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"Education won't help. Teach a human how to do something, and you have one human who can do it. Teach a computer how to do something, and you can have as many c

"Education won't help. Teach a human how to do something, and you have one human who can do it. Teach a computer how to do something, and you can have as many computers as needed doing it. " This is pragmatically not true. There are tons and tons of jobs that can't be done by computers. The 'entertainment sector' was not even a part of the economy 100 years ago. Now it's a big chunk. Think of how big sports are. That was all 'unpaid amateur' stuff before. It's worth examining how much we ought to work and not, but we also should understand there will always be work to do. Also - the industrial revolution had a far greater direct impact upon 'labour' than the computing revolution. 'Machines' could do the work of thousands of men - and the economic translation was direct - not 'soft' as we have with computers. And yet what happened? Consumer surpluses found their way into the economy, and 'people did other stuff'. Paradoxically - through the entire history of 'automation' unskilled labour has been getting more expensive, not less.

sqldba 10y ago
The whole "computers can do anything" theme in the original post and the comments is borderline retarded and describing a mythical state always one or two decades in the future. Teaching a computer to do anything is fucking HARD. And most of the time the problems are just unsolvable. Sure you see cool demos like one that can cook for you. That shit is awesome. So uhhh... where are they? They're demos and proofs of concept, so expensive, require maintenance and programmers (gasp!). Don't except to see real ones mass produced and taking over for a good 30-40-50 years. We can do a lot with computers and automation but IMHO every article that starts with, "If you don't agree then you're an idiot" is immediately sitting on a faulty foundation.
- edblarney 10y ago
  Ya. Whenever anyone talks about 'the singularity' (i.e. computer consciousness) I usually respond with "get your bot to make me a goddam ham sandwich and clean my toilet!" - then we can talk! But let's avoid calling people 'retarded', eh :)
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. The problem is, you wouldn't want to pay thousands of dollars for a robot to make you a sandwich or clean your toilet because those are things you can easily do yourself for free. And there's no economy of scale to offset the cost, because it's just doing it for only you. How about "get your bot to build my microprocessors" or "get your bot to route my package through a warehouse" or "get your bot to weld a car"? There you can get robots to do amazing things, and they can cost whatever the company wants to charge because those robots are making money. If a robot can build a modern CPU, it could clean your toilet. That's not the problem. Even still, there are household robots that are fairly common. I've got one running upstairs right now. It's called a Roomba.
    - Cybiote 10y ago
      Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox. The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.
      - freehunter 10y ago
        I think we're getting confused on the definition of how the robot accomplishes its task. To clean a toilet like a human would, yeah that's difficult. To clean a toilet like a robot would, it's not. A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. Really, really easy thing to do. If a Roomba can clean my entire house, not fall down the stairs, and find its way back to its dock by itself, you can put it on stilts and attach a spinning brush to the bottom and let it find the toilet. Likewise for a sandwich, if the meat and cheese and bread are all in robot-compatible forms, it's just layering them together. Not much more complicated than a printer that can pull from multiple paper trays. You can even combine the two for maximum efficiency. What's hard is making a robot behave like a human, because even humans struggle at behaving like a human. IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant. If you don't think there are sandwich-making robots that actually exist, I'd wonder how you think gas station ham sandwiches are made. Hint: it's a conveyor belt that drops bread, then cheese, then ham, then more bread. That's a robot that makes sandwiches. I'd sell you one for $1m, but you'd probably say "I can make my own for free, thank you!"
