoming more concentrated.
Let's say that I work for you and earn 1000EUR/month, while you (the boss) earn 5000EUR/month. You then decide to replace me with a robot (or a lower paid worker, maybe an immigrant), now I get zero, but since you save some money you now earn 10000EUR/month. It may be good for you, but I still will not like it. If the government asks me (as part of a referendum or an election) if I want to prevent you from using your current solution, I will
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, somehow we still keep coming up with new jobs that begin to exist because of the increases in technology.
There may be an inflection point when needs required by new technology can be fulfilled by technology itself, or fewer people due to advances in tech. I think we are seeing the latter already, and it will steadily progress to the former. There is no turning back.
History can teach us many things, but we can't ignore that some events are unprecedented.
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Historically humans have often had more children than there was food to support as anything up to 50% died before 5.
sadly those who breed most prolifically are the least likely to contribute to society we are heading to idiocracy
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:5, Insightful)
Generations suffered in grinding poverty due to the industrial revolution. That always gets glossed over. The people who lost their jobs weren't back at work within a few weeks. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs.
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:5, Insightful)
It may seem like common sense, but it's flat-out wrong. If you study history, you will see that similar concerns were raised about the printing press, the industrial revolution, electricity, etc. And yet, somehow we still keep coming up with new jobs that begin to exist because of the increases in technology.
Right, because none of those things could flip a burger as well as a human could. However, now we have machines that can do things better then any human can. My job is to automate you out of a job, and if I do my job right then you are obsolete unless you can educate yourself to do something more complex. However, the cost of education is on the rise, so most will not be able to afford to educate themselves. We have a catch 22.
The solution to this problem is free education and a basic income. We should start with a grant for 60 credit hours of community college and a basic income at 60% the federal poverty level.
Re:Why is this guy still talking (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, because none of those things could flip a burger as well as a human could. However, now we have machines that can do things better then any human can.
Because no-one has ever in history designed a machine that could...
* operate switchboards better than a human could
* compute ballistic trajectories better than a human could
* transcribe documents better than a human could
* assemble electronics better than a human could
* sort mail better than a human could
This stuff has been going on for a couple centuries now displacing lower-middle class workers. The only difference now is that it is beginning to affect upper-middle class workers who thought they were safe because they had eeked out college degree, but ended up in a field of work that didn't actually need a college degree, but they worked their way up a corporate ladder because they had some penchant for managing lower-middle class workers and they had some pedigree attached to their "college-attendance". Without these lower-level workers to manage (because it is all automated), what career prospects do they really have?
The solution to this problem is free education and a basic income. We should start with a grant for 60 credit hours of community college and a basic income at 60% the federal poverty level.
The community college thing isn't gonna really help anyone in this new labor-less economy. There isn't a corporate career path in management anymore (even, low-level foreman/supervisory roles). The economy can't really support enough jobs in the "overhead" rolls either. Think of what happens when we get a "boom" cycle of startup companies, there are still only a few winning companies and lots of losing companies. Which companies do you think many of these newly minted freely over-educated citizens will end up?
Sadly the future is likely that the whole idea of a "career" which is kick-started by formal higher education as way to make a path through life is probably reaching a turning point. Historically the whole idea of a "career" launched by formal higher education was really an artifact of the rise of governments and large corporations that needed to hire warm bodies en-mass and were looking for easier ways to sort potential employees.
If corporations eventually get smaller (because they don't need to hire as many people to scale), we are trending back to the artisan era (where people are often evaluated more by their portfolio of work, not their formal education and where apprenticeships are often more valued than training).
Of course an alternate path that is shown by history, is that corporation can also get large and subsume the role of government altogether such that employment in these mega-corps will become simply a new form a citizenship. In this alternate reality there is no need for free-education and basic income, these mega-corps will (as they have historically done) provide it to all their citizens (aka employees) and even provide them jobs in new startup ventures that they want to expand their reach into. I don't know if this is the ideal path preferred by all the basic-income promoting folks, but suspect not. In many ways these mega-corps are almost like a typical military organization.
Either way, a "free" education provided by the government doesn't seem to be worth the cost/benefit in a post-labor economy...
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There is a difference. You wrote a script to save yourself from doing a tedious task (I also do the same). Good. You can spend the time saved by doing something else (to get more money from another client) or watching youtube (the client probably expected you to take all day to do it, so you might as well say you did).
