7 ms·

So, way less drastic than the number of agriculture jobs taken by machinery (reduced from "practically everyone" to "the U.S.A. is at under 2%"). Cool.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
People don't realize that the tractor was basically the number one job killer for humanity. We went from 70%+ of the population involved in farming to less than 3%. We created new industries and jobs from that and we will do so again.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  What jobs? There is a limit to human needs. At some point the robots will feed, clothe, transport, heal and entertain us all. What remains? Hobbies? We will have to invent make-work things for folks to do I guess. And call it work.
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Like Facebook?
  - TheGrimner 10y ago
    off the top of my head, : art, music, literature, relationships, exploration. without the requirement to toil, humanity could be free to explore the stars and enjoy this ride.
    - umanwizard 10y ago
      You're assuming whoever owns the means of production is okay with giving you enough of a share to survive.
  - AJ007 10y ago
    The made up stuff already exists. The explanations a person gives for doing a particular thing perhaps has less to do with the logic of why and more to do with some fundamental instinct to keep busy.
  - jlj 10y ago
    Art, music, creativity. Spending time with friends and family. Getting back to basics. Going fishing, hang out at the beach. Stargazing. Plant a garden. No commute or cubicles, work for the sake of doing interesting work. Traveling to Mars for fun. If all of our basic material needs are fulfilled, and we only take what we need, it would be an interesting and rewarding ride. That's the optimist side of me speaking. It could go the other way too if we humans want to keep fighting and arguing over resources and power. I hope that we could learn to get past that if everyone has what they need. I think about the change my 94 year old grandmother has seen in her lifetime. The technologies and types of jobs we have now compared to her early days are mind blowing. The rate of change today seems orders of magnitude faster and keeps accelerating. Bring on the robots.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      My grandmother was born in 1901 and passed away in 2000. The list of new technologies that came into being during her lifetime is astounding. Your todo list is very sensible and, in my opinion, very doable. Other than a couple items, I do it now. I would like to be optimistic and say that in the future with more automation that many more could live as well as I do.
  - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
    >There is a limit to human needs. There is however no limit to human wants.
- jordanb 10y ago
  Well firstly industrialization was pretty awful for the people living through it. The collapse of rural economies pushed teeming millions into cities where they became an enormously cheap reserve army of labor. Go read Friedrich Engels describe Manchester in the 1840s. One thing that stuck with me was people laying in the alleyways starving to death because they couldn't find work. Secondly, no investment manager would be fulfilling his fiduciary duty if he didn't warn you that past performance does not guarantee future results. Just because the industrial revolution eventually ended up producing a different sort of job to employ all of humanity doesn't mean changes currently afoot will do the same.
- chiefalchemist 10y ago
  Right. But the new jobs - few that there are - are also being automated. The yet is negative. Which we're already seeing.
darawk 10y ago
Two points in response: 1. Speed matters. Going from 100% to 2% over a century is one thing, doing it in 5 years is another. Which isn't to say that it'll necessary be that fast, just that if it is (and there are some reasons to think it will be) that it will have serious consequences for human welfare. 2. People like to point at the industrial and digital revolutions as examples to say "hey look, you can enhance productivity without killing jobs - the jobs just move around". And that's fine, they're excellent examples of that phenomenon. However, two prior examples is not exactly overwhelming evidence, and there are at least a couple real reasons to think that 'this time is different'. Specifically, that AI is getting really good at mimicking humans for particular tasks. We certainly don't have general AI yet, but what we do have can get really good at a whole lot of low-skill, low-education jobs, and a few high-skill high-education ones too. When the industrial revolution happened human jobs persisted because humans could use judgment and learn new things. It was too expensive to automate everything that could in principle be automated, because your processes might change tomorrow. New manufacturing tech is much better at reconfigurability, so that defense is likely out. New AI techniques are able to replicate human judgment in many scenarios now too. Not all of course, but many. If you eliminate all jobs that involve a human doing a particular physical task, you're not left with a whole lot for third world or low-education first-worlders to do. Now, all that being said, would I be extremely surprised if automation came along and labor markets simply retooled around it and everything was fine? No, not really. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way either, and I think it's something we should take pretty seriously.
- chiefalchemist 10y ago
  The past 100 to 150 years is definitely no reference point for the next 5 to 10. AI is different in what it can do and how that scale. Capture the "knowledge" once and it can be reproduced indefinitely. Again, that's very different.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

