14 ms·

Have you had the “AI talk” with your kids?

45 points by cyanbane 10y ago

zer00eyz 10y ago
Presently I think we undervalue creative endeavors. Something like this: http://www.wired.com/2016/05/mysteries-chickpea-water-magical-substitute-eggs-no-really/ http://www.wired.com/2016/05/mysteries-chickpea-water-magica... springs to mind as an example. Are there going to be unemployed truck drivers, and ditch diggers... yes. Will there be a larger place for craftsmenship, and art, I would sure hope so. The question is how we get through the transition.
- maaku 10y ago
  You're assuming machines can't be creative.
  - AdamFernandez 10y ago
    While they may one day be 'creative', I feel this will be the last bastion of human capability beyond AI. Luckily, the interesting thing about creative endeavors is that they are often a unique synthesis of many things. AI may create wonderful art, music, entertainment, etc., but this does not mean things created by humans won't still be valuable to other humans. Things would just be created in parallel and in communion with AI. That being said, the percentage of the population that can 'create' for income/profit may be very small. Hopefully by that point, we will create for the intrinsic value of creating and sharing, and not for money.
  - azinman2 10y ago
    They can only have the perspective that was possible from the program that created them -- ultimately they're constrained by the original programmer (artist). That set of possibilities might be very large, but it's still limited. Because art is expression, and expression is fundamental to humanity, machines won't be able to push art in the same way that humans can.
  - ogreveins 10y ago
    They can but it's going to take a good long while before they have the same kind of access to their physical environment to experiment like humans can. Just think about the steps between figuring out that bean water can be used in meringues for instance; not just the mental ones, but the physical ones as well.
  - thevibesman 10y ago
    I think there is a high likelihood that machine creativity or thought will be different from human creativity or thought.
  - maus42 10y ago
    Probably yes, but people will also keep valuing stuff created by other people.
- vernie 10y ago
  I seem to recall at Watson project that analyzed recipes and discovered unconventional or unlikely combinations of ingredients. Ah, here it is: https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community
  - zer00eyz 10y ago
    First of all I love chefwatson. There is some interesting science out there too: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-network-science-tools-spices-indian.html http://phys.org/news/2015-03-network-science-tools-spices-in... The bean water thing is a bit different. Turning something that was basically garbage (or pig feed) into something that might have a lot of new and interesting uses, is a bit beyond Watson today.
kaosjester 10y ago
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two MIT economists, recently wrote a book about this, called The Second Machine Age (here: http://www.amzn.to/0393239357 http://www.amzn.to/0393239357). We're teetering on the edge of economic shifts, and we have a lot of questions we're going to need to ask about how people will live in a world where jobs simply aren't available. When 60% of the workforce is unemployable, either there will be massive unemployment, and the crime, poverty, and starvation associated, or there will be a massive paradigm shift in how we think about employment, money, and scarcity. I'm hoping we get to the latter before the former.
- klipt 10y ago
  Economics is just a thin veneer over evolution. If the machines can beat us economically, what makes us think they won't beat us at evolution too? That doesn't necessarily mean humans will go extinct, but there might only be a handful of us left in zoos, bred for whatever characteristics pleases the machines most.
- tajen 10y ago
  Or each person (moral, physical or AI person) will be able to have that much more leverage in their entrepreneurship. The industrial revolution eliminated 60% of the jobs and gave birth to communism/socialism/a reaction to the wear of workers by a powerful people. Subsequent revolutions also gave much more leverage to the "guy in his garage in the Silicon Valley". My wishful thinking hopes that AI will enable us to take up much bigger projects, each of us. Writing a symphony when you're alone? Creating a band, 2 albums, with all the matching marketingware and tv ads, in just 2 weeks? Developing a custom processor as a startup of 3ppl? Creating a new model of car every week? My gut says we'll invent enough fashions and arts to keep us busy. But there sure will be a lot of poverty and reactive movements. A bloodshed, at least as much as today.
  - steego 10y ago
    > A bloodshed, at least as much as today. Bloodshed has been steadily going down for the past hundred years. Besides, Facebook's precognitive security system will anticipate and humanely neutralize dissent before blood is shed. ;)
deleted 10y ago
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davesque 10y ago
Maybe, in my rosy colored view and after some really serious growing pains, widespread AI would finally allow humans to pursue art and knowledge without worrying about the basics.
- civilian 10y ago
  I think it would just be hard to justify pursuing knowledge and art when the AI will also do that better than you, in it's spare cycles. I agree that there is a timeless quality to learning sports or arts that are obsolete, but at some point... it might be kind of depressing.
  - zardo 10y ago
    No more depressing than learning how to do just about anything, knowing that you are never going to be world class at it.
  - davesque 10y ago
