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Why is education never discussed in the context of robot / AI automation? It is the solution. If not the ONLY solution. We've been here before with the industri

Why is education never discussed in the context of robot / AI automation? It is the solution. If not the ONLY solution. We've been here before with the industrial revolution. 50% of the population was working in agriculture and everyone feared the factory would automate everyone's job. But we managed. We managed by creating the current education system to produce educated factory workers. Now the current education system is out of date and failing us. IMO programmers are just the modern day factory worker; leveraging machines to do more with less. Imagine if we had ~30% of the population working on the next abstraction (software / robots / AI) instead of the current 2%. We'd be living in the real Utopia. I'm of the opinion that there is an infinite amount of jobs; as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is. But that only works if everyone can produce relatively equally. The problem now is we have a class of society which can not compete against another class who is benefiting from automation; not just programmers, but anything tech.

lowglow 10y ago
It is. It's called adaptive learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_learning
- coenhyde 10y ago
  Somewhat. In this thread and article you were the only one to mention Adaptive Learning. And I was the only one to mention education.
krapp 10y ago
> I'm of the opinion that there is an infinite amount of jobs; as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is. This seems counterintuitive - there is a finite number of companies, a finite amount of work those companies require, and a finite economy in which they operate. It simply isn't possible to find an infinite number of jobs in a system in which everything is scarce and demand is limited.
- coenhyde 10y ago
  There's not a finite number of companies. Companies are a human construct. Easy to create more. Resources are finite on Earth but we will be sourcing resources from around the solar system relatively shortly. I'd say within 50 years.
  - krapp 10y ago
    Companies can only survive as long as enough demand exists for them to remain profitable, their population is self-limited by the nature of competition. You can make as many companies as you like - all but a few will die. It's the reason restaurants tend to go out of business so quickly, there are already too many of them.
jodrellblank 10y ago
Look back 50 years and find code-which-writes-code already exists. If most programmers working today can't handle meta languages and complex type systems and manual memory management and multithread synchronization, do you expect that 30% of humans can go to school and surpass today's programmers, at whatever programming is left once machines also do the easy bits? And to achieve what? Are there not already more than a lifetime's worth of games to play, films to watch, books to read, vlogs to watch, online forms to fill in with your details; what on Virtual Earth would those 100 million - 2 billion people you envisage be programming? as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is. I'd like to see everyone get sheltered and dry living spaces with clean, safe water, light and heat, and enough food and drink, and then see how many people do or don't demand more?
- coenhyde 10y ago
  Why didn't we just stick with bread and rice? How much bread and rice could you possibly want? The point is; you can't envisage what the needs of tomorrow will be. If we truly automate all the necessities of life, then we could for example spend more time doing creative things or researching the some new technology. In a world where material things are abundant, the intangible will be worth more that is currently is. Maybe one day, an average job might be controlling a fleet of drones mining an asteroid. Building all those Star Destroyers takes a lot of resources.
  - jodrellblank 10y ago
    If we truly automate all the necessities of life, then we could for example spend more time doing creative things Right, right, creative, because the cure for global economic woes is more macaroni stuck on craft paper with Elmer's glue. The point is, we in the west have gone from food rationing after WWII, scrapings of butter and self-bottling of fruits for preservation, to plenty of affordable food from around the world. You say "we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is" and I think ... that's not the world I see around me. People are quite content with the cheaper foods, nobody is clamouring for Michelin starred food for every meal, people like drinking the existing beers and wines and eating the existing McDonalds and bananas and steaks and whatevers. And I submit that the drive is "to get away from the unpleasant bits" rather than "always wanting better". They only overlap while the current situation is unpleasant, but removing unpleasant things is a lot easier than inventing infinite new pleasantries.
dispose13432 10y ago
>I'm of the opinion that there is an infinite amount of jobs; as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is One of the unspoken problems with the tech revolution is that there are a lot of people who are simply not smart. Remember, that for every genius, for every "above average" guy, there's the guy who's below average, a bit slow. Until 1960s, you could be the hotshot lawyer, doctor, scientist, businessman or engineer, or you could work as a farmer, factory worker, tailor or water-carrier. In a few years/decades, one will need outright brilliance to find jobs.

lowglow 10y ago

It is. It's called adaptive learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_learning

coenhyde 10y ago
Somewhat. In this thread and article you were the only one to mention Adaptive Learning. And I was the only one to mention education.

krapp 10y ago

> I'm of the opinion that there is an infinite amount of jobs; as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is. This seems counterintuitive - there is a finite number of companies, a finite amount of work those companies require, and a finite economy in which they operate. It simply isn't possible to find an infinite number of jobs in a system in which everything is scarce and demand is limited.

coenhyde 10y ago
There's not a finite number of companies. Companies are a human construct. Easy to create more. Resources are finite on Earth but we will be sourcing resources from around the solar system relatively shortly. I'd say within 50 years.
- krapp 10y ago
  Companies can only survive as long as enough demand exists for them to remain profitable, their population is self-limited by the nature of competition. You can make as many companies as you like - all but a few will die. It's the reason restaurants tend to go out of business so quickly, there are already too many of them.

jodrellblank 10y ago

Look back 50 years and find code-which-writes-code already exists. If most programmers working today can't handle meta languages and complex type systems and manual memory management and multithread synchronization, do you expect that 30% of humans can go to school and surpass today's programmers, at whatever programming is left once machines also do the easy bits? And to achieve what? Are there not already more than a lifetime's worth of games to play, films to watch, books to read, vlogs to watch, online forms to fill in with your details; what on Virtual Earth would those 100 million - 2 billion people you envisage be programming? as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is. I'd like to see everyone get sheltered and dry living spaces with clean, safe water, light and heat, and enough food and drink, and then see how many people do or don't demand more?

coenhyde 10y ago
Why didn't we just stick with bread and rice? How much bread and rice could you possibly want? The point is; you can't envisage what the needs of tomorrow will be. If we truly automate all the necessities of life, then we could for example spend more time doing creative things or researching the some new technology. In a world where material things are abundant, the intangible will be worth more that is currently is. Maybe one day, an average job might be controlling a fleet of drones mining an asteroid. Building all those Star Destroyers takes a lot of resources.
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  If we truly automate all the necessities of life, then we could for example spend more time doing creative things Right, right, creative, because the cure for global economic woes is more macaroni stuck on craft paper with Elmer's glue. The point is, we in the west have gone from food rationing after WWII, scrapings of butter and self-bottling of fruits for preservation, to plenty of affordable food from around the world. You say "we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is" and I think ... that's not the world I see around me. People are quite content with the cheaper foods, nobody is clamouring for Michelin starred food for every meal, people like drinking the existing beers and wines and eating the existing McDonalds and bananas and steaks and whatevers. And I submit that the drive is "to get away from the unpleasant bits" rather than "always wanting better". They only overlap while the current situation is unpleasant, but removing unpleasant things is a lot easier than inventing infinite new pleasantries.

dispose13432 10y ago

>I'm of the opinion that there is an infinite amount of jobs; as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is One of the unspoken problems with the tech revolution is that there are a lot of people who are simply not smart. Remember, that for every genius, for every "above average" guy, there's the guy who's below average, a bit slow. Until 1960s, you could be the hotshot lawyer, doctor, scientist, businessman or engineer, or you could work as a farmer, factory worker, tailor or water-carrier. In a few years/decades, one will need outright brilliance to find jobs.