OTOH, imagine that copying the configuration to all devices was your primary job - someone else creates a template and you now have to apply it to all devices. Some time later, the admin who c
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Greed is great way to fuel progress, but only when contained within a set of rules which makes sure it doesn't destroy everything around it. Like rules which make sure companies deal properly with toxic waste.
The 2008 global financial crisis was born out of eliminating constraints that were put in place long ago (Glass–Steagall Act, 1933) to ensure greed doesn't destroy everything around it.
And we've done fuck-all to stop it from happening again. Wells Fargo is a good recent example of greed and corruption remaining unchecked. Cost over 5,000 people their jobs while the CEO pulls his diamond-lined parachute.
Let me also remind you it was a Clinton who repealed Glass–Steagall, just to show how much
He's right. (and has been for hundreds of years) (Score:5, Insightful)
Hawking wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing". Ignoring the obvious "that word doesn't mean what you think it does" regarding "decimate", he's right.
Automation HAS reduced the proportion of people who work in manufacturing, after it did the same in agriculture. That's happening now, just as it's been happening for 250 years. There was a time when most people worked to produce food and other necessary agricultural products. Automation by machines such harvesters meant that people could stop spending their time trying to produce enough food and move to building convenience items, such as dishwashers, electrical ovens, etc. They could also spend much more time doing R&D to invent radio, TV, airplanes, etc. Once we had machines doing the physical manufacture of products, we spent our time creating an entire new sector of the economy; neither agriculture, manufacturing, nor service. Humans started spending our time creating the *information* sector, building web pages, etc. I'm excited to see what we create next, and I'm glad I don't have to till the field today.
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doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
It literally does but feel in to the same misuse as literally.
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Languages change over time anyway. This is why we speak modern English, rather than Old English, Proto-Germanic, or Proto-Indo-European. And there is nothing you or any other pedant can do about it.
Re:He's right. (and has been for hundreds of years (Score:5, Insightful)
You neglect that a) not everyone has the ability, skill or desire to just jump into programming b) programming can be automated too and c) the US government woefully neglects any attempts at job retraining, unlike European countries, mostly because every effort we've done towards job retraining since Carter was president has been cheap bandaid attempts rather than bottom up serious efforts.
You also gloss over that all of the farmers who were cast aside by automation were absorbed into the very factories we are now discussing being automated into non-existence. Also, simultaneously, millions of people employed in the trucking and taxi industry, including Uber, are facing the extinction of their jobs as automated cars take off. No, there will not be a rise in jobs servicing these cars either, as it's just as easy to develop an automated garage the cars just drive themselves into for service.
You can pretend all you like that new jobs will just pop out of the woodwork for these people but you're delusional. It's taken us 9 years to get back to the job growth we had before the last recession, our economy is not nearly robust enough to absorb the kind of jobless numbers we'll be seeing as automation really gets going.
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Ignoring the obvious "that word doesn't mean what you think it does" regarding "decimate"
It is you who ignores the obvious: languages change. See decimate [wiktionary.org] "properly" vs "generally". What does the word really mean? Not so obvious. If you want to come across as anal then by all means uphold the "proper" (or ancient) meaning. But if you wish to be understood, consider accepting the generally understood meaning.
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Yes, but the farmers that got automated out mostly just went poor, they were not the ones that got the new whizzy jobs building washing machines, it being too far out of their comfort zone. People don't automatically find other ways to spend their time profitably when their job gets automated away.
Suppose long haul trucking gets automated away as seems likely to happen. There's very little chance those drivers are going become programmers. The truck stop waitresses won't either.
Another effect is that in the
Peasants had more free time (Score:3)
Nobody's saying we should go back to tilling the field. We're saying we should learn history and learn from it.
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You can start by outgrowing the Protestant Work Ethic thing that is obviously colouring your judgement.
Re: Why is this guy still talking (Score:2)
Everyone with an open mind and a basic understanding in economics will come to the same conclusion. New automation technology will increase productivity quickly and faster than economic growth. In consequence there will be less jobs.
Re:Nope (Score:4)
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Agreed, but it's much worse than that.
Starting with entry-level education, students learn useless shit and if the right wing Evangelical Christians get their way, we'll be teaching Creationism instead of Evolution; anti-climate change, bigotry and misogyny and nationalism.