    That sort of assumes that the point of doing either of those things is to be better than everyone else. I personally find the activities alone to be worthwhile. Besides, the reality of superior ability wouldn't be anything new. For everyone of my abilities, it seems incredibly likely that there exists another human somewhere that might be considered "better" than me.
    - civilian 10y ago
      So, with art, I can acknowledge that the point isn't to be better. But what about collecting knowledge? Sure, you could help analyzing the genome & biology of a rare butterfly with all your free time. Say, maybe it would takes computer-assisted humans several years. But the AI could finish it in a month! Wouldn't you feel silly about that?
- arethuza 10y ago
  That's pretty much the AI best case scenario portrayed in the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks: Investing all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, A.I. Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture Edit: I also liked the reply when Banks was asked about the great Minds of the Culture "... Is this what gods would actually be like?" to which we replied "If we're lucky".
Nevermark 10y ago
The people who will reap the rewards of machine work will be those that own machines, directly or indirectly through corporate ownership, or own valuable assets, like mining rights or intellectual property. These people will end up with the lion's share of money. Then who will the machines produce value for? The hyperrich in this situation of course. So a few people will be both the owners and the superrich consumers. From a purely mathematical standpoint, this will result in a vibrant economy. From the perspective of the 99% or 99.995% this will be a disaster. But the history of life is the history of the winners. The only way to change that will involve a serious redesign of civilization from the bottom up. I am for that, but human beings don't seem to be well suited for that task. The mindless muddying of every important political issue of our times by news, corporations and politicians suggests most of the human race is going to take a huge hit and then waste its miserable time fighting about why instead of coming together.
- CM30 10y ago
  And who exactly will buy their products or services if they have most of the money? Machines don't buy stuff. Selling only to billionaires isn't much of a market. There is the idea of universal income, but then that theoretically just keeps this sort of insanity going longer.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - bdavisx 10y ago
    >There is the idea of universal income, but then that theoretically just keeps this sort of insanity going longer. Yeah, that's the real issue, at some point, AI will likely render capitalism as "unmaintainable" - but humans aren't very good at changing, and switching from capitalism to some kind of post-scarcity Star Trek economy is going to "hurt" too many of the rich and powerful for them to agree to it - so it will be fought. It will be fought with the armies that the rich and powerful control - and it will be very, very bloody. I don't think I'll live to see it (I'm almost 50), but I think it will happen.
bitJericho 10y ago
My son is young and being silly he said he could drop out of school to become a truck driver for a relative. I had to break it to him that by the time he started to get somewhere with such a job he'd become unemployed due to self driving trucks!
calhoun137 10y ago
>> "and rehashing that tired trope about how old jobs that got displaced by new technologies eventually were replaced with new, but different jobs we couldn’t fathom at the time. That’s not the case this time. This time it’s different." I guess the point here is that the author cant fathom new job types in the future, so therefore there will be no new job types in the future. Glad we got that one settled! This argument has been going on literally for hundreds of years. Just because the author cant fathom new job types proves nothing. People lose jobs because of decisions made by other people. Science will not ever come to an end, and there will always be new job types because of that. Just imagine when commercial space travel becomes a serious thing. They will look back and say "did you know once a month they used to argue on HN about how in the future there will be no jobs? They were so silly because they didnt know about space travel." And then someone else will say "yea they were wrong then, but this time its different..."
- vkou 10y ago
  The explosion in the service industry of the past 30 years is not because technology and globalization created new jobs... What are lathe operators doing these days? Some of them oversee automated factories - the rest flip burgers.
  - calhoun137 10y ago
    I assume you are talking about the American service industry and not the Chinese one. In my view, the massive growth in the chinese manufacturing industry is also not a result of technology either, but rather a result of shipping american manufacturing jobs oversees. Which illustrates my point that people lose jobs because of decisions made by other people.
    - vkou 10y ago
      Shipping stuff from China only became economical due to huge gains in shipping technology.
- neogodless 10y ago
valine 10y ago
I'm looking forward to the day AIs post intelligent comments on Hacker News. Perhaps there will be a new AskAI section.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I think Microsoft already tried that on twitter... it didn't end well.
deftnerd 10y ago
I have three children with my wife and we decided to teach our kids the hard way how to lower expectations and survive the last year. We quit our jobs and moved to Puerto Rico and moved to a mountain top in the center of the island. Our goal was to show them what life is like in most other parts of the world where people struggle. They run around and play in the forest, help tend the garden, and learn from us, books, and exploration. It's been our year of "disconnecting" from the rat race and learning how to thrive as a family of 5 on under $1200 a month. We're packing up and moving to Ithaca, NY at the end of the summer but I hope none of us go straight back to a consumer-based lifestyle even though we'll have the income to do it. When regular employment dries up and all they have is self-sufficiency, maybe they'll now have the tools to be content.
