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I think we are destined for a future of political and social instability in the world if we continue to define labor and its compensation as we do now. We curr

I think we are destined for a future of political and social instability in the world if we continue to define labor and its compensation as we do now. We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required. The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, to be harnessed by willing politicians of short-sighted vision. What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?

mjevans 10y ago
I really hope we end up with something much closer to socialism than we do either the future from "The Time Machine" or perpetual cycles of Viva-La-Revolution.
- visarga 10y ago
  Up until global trade took off, cities, villages and even individual farms were almost self sufficient. Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation?
  - dhdhfjsjgh 10y ago
    >Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation? Have you tried buying land recently without signing yourself into debt for the rest of your life to a bank? How did it go? Not to mention that self sufficiency would imply a major cut in the standard of living for most people, for largely no good reason. It would be far more preferable just to reduce the concentration of capital in too few hands than for the rest of us to live like it's 1850 again.
  - pavanred 10y ago
    Agree, I sometimes wonder how much of this is just a manifestation of our fear of the unknown. Consider, the world before the internet when the postal services was doing all the heavy lifting for communication. Once we got internet, a huge chunk communication was replaced by email etc. But, it also gave rise to eCommerce, on demand delivery services etc. And, the same postal services companies are doing better than ever before.
  - occamrazor 10y ago
    Because the population density was much lower back then.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    How will we get our iPhone 17s?
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Because self-sufficiency provides a much lower standard of living than what you can get with trade and specialization.
    - dagw 10y ago
      True when dealing with a human workforce. Not convinced it's equally true when dealing with an automated workforce. That being said, I don't see why self-sufficient villages is something to strive after even it could be done efficiently.
      - mcv 10y ago
        If efficiency is not an issue, I definitely think self-sufficiency is something worth striving for. Makes you less dependent on outsiders. You're not suddenly in trouble when you get isolated, and because you don't strictly need anything from the outside, outsiders hold no power over your village, making it less likely to be exploited in unfavorable deals. Self-sufficiency would go a long way to addressing structural inequality.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        It's not about efficiency, but about variety. Life gets pretty mundane when you have to eat the same damn foods for every meal.
edblarney 10y ago
"We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required" Yes we do. The industrial revolution had far greater impact on labour than any of this mysterious AI will ever have. The first 'machines' powered by coal etc. instantly 'unemployed' hundreds of people per unit. Go ahead and look at the productivity/capita charts for the early 19th century - UK citizens were multiple times more productive than citizens of any other nation. It was an astonishing explosion. Imagine how many people a single train unemployed? Or the weaving machines that did the work of hundreds. The impact on labour was definite, direct and measurable - unlike a lot of the 'soft' impact that today's technology has (did MS Word really unemploy 'secretaries' - or was it a host of factors?) But what happened during the industrial revolution? Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically. The surpluses from the machines went into the economy, basically providing the foundation for the modern consumer economy. 95% of folks back then worked on farms, mines - or did manual labour/service. The industrial revolution created the middle class: lawyers, entertainers, restaurants, mass market clothing, design etc.. Electricity created massive new industries (think of what you could not do without electricity!). The economy has been diversifying rapidly since the start of the 19th century in the UK, and everywhere else about 50 years later. We will continue to do this. In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings. There were no 'pro athletes' in 1930. Now we have massive industries around pro sports. Working/middle class people did not travel much back in the day. Now they can travel around the world. There were no consumer electronics past the radio in 1940. Now the are zillions of devices. In the 1920's cars were made by people - now automated assembly lines. And FYI - for the last 25 years and for at least the next little while - China (or rather, Mexico, China, India and other low-cost places) are by far and away bigger job killers than automation. 'Automation' as we understand it is not as fast a process as we think it is and the days of 'robot replaces x people' are long gone, it's a more complex and nuanced equation. Try this one: tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine? Not so many. Customer service? Possibly. Some banker analysts? Possibly. But even in the later, there are other things for them to do, and the bulk of the staff on both sides have more to fear form India than Microsoft. In fact, this is happening right now all over North America: people training dudes in India to do their jobs, after they've been told they've been outsourced ... (train your replacement if you want your severance!) ... Also - since 1900 - the size of government has expanded dramatically. I'm not 'against government' or anything, but many gov. agencies are abhorrently inefficient. I have a distant family member who's friend, a low-level thug dealer who was recently arrested. The RCMP (Can. police) spent zillions tracking, investigating this guy. Two years of surveillance, bureaucratic justice issues, lawyers - yada yada. So it's not so nice, but we find ways to 'distribute the surpluses' of the new economy in ways, even if they are not very efficient. The trick is to 'find things for people to do' in a manner that is reasonably efficient and fair. Check out GDP/capita during 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#/media/File:Biaroch_European_GDP_per_capita_1830-1890.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#/media/File:B... Were there was more automation, wealth exploded. (This chart does not address wages, but there are others that do :) )
clock_tower 10y ago