People don't realize that the tractor was basically the number one job killer for humanity. We went from 70%+ of the population involved in farming to less than 3%. We created new industries and jobs from that and we will do so again.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
What jobs? There is a limit to human needs. At some point the robots will feed, clothe, transport, heal and entertain us all. What remains? Hobbies? We will have to invent make-work things for folks to do I guess. And call it work.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Like Facebook?
- TheGrimner 10y ago
  off the top of my head, : art, music, literature, relationships, exploration. without the requirement to toil, humanity could be free to explore the stars and enjoy this ride.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    You're assuming whoever owns the means of production is okay with giving you enough of a share to survive.
- AJ007 10y ago
  The made up stuff already exists. The explanations a person gives for doing a particular thing perhaps has less to do with the logic of why and more to do with some fundamental instinct to keep busy.
- jlj 10y ago
  Art, music, creativity. Spending time with friends and family. Getting back to basics. Going fishing, hang out at the beach. Stargazing. Plant a garden. No commute or cubicles, work for the sake of doing interesting work. Traveling to Mars for fun. If all of our basic material needs are fulfilled, and we only take what we need, it would be an interesting and rewarding ride. That's the optimist side of me speaking. It could go the other way too if we humans want to keep fighting and arguing over resources and power. I hope that we could learn to get past that if everyone has what they need. I think about the change my 94 year old grandmother has seen in her lifetime. The technologies and types of jobs we have now compared to her early days are mind blowing. The rate of change today seems orders of magnitude faster and keeps accelerating. Bring on the robots.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    My grandmother was born in 1901 and passed away in 2000. The list of new technologies that came into being during her lifetime is astounding. Your todo list is very sensible and, in my opinion, very doable. Other than a couple items, I do it now. I would like to be optimistic and say that in the future with more automation that many more could live as well as I do.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  >There is a limit to human needs. There is however no limit to human wants.
jordanb 10y ago
Well firstly industrialization was pretty awful for the people living through it. The collapse of rural economies pushed teeming millions into cities where they became an enormously cheap reserve army of labor. Go read Friedrich Engels describe Manchester in the 1840s. One thing that stuck with me was people laying in the alleyways starving to death because they couldn't find work. Secondly, no investment manager would be fulfilling his fiduciary duty if he didn't warn you that past performance does not guarantee future results. Just because the industrial revolution eventually ended up producing a different sort of job to employ all of humanity doesn't mean changes currently afoot will do the same.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
Right. But the new jobs - few that there are - are also being automated. The yet is negative. Which we're already seeing.

darawk 10y ago

Two points in response: 1. Speed matters. Going from 100% to 2% over a century is one thing, doing it in 5 years is another. Which isn't to say that it'll necessary be that fast, just that if it is (and there are some reasons to think it will be) that it will have serious consequences for human welfare. 2. People like to point at the industrial and digital revolutions as examples to say "hey look, you can enhance productivity without killing jobs - the jobs just move around". And that's fine, they're excellent examples of that phenomenon. However, two prior examples is not exactly overwhelming evidence, and there are at least a couple real reasons to think that 'this time is different'. Specifically, that AI is getting really good at mimicking humans for particular tasks. We certainly don't have general AI yet, but what we do have can get really good at a whole lot of low-skill, low-education jobs, and a few high-skill high-education ones too. When the industrial revolution happened human jobs persisted because humans could use judgment and learn new things. It was too expensive to automate everything that could in principle be automated, because your processes might change tomorrow. New manufacturing tech is much better at reconfigurability, so that defense is likely out. New AI techniques are able to replicate human judgment in many scenarios now too. Not all of course, but many. If you eliminate all jobs that involve a human doing a particular physical task, you're not left with a whole lot for third world or low-education first-worlders to do. Now, all that being said, would I be extremely surprised if automation came along and labor markets simply retooled around it and everything was fine? No, not really. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way either, and I think it's something we should take pretty seriously.

chiefalchemist 10y ago
The past 100 to 150 years is definitely no reference point for the next 5 to 10. AI is different in what it can do and how that scale. Capture the "knowledge" once and it can be reproduced indefinitely. Again, that's very different.