- overcast 10y ago
  That's pretty awesome, and you're moving back to a dope area in the finger lakes, tons of good hiking and outdoorsy stuff there. I'm currently in Rochester, and cruise down there frequently to get away.
- randyrand 10y ago
  >where people struggle It annoys me anything below today's incredibly high standard of living is considered struggling. Puerto-rico's per capita GDP is 5x (!!!) higher than the United States in 1900 (US GDP per Cap was $4,096.00 in 1900 inflation adjusted). Is it really correct to say that almost the entire US population was struggling up until the mid 1900s? And now we're in some utopia? 'Struggling' implies an emotional state. Yet the standard of living implies almost nothing about emotional state. I'd imagine Puerto Rico has a very similar emotional state to the US! So why do we constantly use the word struggle as a financial comparison and not an emotional one? It almost seems like a unconscious conspiracy to garner emotional support for what amounts to a more financial difference.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Was life in the early 20th century better with quack medicine, volatile food prices, and no old-age health care or social security? Yes, it is correct to say that a great amount of the US population struggled until the mid 20th century. Most of that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a very small and privileged few. For an argument about relativity, a reliance on GDP is an amusing false equivalence.
tracker1 10y ago
Two points... First, never underestimate the power of middle management and custom automation tooling. Second, you aren't really going to be able to outsource the plumber, mechanic and electrician any time soon.
- swalsh 10y ago
  A plumber is a person who has knowledge of plumbing, tools, and a will to do it. What if AR helped people with the knowledge part, the "sharing" economy helped people with the tools part, and "wanting to save money" helped people with the "will" part.
  - jhallenworld 10y ago
    "Massachusetts law prohibits any one but a licensed professional from installing, removing or repairing plumbing. The reasons for this may not, at first, be obvious, but public safety blah blah blah..."
- bloaf 10y ago
  I think people actually have some of the AI timelines backwards. To me, jobs like accounting and other financial services are much lower hanging fruit for AI than bricklaying, truck driving, or plumbing. The reason being that financial services are jobs where you primarily work with numbers, and computers are already good at working with numbers. Computers are not good at working with bricks. In other words, automating financial services has one big hurdle (how do we teach the computers to understand financial numbers) but bricklaying has two (how do we teach the computers to understand the numbers, and how do we make something that can successfully work with bricks?)
  - tracker1 10y ago
    The point is because a lot of businesses have customized rules that fall outside checkbox options... Just look at how much customization happens with the likes of SalesForce... I don't think that will be automated away soon... Same goes for anything related to localized construction... We're a long way away from automating that too... Not saying it will never happen, but it'll be around the time we get flying cars.
swalsh 10y ago
A machine probably isn't going to make unique hand-made tables. There's a trend right now, we mock hipsters for their love of "artisinal" products.... but in an age where machines make everything the same, I think people make things that aren't. If you just want a table, you can go to ikea and get the machine made table that everyone else who doesn't care bought too. If you want that "one good" product, you can ask an artist to make one. Or you can find a place with tools, and make it yourself. To me the future is one where we all have access to the basics, and you choose to have a few things that are of quality. The catch is, making things by hand isn't very profitable. I think a minimum income paid for by machine "owners", distributed to everyone frees normal people find the work they LOVE instead of just "work". If I didn't have to worry about money, i'd split my time between the woodshop, and designing a new programming language.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Well, no, the machine will make custom tables that look just like the "unique hand-made table" at a fraction of the price, with customization, so if you saw a table that you like but you wanted yours to seat 6 instead of 4, you upload a couple pictures of the table, and tell the machine to replicate it with a larger tabletop. Some people will still pay the artisan to create the table, but most will continue to take the cheaper route.
  - spc476 10y ago
    There's still creativity though. In one video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc907FbLK4U&t=3m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc907FbLK4U&t=3m30s) the woodworker is using electricity to obtain a unique burn pattern in some wood (the details of which aren't given, sadly). This is something I would not have thought of doing. Could this be automated? I guess, once someone has thought of it. But could the thought of this be automated?
    - qbrass 10y ago
      >(the details of which aren't given, sadly) Looks like he's using an electric stick welder clipped to some nails driven into dampened wood.
scalio 10y ago