Are you familiar with potlatch society in the old Pacific Northwest? With wealth readily available, the "big men" of a tribe (roughly chiefs, but not hereditary) competed to see how much they could give away to their neighbors and rivals; all you had to do to eat well, or make it through a bad winter, was to admit that your neighbors were led by a great and glorious chief. This system didn't work very well at the time (it bred slavery and warlordism, and produced a lot of waste, especially towards the end, when trade goods were abundant and population was running out); but it'll become increasingly more doable as capital becomes more productive. Magnanimity is a human instinct, and people already compete on status and prestige; just persuade holders of capital that supporting the unemployed/unemployable is a good thing, make sure they get personal feel-good-ness out of it, and persuade the unemployed/unemployable not to run up the red flag, and you've probably got a stable system. Probably. I don't think we need to worry about slavery much, but warlordism could become a serious issue. Where potlatch-like culture exists, aggressive bids for the throne (or equivalent) tend to follow; the Earl of Warwick in the War of the Roses comes to mind. Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die) -- the Wars of the Roses had roughly zero impact on the common people of England. (See A Farewell to Alms for a detailed discussion of how England's wars, starting from a pretty early date, avoided messing up England's people.) This is all hypothetical, though; I'm not saying that a potlatch orientation is the only possible solution, nor even that it's necessarily a working solution at all...
- inimino 10y ago
  What is the advantage of this over universal basic income funded by taxes?
  - ianai 10y ago
    Cutting a check sounds a lot less problematic than warlordism/etc
  - wojcech 10y ago
    People think taxes are evil but for dome reason will accept warlords?
visarga 10y ago
> The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, That's why we need to place the means of production in the hands of the people, not just of capitalists. > What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines? Self-supporting human society, a mix of small companies, skilled people and experts, using automation as well, that works to solve the daily necessities for itself. So it would have its own farms, fabs, schools and such, totally self supporting and self bootstrapped. People wouldn't need UBI if they had the means to directly make what they need. We're going that way - everything becoming cheaper, until it lifts itself by self replication.
- ako 10y ago
  Marx speaking...
  - padobson 10y ago
    Maybe, but I'm not sure Marx understood that capitalism would have such a potential for wealth distribution. Today, you can buy a 3D printer for 1/20th of the median US salary. You can buy a super computer that fits in your pocket for 1/50th of it. You can call your broker and buy an ownership stake in Apple, Exxon Mobil, or General Electric for smaller fractions than that. Capitalism has actually provided far more avenues for laborers to own the means of production than any communist revolution has. As automation gets better and cheaper, there will still be jobs for everyone - they'll just be performed by the robots they purchased for 1/10th, 1/20th or 1/50th of the median wage.
    - twoquestions 10y ago
      You could buy bits of capital in the 1890s as well, and technology was advancing at a breakneck pace then too, but society still became a quasi-feudal state. Some form of wealth redistribution will be necessary to ensure people's freedom, the tricky bit is how to do it without unduly stifling innovation and investment. Lately I've really been grappling with how to accomplish this, and it is a Very Hard problem.
  - 10y ago
astronautjones 10y ago
Violence.
shams93 10y ago
We need to have an AI tax that redistributes wealth back to the "ordinaries" so they can have the resources to be creative. Even if machines can generate writing and music there's no real point of view to fully machine generated material. You can do the thing they said don't quit your day job to do.
- 1982734234 10y ago
  What are the things that need to be invented when robots do everything for you?
  - randcraw 10y ago
    Cures for disease. Entertainment. Friendship.
    - croon 10y ago
      Cures for diseases I expect AI to do much better than us very soon. Entertainment will take longer, but I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible to algorithmically create. The lesser ones like Big Bang Theory is basically just a nerd reskin of every other sitcom Chuck Lorre has done. That could probably be churned out by a computer by the end of 2020. The more complicated entertainment will take longer to crack though. Friendship is tough to define. So I'll give you that.
      - icefox 10y ago
        > Friendship is tough to define The first version could take the form of a pen pal over email.
      - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
        > I expect AI to do much better than us very soon. and it's a good thing too, because if we are all out of work there'll be no good reason for us all to have so much intelligence so we'll me devolving back to the apes.
      - 10y ago
jhoechtl 10y ago
The 25 hour day might we well around https://myprivate42.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/lets-shift-to-25-hours/ https://myprivate42.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/lets-shift-to-2... as well as the obligation to consume, otherwise savings will be invalidated. Dystopia ahead.
forumuid 10y ago
little human labor is required,but much more human doctor are required. How to make human labor to human doctor? Education is just result,not methods.The key is that Capital is not the pursuit of money, but the pursuit of a higher level of human nature.
Bombthecat 10y ago
You might want to watch incoperated to get a feel :)
otakucode 10y ago
I have done a lot of thinking about this. There are 2 things that keep sticking out to me: First, history. History does not make our future look good. Humanity has gone through a few disruptive changes in the way society viewed work and societal contribution. The most recent was with the spread of factories and assembly-line production. The result of the adoption of those structures/technologies was not good. Society saw factory workers as 'not deserving' reasonable wages because 'the machines are doing all the work.' Factory owners were more than willing to pay their workers as little as they could get away with. And it turned out, that was very little. Entire families (including children) working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely being able to feed themselves was commonplace. Society had to adopt many radical (in comparison to previous history and other societies, they don't seem radical now because we've kept them around long past any practical utility) changes to function like this. Everything from anti-sex attitudes, the creation of 'adolescent' as a distinct category of person, even changes in the