It's a lost cause for America, anyway.
We lost the middle class a long time ago and we're not going to get it back.
Globalism is out of favour in the future, so we can't even feed into other country's middle class.
Rome burned and people stil
Leftists are the bigots. (Score:3)
It's a lost cause for America, anyway.
Only for leftists bent on screeching "Hate! Bigotry! Shut up!". For the rest of us, it represents a second Reagan-like morning in America.
bigotry and misandry and globalism.
All things that the left teaches, and to do so violently towards non-leftists.
Besides, nationalism isn't a bad thing after all.
Rome burned and people still live there.
Unchecked moral decay caused Rome to burn.
Evangelical Christians get their way
The country is more than just Liberty University. On the other hand, it'd be nice to see university rioters get the Gov. Reagan treatment again.
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Humans want to succeed and have a successful lineage, they want to build things, they want to tinker with things, they want to learn things, and they want to do so without oppression. This is an instinctual set of principles which led to Humans becoming the top of the Food chain.
That doesn't mean our social systems make us the 'most fit' to survive ourselves.
This is not limited to today, but a historical normal. No opportunity for self and family advancements leads to unrest and revolt. Just like all other Utopian dreams, the dream of the lazy human doing nothing while robots do all the work will not succeed.
Just because people *can* be lazy doesn't mean they *will* be lazy. Lazy is boring and lazy people don't exactly make it to the top of the food chain. I work 8 hours a day to be able to work on my ambitions which is the other half. If I didn't *have* to work I would spend my time working on my ambitions, but I would have the freedom for a little more time for surfing and exercise.
How will it work if you have 90% unemployment? Simple, it won't be that way for long. You will have massive unrest, and all of the horrors that would entail.
Have you considered what happens if that 90% of
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Automation is killing lower class jobs... starting with the cotton gin.
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And for a long time it was the working classes that usually had to retool every generation or two from the start of the Industrial Revolution. The big change of the last few decades is that it is those middle income earners whose jobs are increasingly at risk.
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How many jobs today are simple "made up work" - little companies that try to innovate, and fail - consuming speculative investment money, big companies that are so heavily regulated that most of their personnel cost is absorbed in generating documentation to C their As, keep the regulators from shutting them down, and prevent successful lawsuits from being brought. Oh, and then we can talk about the entire legal system, and the insurance industry medical industry black hole of man hours.
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Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
You know you're right. I guess it's easy to convince everyone that a 10-hour workweek for humans is plenty of effort to pay a living wage.
Let's see how well Welfare 2.0 works out, 'cause Welfare 1.0 breeds such fantastic examples of living...
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Incidentally, Friedman also supported the most reasonable solution to the problem we'll be facing - a universal basic income. When you get past the initial fact that it's handing money out to people (via Government), it's actually a surprisingly libertarian/capitalistic s
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And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
If hardly anyone is working where does this magic money come from?
Are you going to take the few people making a LOT of money 3/4's or more of their income to give handouts to everyone else?
At some point, people get pissed they're working for something, and all their money and incentive
This! (Score:2)
GP states that Milton Friedman believed in UBI, but that is not true. Friedman said that it may work as an alternative to Welfare under certain conditions. For example: Friedman believed in Welfare with an incentive to get off Welfare, which we have never had in the US. He also stated that Welfare was doomed to fail without tight immigration control, because it incentivized the least productive people immigrating and dis-incentivized productive people. Why come here to work if you pay 50% in Taxes, yet
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And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
If hardly anyone is working where does this magic money come from?
Corporations, you can start by taxing them more. Perhaps we could go as far as banning for-profit corporations, all companies could be public-benefit corporations.
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And then watch the value and cash flow of those corporations plummet as their stock becomes worthless. No one will invest if there's no possibility of a return on their investment.
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And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
From taxing the profits of companies who have successfully used automation to drive their costs down to near-zero -- with negligible labor, their only costs are input materials, maintenance, and the electric bill.
The one good thing about a vast army of robot workers is that they can provide their owners with fantastic 24/7 productivity at low cost, and thus generate vast material wealth; the only question is whether that vast wealth will accumulate in the savings accounts of the 1% while everyone else starv
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Economics has never had to deal with this level of AI before, and Milton Friedman died 10 years ago, so I doubt he had much to say on the topic.