The solution is obvious: education. Education, education, education. Making it a truly common good will require a massive shift in the way most people are brought up in the west, which is why it won't happen over a couple years but rather over a couple generations, which is why it's high time we got going. Once you can do things in and with your head, the world becomes your playground. Once the kids understand that hurting people in any way is literally senseless, that the civil servant state and nine-to-five work is destroying intellect, once they realise the awesomeness that lies within that big melon everyone of us is carrying around, I think humanity as a whole can get out of this mess properly. And I think enlightment is the only way humans are going anywhere other than destruction, by whom- or whatever it may be. The consumer (a.k.a. mind-numbing) industry everybody seems to be so happy about is definitely not the way to go. Forgive the metaphor, but plugging everybody into the matrix and feeding them bullshit 24/7 just to keep them happy is not how we can stay on top of things and our intelligent machines. If the complex machinery that is a Human is reduced to a consumer, it is of no value to electronic machines out to solve the galaxy's problems (other than maybe as an energy source ). It seems as though we won't be going anywhere far away from the solar system for a while, so instead let's go deep. Let's go into ourselves and discover the worlds inside that nature has provided us with.
- _nalply 10y ago
  And what would you teach?
  - scalio 10y ago
    History, for one. So we could finally stop repeating the same idiotic errors over and over and over again. (edit) I wouldn't teach history either by forcing students to learn dates or locations by heart. Have the teachers respond to the students' whims by talking about whatever happens to catch their fancy. Philosophy and psychology. Not by forcing students to learn Kant by heart and regurgigate him for a good grade, but by showing children what they have in their minds and what they can do with that. Mathematics. Strongly related to philosophy, show the beauty in making connections between simple building blocks to create massively complex systems. You and I, this world, everything we know of is dictated by mathematics (or can at least be understood through them, depending on your point of view). That alone can give any non-debilitated mind enough material to think about for the rest of its days. If your mind is not structured in a way favourable to the understanding of complex relationships, you can go into the arts or crafts. Some minds work better with something physical to work on, some are better at internatlizing concepts and tearing them to pieces by thought. Don't put everyone through the same grind because everybody is different. No wonder our schools fail, because they do precisely that. Also, students are expected to learn a bunch of rules by heart, they often don't need to understand the underlying concepts to pass with flying colours. If you don't know where something comes from, you can hardly expand on it because there's nothing to build on. It's like a structure just hanging mid-air, going nowhere, but steadily being tacked stuff onto. It's not stable, and the stuff being tacked on has no relations to anything else, since there is no foundation of broad, general knowledge about the world. (edit) Classes are way overcrowded. What we need is lots of teachers for little groups so that every student's enquiries can be answered in proper time. Instant feedback on any question should also help make the whole thing more like a dialog where the student tries to find out more about a subject and the teacher can provide the information or show the student where and how it can be looked up.
stevetrewick 10y ago
I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. Richard Brautigan, 1967. (Edit, format)
fsloth 10y ago
Well, if we establish a basic income and produce enough to suffice then people will live as the aristocracy lived the past hundreds of years. Basically European gentlemen of means did not work. The major if is the basic income part - if this is established, psychologically people will adapt to the eternal weekend just fine.
thotpoizn 10y ago
What strikes me as odd about apocalyptic "the perils of the singularity" navel-gazing is that we automatically assume that machines, and ONLY the machines, will improve far beyond our capabilities - perhaps even infinitely. Why shouldn't we improve as well? Every day it seems there is a new story about further advances in amazing / fast / cheap / etc. gene splicing technology, or some new breakthrough in understanding how cancers work, or how longevity may be achieved, or how to correct color-blindness, etc. Is it any less presumptive to assert that humans will make ourselves more and more amazing, as it is to assert that machines inevitably will?
civilian 10y ago
I think we should think about Advanced Chess (aka Cyborg Chess) in this context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess Humans already operate on a very high level of abstraction. I'm not aware of how my food is being digested, I'm not aware of how my muscles are being maintained. (Although, come to think of that, I do wish I could direct my muscles to get swole without going to the gym.) I'm not really aware of every photon my eyes capture, I'm given a blurry "executive summary" that has the contrast in the center turned up to 11, and the color spectrum I see has had a clustering algorithm run on it. Similarly, executives in a company don't always know what's going on in the day-to-day of their reports. They have an idea, but they don't actually solve the problems, and in same cases they don't even know how to solve the problems. We use computers to help inform our decisions. As long as we can continue the path where humans work with AI, we will have some place with them.