architecture of lower class homes to give separate sleeping quarters for children and adults. And that didn't get adjusted for until the New Deal in the 1930s. Back when someone couldn't simply say 'socialism' and completely shut down all discussion, the New Deal was actually possible. People today don't realize how 'insane' the New Deal really was. Think of it from the perspective of the factory owner. Previously, you would get an entire family, say 4 workers, 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and you'd pay them just enough to eat and pay rent. After the New Deal, you were expected to pay 1 worker for 8 hours of work 5 days a week such a (comparatively) titanic amount of money that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. Let that sink in. From 96 hours of work from each of 4 workers each week, 384 hours total, down to 40. That increases your labor cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Society re-configured their notion of what work was worth to address the idea that regardless of what tools are being used, the value the worker creates should play SOME role in compensation. And the world did not implode. But could anything proportionally similar ever be imagined to be acceptable to our modern society? I would argue absolutely not. But there is good news. Maybe. See, this isn't our future. It's our present. Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by only 1%. Computers and automation technology caused average productivity to skyrocket since 1980. But wages were frozen. Not because of any economic reason, the median income of the top 10% rose by 475% during that 1980-2010 period. Profits grew and grew with greater acceleration, but all the benefit went to the owners, executives, etc. Society once again started feeling that workers did not deserve compensation where the value of the work being done played a role. The machine was doing the work. It just seemed too easy. You write some software and make the company $10 million, why should you get a "lottery winning payday"? Apple, Google, Microsoft, and similar employers that set the standards saw this coming and rigged wages in the computer market early on. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the FTC prosecuted them for it. They ended up settling for hundreds of millions of dollars in a huge class-action lawsuit a decade ago. But, really, you could argue it was inevitable. Society didn't see workers using computers as deserving of pay which increased alongside their productivity, so employers obliged society. But something is different this time. Factories and assembly lines are expensive. And computers are cheap. And distribution, the whole reason we MADE factories and big companies in the first place, is effectively a solved problem. While companies have been getting rid of pensions, doing away with annual raises that exceed cost of living increases, cutting vacation time, expanding the work week, reflexively laying off workers to meet quarterly projections, etc... workers have become more than able to out-compete them. The drawbacks of centralization, which for a century were papered over with the invaluable ability to solve the problem of distribution, are now showing through more and more every day. Employment is a two-way street. Employers pay workers because they create the value that is profit, and workers seek employment for things like a reliable income stream, the ability to settle down and make plans for the future, the ability to provide for their family. Except employers have welched on every single thing they ever offered to workers. They provide zero insulation from market fluctuations. They adopt practices that make it necessary for workers to jump jobs every 4-5 years just to keep up with the increases in cost of living. Etc. And it actually might have worked... if not for the fact that their ace in the hole, their one golden ticket, solving the problem of distribution (both of products and of work needing to be done, one to customers the other to workers) became worthless thanks to computers and the Internet. Society changes slowly, and it certainly doesn't abandon century-long traditions overnight. But we're barrelling right for some proper Big changes. We're going to end up with the 'tools of production' (as Marx, who I've never read, would I think call it) in the hands of everyone, with a global market on our desk with commoditized distribution. Eventually enough people will be out of work as automation enables corporations to "reduce their primary cost center" and just trying offering their services online out of desperation that someone will build an excellent marketplace that actually works. And once it takes off, it will hopefully happen so fast that large companies don't even have a chance to react. And I'm serious about that part. If they do have a chance to react... it could be uglier than you could possibly imagine. Wars have been fought over much, much less wealth. And things like the Internet are still primarily controlled at the last mile by large companies which will be directly and existentially threatened by this kind of thing. The government handed over a trillion dollars to make sure that the banking system didn't have to bear the consequences of their actions, what might they do if 50% of the Fortune 500 were facing insolvency?
1982734234 10y ago
When you refer to capital owners, it has a historic context related to land and farms and large amounts of money. Robots, on the other hand, aren't necessarily going to cost lots of money. If everybody can own a robot, nobody has to worry about being employed. The real issues won't change though. Those people who are considered rich will be rich because they own land in nice areas, or have a military-backed monopoly on natural resources. The first issue is due to population size, and the second issue is an eternal issue of war that can't be avoided.
mcv 10y ago
Exactly. The problem is that automation is the problem. Automation should be the solution. The goal of automation should not be to save labor costs for corporations and make people unemployed, it should be to increase productivity and make people have to work less, so they get more time to enjoy life. Best way to accomplish this, I think, is to have a Basic Income. Give everybody enough to live, and increase that the more machines take over our work.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Is job displacement really different from large productivity gain? Both of them result in you needing fewer employees for the same amount of output, and in the end automated systems still need supervision, and someone has to make them.
  - mcv 10y ago
    The only difference is in what you do with it. Does it mean more profits for the owners and no money for the unemployed workers? Or does it mean workers get the same money for less work, now that machines can do it for them. In our current economic system, we get the former. We need to change the system so it turns into the latter.

