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Wall Street Has Hit Peak Human and an Algorithm Wants Your Job
- ourmandave 10y agoBuild a firewall and make the server room pay for it.
- imtringued 10y agoIf a robot can replace your job then just buy a robot (or indirectly through investments).
- dforrestwilson 10y agoA perfect solution for those who will have jobs and money after most do not.
- imtringued 10y agoWell in a world with no human jobs, Universal Basic Income boils down to the fact the wealth of those who own robots will be redistributed to those who don't have them. So why not make it so that everyone has some share of robots?
- collyw 10y agoCommunist!
- Ma8ee 10y agoYes, maybe Marx was right all along, just 150 years too early.
- CelestialTeapot 10y agoHis critique of capitalism seems pretty spot on, but I'm not so sure about his solutions to the problem. Here's a (mercifully short) article on the subject by Chris Hedges: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/karl_marx_was_right_20150531 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/karl_marx_was_right_2015...
- chopin 10y ago>Well in a world with no human jobs, Universal Basic Income boils down to the fact the wealth of those who own robots will be redistributed to those who don't have them It would be interesting to see this proposal work out. Capital is movable whereas people are mostly not. How would you prevent the robots moving (or built and run) where there are no taxes on them? I don't see how this be preventable without all nations agreeing on it. It doesn't work even with tax havens within the EU so why should this work world wide?
- dvh 10y agoSomeone else will always have better robots than you, your unemployed robots will sit in your garage.
- TruthAndDare 10y agoUnless we were overpopulated, it would still work out. That is, if everyone could go out and find a plot of land to live off. Better yet, all the people without access to automation could in form an entire economy among themselves. They would live like we do now, or like we have done at some point in history. Even without any support from the more developed society, they could develop like we do now.
- cousin_it 10y agoGood luck outbidding rich folks for land.
- TruthAndDare 10y agoWhat do you mean? The premise was that there would be plenty of land to go around for everyone. Unfortunately, we have put ourselves in a position where land has become a scarce resource.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Chris2048 10y agoIn the past resources were tight, and population was often controlled by fighting over land...
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoIt's just a finance problem. An analogous thing to look at is mules v. tractors.
- confluence 10y agoI know right. Why don't poor people just get more money?
- imtringued 10y agoThe poor in developed countries are still far more wealthy than the average citizen in a country like india. What the poor here really need is financial security, not just some benefits that they lose immediately as soon as they earn too much. There are already some small scale programs that incentivise them to save by matching their savings with additional $0.50 for every dollar saved. In reality saving is the engine of the economy. Consumer debt only temporarily increases the GDP. Especially in the form of payday loans it is not only bad for the individual but terrible for the rest of the economy.
- collyw 10y agoDepends on how you define poor. Poor in developed countries may have more material wealth. But if it comes to knowing where your next meal is coming from, then maybe they are about the same.
- confluence 10y ago> What the poor here really need is financial security, not just some benefits that they lose immediately as soon as they earn too much. I know right. Why don't poor people just get more money?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hga 10y agoIn this domain, yeah, "bankers" are in trouble. In general, though, it strikes me that we're only scratching the surface of what computer augmented humans can do, what we might call depth, while the major thing today's "algorithms" bring to the table is breath, such as what Google is (in)famous for.
- gaius 10y agoRight, if everyone has access to basically the same technology, then the competition is between people for who can best leverage the technology (and who can develop the tools to help them do so).
- Rexxar 10y agoI hope we have hit peak click-bait titles too.
- coldcode 10y agoI bet we can automate these and eliminate click-bait-headline writers.
- tunap 10y agoUntil then, I will continue to use the humans(?) in the HN comment section to save time & clicks, like caveman did.
- xyzzy123 10y agoBots clicking on ML optimised headlines collecting money from ad networks optimised by machine learning, which serve ads a/b tested to perfection by algorithms, economy 2.0 right there. As long as they're for products made by robot, paid for by investment capital allocated by algorithms... It's basically the ice cream cone that licks itself.
- EGreg 10y agoSoon automated readers will outnumber real readers of the automated writers. You laugh, but... let's take the personal act of wishing someone happy birthday. Before Facebook, you showed you remembered by calling. Then facebook reminded you and you went to their profile wrote on their wall, where you saw tons of other short wishes like "all the best". Then facebook made a little area where you don't even have to go to their wall, and you can just do all your "happy birthday" wishes in one go. Then there are apps that let you automatically wish happy birthday to people. A little further in the future: Now people are complaining they are getting too many "personal", "heartfelt" happy birthday messages from people they barely know so they ask an algorithm to sift through them and summarize them. Now we have bots reading happy birthday wishes from other bots. A few years ago we built this at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon to prove this point: http://techcrunch.com/video/birthdays-demo/517760666/ http://techcrunch.com/video/birthdays-demo/517760666/
- sevenless 10y agoBut if few humans are earning enough to generate demand for goods and services, how long will this algorithm have my job?