- j2bax 10y ago
  Having worked at Mcdonalds in college I'm fairly certain that automation of food service would not be a major hurdle. I felt like a robot in that job.
kazagistar 10y ago
Everyone moved to advertising; since useful work ran out, its all about the zero-sum competition for eyeballs and capturing the biggest possible chunk of consumer spending.
adevine 10y ago
> Think of how big sports are. But that's just it. Sports (and entertainment, your other example) are tiny, because only the top .001% are valued. Everyone else is basically slaving away for free in the hopes that they make it to that top echelon. Even the amount of support jobs is teeny compared to other industries. The problem with advanced automation is that it eliminates sectors that have huge employment bases (think of how many people that drive for a living) and replaces them with sectors that tend to be much smaller in comparison.
- gabesullice 10y ago
  You're talking about athletes and singers. But the vast majority of those employed in these industries are not the pretty faces. They are the producers, the audio technicians, the trainers, the vendors at the stadium, the men who swap kegs at the game. The lighting directors on the movie set. The CGI artists. The bouncers at your favorite venue.
  - adevine 10y ago
    My point still stands. (1) All of those support jobs are still tiny compared to the employment of other industries. (2) Many of those support jobs can be either automated away, or barely pay minimum wage. (3) Most of the support jobs that DO pay well still have the dynamic where a top tiny percent make the lion's share of income. The best CGI artists make multiples more than good ones. Same thing with Hollywood personal trainers, same thing with lighting directors.
njharman 10y ago
> The 'entertainment sector' was not even a part of the economy 100 years ago. Now it's a big chunk. Computer sector is younger and bigger. What is your point? > There are tons and tons of jobs that can't be done by computers. Not really, less and less all the time. Automation has been a trend since Industrial age. It is now expanding into knowledge work. Translation, copywriting, all sorts of analysis & prediction, navigation/driving (for fun look up how many truck driver jobs that will be automated in 10-20 years). IBM Watson isn't just a research project lark, IBM is developing a product to automate thinking and reasoning. Google all over it too. > Think of how big sports are. That was all 'unpaid amateur' stuff before. Do you believe there is more than an insignificant fraction of people employed by "sports"? btw there use to be people compiling stats, doing betting. They have been replaced by machines. > unskilled labour has been getting more expensive, not less. unskilled is misnomer, its un-automatable labour. Humans can't compete with machines. And more and more activities are being automated. Even labour such as medical, legal and acting.
mac01021 10y ago
Tangentially: I wonder how far we are from peak entertainment (in developed countries, I mean). With a fixed population size and a fixed number of hours in the day for each person, there is a hard limit on the number of hours of entertainment that can be delivered by industry. And I'm not even sure I would spend anything more than I do now on entertainment even if all my working hours suddenly became leisure time (unless you're going to start counting activities like home improvement and amateur science and engineering projects as entertainment).