45 points by cyanbane 10y ago

Presently I think we undervalue creative endeavors. Something like this: http://www.wired.com/2016/05/mysteries-chickpea-water-magical-substitute-eggs-no-really/ http://www.wired.com/2016/05/mysteries-chickpea-water-magica... springs to mind as an example. Are there going to be unemployed truck drivers, and ditch diggers... yes. Will there be a larger place for craftsmenship, and art, I would sure hope so. The question is how we get through the transition.

maaku 10y ago
You're assuming machines can't be creative.
- AdamFernandez 10y ago
  While they may one day be 'creative', I feel this will be the last bastion of human capability beyond AI. Luckily, the interesting thing about creative endeavors is that they are often a unique synthesis of many things. AI may create wonderful art, music, entertainment, etc., but this does not mean things created by humans won't still be valuable to other humans. Things would just be created in parallel and in communion with AI. That being said, the percentage of the population that can 'create' for income/profit may be very small. Hopefully by that point, we will create for the intrinsic value of creating and sharing, and not for money.
- azinman2 10y ago
  They can only have the perspective that was possible from the program that created them -- ultimately they're constrained by the original programmer (artist). That set of possibilities might be very large, but it's still limited. Because art is expression, and expression is fundamental to humanity, machines won't be able to push art in the same way that humans can.
- ogreveins 10y ago
  They can but it's going to take a good long while before they have the same kind of access to their physical environment to experiment like humans can. Just think about the steps between figuring out that bean water can be used in meringues for instance; not just the mental ones, but the physical ones as well.
- thevibesman 10y ago
  I think there is a high likelihood that machine creativity or thought will be different from human creativity or thought.
- maus42 10y ago
  Probably yes, but people will also keep valuing stuff created by other people.
vernie 10y ago
I seem to recall at Watson project that analyzed recipes and discovered unconventional or unlikely combinations of ingredients. Ah, here it is: https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community
- zer00eyz 10y ago
  First of all I love chefwatson. There is some interesting science out there too: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-network-science-tools-spices-indian.html http://phys.org/news/2015-03-network-science-tools-spices-in... The bean water thing is a bit different. Turning something that was basically garbage (or pig feed) into something that might have a lot of new and interesting uses, is a bit beyond Watson today.

kaosjester 10y ago

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two MIT economists, recently wrote a book about this, called The Second Machine Age (here: http://www.amzn.to/0393239357 http://www.amzn.to/0393239357). We're teetering on the edge of economic shifts, and we have a lot of questions we're going to need to ask about how people will live in a world where jobs simply aren't available. When 60% of the workforce is unemployable, either there will be massive unemployment, and the crime, poverty, and starvation associated, or there will be a massive paradigm shift in how we think about employment, money, and scarcity. I'm hoping we get to the latter before the former.

klipt 10y ago
Economics is just a thin veneer over evolution. If the machines can beat us economically, what makes us think they won't beat us at evolution too? That doesn't necessarily mean humans will go extinct, but there might only be a handful of us left in zoos, bred for whatever characteristics pleases the machines most.
tajen 10y ago
Or each person (moral, physical or AI person) will be able to have that much more leverage in their entrepreneurship. The industrial revolution eliminated 60% of the jobs and gave birth to communism/socialism/a reaction to the wear of workers by a powerful people. Subsequent revolutions also gave much more leverage to the "guy in his garage in the Silicon Valley". My wishful thinking hopes that AI will enable us to take up much bigger projects, each of us. Writing a symphony when you're alone? Creating a band, 2 albums, with all the matching marketingware and tv ads, in just 2 weeks? Developing a custom processor as a startup of 3ppl? Creating a new model of car every week? My gut says we'll invent enough fashions and arts to keep us busy. But there sure will be a lot of poverty and reactive movements. A bloodshed, at least as much as today.
- steego 10y ago
  > A bloodshed, at least as much as today. Bloodshed has been steadily going down for the past hundred years. Besides, Facebook's precognitive security system will anticipate and humanely neutralize dissent before blood is shed. ;)

deleted 10y ago

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davesque 10y ago

Maybe, in my rosy colored view and after some really serious growing pains, widespread AI would finally allow humans to pursue art and knowledge without worrying about the basics.