In a world where robots with AI can do just about every blue collar and almost all white collar work better, faster, and cheaper -- what do you propose? AI is even replacing most clerical work and has begun replacing tattoo artists and surgeons.
Seriously, who would hire a human being to do any job if they can have a one-time-purchase AI to do the same job that is literally superior in every way?
Ask the rust-belt about all their manufacturing jobs that went to Mexico after NAFTA and to China as well... but, which now are moving from China to Ethiopia or are being replaced by robots. That's right -- China has been cutting thousands of jobs and replacing them with robots... b/c it's cheaper than even the pittance they paid the Chinese labor.
Have a look at the 2 million 18-wheeler driver jobs and the additional 5 million delivery/taxi jobs in the USA. When vehicles become fully self-driving, that's 7 million jobs gone over the course of just a few years to replace the drivers. It'd be one thing if people had time to prepare, to learn new skills, and to find a new job that a robot with AI wouldn't threaten. Thing is, the AI is taking over jobs in all fields. There's even a robot pharmacist dispenser at my local hospital -- sure, it's stocked by a real pharmacist, but it basically does their job and multiple pharmacy tech jobs in one.
The Industrial Revolution made it so that people could do more work. The Information Age made it so that people could do more work and do so globally instead of just locally. The AI Revolution will make it so that few people can find work... b/c the AI is made to REPLACE people, not to help them do more work. Sure, those displaced workers could try to find work in an area that an AI just can't do. But what would that be? Software coding?
No matter the subject, as AI grows, its capabilities will become exponential. There's no job that's truly safe from its encroachment.
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In a world where robots with AI can do just about every blue collar and almost all white collar work better, faster, and cheaper -- what do you propose?
Mind uploading. Then we unemployed humans can become the robots.
I agree with everything you wrote (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Who's gonna pay for it? Yeah, I could write a few paragraphs on this topic, but they're not gonna make folks feel good about paying taxes to fund things like single payer health care, basic income, free public university, etc, etc.
2. The Puritan work ethic. Folks get _really_ uncomfortable with the idea that somebody is doing OK and not working their ass off to do it. There's an intense amount of resentment for it. It's not fair they have to put 40 hours of misery in and somebody else stays home eating steak and lobster and bon-bons. Hell, 'not fair' is one of the first concepts children learn. It's deeply ingrained in us.
Unless somebody figures out what to do with those sentiments we're gonna just keep giving everything to the upper class because we can't bear the thought of it going to anybody else...
Milton Frieldman? (Score:4, Interesting)
Both Brexit and Trump can be seen as the final stage of neoliberal economics: it ends in a populist revolt.
It's not as if labor is just now facing the threat of automation. But nobody in the US - not the unions, not the companies, not the government - is solving the education gap that might help future workers.
Economic theories (Score:4, Interesting)
Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
The problem with "real" economic theories is that there are so many to choose from [wikipedia.org].
Here's a different economist [marshallbrain.com] who extends our current economic system to its logical conclusion, and also presents a viable alternative. It's very readable and a quick read - well worth a few moments if you want to see where we're headed.
It's clear to anyone who studies economics as a math problem that our current system is untenable going forward. In the limit of extremes, automation will supply all of humanity's production needs, while employing no one.
A fine situation, but in that scenario who will have money for purchases?
We're already feeling the pinch here in the US due to globalism. Real wages have been stagnant (against inflation), good jobs are increasingly hard to find, and people are forced to work multiple mc'jobs to make ends meet. Automated vehicles and drone delivery systems will put perhaps 10 million people out of work in the next 10 years.
America can stem the tide a little by stepping away from globalism, bit it's a temporary measure. Ultimately, AI will take over more jobs than it generates, people will tighten their belts and reduce spending, and this will continue until our current system collapses completely.
Something has to change, and we pretty-much know *what* has to change, but no one has any idea or plan on how to get there.
Traditional economics is religion, not science. It never predicts what will happen, only why something *did* happen. It makes conclusions by building a model to fit past data.
If you want to fix the economy, you have to look to the future.
Real economists don't do that.
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First, economists are little more than apologists for whatever the political class wants to do with the economy. Economics is far more voodoo than it is science, and especially in it's current culturally enforced scarcity constraints. Second, Milton Friedman was an especially harmful apologist. Third, it would great if machines did all the hard work, so we could have more leisure. I'm all for it. Fourth, you are right! We would still find things to do, but we wouldn't necessarily have to deal with the abuse
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Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
Senior System Engineer/Architect
And what makes a code monkey's opinion on the matter any better or worse than a famous theoretical physicist?