mjevans 10y ago

I really hope we end up with something much closer to socialism than we do either the future from "The Time Machine" or perpetual cycles of Viva-La-Revolution.

visarga 10y ago
Up until global trade took off, cities, villages and even individual farms were almost self sufficient. Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation?
- dhdhfjsjgh 10y ago
  >Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation? Have you tried buying land recently without signing yourself into debt for the rest of your life to a bank? How did it go? Not to mention that self sufficiency would imply a major cut in the standard of living for most people, for largely no good reason. It would be far more preferable just to reduce the concentration of capital in too few hands than for the rest of us to live like it's 1850 again.
- pavanred 10y ago
  Agree, I sometimes wonder how much of this is just a manifestation of our fear of the unknown. Consider, the world before the internet when the postal services was doing all the heavy lifting for communication. Once we got internet, a huge chunk communication was replaced by email etc. But, it also gave rise to eCommerce, on demand delivery services etc. And, the same postal services companies are doing better than ever before.
- occamrazor 10y ago
  Because the population density was much lower back then.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  How will we get our iPhone 17s?
- adrianN 10y ago
  Because self-sufficiency provides a much lower standard of living than what you can get with trade and specialization.
  - dagw 10y ago
    True when dealing with a human workforce. Not convinced it's equally true when dealing with an automated workforce. That being said, I don't see why self-sufficient villages is something to strive after even it could be done efficiently.
    - mcv 10y ago
      If efficiency is not an issue, I definitely think self-sufficiency is something worth striving for. Makes you less dependent on outsiders. You're not suddenly in trouble when you get isolated, and because you don't strictly need anything from the outside, outsiders hold no power over your village, making it less likely to be exploited in unfavorable deals. Self-sufficiency would go a long way to addressing structural inequality.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      It's not about efficiency, but about variety. Life gets pretty mundane when you have to eat the same damn foods for every meal.