civilian 10y ago
I think it would just be hard to justify pursuing knowledge and art when the AI will also do that better than you, in it's spare cycles. I agree that there is a timeless quality to learning sports or arts that are obsolete, but at some point... it might be kind of depressing.
- zardo 10y ago
  No more depressing than learning how to do just about anything, knowing that you are never going to be world class at it.
- davesque 10y ago
  That sort of assumes that the point of doing either of those things is to be better than everyone else. I personally find the activities alone to be worthwhile. Besides, the reality of superior ability wouldn't be anything new. For everyone of my abilities, it seems incredibly likely that there exists another human somewhere that might be considered "better" than me.
  - civilian 10y ago
    So, with art, I can acknowledge that the point isn't to be better. But what about collecting knowledge? Sure, you could help analyzing the genome & biology of a rare butterfly with all your free time. Say, maybe it would takes computer-assisted humans several years. But the AI could finish it in a month! Wouldn't you feel silly about that?
arethuza 10y ago
That's pretty much the AI best case scenario portrayed in the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks: Investing all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, A.I. Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture Edit: I also liked the reply when Banks was asked about the great Minds of the Culture "... Is this what gods would actually be like?" to which we replied "If we're lucky".

Nevermark 10y ago

The people who will reap the rewards of machine work will be those that own machines, directly or indirectly through corporate ownership, or own valuable assets, like mining rights or intellectual property. These people will end up with the lion's share of money. Then who will the machines produce value for? The hyperrich in this situation of course. So a few people will be both the owners and the superrich consumers. From a purely mathematical standpoint, this will result in a vibrant economy. From the perspective of the 99% or 99.995% this will be a disaster. But the history of life is the history of the winners. The only way to change that will involve a serious redesign of civilization from the bottom up. I am for that, but human beings don't seem to be well suited for that task. The mindless muddying of every important political issue of our times by news, corporations and politicians suggests most of the human race is going to take a huge hit and then waste its miserable time fighting about why instead of coming together.

CM30 10y ago
And who exactly will buy their products or services if they have most of the money? Machines don't buy stuff. Selling only to billionaires isn't much of a market. There is the idea of universal income, but then that theoretically just keeps this sort of insanity going longer.
- deleted 10y ago
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- bdavisx 10y ago
  >There is the idea of universal income, but then that theoretically just keeps this sort of insanity going longer. Yeah, that's the real issue, at some point, AI will likely render capitalism as "unmaintainable" - but humans aren't very good at changing, and switching from capitalism to some kind of post-scarcity Star Trek economy is going to "hurt" too many of the rich and powerful for them to agree to it - so it will be fought. It will be fought with the armies that the rich and powerful control - and it will be very, very bloody. I don't think I'll live to see it (I'm almost 50), but I think it will happen.

bitJericho 10y ago

My son is young and being silly he said he could drop out of school to become a truck driver for a relative. I had to break it to him that by the time he started to get somewhere with such a job he'd become unemployed due to self driving trucks!

calhoun137 10y ago

>> "and rehashing that tired trope about how old jobs that got displaced by new technologies eventually were replaced with new, but different jobs we couldn’t fathom at the time. That’s not the case this time. This time it’s different." I guess the point here is that the author cant fathom new job types in the future, so therefore there will be no new job types in the future. Glad we got that one settled! This argument has been going on literally for hundreds of years. Just because the author cant fathom new job types proves nothing. People lose jobs because of decisions made by other people. Science will not ever come to an end, and there will always be new job types because of that. Just imagine when commercial space travel becomes a serious thing. They will look back and say "did you know once a month they used to argue on HN about how in the future there will be no jobs? They were so silly because they didnt know about space travel." And then someone else will say "yea they were wrong then, but this time its different..."

vkou 10y ago
The explosion in the service industry of the past 30 years is not because technology and globalization created new jobs... What are lathe operators doing these days? Some of them oversee automated factories - the rest flip burgers.
- calhoun137 10y ago
  I assume you are talking about the American service industry and not the Chinese one. In my view, the massive growth in the chinese manufacturing industry is also not a result of technology either, but rather a result of shipping american manufacturing jobs oversees. Which illustrates my point that people lose jobs because of decisions made by other people.
  - vkou 10y ago
    Shipping stuff from China only became economical due to huge gains in shipping technology.
neogodless 10y ago

valine 10y ago

I'm looking forward to the day AIs post intelligent comments on Hacker News. Perhaps there will be a new AskAI section.

tracker1 10y ago
I think Microsoft already tried that on twitter... it didn't end well.