sqldba 10y ago

The whole "computers can do anything" theme in the original post and the comments is borderline retarded and describing a mythical state always one or two decades in the future. Teaching a computer to do anything is fucking HARD. And most of the time the problems are just unsolvable. Sure you see cool demos like one that can cook for you. That shit is awesome. So uhhh... where are they? They're demos and proofs of concept, so expensive, require maintenance and programmers (gasp!). Don't except to see real ones mass produced and taking over for a good 30-40-50 years. We can do a lot with computers and automation but IMHO every article that starts with, "If you don't agree then you're an idiot" is immediately sitting on a faulty foundation.

edblarney 10y ago
Ya. Whenever anyone talks about 'the singularity' (i.e. computer consciousness) I usually respond with "get your bot to make me a goddam ham sandwich and clean my toilet!" - then we can talk! But let's avoid calling people 'retarded', eh :)
- freehunter 10y ago
  Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. The problem is, you wouldn't want to pay thousands of dollars for a robot to make you a sandwich or clean your toilet because those are things you can easily do yourself for free. And there's no economy of scale to offset the cost, because it's just doing it for only you. How about "get your bot to build my microprocessors" or "get your bot to route my package through a warehouse" or "get your bot to weld a car"? There you can get robots to do amazing things, and they can cost whatever the company wants to charge because those robots are making money. If a robot can build a modern CPU, it could clean your toilet. That's not the problem. Even still, there are household robots that are fairly common. I've got one running upstairs right now. It's called a Roomba.
  - Cybiote 10y ago
    Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox. The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      I think we're getting confused on the definition of how the robot accomplishes its task. To clean a toilet like a human would, yeah that's difficult. To clean a toilet like a robot would, it's not. A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. Really, really easy thing to do. If a Roomba can clean my entire house, not fall down the stairs, and find its way back to its dock by itself, you can put it on stilts and attach a spinning brush to the bottom and let it find the toilet. Likewise for a sandwich, if the meat and cheese and bread are all in robot-compatible forms, it's just layering them together. Not much more complicated than a printer that can pull from multiple paper trays. You can even combine the two for maximum efficiency. What's hard is making a robot behave like a human, because even humans struggle at behaving like a human. IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant. If you don't think there are sandwich-making robots that actually exist, I'd wonder how you think gas station ham sandwiches are made. Hint: it's a conveyor belt that drops bread, then cheese, then ham, then more bread. That's a robot that makes sandwiches. I'd sell you one for $1m, but you'd probably say "I can make my own for free, thank you!"
j2bax 10y ago
Having worked at Mcdonalds in college I'm fairly certain that automation of food service would not be a major hurdle. I felt like a robot in that job.

kazagistar 10y ago

Everyone moved to advertising; since useful work ran out, its all about the zero-sum competition for eyeballs and capturing the biggest possible chunk of consumer spending.

adevine 10y ago

> Think of how big sports are. But that's just it. Sports (and entertainment, your other example) are tiny, because only the top .001% are valued. Everyone else is basically slaving away for free in the hopes that they make it to that top echelon. Even the amount of support jobs is teeny compared to other industries. The problem with advanced automation is that it eliminates sectors that have huge employment bases (think of how many people that drive for a living) and replaces them with sectors that tend to be much smaller in comparison.

gabesullice 10y ago
You're talking about athletes and singers. But the vast majority of those employed in these industries are not the pretty faces. They are the producers, the audio technicians, the trainers, the vendors at the stadium, the men who swap kegs at the game. The lighting directors on the movie set. The CGI artists. The bouncers at your favorite venue.
- adevine 10y ago
  My point still stands. (1) All of those support jobs are still tiny compared to the employment of other industries. (2) Many of those support jobs can be either automated away, or barely pay minimum wage. (3) Most of the support jobs that DO pay well still have the dynamic where a top tiny percent make the lion's share of income. The best CGI artists make multiples more than good ones. Same thing with Hollywood personal trainers, same thing with lighting directors.

njharman 10y ago

> The 'entertainment sector' was not even a part of the economy 100 years ago. Now it's a big chunk. Computer sector is younger and bigger. What is your point? > There are tons and tons of jobs that can't be done by computers. Not really, less and less all the time. Automation has been a trend since Industrial age. It is now expanding into knowledge work. Translation, copywriting, all sorts of analysis & prediction, navigation/driving (for fun look up how many truck driver jobs that will be automated in 10-20 years). IBM Watson isn't just a research project lark, IBM is developing a product to automate thinking and reasoning. Google all over it too. > Think of how big sports are. That was all 'unpaid amateur' stuff before. Do you believe there is more than an insignificant fraction of people employed by "sports"? btw there use to be people compiling stats, doing betting. They have been replaced by machines. > unskilled labour has been getting more expensive, not less. unskilled is misnomer, its un-automatable labour. Humans can't compete with machines. And more and more activities are being automated. Even labour such as medical, legal and acting.

mac01021 10y ago

Tangentially: I wonder how far we are from peak entertainment (in developed countries, I mean). With a fixed population size and a fixed number of hours in the day for each person, there is a hard limit on the number of hours of entertainment that can be delivered by industry. And I'm not even sure I would spend anything more than I do now on entertainment even if all my working hours suddenly became leisure time (unless you're going to start counting activities like home improvement and amateur science and engineering projects as entertainment).