edblarney 10y ago

"We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required" Yes we do. The industrial revolution had far greater impact on labour than any of this mysterious AI will ever have. The first 'machines' powered by coal etc. instantly 'unemployed' hundreds of people per unit. Go ahead and look at the productivity/capita charts for the early 19th century - UK citizens were multiple times more productive than citizens of any other nation. It was an astonishing explosion. Imagine how many people a single train unemployed? Or the weaving machines that did the work of hundreds. The impact on labour was definite, direct and measurable - unlike a lot of the 'soft' impact that today's technology has (did MS Word really unemploy 'secretaries' - or was it a host of factors?) But what happened during the industrial revolution? Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically. The surpluses from the machines went into the economy, basically providing the foundation for the modern consumer economy. 95% of folks back then worked on farms, mines - or did manual labour/service. The industrial revolution created the middle class: lawyers, entertainers, restaurants, mass market clothing, design etc.. Electricity created massive new industries (think of what you could not do without electricity!). The economy has been diversifying rapidly since the start of the 19th century in the UK, and everywhere else about 50 years later. We will continue to do this. In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings. There were no 'pro athletes' in 1930. Now we have massive industries around pro sports. Working/middle class people did not travel much back in the day. Now they can travel around the world. There were no consumer electronics past the radio in 1940. Now the are zillions of devices. In the 1920's cars were made by people - now automated assembly lines. And FYI - for the last 25 years and for at least the next little while - China (or rather, Mexico, China, India and other low-cost places) are by far and away bigger job killers than automation. 'Automation' as we understand it is not as fast a process as we think it is and the days of 'robot replaces x people' are long gone, it's a more complex and nuanced equation. Try this one: tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine? Not so many. Customer service? Possibly. Some banker analysts? Possibly. But even in the later, there are other things for them to do, and the bulk of the staff on both sides have more to fear form India than Microsoft. In fact, this is happening right now all over North America: people training dudes in India to do their jobs, after they've been told they've been outsourced ... (train your replacement if you want your severance!) ... Also - since 1900 - the size of government has expanded dramatically. I'm not 'against government' or anything, but many gov. agencies are abhorrently inefficient. I have a distant family member who's friend, a low-level thug dealer who was recently arrested. The RCMP (Can. police) spent zillions tracking, investigating this guy. Two years of surveillance, bureaucratic justice issues, lawyers - yada yada. So it's not so nice, but we find ways to 'distribute the surpluses' of the new economy in ways, even if they are not very efficient. The trick is to 'find things for people to do' in a manner that is reasonably efficient and fair. Check out GDP/capita during 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#/media/File:Biaroch_European_GDP_per_capita_1830-1890.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#/media/File:B... Were there was more automation, wealth exploded. (This chart does not address wages, but there are others that do :) )

clock_tower 10y ago

Are you familiar with potlatch society in the old Pacific Northwest? With wealth readily available, the "big men" of a tribe (roughly chiefs, but not hereditary) competed to see how much they could give away to their neighbors and rivals; all you had to do to eat well, or make it through a bad winter, was to admit that your neighbors were led by a great and glorious chief. This system didn't work very well at the time (it bred slavery and warlordism, and produced a lot of waste, especially towards the end, when trade goods were abundant and population was running out); but it'll become increasingly more doable as capital becomes more productive. Magnanimity is a human instinct, and people already compete on status and prestige; just persuade holders of capital that supporting the unemployed/unemployable is a good thing, make sure they get personal feel-good-ness out of it, and persuade the unemployed/unemployable not to run up the red flag, and you've probably got a stable system. Probably. I don't think we need to worry about slavery much, but warlordism could become a serious issue. Where potlatch-like culture exists, aggressive bids for the throne (or equivalent) tend to follow; the Earl of Warwick in the War of the Roses comes to mind. Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die) -- the Wars of the Roses had roughly zero impact on the common people of England. (See A Farewell to Alms for a detailed discussion of how England's wars, starting from a pretty early date, avoided messing up England's people.) This is all hypothetical, though; I'm not saying that a potlatch orientation is the only possible solution, nor even that it's necessarily a working solution at all...

inimino 10y ago
What is the advantage of this over universal basic income funded by taxes?
- ianai 10y ago
  Cutting a check sounds a lot less problematic than warlordism/etc
- wojcech 10y ago
  People think taxes are evil but for dome reason will accept warlords?