deftnerd 10y ago

I have three children with my wife and we decided to teach our kids the hard way how to lower expectations and survive the last year. We quit our jobs and moved to Puerto Rico and moved to a mountain top in the center of the island. Our goal was to show them what life is like in most other parts of the world where people struggle. They run around and play in the forest, help tend the garden, and learn from us, books, and exploration. It's been our year of "disconnecting" from the rat race and learning how to thrive as a family of 5 on under $1200 a month. We're packing up and moving to Ithaca, NY at the end of the summer but I hope none of us go straight back to a consumer-based lifestyle even though we'll have the income to do it. When regular employment dries up and all they have is self-sufficiency, maybe they'll now have the tools to be content.

overcast 10y ago
That's pretty awesome, and you're moving back to a dope area in the finger lakes, tons of good hiking and outdoorsy stuff there. I'm currently in Rochester, and cruise down there frequently to get away.
randyrand 10y ago
>where people struggle It annoys me anything below today's incredibly high standard of living is considered struggling. Puerto-rico's per capita GDP is 5x (!!!) higher than the United States in 1900 (US GDP per Cap was $4,096.00 in 1900 inflation adjusted). Is it really correct to say that almost the entire US population was struggling up until the mid 1900s? And now we're in some utopia? 'Struggling' implies an emotional state. Yet the standard of living implies almost nothing about emotional state. I'd imagine Puerto Rico has a very similar emotional state to the US! So why do we constantly use the word struggle as a financial comparison and not an emotional one? It almost seems like a unconscious conspiracy to garner emotional support for what amounts to a more financial difference.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Was life in the early 20th century better with quack medicine, volatile food prices, and no old-age health care or social security? Yes, it is correct to say that a great amount of the US population struggled until the mid 20th century. Most of that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a very small and privileged few. For an argument about relativity, a reliance on GDP is an amusing false equivalence.

tracker1 10y ago

Two points... First, never underestimate the power of middle management and custom automation tooling. Second, you aren't really going to be able to outsource the plumber, mechanic and electrician any time soon.

swalsh 10y ago
A plumber is a person who has knowledge of plumbing, tools, and a will to do it. What if AR helped people with the knowledge part, the "sharing" economy helped people with the tools part, and "wanting to save money" helped people with the "will" part.
- jhallenworld 10y ago
  "Massachusetts law prohibits any one but a licensed professional from installing, removing or repairing plumbing. The reasons for this may not, at first, be obvious, but public safety blah blah blah..."
bloaf 10y ago
I think people actually have some of the AI timelines backwards. To me, jobs like accounting and other financial services are much lower hanging fruit for AI than bricklaying, truck driving, or plumbing. The reason being that financial services are jobs where you primarily work with numbers, and computers are already good at working with numbers. Computers are not good at working with bricks. In other words, automating financial services has one big hurdle (how do we teach the computers to understand financial numbers) but bricklaying has two (how do we teach the computers to understand the numbers, and how do we make something that can successfully work with bricks?)
- tracker1 10y ago
  The point is because a lot of businesses have customized rules that fall outside checkbox options... Just look at how much customization happens with the likes of SalesForce... I don't think that will be automated away soon... Same goes for anything related to localized construction... We're a long way away from automating that too... Not saying it will never happen, but it'll be around the time we get flying cars.

swalsh 10y ago

A machine probably isn't going to make unique hand-made tables. There's a trend right now, we mock hipsters for their love of "artisinal" products.... but in an age where machines make everything the same, I think people make things that aren't. If you just want a table, you can go to ikea and get the machine made table that everyone else who doesn't care bought too. If you want that "one good" product, you can ask an artist to make one. Or you can find a place with tools, and make it yourself. To me the future is one where we all have access to the basics, and you choose to have a few things that are of quality. The catch is, making things by hand isn't very profitable. I think a minimum income paid for by machine "owners", distributed to everyone frees normal people find the work they LOVE instead of just "work". If I didn't have to worry about money, i'd split my time between the woodshop, and designing a new programming language.

Johnny555 10y ago
Well, no, the machine will make custom tables that look just like the "unique hand-made table" at a fraction of the price, with customization, so if you saw a table that you like but you wanted yours to seat 6 instead of 4, you upload a couple pictures of the table, and tell the machine to replicate it with a larger tabletop. Some people will still pay the artisan to create the table, but most will continue to take the cheaper route.
- spc476 10y ago
  There's still creativity though. In one video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc907FbLK4U&t=3m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc907FbLK4U&t=3m30s) the woodworker is using electricity to obtain a unique burn pattern in some wood (the details of which aren't given, sadly). This is something I would not have thought of doing. Could this be automated? I guess, once someone has thought of it. But could the thought of this be automated?
  - qbrass 10y ago
    >(the details of which aren't given, sadly) Looks like he's using an electric stick welder clipped to some nails driven into dampened wood.