- EGreg 10y agoDemand for human labor is already steadily going down. It was just masked by consumer credit boom, and now by the rise of temp jobs and contractor gigs in economies that will soon be disrupted (eg Uber drivers by self driving cars). To keep them from starvation, you would need to redistribute money to the ones who don't earn it themselves. Either via Unconditional Basic Income or Negative Tax. Because means tested welfare has the result of punishing people for earning money, so they aren't as willing to reinvent themselves and take productive jobs. Same with minimum wage laws. Eventually our society will be so rich that we'll be able to afford it, but how do we transition there gradually? Computers will attract a larger share of the revenue every few years. They'll become "money sinks". So you tax the profits from laing off people, not enough to disincentivize R&D but enough so we don't have a severe demand shock for human labor and contraction of the money supply as we did in the Great Depression.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- avz 10y agoThis mantra is being repeated over and over: algorithms and automation are taking away the jobs. I'm still skeptical. Ultimately, work is about solving problems which is a complex and multi-stage process: someone must identify the problem first, someone must formalize the problem into a domain in which algorithms can be applied, someone must code or train an automated solver, someone must deploy and maintain the code... I expect that a lot of future work will be what we would call today "managerial" type of work. People will identify problems and manage available resources to achieve the desired outcomes. In the past, a significant amount of those resources were other people. In future, more and more of the resources under management will consist of computing power, datasets, robots and only very few other people. And so I doubt we will run out of work to do. This would mean that somehow we ran out of problems to solve. On the contrary, we appear to be flooded with them: cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... Maybe in some very far away future we will have a god-like super-AI that will seek and solve problems completely autonomously with no need for our involvement. This is very far off though.
- vertex-four 10y ago> Ultimately, work is about solving problems which is a complex and multi-stage process Err, not really. A very significant amount of work is "grunt work" which we haven't automated because it's too capital intensive or for other reasons - that is, many humans simply take the place of relatively simple robots where it wouldn't be cost-effective to build said robots due to short lifespan of each specific type of job, or other issues. As robots become more generalized, it becomes more cost-effective to fire the people. The programmers, the analysts, they're not the people anyone's worried about. In the UK, huge portions of the country still haven't gotten over the effects of Margaret Thatcher moving us from a manufacturing economy to a service one. Doing that on a global scale is only going to hurt even more.
- ralfd 10y ago> Margaret Thatcher moving us from a manufacturing economy to a service one Which as a German sounds strange in my ears. We are proud to have factories.
- kingkawn 10y agoMore wage depressing propaganda
- sakri 10y agoI'm so bored of "OH NOES Robots and AI are stealing our jobs", when it should be "Robots and AI are finally liberating us from our jobs".
- mc32 10y agoRight, except for the millions of people who live in places where the only alternative to subsistence farming or destitution over the past 4 decades was providing human labor to the larger economy and whose economies are not robust enough to provide for them.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoWell the question is, will we be retired, or sacked?
- sevenless 10y agoThis would be true only if having a job wasn't a social norm enforced by threat of starvation, homelessness, bad quality of life, and loss of healthcare (in the US). Being unemployed makes you lose social status.
- TruthAndDare 10y agoWhoa, there! You must be deliberately conflating different things. Social norms isn't important here. The reason we work, if you didn't know that, is that it is a way to provide for oneself, i.e. earning money to buy food, a house, clothes, treatments for illness etc. It's up to you to get those things, or whatever things you crave. It's not like anything you originally owned has been taken away from you if you don't manage to do that.
- sevenless 10y ago> Social norms isn't important here. That is a huge generalization, which seems intuitively wrong: why have norms towards conforming if they aren't effective? I'm talking about the fact that the unemployed will face drastically lower qualities of life, or even life threatening situations. That this is acceptable comes from government policies, which in turn come from social norms. It's seen as okay to harm the unemployed, deny them healthcare, or let them starve. They're lazy, and they should be punished. I won't speak for others, like you're doing, but conforming socially is the primary reason I work. I've been unemployed before, and I lost social status from it. It was embarrassing to admit to it. It was like losing a central part of my identity. Social norms are important, but often you won't notice till you deviate from them.
- hiou 10y agoI'm surprised no one around here talks about AI replacing software programming jobs.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoHere is my (repeated) experience with AI. - Wow that looks cool. - Heh. Look! It sorta works. - Oh. It only sort of works. - Um, we can ship this but... - Next!
- Aardwolf 10y agoIf money becomes some kind of automatically traded around thing with artificial value changes based on interacting algorithms, will it still be a useful for humans to trade physical goods and services?
- sevenless 10y ago"If"?!
- lujim 10y agoWe've hit Peak Hunter/Gatherer and a Farmer Wants Your Job. Now What? This has been going on ever since humans started thinking up better or different ways of doing things. Maybe we don't need as many money managers and brokers doing work that is done cheaper and better with technology. We will still need some, but not as many. There will be new areas where smart, driven people can make a great living.
- sevenless 10y agoAnd for the rest of us, will there be suicide booths, or should we just starve to death?
- lujim 10y agoYou could build suicide booths for other people! Edit: One other thing to think about is how drastically automation could reduce the cost of living. In 1928 "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage" was a campaign slogan. In 2016 where you can get a whole uncooked chicken for a few bucks in a grocery store it seems quaint that this resounded so heavily with the general public in 1928.
- TruthAndDare 10y agoCan't we still be hunters/gatherers?
- CelestialTeapot 10y ago> Can't we still be hunters/gatherers? Sure! Now then, whose land will you be hunting/gathering on? You'll most likely have to pay for access to someone's land, and they probably won't barter access for chickens/goats.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tehrei 10y agoMost of Canada is uninhabited. You just have to inhabit it for a bit and homesteading law says it's yours. Also, if you just take some land in bumfuck nowhere and form a hunter/gatherer tribe, I don't think anyone would bother sending enough law enforcement to boot you off of it.
- tehrei 10y agoI lobby for universal basic income and spend the rest of my life studying Manchurian Anthropology, blogging about it and making a small amount of side profit on Patreon.