visarga 10y ago

> The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, That's why we need to place the means of production in the hands of the people, not just of capitalists. > What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines? Self-supporting human society, a mix of small companies, skilled people and experts, using automation as well, that works to solve the daily necessities for itself. So it would have its own farms, fabs, schools and such, totally self supporting and self bootstrapped. People wouldn't need UBI if they had the means to directly make what they need. We're going that way - everything becoming cheaper, until it lifts itself by self replication.

ako 10y ago
Marx speaking...
- padobson 10y ago
  Maybe, but I'm not sure Marx understood that capitalism would have such a potential for wealth distribution. Today, you can buy a 3D printer for 1/20th of the median US salary. You can buy a super computer that fits in your pocket for 1/50th of it. You can call your broker and buy an ownership stake in Apple, Exxon Mobil, or General Electric for smaller fractions than that. Capitalism has actually provided far more avenues for laborers to own the means of production than any communist revolution has. As automation gets better and cheaper, there will still be jobs for everyone - they'll just be performed by the robots they purchased for 1/10th, 1/20th or 1/50th of the median wage.
  - twoquestions 10y ago
    You could buy bits of capital in the 1890s as well, and technology was advancing at a breakneck pace then too, but society still became a quasi-feudal state. Some form of wealth redistribution will be necessary to ensure people's freedom, the tricky bit is how to do it without unduly stifling innovation and investment. Lately I've really been grappling with how to accomplish this, and it is a Very Hard problem.
- 10y ago

astronautjones 10y ago

Violence.

shams93 10y ago

We need to have an AI tax that redistributes wealth back to the "ordinaries" so they can have the resources to be creative. Even if machines can generate writing and music there's no real point of view to fully machine generated material. You can do the thing they said don't quit your day job to do.

1982734234 10y ago
What are the things that need to be invented when robots do everything for you?
- randcraw 10y ago
  Cures for disease. Entertainment. Friendship.
  - croon 10y ago
    Cures for diseases I expect AI to do much better than us very soon. Entertainment will take longer, but I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible to algorithmically create. The lesser ones like Big Bang Theory is basically just a nerd reskin of every other sitcom Chuck Lorre has done. That could probably be churned out by a computer by the end of 2020. The more complicated entertainment will take longer to crack though. Friendship is tough to define. So I'll give you that.
    - icefox 10y ago
      > Friendship is tough to define The first version could take the form of a pen pal over email.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      > I expect AI to do much better than us very soon. and it's a good thing too, because if we are all out of work there'll be no good reason for us all to have so much intelligence so we'll me devolving back to the apes.
    - 10y ago

jhoechtl 10y ago

The 25 hour day might we well around https://myprivate42.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/lets-shift-to-25-hours/ https://myprivate42.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/lets-shift-to-2... as well as the obligation to consume, otherwise savings will be invalidated. Dystopia ahead.

forumuid 10y ago

little human labor is required,but much more human doctor are required. How to make human labor to human doctor? Education is just result,not methods.The key is that Capital is not the pursuit of money, but the pursuit of a higher level of human nature.

Bombthecat 10y ago

You might want to watch incoperated to get a feel :)