scalio 10y ago

The solution is obvious: education. Education, education, education. Making it a truly common good will require a massive shift in the way most people are brought up in the west, which is why it won't happen over a couple years but rather over a couple generations, which is why it's high time we got going. Once you can do things in and with your head, the world becomes your playground. Once the kids understand that hurting people in any way is literally senseless, that the civil servant state and nine-to-five work is destroying intellect, once they realise the awesomeness that lies within that big melon everyone of us is carrying around, I think humanity as a whole can get out of this mess properly. And I think enlightment is the only way humans are going anywhere other than destruction, by whom- or whatever it may be. The consumer (a.k.a. mind-numbing) industry everybody seems to be so happy about is definitely not the way to go. Forgive the metaphor, but plugging everybody into the matrix and feeding them bullshit 24/7 just to keep them happy is not how we can stay on top of things and our intelligent machines. If the complex machinery that is a Human is reduced to a consumer, it is of no value to electronic machines out to solve the galaxy's problems (other than maybe as an energy source ). It seems as though we won't be going anywhere far away from the solar system for a while, so instead let's go deep. Let's go into ourselves and discover the worlds inside that nature has provided us with.

_nalply 10y ago
And what would you teach?
- scalio 10y ago
  History, for one. So we could finally stop repeating the same idiotic errors over and over and over again. (edit) I wouldn't teach history either by forcing students to learn dates or locations by heart. Have the teachers respond to the students' whims by talking about whatever happens to catch their fancy. Philosophy and psychology. Not by forcing students to learn Kant by heart and regurgigate him for a good grade, but by showing children what they have in their minds and what they can do with that. Mathematics. Strongly related to philosophy, show the beauty in making connections between simple building blocks to create massively complex systems. You and I, this world, everything we know of is dictated by mathematics (or can at least be understood through them, depending on your point of view). That alone can give any non-debilitated mind enough material to think about for the rest of its days. If your mind is not structured in a way favourable to the understanding of complex relationships, you can go into the arts or crafts. Some minds work better with something physical to work on, some are better at internatlizing concepts and tearing them to pieces by thought. Don't put everyone through the same grind because everybody is different. No wonder our schools fail, because they do precisely that. Also, students are expected to learn a bunch of rules by heart, they often don't need to understand the underlying concepts to pass with flying colours. If you don't know where something comes from, you can hardly expand on it because there's nothing to build on. It's like a structure just hanging mid-air, going nowhere, but steadily being tacked stuff onto. It's not stable, and the stuff being tacked on has no relations to anything else, since there is no foundation of broad, general knowledge about the world. (edit) Classes are way overcrowded. What we need is lots of teachers for little groups so that every student's enquiries can be answered in proper time. Instant feedback on any question should also help make the whole thing more like a dialog where the student tries to find out more about a subject and the teacher can provide the information or show the student where and how it can be looked up.

stevetrewick 10y ago

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. Richard Brautigan, 1967. (Edit, format)

fsloth 10y ago

Well, if we establish a basic income and produce enough to suffice then people will live as the aristocracy lived the past hundreds of years. Basically European gentlemen of means did not work. The major if is the basic income part - if this is established, psychologically people will adapt to the eternal weekend just fine.

thotpoizn 10y ago

What strikes me as odd about apocalyptic "the perils of the singularity" navel-gazing is that we automatically assume that machines, and ONLY the machines, will improve far beyond our capabilities - perhaps even infinitely. Why shouldn't we improve as well? Every day it seems there is a new story about further advances in amazing / fast / cheap / etc. gene splicing technology, or some new breakthrough in understanding how cancers work, or how longevity may be achieved, or how to correct color-blindness, etc. Is it any less presumptive to assert that humans will make ourselves more and more amazing, as it is to assert that machines inevitably will?

civilian 10y ago

I think we should think about Advanced Chess (aka Cyborg Chess) in this context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess Humans already operate on a very high level of abstraction. I'm not aware of how my food is being digested, I'm not aware of how my muscles are being maintained. (Although, come to think of that, I do wish I could direct my muscles to get swole without going to the gym.) I'm not really aware of every photon my eyes capture, I'm given a blurry "executive summary" that has the contrast in the center turned up to 11, and the color spectrum I see has had a clustering algorithm run on it. Similarly, executives in a company don't always know what's going on in the day-to-day of their reports. They have an idea, but they don't actually solve the problems, and in same cases they don't even know how to solve the problems. We use computers to help inform our decisions. As long as we can continue the path where humans work with AI, we will have some place with them.