You are in error (Score:2)
New automation methods will drastically increase productivity, while growth is not expected to go through the roof top. In essence you need less jobs.
Please do not compare this with the industrial revolution, as we had a labor shortage than. Also automation applied in the 1980s with robots cost jobs, but growth was bigger (at least in Germany) so more new jobs were created outside the factories. Now the situation is different, as all jobs in offices are targeted and in addition, drivers, nurses etc.
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Being unemployed will be the new occupation.
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Well, I'll be retired a bit before then....
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Translating a set of requirements into code is something we can automate. One day we'll be able to have one programmer that is able to do the job of 20 programmers.
Also if the middle class is out of a job and not buying gadgets, then I'm pretty much out of a job as a programmer.
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Translating a set of requirements into code is something we can automate. One day we'll be able to have one programmer that is able to do the job of 20 programmers.
Also if the middle class is out of a job and not buying gadgets, then I'm pretty much out of a job as a programmer.
To do that you would have develop a very precise requirements language... in fact you might say higher level code is a requirements language that translates specific requirements into machine code via a compiler.
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Most of my work lately is writing code that writes code.
Compilers are software that writes software.
Siri/Cortana/et.al. are lowering the bar for input to the point where they can take it from people who don't even know they are interacting with "a computer." When you describe to your phone that you want to go to the theater, and it provides you driving directions based on current traffic conditions, down to the level of detail of lanes to take, turns to make, and guides you to available parking, who will b
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Well not yet, but machine intelligence will be able to program itself eventually, and they'll do it better than you or me. You think your brain is anything more than a biological machine?
That's all beside the point. It's not the automation or the AI that's causing all this unemployment pain - it's the system surrounding them. Mechanization, automation, AI - these things can all be used to solve every human problem we've ever faced, yet, all we get are warnings of impending doom from our visionless "leaders"
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The problem with "visionless leaders" is mainly they are in the pockets of large moneyed interests like corporations, who want to make sure that they receive the vast benefits of automation, but do not see their overall tax liability increased. That's why they love politicians who talk endlessly about corporate tax cuts (heck, I've seen some people argue corporations shouldn't pay tax at all, and now you know why), but at some point, automation is going to mean corporate tax bills are going to go up. At the
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Concepts of ownership don't have to remain they way they are now though. These concepts in the history of the human race are actually quite young, and capitalism is barely a zygote. For most of our existence, we didn't have such nonsense restraining us. What happens if automation leaves us with no more scarcity?
They don't have to completely program themselves (Score:2)
Currently, I'm the only person writing any code for my project.
20 years ago when I started my career, this project would take around 20-30 people to code. I'm not 20-30x better than they are. Instead, a whole lot of what I need is "automated". I don't have to write a network stack. I don't have to write a server or client. I don't have to serialize/deserialize the messages between the services. I don't have to write the deployment, monitoring and automatic recovery software. I don't have to write mos
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I wrote you didn't I?
Oh wait, you are a very very simple shell script... Kind of explains why you are unstable and can't get a job or make friends.
Re: Um, no. (Score:2, Funny)
Here I am, in America, trying to reach third world poverty level, and you're telling me those third world farmers wish they had it as good as I?
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You DO have access to the Internet, don't you?
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What he is saying is not really new, it's something many thinkers have considered through the 20th century. The Technocracy_movement [wikipedia.org] predicts that a price system based society must eventually be replaced as the multiplier for work an individual can do increases to a point that only a few people are necessary to cover the production needs of the entire world population. That has deep cultural implications as to how we may change how we consider the value of an individual to society. And this particular examp
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Re:Continuing the tradition (Score:4, Insightful)
I see that Hawking is continuing the tradition of world-renowned physicist commenting on things they have no specialty in.
Well, why shouldn't he? Everyone else on this thread is doing the exact same thing. Commenting on things you aren't an expert on is something just about everyone does, on a daily basis.
The only difference is that when we make a brilliant (or stupid) post to Slashdot, it doesn't get picked up by any news agency. If you find that troublesome, you ought to blame the news agencies, not Hawking.