otakucode 10y ago

I have done a lot of thinking about this. There are 2 things that keep sticking out to me: First, history. History does not make our future look good. Humanity has gone through a few disruptive changes in the way society viewed work and societal contribution. The most recent was with the spread of factories and assembly-line production. The result of the adoption of those structures/technologies was not good. Society saw factory workers as 'not deserving' reasonable wages because 'the machines are doing all the work.' Factory owners were more than willing to pay their workers as little as they could get away with. And it turned out, that was very little. Entire families (including children) working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely being able to feed themselves was commonplace. Society had to adopt many radical (in comparison to previous history and other societies, they don't seem radical now because we've kept them around long past any practical utility) changes to function like this. Everything from anti-sex attitudes, the creation of 'adolescent' as a distinct category of person, even changes in the architecture of lower class homes to give separate sleeping quarters for children and adults. And that didn't get adjusted for until the New Deal in the 1930s. Back when someone couldn't simply say 'socialism' and completely shut down all discussion, the New Deal was actually possible. People today don't realize how 'insane' the New Deal really was. Think of it from the perspective of the factory owner. Previously, you would get an entire family, say 4 workers, 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and you'd pay them just enough to eat and pay rent. After the New Deal, you were expected to pay 1 worker for 8 hours of work 5 days a week such a (comparatively) titanic amount of money that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. Let that sink in. From 96 hours of work from each of 4 workers each week, 384 hours total, down to 40. That increases your labor cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Society re-configured their notion of what work was worth to address the idea that regardless of what tools are being used, the value the worker creates should play SOME role in compensation. And the world did not implode. But could anything proportionally similar ever be imagined to be acceptable to our modern society? I would argue absolutely not. But there is good news. Maybe. See, this isn't our future. It's our present. Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by only 1%. Computers and automation technology caused average productivity to skyrocket since 1980. But wages were frozen. Not because of any economic reason, the median income of the top 10% rose by 475% during that 1980-2010 period. Profits grew and grew with greater acceleration, but all the benefit went to the owners, executives, etc. Society once again started feeling that workers did not deserve compensation where the value of the work being done played a role. The machine was doing the work. It just seemed too easy. You write some software and make the company $10 million, why should you get a "lottery winning payday"? Apple, Google, Microsoft, and similar employers that set the standards saw this coming and rigged wages in the computer market early on. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the FTC prosecuted them for it. They ended up settling for hundreds of millions of dollars in a huge class-action lawsuit a decade ago. But, really, you could argue it was inevitable. Society didn't see workers using computers as deserving of pay which increased alongside their productivity, so employers obliged society. But something is different this time. Factories and assembly lines are expensive. And computers are cheap. And distribution, the whole reason we MADE factories and big companies in the first place, is effectively a solved problem. While companies have been getting rid of pensions, doing away with annual raises that exceed cost of living increases, cutting vacation time, expanding the work week, reflexively laying off workers to meet quarterly projections, etc... workers have become more than able to out-compete them. The drawbacks of centralization, which for a century were papered over with the invaluable ability to solve the problem of distribution, are now showing through more and more every day. Employment is a two-way street. Employers pay workers because they create the value that is profit, and workers seek employment for things like a reliable income stream, the ability to settle down and make plans for the future, the ability to provide for their family. Except employers have welched on every single thing they ever offered to workers. They provide zero insulation from market fluctuations. They adopt practices that make it necessary for workers to jump jobs every 4-5 years just to keep up with the increases in cost of living. Etc. And it actually might have worked... if not for the fact that their ace in the hole, their one golden ticket, solving the problem of distribution (both of products and of work needing to be done, one to customers the other to workers) became worthless thanks to computers and the Internet. Society changes slowly, and it certainly doesn't abandon century-long traditions overnight. But we're barrelling right for some proper Big changes. We're going to end up with the 'tools of production' (as Marx, who I've never read, would I think call it) in the hands of everyone, with a global market on our desk with commoditized distribution. Eventually enough people will be out of work as automation enables corporations to "reduce their primary cost center" and just trying offering their services online out of desperation that someone will build an excellent marketplace that actually works. And once it takes off, it will hopefully happen so fast that large companies don't even have a chance to react. And I'm serious about that part. If they do have a chance to react... it could be uglier than you could possibly imagine. Wars have been fought over much, much less wealth. And things like the Internet are still primarily controlled at the last mile by large companies which will be directly and existentially threatened by this kind of thing. The government handed over a trillion dollars to make sure that the banking system didn't have to bear the consequences of their actions, what might they do if 50% of the Fortune 500 were facing insolvency?

1982734234 10y ago

When you refer to capital owners, it has a historic context related to land and farms and large amounts of money. Robots, on the other hand, aren't necessarily going to cost lots of money. If everybody can own a robot, nobody has to worry about being employed. The real issues won't change though. Those people who are considered rich will be rich because they own land in nice areas, or have a military-backed monopoly on natural resources. The first issue is due to population size, and the second issue is an eternal issue of war that can't be avoided.

mcv 10y ago

Exactly. The problem is that automation is the problem. Automation should be the solution. The goal of automation should not be to save labor costs for corporations and make people unemployed, it should be to increase productivity and make people have to work less, so they get more time to enjoy life. Best way to accomplish this, I think, is to have a Basic Income. Give everybody enough to live, and increase that the more machines take over our work.

Eridrus 10y ago
Is job displacement really different from large productivity gain? Both of them result in you needing fewer employees for the same amount of output, and in the end automated systems still need supervision, and someone has to make them.
- mcv 10y ago
  The only difference is in what you do with it. Does it mean more profits for the owners and no money for the unemployed workers? Or does it mean workers get the same money for less work, now that machines can do it for them. In our current economic system, we get the former. We need to change the system so it turns into the latter.